Longbows are no good

[dopp]

Threads like this amuse me highly, so many armchair historians have put forward all kinds of theories, so many tests have been carried out. How many of them were actually present at battles like Agincourt? The best they can do is guess.
I have read accounts over the years and the Longbow has been reduced from a weapon of mass destruction to a mere annoyance.
The Asiatic Composite falls apart in damp weather.......LOL!!! It's hilarious. The Huns never saw rain then? How on earth did Chingis and Jamuka manage when they met in a snowstorm?
Who are these people who claim these things?
Speak to Hungarian bowyer Csaba Grozer, I have. Ask him about his composite bows and rain, I have.
All but torrential rain is fine.(and torrential rain only spoils the finish)

Bodkins.
Why were these heads used when they did nothing? More precisely, why did the bodkin evolve from the needle bodkin that could pierce and cut through chainmail into the short bodkin? What do we hear from armchair historians? "Only effective at 60 metres or less.
Kassai Lajos was able to pierce a military helmet with the technology available to the Huns.
What was the standard of plate armour? Were all Knights and Men-at-Arms covered completely with 'top of the range' armour? Was every part of the body totally enclosed?

.......Orda

Of course, the best we can do is guess. Even if we were all practicing soldiers (all historians are armchair theorists, you mean armchair generals surely), the tactics and weapons of the time are too far removed for us to really know for sure. The problem is that the longbow has been elevated to an almost divine status, connected with the image of Anglo-Saxon national superiority and collecting attributes that are sometimes quite ridiculous. I think CA has gone for a balanced view that makes the longbowmen superior missile troops with unique abilities, but not supreme. They may need a little tweaking, but arguing for them to outshoot everyone else on the basis of flimsy historical accounts calls for a response.

Nobody said the heads did nothing. 60m effective range is still considerably further than the reach of a mounted knight, plus the horse would be vulnerable at any range. There were weak points that could be pierced, the face/visor and shoulders being the most vulnerable to plunging arrow fire. Even if the plate was not penetrated, potentially lethal arrow fire was extremely unnerving, even to seasoned troops. Armor was evolving as well, and seems to have kept pace with the new armor-piercing arrows. To turn your argument around, why was the armor still worn if the arrows could penetrate it so easily? Shouldn't they have started reducing the amount of armor and increasing its thickness by Agincourt, like they tried to do against firearms a century later?

Although there is some debate over whether man-at-arms is synonymous with knight, they were the social elite, trained and bred for battle and relatively few in number compared to the professional state armies that replaced them. They would have been able to afford the very best. They were not regulars equipped with some army-standard bargain-rate equipment, they were rich (though deadly serious) warriors that commissioned their weapons and armor from master smiths. At least one historian (John Keegan, whose account of Agincourt I have on hand as I type this) considers it likely that most of the men-at-arms facing the English at Agincourt were fully armored in plate. He doesn't consider the longbow a mere "annoyance" either, since the knights were obviously dissuaded from approaching the archers and took casualties from them. But the image of English archers scything down waves of charging knights at 300 yards with a continuous stream of arrows like some WWI trench assault needs some gentle correction.

Longbows do have a higher rate of fire in the game. They already do. Watching crossbows reload is like watching grass grow. Watching muskets reload is like watching a bunch of circus clowns play soldier.