Mod Resources (Updated Nov. 19)

[y2day]

Cool Roz!

I found a whole lot on Steppe Units here, good pics too.

Steppe Units

[Argent Usher]

Some links (picture) are broken but who cares really than over 600 are left.

Good job.

[Gorrrrrn]

A report of the findings of the Defence Academy warbow trials Part 1 Summer 2005

Authors: Bourke, Paul; Whetham, David

Source: Arms and Armour, Volume 4, Number 1, April 2007 , pp. 53-81(29)

Publisher: Maney Publishing
Abstract:
In 1992, Peter Jones established a scientific benchmark for the discussion about the effectiveness of the medieval longbow. Since then it has often been employed as the basis for those seeking to demonstrate, compare or contrast or re-evaluate the historical role played by this weapon system. While the authors of this paper acknowledge the importance of Jones's tests in establishing a foundation for the scientific analysis of the effectiveness of the medieval longbow, it must also be acknowledged that some of the assumptions in the tests made by Jones are now considered flawed or have otherwise been called into question by shifts and developments in historical opinion. The aim of these tests was to complete a series of trials repeating the work done by Jones to a standard that is satisfactory to traditional archery experts, historians, blacksmiths and academics alike, allowing a new evaluation of the power and effectiveness of the longbow and its performance against armoured targets concurrent with current historical opinions from a range of disciplines. Once the tests were completed, the team would try and recreate the results in the laboratory to provide a basis for future testing.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1179/174962607X177436

Free Download (no subscription required) access here:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...00001/art00005

or

get the DVD here!

http://www.sptradarch.org/Series%201...der%20copy.pdf

[Brewskii]

Here is a good site for modelers and skinners working on eastern factions
http://steppes.proboards23.com/index.cgi?board=board...

[y2day]

“It is only when you despair of all ordinary means, it is only when you convince it that it must help you or you perish, that the seed of life in you bestirs itself to provide a new resource.”

“Lack of resource has hanged many a person.” - Irish proverb

Our progress as a forum can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world domination, our hopes for economic growth, and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young TWC members capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Ok now for a few funny ones....

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Everybody wants to go to heaven; but nobody wants to die

It takes 46 muscles to frown but only 4 to flip 'em the bird.

and finally

Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.


Ok, first post updated.... need more resources people....

[Brewskii]

“It is only when you despair of all ordinary means, it is only when you convince it that it must help you or you perish, that the seed of life in you bestirs itself to provide a new resource.”

“Lack of resource has hanged many a person.” - Irish proverb

Our progress as a forum can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world domination, our hopes for economic growth, and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young TWC members capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Ok now for a few funny ones....

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Everybody wants to go to heaven; but nobody wants to die

It takes 46 muscles to frown but only 4 to flip 'em the bird.

and finally

Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.


Ok, first post updated.... need more resources people....

hilarious +rep

[Gorrrrrn]

Reuven Amitai-Preiss, "Mamluks and Mongols: an overview," Chapter 10 of his Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260-1281, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 214-235.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/amitai-preiss.html

Really interesting comparison between Mongol and Mamluk training, tactics, logistics etc.

[Gorrrrrn]

Found a couple of useful looking threads for anyone thinking of writing their own scripts:

Intro to scripting:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=121589


Intro to scripting (classes!)
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=743

and there's a complete guide to plug-ins:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=176711

here's the kingdoms docudemons:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=128316

[Gorrrrrn]

a couple of accessible articles on medieval trade in Britain and Ireland for anyone wanting a more realistic trade model, ideas on prices, transport etc

Markets and Fairs in Britain and Ireland before 1216
http://www.durham.ac.uk/r.h.britnell...rlymarkets.htm

The Marketing of Grain in England, 1250-1350
http://www.durham.ac.uk/r.h.britnell...Grainframe.htm

[JaM]

Something about cavalry charges:

http://l-clausewitz.livejournal.com/185116.html

Horse against foot. Again. Isn't it getting tedious?
An ordinary horse, not specifically trained for war or otherwise manipulated, would shy and stop short before a solid obstruction unless it could be jumped. A closely-formed line of men on foot obviously falls into the category of such an obstruction. Therefore, when mounted shock troops wished to break formed foot, they had to devise some trick to either break the foot before contact or to deceive their horses into coming closer than they usually would


The first and most commonsense trick, of course, is relying on psychological impact--in simpler words, scaring the enemy off. This concept lies at the core of cavalry shock action, which is all about delivering a psychological shock against the enemy rather than a physical one. While a closely-packed line of men can scare horses, a closely-packed line of horses approaching at high speed is also an unnerving sight for men. I speak with the authority of one who had once been mistaken for a rioter and chased by a couple of mounted policemen into an alley. This trick is particularly good for breaking inexperienced or poor-quality infantry who have been told that they could repel cavalry but never have actually done so in practice.

In the gunpowder age there was a way to distinguish such inexperienced units; a cavalry commander would advance a few men in a skirmish screen to within one or two hundred yards and start firing. If the infantry responded with a volley, they probably didn't have the discipline to hold their fire until the cavalry came within point-blank range, and the cavalry would have reached their lines before they had finished reloading. Ironically, the smoke of the ineffective volley would usually contribute towards the defeat of the infantry--imagine a line of screaming horsemen leaping out of the sulphurous smoke, brandishing their sabers like maddened demons bent on adding your head to their grisly collection of trophies. By the time the cavalry came into contact with the infantry they would be stabbing at the backs of the fleeing foot-soldiers.

Horsemen in history used various tricks to increase the effect of this morale impact. The most common was shouting a battle-cry and sounding musical instruments such as horns, bugles, and drums while launching the charge. The second, scarcely less common, was falling upon the infantry's flank or rear, either by surprise or by engaging the infantry frontally with other troops prior to the charge--or both, as in the attack of the Visigothic cavalry upon the Roman flank in the battle of Adrianople (378). The third--particularly useful after the widespread adoption of gunpowder weapons--was the abovementioned idea of baiting the infantry into wasting their fire by the use of a mounted skirmish screen. This "baiting" trick is present in practically all European and American cavalry manuals since the 18th century and possibly in other places as well.


The second is by getting the foot to break formation. Sometimes this can come by the accident of a genuine rout--as in the medieval battle of Bouvines (1214), where the Low Countries foot defeated and pursued the French foot in the center of the line only to be charged by the French mounted men-at-arms when they were still disorganized and exhausted from the pursuit. The same effect can also be obtained with a feigned flight, as in some interpretations of the battle of Hastings (1066).


Third is by combining the charge with supporting firepower. A separate post deals with this matter in greater detail than can be covered here.


Fourth in line is manipulating a stallion's competitive instincts. Obviously, it is only practicable when all or a significant proportion of the men ride stallions. When one of the riders urge the stallion into a gallop, there is a chance that the others will mindlessly follow, considering it as something of a race. Unfortunately in such a charge the fastest horses would soon outpace the others while the slowest lag behind, leading to a disorganized formation and an ineffective, suicidal charge. The only way to prevent this was by making sure that the gallop and the charge was begun at a relatively short distance, preferably below fifty paces. This fact was recognized early on--the tactical doctrine of the Knights Templar as outlined in the Regle du Temple already included a cautionary statement against coming into the gallop too soon, and chronicles written as early as the ninth century already commented on the difference between an organized charge and a disorganized suicide. Of course I find it impossible to believe that none of the Chinese, the Macedonians, or the Persians had not discovered this earlier. That being said, holding off the final dash until a short distance was a good idea regardless of whether the charging horsemen rode stallions, geldings, or mares; it only applies with greater urgency to the troublesome stallions.


Fifth comes a method that may sound rather inhumane to some: dead horses. In repelling a cavalry charge by fire action, firing from too close a range was almost as dangerous as firing from too far away. While the living horses could swerve away from an unwavering line of infantry, the dead horses couldn't and they usually would plunge forward for a while before the friction of the ground stopped them. If the infantry commander judged the distance right, these dead horses would form a rampart that subsequent cavalry attacks would have to jump over or wade through. If the fire was delivered a little too late, though, one or some of the dead horses might have retained considerable momentum when they reached the infantry line, and there was nothing a bullet or bayonet could do to stop it. Not rarely the corpse would bring two, three, or even four ranks down; a perceptive cavalry commander could often take advantage of the confusion caused by this incident to launch a follow-up attack into the now-disorganized infantry formation. Usually the cavalry had a decent (but by no means certain) chance to catch and rout the infantry before they could reform their line.

In the early 18th century, the French cavalry tried to turn this exploitation of an unforeseen advantage into a standardized tactical doctrine. They experimented with having the main cavalry attack screened by a loose line of horses that would be sacrificed to the enemy's fire, the riders pushing the wounded, enraged, dying horses into the infantry formation before the actual attack came to exploit the gaps thus created. Experienced infantry commanders tended to be quite good at judging the range for the musket volley, however, and the trick failed dismally as a regular doctrine; it was soon erased from the standard drills. From then on the exploitation of gaps caused by dead horses was relegated back to the status of an incidental tactical response.


The sixth item in the list is the use of longer weapons. Some heavy cavalrymen involved in the Italian Wars of the 16th and late 15th centuries experimented by lengthening their lances to twenty feet or more. They would stop their horses just beyond the reach of hostile pikes and then try to thrust and "fence" against the pikemen, hoping to bring one or two down and create a temporary gap to exploit. This was not a very successful idea because it did not allow the gendarmes to use the mobility of their horses. Things could also go wrong if the pikemen suddenly decided to charge, often panicking the horses and throwing the gendarmes down from the saddle. By the late 16th century the idea had vanished from Western European military records--something that may have been related to the adoption of the long cavalry pistol as the standard weapon for heavy horsemen, or (more likely) to the other side of Renaissance European cavalry doctrine, which called for the horsemen to operate as part of a combined-arms team along with friendly infantry formations.

Interestingly, longer lances did seem to work on ancient battlefields--mostly in the hands of Sarmatian horsemen and the Eurasian cataphracts found all the way from Parthia in the west to China and Korea in the east. The Romans called these lances contus (from Greek kontos/kontoi a word meaning both "barge-pole" and "pike") and feared them for their ability to pierce two men at once in the right circumstances. But these lances were different from that used by 16th-century gendarmes, being mostly straight without vamplates and designed for use in two hands rather than one; and most importantly, none of the horsemen wielding this kind of lance seemed to have been required to engage opposing infantry all on their own--most of the relevant cultures placed their lancers in combined-arms roles together with horse archers and/or infantry, while others preferred to use the lancers against opposing horsemen and leave the enemy's foot for the other parts of the army to deal with.

The Polish husaria of the 16th and 17th centuries will inevitably come to this discussion, and in their case I'd invite readers to look deeper at the husars' battlefield record. Sure, the husars performed tactical miracles with their long lances, but most of these they did against opposing cavalry. The occasions where they made important successes against infantry practically always involved cooperation from friendly infantry and/or artillery--which brings us back to point #3 above. Still, one of their engagements includes an incident that is of particular interest to us, as it allows us to add the seventh and last point to this list.


In the Battle of Kirchholm (1609), the Polish husars on one wing routed the Swedish cavalry and then herded the panicked Swedish cavalrymen into the Swedish infantry formations, where they caused a great deal of confusion in their desperate search for shelter from their Polish pursuers. With their formation torn up to pieces by the friendly cavalry, the Swedish infantrymen were in no shape to give any effective resistance against the Poles, so they soon joined their cavalry in the headlong rout. I'm not sure whether this trick of routing the enemy's horse and throwing them upon their foot had been intended all along or was just an improvised response to the developments on the battlefield, but in any case it took a large portion of the Swedish army out of combat and rendered it so much easier for the Poles to deal with the rest.

The Kirchholm incident is not exactly an isolated example, as in the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.) the Thebans opened the engagement by sending their horsemen to rout the Spartans' horse and then throw these horsemen back in disorder into the Spartan phalanx. In this case the final blow was delivered by the Theban (infantry) phalanx rather than the cavalry, so the example may not be entirely relevant to our discussion except for showing that the idea and its execution is not restricted to the husars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.


This list is by no means exhaustive, but I hope it can be instructive to writers who wish to find a way for a horse-riding character and his/her comrades to break a line of formed foot. Pay particular attention to the fact that only the fifth method requires a frontal attack; all the others can be performed as well (if not better) against the flanks and rear of the foot formation. It is also important to remember that most of the ideas listed above can be combined with each other for even greater effectiveness.

[JaM]

Oh, one more thing - a list of all such analyses is here:

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/mem...ics&filter=all

[Gorrrrrn]

GrnEyedDevil has done a brilliant tutorial on advanced family trees here:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...54#post3554454

[y2day]

Updated: 11/19/08

Thanks Roz and JaM.

If you find a good site please post. Hopefully I can update it a little more often.

y

[Gorrrrrn]

GED is starting work on a new economic model for M2TW / Kingdoms using his Barebones mod.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=994

The economic model has many new features BUT it is very early days and very much work in progress. if you post there please keep comments relevant to the Barebones mod at this stage.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1615

[y2day]

GED is starting work on a new economic model for M2TW / Kingdoms using his Barebones mod.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=994

The economic model has many new features BUT it is very early days and very much work in progress. if you post there please keep comments relevant to the Barebones mod at this stage.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/downl...o=file&id=1615

Yes I know, I'm helping him. Between him and Mim I am lost in the dev forum . Those guys are really amazing. Its going to be great!

Will update once GED releases later version.

y

[Gorrrrrn]

1,000 years on, perils of fake Viking swords are revealed

• Maev Kennedy
• The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2008

It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass.


"You really didn't want to have that happen," said Dr Alan Williams, an archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection, the London museum which has one of the best assemblies of ancient weapons in the world. He and Tony Fry, a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, south-west London, have solved a riddle that the Viking swordsmiths may have sensed but didn't quite understand.
Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons after a millennium. The legendary swords found at Viking sites across northern Europe bear the maker's name, Ulfberht, in raised letters at the hilt end. Puzzlingly, so do the worst ones, found in fragments on battle sites or in graves.


The Vikings would have found it impossible to tell the difference when they bought a newly forged sword: both would have looked identical, and had razor sharp blades. The difference would have only emerged in use, often fatally.


Williams began to test the Ulfberht blades when a private collector brought one into the Wallace, and found they varied wildly. The tests at the NPL have proved that the inferior swords were forged in northern Europe from locally worked iron. But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran. The tests at Teddington proved the genuine Ulfberht swords had a phenomenally high carbon content, three times that of the fakes, and half again that of modern carbon steel.
The contemporary fake Ulfberhts used the best northern metal working techniques, which hardened the metal by quenching - plunging the red-hot blade into cold water. It enabled them to give the blade a keen edge, but made it fatally brittle.


In the 11th century the Russians blocked the trade route, and the supply of crucible steel ended. Evidence is emerging that the swords from burials are the fakes, or the work of less prestigious makers. The genuine Ulfberhts have mostly been found in rivers. "I don't think these were ritual offerings," Williams said. "They are mostly from rivers near settlement sites, and I think what you have almost certainly is some poor chap staggering home drunk, falling into the river and losing his sword. An expensive mistake."


Their work has also proved that many of the Ulfberht swords in some of the most famous weapons collections in the world are fakes. The Wallace's is the real McCoy, but the one brought in by the private collector which started the hunt turned out to be fake.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...-vikings-sword

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interesting. I wonder how much of te interest the vikings had in russia was down to trying to protect the source of their steel for their swords?

Also if the vikings suddenly had the source of quality steel cut off how much difference would that have made to their combat abilities - ie fighting with swords that fell apart?

[Gorrrrrn]

Four excellent and straight forward tutorials from Mythic Commodore have just been released:

How to Make New Buildings
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=221102

A Guide to the Export_Descr_Buildings.txt File
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=221100

How To Make New Units
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=221097

A Beginner's Guide to the Export_Descr_Unit
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=221093

[JaM]

nice ones, maybe we can persuade PB to rename those units he modded so there will be no more cataputs aka arquebusiers etc...

[Point Blank]

That was done long ago.

[JaM]

then i should update before saying something....