Hey man, I'm excited to see another attempt at righting the gross historical inaccuracies of Vanilla unit rosters. Specifically the Roman ones...
My biggest qualm with vanilla, and with almost every mod out there is that they seem to ignore the fact that by 400 AD, Roman units used the
hasta spear as their primary melee weapon. The spate was of course used, but only once close formation combat gave way to chaotic melee with more room to swing the longer sword.[1,2] So if you're going to making a historical mod,
please equip regular Limitanei, Legio Comitatenses, Legio Palatina, and other bread & butter infantry units with a spear. I'm really tired of seeing the (usually worse) Roman spear units dubbed with the
lanciarii moniker, while the basic infantry unit of that rank is just "comitatensis" or something like that.
Now, back to
lanciarii. This refers word to the
lancea, not that hasta with which late (and very early) roman infantry units equipped. The lancea was [most likely] a light spear/javelin that was mainly used for throwing. The lanciarii, then, were probably light infantry, filling the role of the antesignani before them. Other plausible theories include
1) semi-elite, escort, or bodyguard units without a specified role,
2) or just regular units of infantry with a vestigial title (like many other units in the ND) but not not notably different from other roman legit units. Whatever the case, they were
clearly not called
lanciarii because they carried the hasta spear... that almost all Roman infantrymen used as their primary weapon. [3]
1]
https://faculty.nipissingu.ca/muhlberger/ORB/LRA.HTM
2] Elton, Hugh. Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 http://s22.postimg.org/q0kofldfl/Screen_Shot_2016_04_07_at_4_37_39_PM.png
http://s9.postimg.org/p1xfgaufz/Scre...4_40_51_PM.png
3]http://lukeuedasarson.com/Lanciarii.html If you haven't check out his site do so here