[MachingunJoeTurbo]

Originally Posted by vfb

So, for example, if you were at the Battle of Hastings, and you were told to shoot over the shield wall and ensure victory for the Normans, you'd be like, "Sorry dude, I can't arc."

You can't vary the drawing of the bow and still have it work the way it is suppose to work. They wouldn't have been able to shoot over that wall at any distance within their range. For example if they were close they couldn't just give the arrow a little tug to scoot over. Bows have to be shot full powered. It's simply the mechanics of how they work. Read my post and I'm talking about absolute arcing all the time. They obviously can do so when in a position that allows them in accordance with the power of their weapon but not in the way you see in these games where the crossbow is forced to shoot straight and the bow has all this extra magical flexibility. You can ,and they did, lob high angle shots with a crossbow too. However that isn't arching whenever is it? That is my point if I was not clear.

@Sombre.

Lol at lexicographers knowing what they're doing. Have you heard about words like "acorn" being removed from the Oxford Junior dictionary? Sorry the definition is still wrong, but that is not your fault so this isn't a flame. Security smiley incoming.

Originally Posted by Agema

I don't support the "because they were cheap" argument for one main reason: I don't think it adequately explains the adoption of massed bowfire as a tactic itself. I think that requires military commanders seeing how a weapon can be used and adapting to it. In the ancient and medieval eras, massed bowfire was common in Eastern militaries, but the further west into Europe you got, the more the ethos was melee: archery was generally about softening up or harassing an opponent prior to the real action. That the English used such mass deployment of archers suggests a tactical doctrine at variance with not just their own history, but the prevailing cultural habits of Western Europe. Thus they would have to have weapon to make that doctrinal change viable.

They were massed because they could be because they were cheap enough for the populace to snag them up. They wouldn't be able to sub in another competing range weapon because they did not have the pimpin' money rolls to do it with. There was no mystical English hoodoo going on and restricting the discussion to Europe seems a bit odd given the setting of the game pulls from everywhere.

This is why I suggest the English longbow is a "battle winner" - it was a weapon you could heavily base your army on, not that it meant proper scouting, logistics, good morale, disciplined troops and decent generalship became less necessary. It could fulfill this role because weaker bows could not fire an arrow far enough and or with enough penetration, whereas crossbows that had the range and power fired too slowly. Yes, I think it *was* a superb weapon; the many victories accomplished with it should be some testament to its effectiveness.

To prove this you would have to prove that what the English have accomplished could not have been done otherwise without the longbow. The longbow's power is inflated simply because the strategies of the French were poor. Poor enough when at Morlaix when they didn't even use them they still won with basically what amounted to traps and pointy sticks. When the French gain cohesion and focus later on, they fell apart.

And the crossbow is not as "slow" as you think it is. For one you have to realize the inherent advantages of a missile weapon held in such a manner allowed a greater frontage. The man in front can lower his profile giving the men behind clear sight. This also allows multiple ranks to take turns ensuring a continuous and more cohesive stream of missiles. Recalling my good discussion with my buddy at the top of my post remember what I said about bow arcing. Imagine a longbowman standing behind his fellow longbowman. The longbow because it is...long cannot be shot from a crouched/prone position in the manner of crossbow/firearm. So how is the guy gonna get around his buddy? If the target is too close and he aims up a little bit he'll over shoot. If he trys to go way high up he is likely to miss. And not to mention he's doing this without being able to see past his buddy's pumpkin head. So he can't even get a rough idea on how to adjust following shots. Combine this with what I've said before and the rate of shooting of the longbow is no where near the kind of efficacy that you think it is.

Strong bows with huge draw weights are indeed worldwide. However, that doesn't mean it's easy and anyone plucked from the general populace could do it without practice: they would largely have been specialised hunters and the like. Producing tens of thousands of such archers available for warfare is a different matter. Longbows vary, well, yes this has been agreed. In that sense you'd be right that there was nothing very special about longbows generically. However, to do so would also mask the fact that the Welsh/English version was much more powerful than your average longbow. At which point, we'd be asking instead "Which longbow does the game mean?"

Producing many archers has been done before. Again there is nothing special about the Welsh/English longbow comparative bows are found elsewhere in Europe there is no extra power that it has. And it isn't that difficult. There is no special Englishness that let's them engage in the kind of martial archery practice that happened elsewhere. Average longbows of that strength are found in old Viking burial sites. The weapon is really really old.

Edit: Oh yeah a couple more things. The V thing is pure apocrypha. To pull a warbow you need three-four fingers. So there is no significance in two. Longbowman would not likely be bothered to be ransomed back in the first place and so they would have dead so it didn't matter how many fingers they had left. Churchill lied his rear end off about a whole lot of things and admitted it too.

And the church ban didn't do anything since the pope at the time was weak.