Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Clothing hampering blades seems right to me. When it comes to blades, especially impaling weapons (vs. cutting weapons), your skin is the thing protecting you. Once a knife penetrates your skin it can be amazingly deep with only a little extra force. It's very plausible to me that clothing could make a difference.

http://www.classicalfencing.com/articles/bloody.php

"Even today, prosecutors trying homicide cases involving death by stabbing will sometimes attempt to convince juries that a deeply penetrating stab wound serves as an indicator of murderous intent by virtue of the great force required to inflict such wounds. It is generally accepted today among experts of forensic medicine, however, that the force requisite to inflict even a deeply penetrating stab wound is minimal.8 This opinion would seem to be supported by the experience of a stage actor who inadvertently stabbed a colleague to death during a stage performance of Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet. The unlucky young man delivered a thrust at the very moment his vision was inadvertently obscured by a member of the cast. Although he claimed to have felt no resistance, a post mortem examination revealed that he had penetrated the chest of the victim to a depth of eighteen centimeters.9"

"Except for bone or cartilage which has become ossified, it is the skin that offers the greatest resistance to the point of a blade. In fact, once the skin is penetrated, a blade may pass, even through costal cartilage, with disquieting ease.10 Generally, of the factors governing the ease of entry, the two most important are the sharpness of the tip of the blade and the velocity with which it contacts the skin. While the mass of the weapon is a factor in penetration, the velocity of the blade at the moment of contact is of greater importance, since the force at impact is directly proportional to the square of the velocity of the thrust.11"

8 B. Knight, Forensic Pathology (New York: 1991) 146-147.
9 Thimm (Supra n. 6), 463.
10 C. Polson, D. Gee and B. Knight, The Essentials of Forensic Medicine (Oxford: 1985)125.
11 Knight (Supra n. 8), 147.


-Max

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Interesting. I knew that knives could easily cause really bad wounds without much force, but my (faulty) conclusion was that since skin/body tissue doesn't offer much resistance, extra layers of cloth wouldn't help either. Thanks for the clarification.


P.S. Speaking of Jomon, this means that their armors could be made of cloth that wouldn't be encumbering but would still offer great protection.

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Jomon sucks.

Edit: Makes me want to make a guide for them a la my Patala guide tradition. Need to play a few games with them in MP though. =(

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

I think a new guide on the Jomon would be awesome. Although I hope they really don't suck all that much. They have interesting summons.

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

You probably want to wait a bit with a Jomon guide, since they are my ongoing project. I've not been working much on them the last month, but I believe I will have some time before school starts again.

They will get some new summons and some other stuff. They will still be unshielded :)

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Thinking of cloth armour... IIRC Mongol cavalry tended to wear loose shirts of raw silk. The cloth tended not to be cut by arrows, which a: protected the archer and b: made removing barbed arrowheads an awful lot easier, because the cloth around the arrowhead made pulling it out much safer.


On the swords/armour bit, I'm with Endo on maces/hammers etc. being used a lot. The Royal Armouries in Leeds (UK) have a few experts who do demonstrations of swordfighting, jousting etc., and I chatted a bit while visiting. I think they were talking about late medieval/early renaissance equipment (full harness and so on), and apparently swords would start a battle literally razor sharp but got blunted pretty quickly due to hitting hard objects with a great deal of force. Hitting plate armour with a newly sharpened blade could do pretty horrible things to it, but you weren't going to keep an edge on the blade very long. A can opener on a stick of some sort was much more reliable against armour, and still killed unarmoured men pretty well into the bargain.

Oh yes - since the later armours were quite highly engineered to allow mobility with high levels of protection, just denting armour could have a serious impact on the wearer's mobility.

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

The unshielded parts would be ok if each samurai had a high enough morale to not get fazed by the arrows.

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Considering Samurai beliefs about death and honour, another solution might be to give all samurai units an automatic "sermon of courage", so that, as other units died around them, their morale would actually go up.

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

I don't understand. How is SoC different from just giving them a high base morale, and why would that make their morale go up? (I suppose it might affect the "average" morale of their squad, but losing units makes your bonus for "intactness" go down.)

Sermon of Courage is simply +2 to Morale, end of story.

-Max

Re: If Giants existed in BC times...
 

Considering samurai beliefs about death and honor, you would probably lose your best commander every time you lost a major battle as he ritually killed himself. I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea to me.... Samurai do have decent morale, but perhaps it should be a bit higher thematically speaking. Their defense should almost be a little higher as well. The samurai do make excellent shock infantry as is, it would just be nice if they worked a little harder at surviving.