Quote Originally Posted by General Malaise View Post
Where are you getting that from? I've read "te-" is more of a generic rather than specific term, and I meant "longspear" in the generic sense that you wield it with two hands, but it's still not a pike-length.
The only word I can find for the long spear is naga yari, and everywhere I look, the te-yari is a short hand-spear, 3-4 feet in length. I'm rather curious as to who says a te-yari is a long spear.


As for the nagamaki, it's weird to call it a "mounted naginata" as you use it more like a katana then a polearm, with the same types of stances and without sliding your grip up or down the shaft as you do with the latter.
The nagamaki is a short pole with a sword blade, in essence, and the long pole makes it quite impossible to use it like a katana (which itself originated as a cavalry sword, with the tachi). The average tsuka of your average katana of Sengoku and earlier is about 8-9", meaning your hands will be pretty close to eachother. When tsuka start to reach lengths in excess of 12" (something we first see in Edo), it becomes awkward to keep the hands that close together. The nagamaki requires you to keep your hands quite far apart, so you can't use it the same way as a katana. Try chudan or jodan no kamae with katana and nagamaki, and then tell me the stances are similar.

The reason the nagamaki is more a "horseman's naginata", though, is because the naginata is too long and unwieldy for mounted use. If you want to cut with it from horseback, the shaft has to be shortened. Also, the halberd is a polearm with an axe head, and the naginata handles nothing like it. The naginata is a glaive, the glaive being essentially a blade on a pole. The nagamaki is a hybrid, neither glaive nor sword, but tries to be both.



I'm not really interested in historical nitpicking though, I'm more concerned that the units are balanced and unique as I've said before, than that we get eight types spearmen with one or two point differences in stats.
The problem here is to make different spear units distinguishable. The nagayari varied greatly in length, and which was better of longer vs. shorter nagayari never reached a proper consensus. Except we know that there was a difference. But how do we balance this out, not quite knowing the differences without hands-on experience?