Quote Originally Posted by [cF]Adherbal
who told you such nonsense??
An Iranian's graduate thesis in history. His was on the Parthians. Don't have a link. But he said that Cataphracts were an evolution of steppe nomad heavy cavalry. That it was a repsonse to Macedonian pike phalanxes. Or rather the Parthians use of only HA/Cata armies was. Can't recall much more than that.


Quote Originally Posted by Orda Khan
Pardon?!?!.......erm ....no.
Er, um yes.

Quote Originally Posted by TosaInu
The Nagashino battle, the one in Akira Kurosawa's movie Kagemusha, was not a 10 minutes bam bam boem. Guns did something there, but there was fierce hand to hand combat that lasted for hours (no, there was no break for tea). It might be true that individual combat between two men is over in a few minutes, but not the clash between two armies on a field (added to that is time for manoeuvring).
Personal combat 2 guys slugging it out, rinse repeat. Didn't last long. There are limits to human endurance, even if you factor in adrenaline. 10 minutes was a low ball. But a melee wouldn't ever last more than an hour. TW condenses and abstracts a lot. Battles length is a one such condensation. Combat has to be shorter than it would have been. I would accept battles that were 15 minutes, with manoeuvring, but never 30. That's way to long.

Also optimal doesn't mean perfect. It means that a general good place has been reached and tweaking should be a priority.