<Snipped quote by Pepperm1nts>
I hope you get decimated for thinking the romans would just abandon their formations and latin like that. They didn't for the last 600 years, why now? Sure the shield designs and politics change, sure some modifications to strategyto deal with new threats, but radical changes in how the roman army structured itself I don't recall being a thing.
Barbarians are made civilized pepper, not emulated.
Sort of. Not quite though.
The Roman military formation had been built based on Roman presumptions about war, and it changed quite frequently. They adopted manipular shield walls after the Samnite Wars, abandoning the Greek Phalanx because the mountain-based Samnites could employ skirmishers to break phalanxes. Sword infantry was more maneuverable, and so they used it.
While moving across western Europe, they developed the form of infantry warfare that everyone recognizes as uniquely Roman, and it worked quite well because the Celtic and Germanic peoples they were up against liked a heroic form of warfare where personal achievement was more important than coherent battle lines. When the Romans fought Carthage, they had more trouble, and they were forced to adopt a navy.
But the most important change to Roman warfare came about when they went east and discovered Parthia. Now, if you've seen a movie with mongols or huns in it where the archers fire their bows while running away from their targets, that is often called the Parthian Shot. The reason it has this name is because the Romans, who often dominate historical writing at the time, learned its existence from warring with the Parthians.
And the way they discovered this was pretty bad for them.The Romans had not developed Cavalry simply because it didn't have a place in their early society. Italy wasn't the type of place that naturally bred an interest in horses, and you need a horse culture to breed a cavalry culture. But when they went east and ran across horse-based militaries, they had a hard time keeping up, and it took them a long time to develop a decent cavalry base.
It will.Continue.To be.A problem.For them.Now, the way this is going to evolve is that the Roman military will began employing cavalry in more and more central roles, until by the time the west has fallen cavalry will be the cream of the Roman military and the infantry will become something more akin to the battle lines of the medieval ages. It helps to understand that too, the expensive professional armies of the late Republic and earlier Empire will increasingly be replaced by poorly paid conscripts from the country with little chance of advancement, and by foreigners who lived rougher lives and were willing to be paid less. This is to say that they won't nearly be as strong.
On the other hand, the Romans will be recruiting their best soldiers for the cavalry, and
they will arm them to the teeth. They also end up employing large numbers of mercenaries from the incoming steppe tribes to act as cavalry archers, because that Parthian shot will last long after the Parthians are gone.
