Longbows are no good

[PaulTa]

I think what made the longbow a significant part of how we see medieval english armies today is not necessarily the quality of the bow, but the quantity. Archery training was as common as fast food in medieval england, and sunday was even a day dedicated to nothing but longbow training?

Side note- On the ringmail, the rings worked really well at stopping a slashing sword attack, but the rings were prone to not necessarily break apart, but part when something pierced instead of slashed. So against a sword cut, the ringmail was effective, but against a bodkin arrow? Not at all.


I think the solution for the English is to increase ROF for longbows. If you take it in a historical sense, a large portion of the english population were trained as opposed to able. In a game mechanics sense, the English are the retarded cousins of the French, who have everything the english have and then a whole bunch more (like an effective crossbow unit, better cannon selection, better cavalry, and better spear infantry, a good pike unit, and Scot's guards which are retinue longbowmen with armor plating... Not to mention horse archers.)

If English bowmen had a higher rate of fire, then an english army that was primarily made up of bowmen (which seems historically accurate) would give a french army a run for their money. This is what england needs in my opinion.

[dopp]

3mm on the helmet, 2mm breastplate and 1mm everywhere else doesn't sound awful, in fact it's a little thin. You are maximising the armor on the surfaces that receive the incoming fire, which is really sensible and similar to how tank (and battleship) armor is distributed today. In fact, replica battle armor is often 1mm thicker on average, and tourney armor is unbelievably thick at around 4-5mm. Armor like that would weigh around 40-60lbs, considerably less than what a modern paratrooper would carry into battle. Furthermore, penetration alone is not a true gauge of a weapon's effectiveness. Even though the thinner breastplate was pierced a fair number of times (about 50%), the arrow did not penetrate deeply enough to cause a lethal or even disabling strike.

Placing a 3mm steel plate bought from a hardware shop and shooting stuff at it at 90-degree angles doesn't really test the bow's power. Your angle of impact is perfect and the flat plate does not offer the glancing surface that true armor would provide, which increases the effective thickness of the armor manifold.

The bow used was a replica based on weapons recovered from the Mary Rose, fired by some bloke borrowed from the Yeomanry and thus a little bit more skillful than the average college professor with his 30lb hunting bow. I do not recall the exact poundage, but I think it was 90lb-110lbs. A respectable test weapon, considering that there is some debate over the poundage of the Mary Rose bows and how representative they were of English longbows. Your 150-160lbs is a little generous, since most estimates range from 90 to 160lbs. This fascination with the uber longbowman who was able to draw 200lb bows sounds to be yet another manifestation of the "those were real men" attitude. Despite being a professional mercenary soldier (which in those days usually meant he was a criminal or a never-do-well, hardly the sort of material to produce uniformly elite soldiers) suffering from malnutrition and inadequate healthcare, the longbowman is still regularly depicted as handling bows too powerful for champion Olympic shooters, rigorously selected, well-fed and honed to athletic perfection, to even draw, and scoring hits on individual targets at three times the range.

[Gaius Terentius Varro]

I actually wonder if pavise's shield bonus is applied differently from other unitsl (front/left hand side) while they are engaging in melee or just standing around and laughing at incoming arrows.