Salvete,
Does anyone here know about "Time Commanders" ? It is a British program in which historical battles are brought back to live. I've only seen a part of one episode and it looked great, it goes like this :
Four "celebrities" are chosen to command an army at a certain battle ; the battle I saw was the one of Pharsalus (Caesar vs Pompeius). These four brand new generals are given a background of the situation, get a view of the battlefield, which is displayed on enormous computer screens, they are informed about every type of soldier they have to command and are given some time to organise their troops.
After that, everything happens in real time. The freshly promoted generals were given the command of the troops of Pompeius, while the troops of Caesar were commanded by a computer, who appeared to be capable of adjusting his strategy in response to that of his opponent.
The battle was...brutal, the troops of Pompeius were pretty much slaughtered (even though they had the high ground) and the "experts" who were present to provide academical commentary pointed out mistake after mistake...after mistake....until their defeat was a fact and they had lost over 50 thousand men. It was a good day to be Caesar.
What amazed me was how well the computer reacted to everything and how they managed to design it so that it "acted like Caesar". It started out with the same movements as the actual battle, because that was probably just programmed, but due to the rather onorthodox strategy of the modern generals, the computer quickly abandoned that strategy and came up with a new strategy, really interesting to see, especially since it also used the famous tenth legion of Caesar in a key rol.
Very interesting because of the commentary by the experts and of course fun to watch and think "how would I take care of this ?"
For the Belgae, next thursday there will be a new episode on BBC 2, around 9 o' clock, this time, the battle of Cannae !
Valete bene
Lupus