Poor sanitations on fleet

[Sruba]

Hello,

I'm writing regarding a weird incident that occured to me while playing PBEM game with my friends.
We have started The Year of Four Emperors scenario, and while i wanted to move my fleet I have suffered huge losses due to poor anitations event.
I've lost only 13 hits from movement phase and some hits on other fleets, but when I opened the replacement window I saw that I've lost 350 Heavy Warships hits + 60 transport and 30 light.

Is it possible to get such losses on sea without making into storm ?

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[vaalen]

It seems to me that your fleet had an epidemic that decimated the crews. Perhaps the damage to the ships was caused by not having enough crew to sail them properly, or to maintain them.

I am just guessing, but that is how I interpret the event.

[Sruba]

Well, that's what I have though also but is it a bit unnatural to something like that happen on sea and on such scale ?

I've got hitten by such epidemics on land, and they have never struck so hard like this one on sea with clear weather on first turn.

[Philippe]

Roman fleets were more like Hellenistic fleets than early Greek ones, but shouldn't be confused with modern iron and steel navies that can stay at sea for protracted periods of time.

There were a lot of oarsmen on an ancient ship and not much space beyond the rowing benches. Sanitation was probably not poor so much as non-existant.

Ancient fleets tended to stay near shore and pull up on the beach every night, if for no other reason that there was no room on board for their oarsmen to lie down. There was also no room for more than one or two cooking fires, and trying to light any kind of a fire on an ancient ship was probably not a good idea.

I seriously doubt that an ancient fleet could spend more than a day or two away from the coast, but if it did it would get very cramped and smelly and take a big hit to cohesion, not to mention health.

I don't know how much of this is actually modeled in the game, but a sanitation problem debilitating an ancient fleet or an army being transported by one makes perfect sense to me.

Ancient fleets, by the way, weren't powered by slaves. The oarsmen were carefully trained teams that had to have trained together enough to row in unison and not foul themselves up, which was easy to do in ships with multiple banks of oars.

On-shore rowing banks for training teams of oarsmen have survived from the Classical period in Greece. It's a bit trickier to figure out what was going on with Hellenistic fleets (the Romans used Hellenistic-style ships) because it's not clear how their oar banks were arranged. A quinquireme was probably five men to an oar, but it might also have had a bireme configuration with three men per oar on one bank, and two per oar on the other. What it certainly wasn't was five banks of oars (the ship would have tipped over).

The fact that oarsmen were paid free men and not slaves could be an important strategic factor. Towards the end of the Peloponesian war the Athenians lost a naval campaign when their opponents doubled their oarsmen's pay, which caused a lot of rowers to defect to the other side. And the war itself was ultimately decided because of the naval disaster of Aegospotamoi, where the Athenians picked the wrong place to pull up onshore for the night.

[Sruba]

No one is saying that pestilence, or some medical problem can occur on sea especially in ancient times, but the sheer umber of losses is astonishing. Around 400 hits from poor sanitations on sea, is really a lot. I've forgot to ention that also naval marnes unit got almost destroyed too.

[vaalen]

No one is saying that pestilence, or some medical problem can occur on sea especially in ancient times, but the sheer umber of losses is astonishing. Around 400 hits from poor sanitations on sea, is really a lot. I've forgot to ention that also naval marnes unit got almost destroyed too.

The Antonine plague, one of the worst plagues in history, hit the Roman empire during this period. It could have easily wiped out a fleet or an army. I think the severity of the losses you suffer might have something to do with this particular plague, which killed huge numbers of people. In fact, Septimus Severus himself, along with a large part of his army, was killed by this plague, though he had a long reign.

I think the deadliness of this event, which I have never come across, may be unique to the Septimus Severus scenario, which I have never played.

[Philippe]

I think the year of the four emperors scenario is about a hundred years too early for that particular plague.

It's been a while since I read Tacitus, but I don't recall any naval operations during that particular civil war that made much of an impression on me. I would have thought that the fleets were pretty much mothballed by then.

[vaalen]

I think the year of the four emperors scenario is about a hundred years too early for that particular plague.

It's been a while since I read Tacitus, but I don't recall any naval operations during that particular civil war that made much of an impression on me. I would have thought that the fleets were pretty much mothballed by then.

Thank you for correcting my mistake. I mixed up scenarios, somehow.

[Philippe]

Year of the three emperors, four emperors, five emperors. What's an emperor or two among friends?