Mouser I don’t know how you can say you quotes come from the Warring States they do not. Read your own link! See:
“The Tai Gong Six Teachings
Jiang Ziya
c. 1700 BCE – 1045 BCE
Tai Gong Six Teachings
Written by Jiang Taigong. He is the military advisor of King Wen and Kin Wu, helping them to defeat the fatuous Shang Dynasty’s king, King Zhou, to establish the Zhou Dynsasty”
Unless you want to say the Shang dynasty ended between 480-221 BC you better be more careful in your claims about your own sources!
Fogman
The citation in the Hellenics only deals with the scattering of forgers hardy a steady body of men. You have provided no examples where chariots routed a legion or a phalanx in good order. Foragers don’t count. In the Anabasis account, you give; the Greeks easily nullify the chariots effect and come to little harm.
“They were an enduring feature of grand Asiatic armies.”
A lot of good they did them from Alexander to Pompey. The great Asiatic armies were smashed by organized bodies of infantry. Not until the Parthians, at Carrhae, who did not use chariots was the inexorable tide of western arms halted.
At the battle of Arbela Alexander handily dealt with Darius III’s Chariots.
“Diodorus records that, when the chariots attacked the phalanx, the Macedonians beat their shields with their spears, creating such a din that the horses shied, turning the chariots back on the Persians. Those that continued forward were allowed to pass as the soldiers opened wide gaps in the line. Some horses were killed as they charged ahead but the momentum of others allowed them to ride through, the blades of the chariots severing "the arms of many, shields and all, and in no small number of cases they cut through necks and sent heads tumbling to the ground with the eyes still open and the expression of the countenance unchanged, and in other cases they sliced through ribs with mortal gashes and inflicted a quick death" (XVII.58.2-5).”
The scythes killed the horses of their neighboring chariots, a rather humorous failing!
In Caesar’s account of his Briton campaigns and in the campaigns of Sulla and Alexander the ancient sources agree that Scythed Chariots were ineffective against Phalanx’s or Legions’. Nothing provided thus far contradicts the above citation of Vegetius.
Let’s put this scythed chariot nonsense to rest shall we.
Here is the most detailed account of Scythed chariot use I have found anywhere online:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/enc ... riots.html
Apart from Cyrus at the Battle of Pteria and Mithridates and fogmans battle of the foragers Scythed chariots, by classical times have little to no successes. Mithridates won the battle of Amnias River by the use of scythed chariots, but the Bithynian’s were ill disciplined and when Mithridates fought Sulla they were only a triviality.
“Yet, three years later at the Battle of Chaeronea, those same chariots were carried through the Roman line by their own momentum. Then, "before they could turn back they were surrounded and destroyed by the javelins of the rear guard" (Appian, The Mithridatic Wars, XII.42). Or the quick advance of the Romans did not allow them to gain any speed. Indeed, the chariots were so feeble that the "Romans, after repulsing them, clapped their hands and laughed and called for more, as they are wont to do at the races in the circus" (Plutarch, Sulla, XVIII.2-3). Frontinus, too, relates that they were hung up on stakes driven into the ground, screened by men in front, or driven back by the shouts and javelins of the Romans (Strategems, II.3.17).” The chariots only evinced laughs from the Romans. “Lucullus confronted the scythed chariots of Mithridates in 74 BC (Plutarch, Lucullus, VII.4) and paraded ten of them in his triumph in 66 BC (XXXVII.3). They also were used by Mithridates' son Pharnaces II at the Battle of Zela in 47 BC. Disconcerted at first, Caesar's legionaries soon halted the attack with a barrage of missiles in what is the last reliable account of the scythed chariot in battle (Aulus Hirtius, On the Alexandrian War, LXXV.2).”
“To be sure, the grievous injury caused by scythed chariots had a profound psychological effect but tactically they were much less daunting, especially against disciplined troops. Requiring flat, open, and dry ground (Curtius, VIII.14.4) to maneuver and gain sufficient momentum, they often were prevented from charging by a quickly advancing enemy and overwhelmed before they could gain sufficient speed. Horses and drivers, too, shied from charging into a phalanx of Greek hoplites or a wall of Roman legionaries. Horses were thrown into confusion by the noise of battle or chariots allowed to pass and then surrounded and attacked in the rear.”
“By the fourth century AD, Vegetius could dismiss the scythed chariot as a "laughing-stock," rendered ineffective if a single horse were killed or wounded (Epitome of Military Science, III.24)—which, as Appian recounts, is exactly what the Romans sought to do, "for when a horse becomes unmanageable in a chariot all the chariot becomes useless" (The Syrian Wars, XI.6.33). Most of all, says Vegetius, they fell victim to spiked caltrops, which the Romans scattered over the field. In battle, "the speeding chariots were destroyed as they encountered them."”
“Presumptuous but well-meaning, the unsolicited advice likely was never read by the emperor. To be sure, such a chariot was completely fanciful—a modification of a weapon that had not been deployed for four centuries and never was part of traditional Roman warfare, a liability to those foolhardy enough to use it, and contemptuously dismissed when it was. By then, the cavalry—mobile and able to function in rugged terrain, less costly and more practical—had long assumed the role of the chariot, scythed or otherwise.”
By the era of classical warfare no western general of quality Alexander, Sulla or Caesar took Chariots seriously. The only response the gained from the Romans was laughter. All I ask is that a game which claims to simulate ancient battles actually live up to its own standards.