Slingers

[Parallel Pain]

Having been busy with everything else I couldn't write any more of my AAR (for those of you that remember it). Hopefully once my creative writing course starts I could.

Now then onto the subject of the day.

I've been having a few MP games with my small forum group and watched them play in EB and it seems that to win 1/4 to 1/3 of your army have to be slingers with upgraded attacks.

...Doesn't that mean slingers are, in comparison with their historical counterparts, a bit overpowered? I was under the impression in Europe slingers and skirmishers started to become phased out due to advancements in archery. In any case having over 25% of an army being ranged troops is unhistorial...or is it?

What do you think?

[Aemilius Paulus]

...Doesn't that mean slingers are, in comparison with their historical counterparts, a bit overpowered? I was under the impression in Europe slingers and skirmishers started to become phased out due to advancements in archery. In any case having over 25% of an army being ranged troops is unhistorial...or is it?

What advancements? Europeans were still using self bows, as they were since the dawn of mankind...

Slingers were much cheaper and easier to train and the sling bullets, especially leaden ones did more damage as against an arrow, your shield can easily protect you, but when faced with lead sling bullets, it will likely crack and/or shatter. Skirmishers on the other hand were even more popular than archery in most areas, and much more advancements were made in that area, like the tying of a string to a javelin and throwing it by holding the string, and not the shaft of the javelin. This atlatl-like innovation increased the range greatly.

[LordCurlyton]

I'd say that if 1/4 - 1/3 of their army is slingers make 1/4 - 1/3 of your army be light cavalry and mow them down. In any case that percentage doesn't seem too far fetched, but that would include both archers and slingers and may possibly include light skirmishers as well. Mostly I'd say that any "overpowered" perception of slingers is due to the limitations of the RTW engine since until the superior composite (compound?) bows made their way into Europe slingers were generally more popular, more available, and more powerful than period bows. Archers had the advantage of being able to stay behind your big boys and less training time comparatively, which is why they won out eventually.
Also, I don't believe skirmishers ever really got phased out. There were still javelineers in Medieval times, and various units functioned as skirmishers in the Empire days of muskets (dragoons?). And of course, today basically everyone is a skirmisher.

[ziegenpeter]

Slingers were much cheaper and easier to train and the sling bullets, especially leaden ones did more damage as against an arrow, your shield can easily protect you, but when faced with lead sling bullets, it will likely crack and/or shatter.

Interesting, where do you got this from?

[bovi]

slingers with upgraded attacks.

This is your problem. You should never upgrade weapons in custom battles, it completely throws the stat system. This is also why we don't allow any weapon upgrades in the campaign.

[johnhughthom]

Never played multiplayer EB but if I did I would insist my one slinger per stack houserule was followed. I think they are slightly overpowered, but the AI doesn't spam them and doesn't use them well so it doesn't really effect singleplayer games.

[Aemilius Paulus]

I've been having a few MP games with my small forum group and watched them play in EB and it seems that to win 1/4 to 1/3 of your army have to be slingers with upgraded attacks.

*writes down and makes note to use them in EB MP battles*

Ah, too bad no mounted slingers - that would be fun to play against! Or better, yet - cataphract slingers with a sling and a lance (that's too much!)! I mean, usually slings were weapons of the poorest, and it was often the wealthier or even middle class who had horses, and they were difficult to shoot from horse, but surely some tribe or peoples(expect the Balearics - I don't even think it was too honored of a profession in Rhodes, with it being Greek) must have recognized their usefulness over arrows and overcame the distaste? Also, the helicopter-style launching of a sling bullet could have been feasible from a horse, eh?

[Parallel Pain]

@ LordCurlyton. The nightmare of these slingers is they'll hit any cavalry light or heavy so hard by the time those cavalry reach the slingers, the slingers can take them on in melee. I think this is also because movement speed is decreased in EB (if I remembered right).
Also no other ranged troops are used, since it would seems these slingers can do the job of all others and better.

@ bovi. Thanks I'll tell them. So there's no weapon upgrades in campaign. What about armor upgrade? Would experience upgrades through the system off too?

[LordCurlyton]

If you want the best balance, go with no upgrades at all. The RTW xp system gives a max of +9 att/def/and possibly morale at triple gold-chevrons, which needless to say is rather unbalancing. And if the slingers are hitting your cavalry so hard before they can reach you have a problem I would say. Light cavalry is ultra-fast and no slinger can outrun them. Leuce Epos or other jav-cav is a good slinger-killer (esp the Leuce Epos). Failing that, light melee cav like the Illyrioi Hippeis is a good bet. Yes you do have to send the cavalry on ahead, but then that's how it worked in RL...in RTW I would consider my light skirmishers and cav expendable as long as they performed the function of allowing the bulk of my army to close and engage.
EDIT: If you have to have some upgrades, limit them to what EB allows in the campaign: bronze wep/armor upgrades. If EB could they'd likely do away with xp altogether with the exception of MAYBE one bronze chevron. If they could they would show units getting better xp/armor by having them change into better units (ie levy phalanxes becoming regular ones after campaigning for a while to represent the loot, etc). Sadly that is out of the reach of RTW.

[Parallel Pain]

You have to remember this is MP we're talking about, not fighting AI. Sending ANYTHING ahead against a competent player would result in that thing getting killed very quickly with nothing achieved. You would just loose those units, giving the other player an advantage in the battle to come in the form of extra units to flank you with. Oh and in MP max 3 bronze chevron of exp is allowed by the game.

Also what's a good amount of minai for MP?

[antisocialmunky]

Heh, even if they do, just put them in loose formation and the cavalry have a hard time killing them all. Also assuming you've killed a fair amount before they hit:
If you order your slingers to defend and then force fire at the horses that have engaged them they'll hit them point blank with their sling in their weak spot for massive damage.

[geala]

The problem is that slingers have the ap stat, haven't they? This is imho one of the few flaws in current EB. In SP I changed it immediatly, in MP you have a problem.

Slings were imho normally no more able to break armour or shields than arrows and javelins. I tried to examine the problem of the sling both from the ballistical and historical side. There are only a few sources which describe slings as very powerful. There is only one incident when slings seam to have had a noteworthy impact in battle (Eknomos 311 BC). When you consider the energy and impact of slingshots it is not understandable how such projectiles should work better than arrows.

The sling had some advantages: far reach, cheap, easy to obtain, small projectiles very hard to see in the air, relatively accurate with good training (like the people of Rhodes or the Balearic Isles had). But it did not send extremely armorbreaking devastating missiles.

Slings were in use also in the medieval period, e.g. in the Spanish campaigns in the Hundred Years War the English faced lots of slingers.

[Celtic_Punk]

And of course, today basically everyone is a skirmisher.

This is not true. The battle lines have just changed in shape and distance. this is also very untrue in urban combat. Today's version of a skirmisher would be light infantry. who's job is a shock force who soften up and push the enemy back and establish lines - dig in. then our heavies will move in with our IFV's and infantry proper and kill the enemy. with tanks and artillery doing the job of archers and arty. Snipers are our greatest asset in my opinion. Reach out and touch the enemy without actually being in the line of fire. This strikes fear into the enemy. Everytime you take up post, in the back of your mind you do not worry about a full scale attack that will never come. You worry about your throat being slit by special forces or a pot shot from a sniper.

Armour is the new cav
Airborne is your skirmishers who happen to be just as good if not better than the regular infantry at killing. Just not as heavilly equipped.
Infantry - same as it always was. Hittin the meat grinder. :/ sadly I fall into this category.
Light Infantry- Skirmishing duties and shock duties
Artillery - Same as it always was. Cept with better accuracy and scarier results.
Special forces- Your best of the best.... Champions if you may. What I wish to be someday! (pffft as if Canada could afford more than what we have as "special forces")

[antisocialmunky]

The problem is that slingers have the ap stat, haven't they? This is imho one of the few flaws in current EB. In SP I changed it immediatly, in MP you have a problem.

Slings were imho normally no more able to break armour or shields than arrows and javelins. I tried to examine the problem of the sling both from the ballistical and historical side. There are only a few sources which describe slings as very powerful. There is only one incident when slings seam to have had a noteworthy impact in battle (Eknomos 311 BC). When you consider the energy and impact of slingshots it is not understandable how such projectiles should work better than arrows.

The sling had some advantages: far reach, cheap, easy to obtain, small projectiles very hard to see in the air, relatively accurate with good training (like the people of Rhodes or the Balearic Isles had). But it did not send extremely armorbreaking devastating missiles.

Slings were in use also in the medieval period, e.g. in the Spanish campaigns in the Hundred Years War the English faced lots of slingers.

Arrows rely on piercing, sling shots rely on the transfer of momentum to what's under the armor. Arrows need to penetrate the armor to do damage, slings just have to hit the armor. The shot might not break the armor but its going to mess up whatever is underneath. Its the same concept used against Medieval European knights. If you can't penetrate armor, whack the armor hard enough to do concussive damage to the person underneath. Break a clavical, give someone a consussion, and generally mess his squishy bits up. You see it in the late medieval weaponry when armor won out over arms.

If you can't stab it to death, crush it.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The type of ammunition also changes the results, lead shot deforms and flattens, to the extent that the Greeks believed it must have become molten in the air. Stone either holds together, cracks or shatters.

I don't know if slate slingshots were ever actually used, certainly in the Mediaeval era slate balls were used to attack Castle defenses, a crude but effective form of shrappnel.

[bovi]

@ bovi. Thanks I'll tell them. So there's no weapon upgrades in campaign. What about armor upgrade? Would experience upgrades through the system off too?

We allow bronze upgrades on melee weapons and all armour. In a melee it doesn't make that huge a difference because we can control the lethality there. Missile weapons have a 100% lethality, so increasing the armour piercing attack of slingers from 1 to 4 has a ridiculous effect. Slingers are not very effective as they come in the campaign, where their attack can't be raised above 1.

Experience does not have any effect on missile attacks, from my testing, despite saying so on their unit card. I played a custom battle with a slinger unit against a phalanx, counting the number of kills before the phalanx came close enough to make them retreat. There was no perceivable difference between a 0 exp and 9 exp slinger, but a triple weapon upgrade with 0 exp made them annihilate the enemy.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Slingers are not very effective as they come in the campaign, where their attack can't be raised above 1.

?

Slingers are brutally effective, more so than archers, especially against any kind of armoured troops, even the lightly armoured ones. Whenever an enemy army has slingers, I throw all my cavalry at them in the beginning, destroying them at all cost if possible. Also, their base attack is (usually) two, and usually each experience chevron raises it by one attack point. Not only this, but slingers are the #1 cheapest unit type in EB. Despite the cheapness, they'll inflict huge casualties on my precious, veteran Camillian Triarii.

[geala]

Arrows rely on piercing, sling shots rely on the transfer of momentum to what's under the armor. Arrows need to penetrate the armor to do damage, slings just have to hit the armor. The shot might not break the armor but its going to mess up whatever is underneath. Its the same concept used against Medieval European knights. If you can't penetrate armor, whack the armor hard enough to do concussive damage to the person underneath. Break a clavical, give someone a consussion, and generally mess his squishy bits up. You see it in the late medieval weaponry when armor won out over arms.

If you can't stab it to death, crush it.

I concur in general but the performance is strongly connected to the energy and momentum of a weapon or missile. I'm a bit tired to write it again and again and give the maths, in the unlikely event somebody is interested he could find the threads on RAT or on this forum with search.

If slings were without effect it would not have been used. Clearly. Mardonios was perhaps killed by a slingshot. Xenophon describes its use against the Persian archers, the Romans used it to good effect against the Parthians. And so on. Slings were surely effective against people without armour (death or blindness from headshots, broken bones, flesh wounds or at least concussions) and effective against people with armour in the sense that with soft armour without adequate backing materials perhaps bones could be broken and hits on the helmet could result in unconsciousness. Or just headache. Same would have happened from an arrow stopped by the armour, so I don't like the ap stat for slings.

Please take into account that you need about 600 to 700 Joule to injure a person wearing a modern helmet (without penetration) and that projectiles from slings normally had energies between 50 and 100 Joules. Of course a modern helmet has better shock absorbing qualities but ancient helmets also had substantial padding to cope with the much lower energy.

[Watchman]

IIRC the sling was one of the very few native weapons armoured Conquistadors were wary of; even through a helmet, a head hit was wont to cause all kinds of unpleasantness up to and including death. (Concussion sucks.)
And that was with stone shot.

Put this way, if an arrow is a spear-thrust delivered at long range then the sling bullet is a mace blow.

[bovi]

Slingers are brutally effective, more so than archers, especially against any kind of armoured troops, even the lightly armoured ones.

Are you sure you're talking about EB 1.2? Many slinger units got reduced attack in 1.2.

[geala]

IIRC the sling was one of the very few native weapons armoured Conquistadors were wary of; even through a helmet, a head hit was wont to cause all kinds of unpleasantness up to and including death. (Concussion sucks.)
And that was with stone shot.

Put this way, if an arrow is a spear-thrust delivered at long range then the sling bullet is a mace blow.

As far as I know from the sources the sling was the Indian weapon most feared by the Spanish. But death or blindness were only reported when no helmet was worn or unarmoured parts were hit. I always took the reports or the Conquistadores as proof for the limited performance of slings against armour. Same for Xenophon, often presented as the witness of supreme power although his diction indicate an often less than lethal performance.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Are you sure you're talking about EB 1.2? Many slinger units got reduced attack in 1.2.

Geez. I am an old geezer by now. No, I'm still talking about 1.1.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

IIRC the sling was one of the very few native weapons armoured Conquistadors were wary of; even through a helmet, a head hit was wont to cause all kinds of unpleasantness up to and including death. (Concussion sucks.)
And that was with stone shot.

Put this way, if an arrow is a spear-thrust delivered at long range then the sling bullet is a mace blow.

Heh, actually the Spanish were afraid of spears hurlded with the adahadal (sp?), one of the tutors here told me it will go through steel plate, the increase in throwing power is just insane. Then there are the Obsidion swords capable of cutting an armoured man in half (though it ruined the sword).

[Watchman]

I don't quite think *those* claims stand up to much scrutiny - given that the Europeans themselves had to develop a whole new generation of weapons just to deal with the mediocre-quality "munition" plate worn by common troops. And they were using steel and quite sophisticated metallurgy for their weapons.

Obsidian business ends? *snap* That stuff is volcanic glass. It's hard and takes a good edge, but hoo boy it's brittle too. Hit metal with that stuff and you can just as well already reserve a refit session with the weaponsmith... Far as I've read of it the most even the two-handed version of the macauitl achieved on metal armour was knocking the victim around with the sheer weight of the weapon itself. Doesn't really help those sword-clubs weren't the altogether most lethal weapons to begin with (good old spear, axe and mace were probably rather more reliably deadly) - which was just peachy for the POW-sacrificing obsessed Aztecs mind you.

The heavy copper axes the Incas used were apparently regarded as rather more dangerous by the European invaders.

[Indomenos]

Light cavalry is ultra-fast and no slinger can outrun them. Leuce Epos or other jav-cav is a good slinger-killer (esp the Leuce Epos). Failing that, light melee cav like the Illyrioi Hippeis is a good bet. Yes you do have to send the cavalry on ahead, but then that's how it worked in RL...in RTW I would consider my light skirmishers and cav expendable as long as they performed the function of allowing the bulk of my army to close and engage.

the problem is that this person doesn't simply leave the slingers out in the open to get attacked by all and sundry, but takes advantage of the fact that in EB slingers can fire over infantry in front of them and places a thin line of pikemen (2-4 ranks) in front of the slingers which presents rather a challenge to most cavalry - no human player is going to charge cavalry into sarissas - and delays infantry attacks from reaching the slingers, often leaving them free to deal out massive destruction. essentially it's a variation of the persian tactics of massed archers behind sparabara, but made more effective with sarissa wielding infantry and slingers. i've seen heavy cavalry formations melt under the sustained barrage, the main line is virtually impossible to approach with cavalry of any sort, light cavalry would be so quickly dispatched they would play virtually no role in the fighting.

the typical result is that the battered cavalry are quickly outmanouevred and sent from the field, which leaves his - generally fairly intact - cavalry force free to defeat the remainer of the army in detail. amongst our group, this person hasn't lost a battle on EB despite always using variations on this theme - even opponents he's played multiple times seem unable to cope. admittedly, even the rapid adoption of massed slingers by other people hasn't changed this, so perhaps it's simply superiority of deployment and execution.

[Gleemonex]

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Use his exact army composition. If it's truly unbeatable, you'll whittle his record down to 50/50 by sheer happenstance. In the far likelier event that there is a way to beat it, you will probably be exposed to it at some point (ie. you will be beaten). Then, simply turn around and use the strategy that defeated you.

If it is management and execution as you say, then the position itself isn't what you should be attacking. It should be his discipline and order. Surprise attacks, feints, multiple simultaneous actions, that sort of thing. More easily said than done perhaps, but so are most things.

-Glee

[antisocialmunky]

Well, the only truly unbeatable armies are HA or a whole stack of Eastern FMs.