Longbows are no good

thats true that the english lost a battle against the french because the french had artillery superiority. cant remember what the battle was called but artillery had a greater effect on crossbowmen and longbowmen than the arqs and muskets and may have been a big factor in their demise.

but back to the pavise i do know from mp which i know isnt a discussion topic here but shows good comparisons because you dont come across good ai armies in campaign. but they do seem to have the advantage one on one against longbowmen. of course there are different grades of pavise xbow as well as with longbowmen with increasing missile damage for the most expensive units.

but the big problem is the flaming arrows being too destructive against infantry plus they are nearing the accuracy of unlit which is not balanced.

but it could be possible that longbowmen are dishing out more than they take because of their rate of fire against x bow pavise.

yes but i find out in the game that yoman longbows are better than longbows {i have 6 units of y/longbowmen }that 360 longbows firing fire arrows that a lots tho thing about it:viking: and they range is longer ? than longbows but it the same thing ?
if im rigth was a longbow fire rate was more 3 to 1 crossbow bolt:help:

:duel: why cant english have pikemen?

Yeoman longbows have higher missile and melee attack and better morale.

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Originally Posted by sir bob a lot

[ :duel: why cant english have pikemen?

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Do you really WANT those confused dysfunctionals clogging up your recruitment scrolls?

^^^ Pikemen dont work properly in this game, because even if you are in 1490 or something, AI wil still charge wt you with armored swordman. and to be honest I dont know how to use them. if they get hit mby any type of infantry (par Peasants) they're gone....

back to topic, How do you shoot a longbow accrurately anyway? Range is pretty much all guess work and luck, however good you are. I just dont see how the shear range of the longbow arrows are an advantage? How effective would a volly of longbow againest musketeers in loose formation? where the gun is bascially aim and shoot (similar to X-bow), the bows relies on their density of arrows to do damage.

Get the Pike Fix. They are devastating with pikes, but rubbish with swords. The problem is they switch to swords the moment another unit comes into contact.

With the Pike fix they have no swords and keep fighting with Pike. They are still vulnerable to missiles and flank but are untouchable head on. Slaughter 2h, cavalry, s&s, spearmen, anything.

Some people argue they are too good with fix (despite missile/flank vulnerabilities) and playing the scots I have sympathy. My cities produce the only inf (although I do have a soft spot for those cheap, poorly armoured and suicidal Highland Nobles. Especially their pre-battle abuse animation!) I could possibly need, meaning castles are just for archers and cavalry (mainly hospitallers as my knight options are pretty poor).

However as I am playing Scotland I'm not unfixing until next campaign!

Patched Pikes Rock.

@ silver: It's really a matter of training, probability, and sheer numbers.

That's another part of why longbowmen and archers in general are relatively expensive to train. They have to do it so long they have a "feel" for where the arrow will land. It involves an eye for range and a feel for the proper angle and draw. And archers can compensate somewhat for falling short or long in their estimation. This is why I referred to "bracketing" fire, something done by artillery. Archers have enough firing speed to make it practical.

The archer isn't aiming at a person. They are aiming at a formation. All each individual archer is trying to do is get his arrow to drop into that formation somewhere... anywhere. It's when you put hundreds of them together all doing that that probability, numbers, and rate of fire start adding up. The concept is fundamentally more like a mortar... if enough arrows are landing in the area, somebody will get hurt.

(The musket issue is dependent on era; matchlocks might not be so bad if they had individual sights. Later era colonial sightless muskets would be pretty pathetic in looser formations.)

"How do you shoot a longbow accrurately anyway? Range is pretty much all guess work and luck, however good you are. I just dont see how the shear range of the longbow arrows are an advantage? How effective would a volly of longbow "

i use my longbows in bloxs pretty must let them fire away
but if woods are near them, use the woods to couer them ,
aka fire over the woods or place them on hills
let start with guessing the range :idea2:

1 u start with crossbows you use them 1st the get to know how far thay go
ie at the start off the game u hire "m/crossbow " 3 or 5 battles
2 then u train p-Archers get to know there range but use the crossbows as back up
3 then you train longbows do the same to them as with the p-archers

but this time you put the p-archers in font as your longbows is long range than ur archers by the time thy come to get your p-archers the longbow got them and your p-archers run any way but the longbow started to fire
like this

p/a p/a

l/b l/b
l/b l/b
you do the same to y-longbows to

but the units you dont need put in forts as thy have exp to be { better hit } who is outside knoking at your door :wall:

:laugh4: :laugh4: who needs archers? just take all cav and rush!!

@Silvester:

When the battle opens, usually one longbowman will shoot one arrow to range the enemy. Then, if you have an army of people all drawing the same weight bow and all having pretty much the same body size. All you got to do is raise your bow at approximately the same angle as that other guy and loose. One arrow will land 3 meters behind the first arrow and another will land 3 meters in front, doesn't really matter if you're shooting at a formation covering 20 meters from front to rear.

Just like clout shooting nowadays. Now these are people who shoots for fun, and only practice 2 or 3 times a week. Yet 8 people can put 48 arrows all neatly inside a circle that is 12' in radius at about 185m away.

@Silvester:
yes that did happen at the 100 years war{ cav rush}:book:
but the f-i-sh :oops: {not nameing names} use mian mec-heavy cav they were armored to head to toe and the hoses was to,
The armor was heat chirted heated up then cooled then heat up agen it made it harder ! the metal went blue it realy cool to look at :laugh4:

the longbow arrows were not going though the armor so thy rushed the longbows and they routed !

The english lost all there longbows had to figth hand to hand but won the battle anyway!!!

did you know the 1st air rad was not in the ww2 or ww1 but at medieval time !
a hint" let go fly a kite"

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did you know the 1st air rad was not in the ww2 or ww1 but at medieval time !
a hint" let go fly a kite

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Somwhere, I can't remeber where for sure, (was it jerusalem in one of the crusades?), they used Kits to drop Gunpowder bombs on a besiged settelment.

yes that rigth i seen it in a museum {plane museum} thy fly the kite over the settelment then drop the {gunpower bombs} like a hand grader
some time it didnt work he he

japanese did that in world war 2 sent balloons with bombs across the pacific to land in the west coast usa. i think it was the 70s or 80s a family of picnicers stumbled upon one laying dormant and it exploded killing some of them.

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Originally Posted by Moah

Hear hear! One of my bugbears too! The English only developed any sort of longbow culture after Edward 1 conquered Wales.

Of course I'm a scot. It's easier to admit our armies were slaughtered by the Welsh than the English.....And Culloden was the lowland scots beating our own. Flodden Field was purely because James IV refused to let his artillery open fire out of chivalry!!! Falkirk was the Welsh archers and the treachery of scottish nobles (cavalry)...Prestonpans was..erm...eh..a bug! Yes that's it. The AI was broken!

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The Northern Eastern Welsh I think you mean, Wales has never been united as a single state, it has always been small waring tribes that the English picked off one after the other. Cardiff is more English than London but we won't get into politics. It's very easy for me to talk about English victories against the Scots, King Athelstan V King Malcolm was by far my favourite. You should keep in mind the southern Scots are decended from English! Your not 100% Scottish like we're not 100% English

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Originally Posted by dopp

That's actually quite good, except for one minor problem. Completely unarmored British Regulars with muskets often faced foreign armies with pretty sophisticated bows and decent archers (especially the Eastern ones that had retained composite bows of some sort or other in their armies) and still beat them while suffering fairly minor losses. Still doesn't quite work, although you make good points. Bows did go up against firearms, often with disastrous results. And of course it's hard to claim that there were more muskets than bows in those cases, as the Europeans were almost always outnumbered in their empire-building wars.

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You are overestimating equiptment when there was a variety of factors.

1. Superior command structures, the British Sergeants happen to have been overall the best during colonial times.

2. Better commanders, fuedal armies which is essentially what Europeans crushed in their empire building wars are not especially known for their good commanders.

3. Better soldiers, British regulars had some of the best training in europe, they could fire at least 3 shots for everyone one shot fired by French or Spanish regulars.

4. Artillery was involved as well. The French won the Hundred Years War partly because of superior cannon, and for using them as field artillery instead of as just siege engines, and this brings me to my next point.

The Great Longbowmen trained their enitre lives in the art of archery with Longbows, they had the life time training in common with Knights, however to be effective the Longbowmen had to be close together and firing in volleys at around the same place, and because they are great at killing but not perfect at it to avoid a cavalry charge they may need to puts stakes in the ground. Now this is all well and good in and age when the bombard is essentially a siege engine, but when there are very effective field artillery pieces around the outranged Longbowmen will get killed by a few blasts or need to disperse and become worthless. Out of formation a Longbowmen may get a lucky shot and perhaps even down a knight, but overall he is not very significant to the battle. Yes it is true that he could draw sword, but that isn't exactly when you want with a longbowmen is it? That might be why the Longbow was not kept on as a weapon for only a single elite troop supporting the muskets, since afterall the costs of getting a good enough longbowmen, wiegh that against them either dying or being made worthless every battle, just what is the point? Especially considering that musketeers scattered by artillery fire could theoretically join with another line or column for the battle, still be effective, and then return to their original officers when they could. Despite it's advantage the Longbow was made obsolete.