Dacian Falx

[Thunder]

Myself, I'd take the falx, and a scale cuirass, and some greaves maybe. Get enough such soldiers, some training and you have a shock cadre that's going to tear open a Legionary line of battle.

Well, perhaps. But clearly the Dacians couldn't do that, since most falx-men are not even wearing tunics! If you can armor and train a significant force, better off just arming them in Roman fashion, as other ancient nations tried to do, since that gets you a much more flexible force.

Besides, even if you do armor and train a few cohorts worth of falx-men, sure, they'll cause a ton of damage, but you don't think that's going to beat the Roman Empire, do you? Kill a legion's worth of Romans, and they'll bring in 3 more, with artillery or cataphracts or pikemen or whatever it takes to neutralize your falx-men. Adaptation was their specialty.

Good point about pole-arms not necessarily needing a whole lot of space. I don't think the falx is quite the equivalent of a medieval halberd or poleaxe, though, since it's shorter and has no thrusting point. So the falx-man is still reliant on the regular spear-and-shield guys, overall.

Vale,

Matthew

Cataphracts? They didn't have them. Pikemen are too inflexible in Dacia, as is artillery. Really, the falx is a rather good weapon to employ against the Romans and their unending ability to wear out their enemies through sheer weight of heavy infantry means that there's pretty much no military circumstance in which you can see them 'losing'.