>loses war
What king of general loses wars?

>>18448736
His entire quirk were genius ambushes and smart use of the cavalry. Both useless in sieges. He was bad at besieging cities in Iberia too

>cowardly
More like he suffered colossal losses and had to rely on untrustworthy mercs

>>18448776
>had to rely on untrustworthy mercs
As opposed to the usual Punic army?

>>18448736
How was he supposed to bring siege equipment through the alps?

>>18448736
>The whole Punic senate avoids funding him for 99% of his campaign for fear he might become a dictator
>No senate backed peace attempts are made to the Romans during this
>Ends up being genocided by the Romans
Why are Semites soo dumb when it comes to the big picture?

>>18448736
Actually according to Professor Ching Chong Bing Bong Hannibal never existed.

>Muh 9m walls of Rome
He built roads for elephants on the Alps.

He didn't want to conquer nor destroy Rome, just make them plead for peace and stop imperialism.

>>18448919
no way he is that fucking stupid or naive

>>18448892
Build it in italy

clearly should've sacrificed more children

>>18448736
He didn't really have the resources for a massive sustained siege that would've ultimately been assisted by other Italians. He was just one army behind enemy lines and his own country wouldn't even send any help.

>Besieges Rome
>Faces resistance from fanatical population terrified that he's going to raze their city to the ground and will fight to the death
>Italian allies will probably swoop in to relieve the siege anyway
Versus
>Continue winning decisive battles which you've already been doing and convince allied cities to ditch the Romans and support you
The problem was Hannibal had no other support as long as the senate in Carthage didn't have his back and the Romans kept them busy in Hispania.

>>18448900
We have small reptile brains. Being a semite is eternal suffering....

>>18448736
Not enough feral BBCs that could storm the city and only had manlet nafris who were easily overpowered in close combat

>>18448736
>Makes deals with southern italian city-states >
> Southern italian city-states begin to bicker >

Who could have predicted that

A large part of Hannibal's army died crossing the Alps, and he only managed to replenish his numbers by flipping a lot of Rome's vassals in Italy to his side. He gained soldiers, and more importantly, he gained a logistical network that would allow him to stay in Italy even without a line of supply back to Carthage. Hannibal was cut off from meaningful reinforcement or resupply, so he had to forage or rely on new allies to survive. The problem is that his foraging was limited to only lands held by Rome's elite senatorial class, if he attacked the Italian confederates, they'd turn on him, so he had to deal peacefully with the friendly and neutral Italians, counting on them for the bulk of his supply. It was a precarious situation, because many of those Italian city states only supported him on the basis that he kept beating Roman armies. As long as Hannibal seemed invincible, they'd back him, which seems like no problem at all because Hannibal was, essentially, invincible in battle. Except, it doesn't matter how strong Hannibal actually was, it mattered how the Italians perceived him. It's easy to seem like an invincible conquering general when you win battle after battle, it's much harder to maintain this image when your army is camped in one spot for weeks, or months, on end. Demand for food never stops to feed hungry soldiers, yet you have no defeated Roman armies to boast about, you have no ransacked settlements, and most importantly, you have no loot to pay for your supplies.

Besieging Rome would've required such a lengthy investment. It was a huge walled city and a significant portion of its populace could be mobilized to defend it, if need be. It wouldn't fall quickly. Which means his army would be stuck in one place, exhausting local food supplies, and they'd be totally dependent on those fickle allies to keep supporting them. It's not a good strategic situation.

>>18448923
Hannibal, for all his skill at war, came from a mercantile culture, not a warrior culture. Hannibal's family had made their fame subjugating Iberians and fighting Romans, rather than trading and sailing as most of the big Carthaginian houses did, but the cultural background in which he was raised, which informed his understanding of warfare as an extension of statecraft, was that of a merchant. In his view, the Romans only prosecuted wars that profited them, to expand their influence and to take slaves and treasure back to Rome, to add new lands for plantations and colonies. So he reasoned that, logically, if the Romans were forced to fight a war that gained them nothing, a defensive war fought entirely on their own territory, whose continued prosecution saw only the worsening destruction of their own lands, the continued slaughter of their own people, and the gradual impoverishment of their ruling elite, surely they would capitulate quickly. Surely.

He was terrified of sieges. Something happened in Spain

>>18448923
He wasn't.
He invaded Italy with the expectation that defeating a few armies would make Rome look weak enough to trigger a mass uprising of italic and magna graecian allies which was stupid because he is known to have studied the pyrrhic war in which Pyrrhus tried and failed to do exactly that.
It doesn't help that no matter how disastrous Cannae looked, Marcellus already had another army on his ass right afterwards, and the same happened after every victorious engagement, so no victory actually looked all that definitive.