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Unpopular opinion: I ran a whole Roman Empire campaign where Carthage won and Rome never became a thing
Last winter I got really into this board game called Falling Sky about Rome fighting Carthage, and after about 40 hours of playing I got curious what would actually happen if Carthage had won the Second Punic War around 202 BC, so I mapped out a whole timeline on a big whiteboard in my garage over a weekend. My version had Carthage controlling the western Med, keeping their navy strong, and never building anything like Roman roads or Roman law, so trade stayed tied to sea routes instead of one huge land empire. The wild part was how fast the whole idea fell apart the more I dug in, because without Rome I could not figure out who holds off the Germanic tribes in the north, and my best guess was a bunch of smaller kingdoms squabbling for centuries. I also realized Latin never spreads, so my whole timeline ends up with Greek and Punic as the big languages, which honestly sounds cooler until you think about how much stuff we only know because Roman writers copied it down. I spent like $30 on library fines grabbing books on Punic history just to fill in gaps, and the deeper I went the more it felt like one battle going the other way would not just swap rulers, it would erase a ton of stuff we take for granted. Has anyone else built out a no-Rome timeline and hit that same wall, or is there some angle I am missing that keeps things from falling apart completely?
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holly_reed5522d ago
Try picking one small region and running it forward instead of the whole map at once. I did a no-Rome setup for Iberia only and it stayed pretty stable as a mix of Punic trading towns and local tribes, mostly because I stopped asking it to also solve Germany. The trick is letting the timeline be boring sometimes, because real history has long stretches where nothing big happens and you do not need a Rome sized answer for everything.
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