Relative Strengths

[Philippon]

I was musing along and thought I would pass on this bit of general historical info to the modders out there. Again, as is all my stuff, it's mostly general principles which may or may not work in either this mod or any mod. But so folks can understand how pre-socket bayonet combat worked.

There were essentially four or five (depending on your preferences for sorting) weapons types. You had pole weapons, hafted weapons, missile weapons both mobile and static, and you had cavalry. Each weapon group had it's own strengths, but likewise it's own weakness. The successful army general knew where to put each weapon type (if he had it) and how to emply each one to it's best advantage.

The quickest weapon's companies you could muster up where the hafted weapons, specifically spear, though by the time of the Middle Ages, all sorts of weapons types where stuck on the end of a pole arm. Nevertheless they all worked pretty much the same. They presented a wall of sharp and pointy items in front and were next to impossible to get through. Horses, being practical animals in staying alive, would not charge such a wall unless trained forever to do so and even then, wouldn't push it. Hence the hafted weapon's front was perfect for stopping a charge dead on. The most successful units were the pike and sarissa units of the Renaissance and Macedonian and Successor States formations, but nearly all armies at one point or another had something which would be siimilar.

The only weakness which a company of spears had, was a company of swords or hafted weapons, such as swords, axes, or clubs, and the irony was that the longer the spear, the more vulnerable. Hence the better the spear company was at defending itself against a charge of cavalry, the less capable it was of defending itself against a charge of swordsmen. And it all had to do with simple physics which you can demonstrate to each other in the privacy of your own home.

The longer the weapon, the less kinetic force the end of that weapon has. A spear, being thrust forward, has great penetrating power, but only forward. It has no real power on it's side. So it always was easy for a Roman legionare to knock aside the Macedonia sarrissa's by hitting them on the front side, or top and stepping past the point. In fact a good smack down on the tip, folllowed by your foot on it, and the spear point is buried in the ground and you can walk up the spear, forcing it out of the hand of it's carrier. When you parry a blade, you want to meet it on the shaft as slose to your hands as possible and as close to the tip of the blade as possible because of this principle. It's next to impossible for a person to do this with a long spear.

This is why the Roman Legion marched across Europe. But once the Goth's introduced the stirrup to the horse, that changed because the Roman Legion lacked the one thing needed to stop a horse from doing the iron shod fourstep on the Legionarre's face. That being a wall of pointy things pointed straight at you.

Prior to the Roman Legion, the chief advantage with the phalanx was that there was no army which had a professional cadre of swordsmen form which to draw. But likewise the Romans were able to not worry about cavalry charges because of yet another simple law of physics, until the arrival of the Goth's and a new innovation in horseback riding . . . the stirrup..

Suffice to say, while a man on a hose with a sword or club is going to make trouble for the boys down below, a good shield, heavy armor, and the discipline will more than offset that advantage. But the real trouble comes when the man on the horse is galloping at you full tilt with a spear pointed at you. Your shield is not going to stop that so easily because that spear has got a horse and rider's weight in inertia behind it's point. But the moment that spear hit's the target, if it's going to have that much impact the man has to be able to hold on long enough for it to hit. If he holds on that long however, the horse keeps going, but the man frequently does not, and he falls off the back of the horse and lands on his keester, looking rather silly, and prone enough to aquire that pale flaccid dead look after being whacked on by the axe or club or sword of his surviving foes.

The stirrup holds the man on the horse and so for the first time in history, you were able to make what would become, the Knight, in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

Alexander the Great's heavy cavalry had mastered the art of letting go just at impact and thus did the damage that the later knights of the medieval age could achieve routinely, but the training to achieve that was of such duration that they were seldom more than a few hundred on the battle field and after Alexander, almost never seen.

So in the Middle Ages, you had a trilateral shift which worked like this. Spear stops Cavalry, Sword takes out Spear, Cavalry takes out Sword.

Add to this the missile weapon, be they bow or catapult. Here you had another set of problems. The Bow or Crossbow required either a lot of training and/or both hands to operate well and that meant you could only effectively carry a small hafted weapon to defend yourself with. Remember what Cavalry does to sword? Same thing to missile and given that the missile unit is trained mostly in missile, sword and spear likewise do a number on the unit fast.

Thus while missile weapons could inflict a great deal of death from above and afar, they were the easiest unit to take out by anyone else. Bow and Crossbow and early black powder could move to avoid such problems, but the static catapult or cannon was pretty much any man's weapon if you captured them.

Needless to say, in generic strength, at a numerical system of one per man. The various companies would have the following melee strengths.

Bow, Crossbow, Musketry - 100 attack and defense

Missle Horse - 100 attack and defense

Light Horse - 100 attack and defense

Peasent - 200 attack, 100 defense verses hafted and 400 defense verses Horse

Militia / Urban Spear - 300 attack, 150 defense verses hafted and 600 defense verses Horse

Axe or Club hafted - 300 attack and 300 defense verses spear and 150 defense verses horse

Professional Cavalry - 300 attack and 300 defense

Professional Spear - 400 attack and 200 defense against hafted and 800 against horse.

Professional Sword - 400 attack and 400 defense against spear and 200 defense against Horse

Heavy Cavalry - 400 attack and 200 defense. While possessing great impact, all that weight slows down the unit and deprives it of mobility once the charge is fimished, making it a bit more vulnerable. This is one of the reasons why you had so much armor on the horse, since that offset the vulnerability of the unit somewhat.

Professional Pike - 600 attack with 300 defense against sword and 1200 defense against Horse.

Missile weapons attacks were another set of issues.

I've hunted and one of the curious experiences when hunting game birds, especially doves, is the gentle patter of shot upon the ground around you as well as on your body as the shot returns to earth. It is a mild patter which you don't fear in the least since the weight of the shot is so slight, the air resistance slows it down to the point where you can catch them in your hand after they've fallen hundreds of feet from the sky. In other words, while a shotgun can blow a man's heart out at 10 yards, at 300 yards, all you need is an umbrella.

You had three things to take into account when you had a bow unit, the pull of the bow, the weight of the arrow, and the armor of the opponent.

The pull of the bow was what determined the initial speed and inertia of the arrow, thus determining how much penetration power it had. The arrow's weight itself determined how much penetration it would have at a distance. Finally the armor of the opponent determined just how good that arrow would be when it impacted as specific ranges.

Arrows then were of various types depending on what sort of target you were going to be dealing with. The less armor, the more broad the arrow's head, and the more armor the more pointed the arrow's head. When you hit an unarmored man, you wanted a broad tip for a wide puncture. It put the man out more effectively because even it if hit only muscle, the wideness of the cut produced much blood and pain and took an expert a while to remove. A pointed shaft would go right through an unarmored man and unless it hit a vital organ, the damage was so negligable that the man could swear one or two times, yank or push the arrow through,and keep fighting. I've had some pretty deep puncture wounds in the muscle regions and they really don't stop you for long.

But when the man was encased in a quarter inch minimum of iron, that pointed shaft was needed to get through that armor and start the man to bleeding. It wasn't a single pointed shafted arrow that took down the French Knight at Agincourt and Crecy, it was the two or three dozen stuck in him which did the job. The English Longbow took out the French Knights by hitting them so many times, they fainted or died from blood loss.

The musket ball had the advantage in that it's initial penetrating power was such that it didn't matter how much armor you had at a certain range, you were going down because the ball didn't just puncture you, it ripped you as well. The ball, passing through the muscle region ripped up the muscle enough to render that arm or leg pretty useless for the time, if not forever. And of course it pretty much could take out the organ it hit as well, usually killing you sooner or later. But like the arrow or bolt, the farther it had to travel, the less damage it would do on impact. Even good hardened leather, if treated properly, would stop your typical musket ball, as was shown by Ned Kelly in his famous shoot out with the British solders in Australia back in the 1860's.

[Alkidas]

This is too long for me to read carefully right now, but a great deal of simplification seems to be going on here (the "trilateral shift" is a good example). Things aren't this rock-paper-scissors in reality. You have to take into account a lot of factors - morale, ground, tactics - and morale.

A pike in reality wasn't invulnerable to cavalry. Yes, a horse would stop if you didn't give way (after which the infantry would beat the cavalrymen down with axes, swords, spears etc.), but often you did. Because of the sheer psychological effect of the charge. In fact, the French were used to infantry shattering even before impact - which is one reason why they didn't expect to lose at Courtrai (where they faced goedendags). It simply isn't a matter of technological comparison. Technology doesn't explain why unsupported infantry started defeating cavalry during the 14th century, not before. Other factors has to be included. For instance, cavalry supported by archers can defeat even pike-armed infantry.

And sword is not as effective against pike as claimed here. The Macedonians were very successful frontally against Romans - in fact perhaps too successful, since this made their flanks vulnerable. And I recall that they were successful even in bad terrain, even though this should've been a liability.

And I wonder if the advantage of stirrup is not also overplayed here? One has to recall the powerful eastern cavalry which didn't require it.

The point of the English longbow was not to eliminate the enemy, but to distract them and change his movement. Here tactics again come into picture. What happened at Crécy was tactics: location and good combination of different kinds of weapons. It was not a simple matter of "killing machines" called longbows annihilating the knights.

[Philippon]

Alkeides: This is too long for me to read carefully right now, but a great deal of simplification seems to be going on here (the "trilateral shift" is a good example). Things aren't this rock-paper-scissors in reality. You have to take into account a lot of factors - morale, ground, tactics - and morale.

Me: Yes, very simplistic. But that was the point, an overall view which gave the general principles. As you read other comments that I make, you'll spot that I recognize those other factors as well in specific circumstances.

[Philippon]

Alkidas: The Macedonians were very successful frontally against Romans - in fact perhaps too successful, since this made their flanks vulnerable. And I recall that they were successful even in bad terrain, even though this should've been a liability.


Wheaties: Actually it was the terrain at Crysophalea which resulted in the defeat of the Macedonians by the Romans. And Magnesia a few years later showed that the Selucid Phalanx was even less capable.