Crossbows vs. Longbows

[Agema]

Longbowmen worked because the kings of England compelled the male population to train with them (I think) one day a week. They couldn't even be fired effectively without extensive development of the right muscles. Longbowmen had a distinctive lopsided shoulder musculature, I believe.

Further studies have shown that a top notch yew longbow with the right arrowhead would be devastating, but most longbows were cheaply produced with a poor arrowhead, and were not optimal for defeating armour, and generally a crossbow bolt had more force than a longbow arrow. By the time of Agincourt, the French armour was generally good enough to block a longbow arrow at range. You're quite right that the time and effort required to produce longbowmen and their weapons made them essentially impractical when gunpowder came along. A useful side effect of longbowmen's training which may have contributed to their effectiveness is that they would have been at least semi-professional troops, where most nations would merely have raw militia from the equivalent class. Longbows were still used up to at least the mid-16th century (e.g. Pinkie Cleugh), until gun technology got good enough to really make them obsolete.

I'm pretty sure that slings have another problem, which is that they require quite a lot of room to fire - you've got to whirl the sling without risk of hitting your neighbours. You can pack conventional bowmen very tightly, which means you can amass more firepower for your unit frontage, which is a huge plus when the intention is to use firepower to do major damage rather than skirmishing harassment.

[cleveland]

On the original question of armor penetration, I think it's really a Terminal Ballistics issue.

Neither the arrow nor bolt would be rotating (like a rifle bullet) so the longer arrow would be more subject to yawing & pitching than the bolt. Therefore, upon impact, the arrow would have a significantly higher chance of striking the target "off-center" with respect to the flightpath.

An off-center strike would cause the missile to deflect and/or shatter, significantly decreasing armor penetration...so a short bolt has a much higher chance of reliably penetrating armor.

But since the arrows & bolts have roughly the same kinetic energy, a proper arrow strike would be expected to penetrate armor, when it (rarely) occurs. This is how English Longbows were deployed, if I recall correctly: overcome the low chance of penetration by blotting out the sun with arrows. Something like a half-million arrows were fired at Crecy.

This seems to be well modeled in Dom3, with the DRN randomness.

I personally think a much more egregious oversight is that the Lance is not AP...this thing is the quintessential kinetic penetrator...

[Agema]

On the other hand, a Dom3 lance deals out quite enough damage to not need AP. A 25-protec thug without Awe staring at a line of charging cavalry should feel a large amount of trepidation.

[BesucherXia]

Besides lances, morning stars and maces are also very effective to hurt well armored persons since they are delivering stun damage instaed of slash or thrust.

A brainstorm: can we mod these weapons to give them a second effect of fatigue increase? That also hurts the heavy units a lot and those hitted will soon face AP damage just due to their fatigues.

[Agema]

I don't think that would reflect what they did particularly effectively, and could do some really massive things to battle mechanics. Full AP damage would make them insanely powerful, and I doubt that anyone's going to be coding a new "lesser AP" at 10-25%.

What could be done in a mod easily is a damage increase for weapons like battleaxes, warhammers, maces and so on, but even that could be tricky to balance. Although it might go some way to counteracting the fact that these weapons don't really do more damage than a sword and tend to have worse Att/Def values as well.

[Sombre]

If you start giving stuff like lances and longbows the AP tag, you're eroding the point of the tag in the first place, which is to differentiate weapons. Lances are not niche anti armour weapons in dom3, they are simply high damage weapons (which often makes them a good choice vs high prot units). A crossbow is a good choice vs armour, but much less of a good choice vs an unarmoured high hp unit, where you could be using shortbows, longbows, javs etc. It may not be completely realistic, but it makes for better gameplay and is intuitive.

You could mod maces etc to give secondary fatigue damage, but unless you make it something like AP rather than AN fatige damage and have a lowish value on it, they're going to be far too good against thugs etc. I don't want to see 20 peasants with clubs phasing a 28 prot cyclops just because they can't afford swords.

[Sombre]

Actually giving maces dmg 7 and AP might work to an extent. They'd be like the melee versons of crossbows - less good vs light prot guys, better against high prot guys. The fact they have worse att and def makes sense, since they are deployed against high prot encumbered guys, or heavy cav (who have good def but who shouldn't be taken out by mace armed foot troops anyway, really).

[Aezeal]

Well I'm not getting it, maces aren't armour piercing in any way right? (IRL I mean) so why would THEY get AP and not something that could actually penetrate armour even on specific weak points.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Actually giving maces dmg 7 and AP might work to an extent. They'd be like the melee versons of crossbows - less good vs light prot guys, better against high prot guys. The fact they have worse att and def makes sense, since they are deployed against high prot encumbered guys, or heavy cav (who have good def but who shouldn't be taken out by mace armed foot troops anyway, really).

What do you mean by "dmg 7"? Damage 7, no-str or the sum of strength and weapon damage being 7? I've changed hammers, but not maces/clubs, to be dmg -4 and armor-piercing. Details below.

Maces are mostly used by the monkeys of all castes: Atavi, Vanara, Bandar, Kala-Mukha and leaders. Villains and Burgmeister Guards also use maces. They are pretty rare, but armor-piercing doesn't work with these units. Increased damage would be all right, I think.


Since the discussion changed into weapon balance, would you guys be interested in testing out this little mod I've been making? See attachment.

It started out as giving all magical spears #lance bonus, but I've been slowly adding into it and now it changes most mundane weapons. Most of it doesn't really make a difference, but Hammers (but not maces or clubs) are armor-piercing. They are used by VERY few units, which include few nationals (MA Ulm), Claymen and... Siege Golems! Haven't changed the golems yet, don't know if I should...

Other notable changes: +1 att to most spears, mauls, glaives, mauls and such have higher damage, many weapons cost less resources, axes got more precise.

[cleveland]

Originally Posted by Agema

On the other hand, a Dom3 lance deals out quite enough damage to not need AP. A 25-protec thug without Awe staring at a line of charging cavalry should feel a large amount of trepidation.

Lances aren't quite as potent as you'd think. I ran some tests, reported in this post, which showed that a Heavy Cavalry's Lance deals just 22 damage...certainly better than a spear, but nothing a 25-prot thug should really fear.

Even chain-mail infantry survive a Heavy Cav's Lance more often than not (17 prot).