Slitherine

I rolled up a random battle (I pretty much exclusively do custom and random battles as my preferred FoGII mode of play) and was somewhat surprised to find a match-up of Arab Abbasid 836-873 versus Serbian 850-1039. I did some Wikipedia checking and found the following articles that referenced the opponents; Abbasid Caliphate and Principality of Serbia (early medieval). It didn't look to me that these two opponents ever met in the real world, but then I'm never surprised that there is something I'm ignorant about. Did these two opponents ever actually engage in war, or is this a situation of "what might have been"? I'm genuinely curious.

Temple wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 8:09 pm I rolled up a random battle (I pretty much exclusively do custom and random battles as my preferred FoGII mode of play) and was somewhat surprised to find a match-up of Arab Abbasid 836-873 versus Serbian 850-1039. I did some Wikipedia checking and found the following articles that referenced the opponents; Abbasid Caliphate and Principality of Serbia (early medieval). It didn't look to me that these two opponents ever met in the real world, but then I'm never surprised that there is something I'm ignorant about. Did these two opponents ever actually engage in war, or is this a situation of "what might have been"? I'm genuinely curious.

6 months ago someone asked exactly the same question, but that time involving the Abbasids and the Moravians:

https://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewto ... 77&t=95939

This was my explanation;

It's a consequence of how the armies geographical areas are defined. In the ArmyList.txt each army has values for it's minimum and maximum Latitude and Longitude values, these are based upon the farthest points North, South, West and East that the army fought. So therefore each army has a rectangular area of historical usage. It's a very imprecise way of defining it, as there will be areas in the corners of that rectangle where the army never historically fought in, but there is no other simple way of doing it.

If two armies areas overlap, then they will be possible opponents, so this sometimes leads to non historical matchups when you get two areas overlapping at the corners.

Here are is a rough approximation of the Abbasid Caliphate and Greater Moravia at their greatest extent, note that their armies may have fought beyond these borders, but for simplicity lets just look at the borders:



In this next picture I have overlaid the two rectangular boxes defined by the latitude and longitude limits of the two empires. Light green for the Abbasids and orange for the Moravians. The brown areas are where the two rectangular geographical zones overlap, hence the two factions are potential opponents for each other in FOG2 skirmish battles and campaigns:



It's exactly the same with the Serbians and the Abbasids, their armies probably never fought, but the geographical areas described by their Latitude and Longitude values overlap.

Thanks for posting your response! It makes a great deal of sense and as you noted in your post in that thread, there's probably no better way to do it that wouldn't involve a lot of research, guesswork and maybe even some coin flipping . I missed the original thread which I see was active between Christmas and New Years Day, when my time is not my own

Thanks Paul.

It also makes sense as an alternative history situation. If the Arabs had succeeded in capturing Constantinople when they besieged it in 674-678 or 717-718, the Byzantine Empire would probably have collapsed and Serbia would have been one of the next states on the hit list.

I like these possible clashes, since even if they didn't happen, they COULD have happened. And maybe did, for all we know.

And it's good that time periods of army lists have to overlap, since I wouldn't want to see 7th century Assyrians fight 10th century AD Byzantines.