Haaa hahaha, are you kidding? This is the best they could come up with, huh... I never even found my dad in that stupid game, now I KNOW that I won't bother to finish it!

I'm guessing that there are several women right here on this very forum who might think differently. Hehe, my wife, who coincidentally is a woman, and plays one in game, has already wiped out about half of those skirt-wearing yahoos by herself... The man behind the curtain should get a new one, the one he's hiding behind is getting so thin you can see through it. :shrug:

Be that as it may, in order for slaves to stay, well, slaves requires "masters". How many "Caesar Juniors" (i.e.- tactical geniuses that can inspire otherwise mediocre "soldiers" to military greatness by fear alone) do you think the Legion leaves behind at every one of these places?

Wow, putting it in that context, even in-game it sounds ridiculous... May need to edit my previous post.

I blame Wikipedia and "fanboyism" for this thread.

One thing about olden-day legions (or modern-day legions for that matter): spoils of war. One didn't have to be fanatic, one could be just greedy to join an army/legion.

Fighting to the death isn't all that uncommon if you know you are going to get killed if you surrender, either by the enemy, or overzealous commanders behind you who'll shoot you themselves if you retreat/surrender.

There are plenty of examples in modern history of ill-equipped armies facing superior-equipped armies, with mixed results: some get annihilated, some stand their ground.

As for the in-game Caesar's legion, I don't know. I thought it was dumb as a concept; I thought it contradicted itself... I would've preferred someone like a General Kuntz as the "bad" guy; that would've made the game much more interesting: "... it is impossible, to describe... to those, who do not know, what horror really means."

The New Californian Republic, maybe, but the Brotherhood of Steel?, yes they have the technology and other good stuff, but they are a remnant now in the Mojave, the Legion can easily handle them, (like the NCR wiped out the BOS in HELIOS ONE), now, if for some reason, the East Coast BOS, reach to Nevada, thats another history



Like Colonel Martyr said, the Caesar Legion wasnt supposed to be a replica of the real Caesar Legion, not even the Khan are like the Mongols Khans

On that note, wasn't the GECK originally just filled with seeds and instructions on how to make farming and water purifying work?
How can a bunch of random seeds and some pieces of paper magically repair Project Purity?

What? In that Post-Apocalyptia world, you think all women are frail victims-waiting-to-happen? It doesn't take a pair of testicles to pull a trigger, wield a knife or throw a rock. Given the opportunity to do so, I guarantee that MANY of the women subjugated by the Legion would gladly die fighting the Legion rather than continue being slaves.

The Legion's unrelenting cruelty towards pretty much EVERYONE except those in Legion uniform (which definitely precludes women) would mean _constant_ resentment towards the Legion, with pretty much all non-Legionaires eagerly looking forward to an opportunity to stick it to the Legion. [On a personal note, I know that one of my most favorite activities in FNV was "Legionaries-hunting" near Ranger Base Charlie and around Nelson. There was something just soooooo......satisfying about picking them off. It gave that self-righteous glow one gets when destroying unmitigated Evil.]

Literally, the GECK was modeled after the Genesis Device from the Genesis Project in "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan". Basically, it acts as a catalyst to take depleted soil and water of any kind to start a rapid growth cycle that renews itself and continually expands until the entire planet becomes a botanist's dream (or nightmare). The GECK seems to (reasonably) have a limited "range" of effect, unlike the Gensis device. (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/GECK)

If you activate it in FO3, It will wipe all life within its radius.

The Legion seems really out of place but I can't think of a better solution. . . ok nvm I just thought of a better solution.

After you help a faction a certain amount they want a way to gain more power. Helios 1, Hoover Dam and taking other factions bases and equipment if you defeat them or even making allies of other factions; which would lead to the groups not staying in only certain areas like the B.O.S. they setup outposts in the wasteland.

what i don't get why dosn't the NCR just send 1st recon and ground forces to take care of the legion. the majority of the legion use melee weapons

:facepalm:

Short version: Caesar takes whatever pieces of history he finds useful and disregards things he doesn't find useful. He has specific goals and uses history as a tool to meet those goals. When history doesn't help him, he doesn't use it. Even things like a reluctance to use advanced technology have more to do with his desire to keep the Legion ignorant/dependent on him than with anything "historical". Control is very important to him, even if it means that the people who serve him lack any of the medical knowledge necessary to help diagnose or treat his problems. It's very important for Caesar to maintain that the Legion is different. It is physically different, has different values, and different priorities. When Romans were wearing pants, they thought people wearing skirts were barbarians. When Romans wore togas, they thought people wearing pants were barbarians. People on the other side of that river wear pants. Our identity is good, your identity is bad.

Clearly there are many things Caesar does that work against his goals, or choices he made to emphasize one goal over a conflicting goal and it resulted in problems. But it's important to understand that Caesar calls the shots in the Legion. And when Caesar's not around, it's someone following his lead. Whether that's Lanius or Joshua Graham, there's not going to be a fun party when one of these guys rolls into your town. Events in the vein of Tamerlane and Simon de Montfort are going to happen. Events that culminate in pyramids of human heads, mass blindings, and burning a cathedral down with an entire congregation inside.


This almost never happens. Conquered men, women, children, elderly people -- they don't spontaneously rise up and try to kill people who abuse and oppress them. Most people are not heroic. Most people are easily terrified, especially once they have already been placed in subjugated position. And if they are heroic, they usually die heroic deaths, alone. It continues to happen all over the world. Right now, somewhere, someone is being beaten and horribly abused and even if given the opportunity to strike back at the person doing the abuse, they won't take it.

In Roman Britain, the tribes didn't stage a successful coup against the occupying forces even when given ample opportunity and more than enough reason to unite. On three separate occasions, the governor of Britain broke off from the empire. Even in a state of Roman civil war, the tribes were unable to eject the Romans. The one very notable case of rebellion was during Suetonius Paulinus' campaign in what is now Wales. The leader of the Iceni, Boudica, was beaten and her daughters were [censored] because Boudica challenged the transition of her late husband's authority to the Roman governor (Paulinus). Only with Londinium essentially vacated of military forces did the Iceni and Trinovantes dare to attack. They were successful in causing a huge amount of civilian damage, but in the end, Paulinus' troops rolled over the Iceni and routed them. The nearby Brigantes provided essentially no help to the Iceni and at least one source suggests Boudica may have even been poisoned by the Brigantes' queen. Someone mentioned Nero earlier; it's worth noting that all of this happened under Nero's rule and Rome still easily held Britain despite Nero's general lack of... being good as an emperor.

This pattern can be found a lot in history. It's rare for spontaneous uprisings to happen against conquerors. Or rather, it's more appropriate to say that it is extremely common for abusive occupation to go effectively uncontested for years, decades, or even centuries.

Very well put J.E

*Copy and pastes for history report*

Nice, also, first time than i see J,E. in the forums, im shocked :shocking:

Caesar's will is the will of the legion
Explain?
Is he saying that Caesar's death was good for the Legion?

I'm not saying that the rebels automatically win. I'm just saying that the revolts and uprisings WILL occur. Using Rome itself as an example (http://www.musesrealm.net/rome/timeline.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions):

340-337 B.C. - Revolt and end of the Latin League
147–139 BC: The Lusitanian Rebellion against the Roman forces in modern day Portugal, led by Lusitanian leader named Viriathus.
135-132 B.C. - Slave Rebellion in Sicily
103-102 B.C. - Second Sicilian Slave Rebellion
91-88 B.C. - Rome goes through a civil war
82 B.C. - Rome enters another civil war; Sulla becomes dictator and restores the power of the Senate
73-71 B.C.- Sparticus leads a revolt of slaves and gladiators and is killed along with most of his followers
52–51 BC: The revolt of the Celtic Gauls, led by Vercingetorix, was crushed by Julius Caesar.
49–45 BC: Julius Caesar crossed the river Rubicon heading part of the Roman army and marched on Rome. After overthrowing and assuming control of Pompeian government, he was proclaimed "dictator in perpetuity".
6–9 A.D.: The Pannonians, with the Dalmatians and other Illyrian tribes, revolted against the Roman Empire, and were overcome by Tiberius and Germanicus, after a hard-fought campaign which lasted for three years.
9 A.D.: The Arminius revolt against the Roman Empire; alliance of Germanic tribes led by Arminius ambushed and annihilated three Roman legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
60–61 A.D.: Boudica, queen of the Celtic Iceni people of Norfolk in Roman-occupied Britain, led a major uprising of the Briton tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire
66–70 A.D.: The Great Jewish Revolt, the first of three Jewish-Roman wars that took place in Iudaea Province against the Roman Empire
69–70 A.D.: The Batavian rebellion in the Roman province of Germania Inferior.
115–117 A.D.: The Kitos War, the second of the Jewish-Roman wars.
132–135 A.D.: Bar Kokhba's revolt, the third and last of the Jewish-Roman wars.
286 A.D.: Rebels in Gaul, known as Bagaudae, are crushed by the Caesar Maximian and his subordinate Carausius, working for Augustus Diocletian.
532 A.D.: The Nika revolt in Constantinople.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Pretty much every nation or empire has experienced revolts and rebellions. Pretty much every nation that has had large-scale slavery has had Slave Revolts. All it takes is for the oppressed to start thinking that the attention of their masters is elsewhere, or "What have we got to lose?" (in the case of particularly harsh slavery).

My biggest beef as an Italian is their corruption of MY language (which sadly I don't speak-5th gen American) and their INSANE corruption of of original Latin. It grates on my nervers SOOOO much I don't know if I could ever do a Legion play-thru, if this game EVER gets fixed.

People don't really speak Latin today so it can be forgiven if people don't speak it well 200 plus years after a Nuclear Armageddon and in an area set in Nevada. But if you are just talking about translation/voice acting then that's a different issue.

The pronunciation of Latin in the game is based on classical, not ecclesiastic, rules of pronunciation. While it is difficult for us to know how Latin was actually pronounced in the time of Julius Caesar, classical pronunciation assumes that the presence or absence of certain letter/sound combinations in the surviving languages of Romanized cultures can inform our understanding. The most obvious example is the name "Caesar" itself, one of the earliest Latin loan words to Germanic languages, which became "Kaiser". Another is a word Caesar himself used, "Celt?". Greek historians used the word "Κελτο?", and there's not a lot of debate over how that's pronounced. Just as Italian doesn't follow Latin pronunciation (and in fact pretty much abandoned case, which is an enormous part of Latin -- thanks Jabby), Old French and Late Latin softened many of the Latin consonants before they entered English. Thus, we have people hissing at each other over the pronunciation of "Celt" and "celtic": Anglicized Latin words passed to us through Old French from the days of the Roman Republic, where they had been borrowed from a Greek word that was likely a self-identifying term for a tribe on the Iberian peninsula. Inappropriately, we almost always use those terms to refer to Irish people and things.

Anyhoo, generally speaking, if you find an academic textbook on Latin pronunciation these days, it's going to follow classical rules. If you're taught Latin through your local church, you may very well learn Italianate/ecclesiastic rules. Caesar learned from academic textbooks, so he passed on that tradition.

If you did learn Italian today (you should), the Italian you learned would not be the same as the Tuscan Italian spoken/codified by Dante. And the German that people learn today is not the German that my grandmother learned when she was a little girl, much less the Althochdeutsch dialects spoken by dudes cruising around the HRE in the 10th century. Even closely related languages that look very similar can sound completely different. E.g. Danish and Icelandic. They're both North Germanic, but Danish doesn't really sound anything like Icelandic despite both languages having close original ties.Over time, pronunciations change. Some places never change their pronunciations and other places shift rapidly and radically over time.

Now list all of the years where there were no revolts worthy of entry into any surviving historical record. The republic lasted for about 500 years, the subsequent empire for another 500 before it fractured/collapsed. For 1000 years, that's really not much revolt.

I think that one of the biggest disconnects for the game is the heavy Latin language emphasis of the Legion. Taking place in the American Southwest and West, the heaviest influence on the 87 "tribal languages" that were molded into the Legion would have been American-version English. Followed by Spanish, the several reservations of Native American tribal languages, and a smattering of Chinese dialects (remnants descended from the Chinese railroad workers for the most part). Nowhere would there be any kind of concentration of Latin-speakers. Logically, Caesar _should_ have used English (maybe Spanish) as his empire's lingua franca. Literally, he would have had to teach EVERYONE how to speak Latin from scratch. And since he seemed to be hoarding books to be used almost exclusively for himself, about the only way he could have gotten a cadre of Latin teachers is if he educated those instructors himself. At the same time that he was teaching the Blackfeet how to **properly** wage war, use more sophisticated weapons, infantry tactics, command structure, et al. There simply would NOT have been enough hours in the day to juggle all of that. The path of least resistance, Occam's Razor, would have been ti focus on a language that most of those 87 tribes already had as the foundation of their "tribal languages".

It may be argued that by using Latin, Caesar was making the 87 tribes into a single homogenized group that would have its own distinct identity, different from ALL of the tribes. Thus he would create a bond mechanism: We ALL had to go through this. Much like the Roman outfits and the focus on in-fighting with bladed weapons. But of all the things that would help make his citizens "Legionaries", choosing a difficult language that EVERYBODY would have to learn from scratch would have seriously slowed down his assimilation program. And in the early days of his empire-building, the one thing Caesar didn't have was time. His ground floor choice for starting an empire was the Blackfeet tribe, and they were on the verge of extinction at the hands of about a half-dozen other tribes that were ALL at war with the Blackfeet. (And who knows how many tribes each of those were _also_ at war with.)

J.E., that was a cheesy dodge, and you are obviously enough of a historian to know that unless an uprising coalesced into a military campaign, it generally never got a mention in General History texts. If the slaves of a given city in the Roman Empire had an uprising that was put down by a local garrison, wouldn't that count towards "rebellious slaves"? Yet, such an incident would hardly be noticed by casual historians because it was "too insignificant to mention".

If you _really_ want to have a semi-detailed account of rebellions, revolts, and uprisings during the Roman Empire, you can look at The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History by R. Ernest and Trevor N. Dupuy, Chapters III to VII. You will find considerably more than a few hundred battles where people actually took up arms against the mighty Roman Empire that had oppressed and enslaved them. And even this would be mostly "highlights".

Instead of actual warfare, perhaps we should be looking at just runaway slaves. There's LOTS of books out there that discuss how slaves in America dealt with being slaves. There were so many runaway slaves and it was such a constant event that there was a small army of slave catchers (mostly independent contractors) made substantial incomes chasing down the runaways. That hardly indicates a population of complacent, terrified people such that ALL (or anything even remotely close to "all") of them don't dare resist their enslavement. Yet, Bethesda has no compunction to suggest an entire society where EVERY slave stays put and _never_ rebels. (That goes hand-in-hand with the idea that EVERY Legionary _will_ fight to the death, no matter what -- except for Pilus, that is.)

I'm with the people who kinda lean towards the more mad max type of slaver army, or something else entirely that's different. All this after seeing what the legion actually looked like, I mean I only knew about the legion after firing up the game and once I got a feel for them I wasn't so keen on the whole approach. Sure I went with it and it's still a great game but I'm not enthused about more Legion content, more just interested in the followers and the brother hood to be honest. Oh and the Boomers, they were great I don't mind shooting legion though, the game does a good job at painting them as the clear a**poles of the game.

I know a lot of people (going on the amount of historical buffs just in this thread !) who like the whole Caesar thing and historical reference are loving it, just personally would of rather a different extension of the imagination to something more unique like I find in the rest of the fallout universe so far. (haven't played 1 or 2 sadly enough, started with tactics.)

What some have pointed out about having more of an influence based on the Latin American areas the tribes were rounded up from to me sounds far more interesting.

I think I also found the mostly black and white nature of NCR versus legion to be pretty dull. If the Legion were more of an alternative to NCR I think I'd appreciate them more. The whole massing of evil just felt too "Lord of the Rings" for my liking.

That said, all the peeps that worked on fallout I love most of your work Can't please everyone etc.

I think it is odd that you choose to highlight the exceptions rather than the very obvious reality that defined the rule: the Roman republic and empire lived and thrived on slave labor for one thousand years. The vast majority of people who were born into slavery or were taken in as slaves, lived their whole lives as slaves and died as slaves.

Yes, many slaves in the antebellum American south ran away. The overwhelming majority did not do so until their plantations (typically) were so obviously abandoned that there was no fear of reprisal. Running away is also very different from rising up against. It's certainly very different from the scenario you initially described where everyone who is not a legionary is continuously watching and waiting for an opportunity to bravely attack their captors. I also didn't suggest that no one would resist. Bitter Springs is a refugee camp consisting of NCR military personnel watching over (mostly) escaped slaves. But for every escaped slave, there are a bunch of corpses of slaves and a bunch of badly beaten slaves who didn't make it. And for every one of them, there are probably a dozen people who never attempted to escape and never will. There are so many cases of long-lasting oppression and enslavement in human history that the exceptions just register as tiny blips to me. People like Boudica and Spartacus are exceptional specifically because the vast majority of people who were oppressed by the Romans wound up being silently ground into the dust over a lifetime of war or servitude.

EDIT: For some additional perspective on how I view these things, most of what I studied in college was social history, which often comes across as a huge foot stomping on millions of faces for a few thousand years.