Re: Fundamentally changing the game
Originally Posted by
Quinn Inuit
Sorry, I must have been unclear about the longbowmen. Here's a precis of the article:
England has a large longbow corps made up of its yeoman farmers, who practice in their spare time.
Black Death hits.
Survivors are able to acquire more land and apply newly-developed farming techniques to it.
Suddenly, the English yeoman are making vastly more money than before, and additional work yields substantial additional reward.
This creates an incentive to work one's fields as opposed to practicing the longbow.
The longbow requires substantial training to use effectively, so without practicing longbowmen, fielding a longbow corps in wartime became almost impossible.
The economic effects of the Black Death, as I've heard it, was that fields were left unworked because of severe shortages in manpower. With the supply of work remaining constant but the supply of workers drastically reduced, peasants who were maltreated by their lords or otherwise not content with their lot could move elsewhere, and the employers would offer greater incentives and protection in order to hold on to their workers. I'm not sure what this would mean in game terms, but then not everything can be modelled by the RTW engine anyway.
The supply of longbowmen disappeared because it was deemed more efficient to train musketmen instead, some time during the Tudor-Stuart period. Once the shift was made to muskets, bows were neglected, and the supply of trained archers disappeared. In game terms, there were two mutually exclusive recruitment trees for longbows and muskets, and after the faction switched to the musket tree, it wasn't possible to recruit longbowmen again without a lengthy readjustment period.