[wombatsSAR]

The whole reason for me posting was to weigh in was because various comments that desired a sim approach. I felt that some of the suggestions for the sim side were not accurately describing various phenomena and I wanted to add information from various knowledgable sources. I am not an expert on these subjects but I am moderately well-read.

Sim: xbows blow away everything else in terms of sheer hitting power. At least the steel variety. The pre-steel ones score over the traditional bows in being MUCH easier to train peasants to an adequate level of skill. They are cheaper to stock and the bows are more durable than regular bows. Reload rates sucked but then, if you kill them first, you don't have to parry.

Sim: pointy things - all of the pointy weapons are armor piercing in effect. They plant an enormous overpressure on the armor causing a point failure. The longbow and composite bows had enough force to let them pierce plate when using properly designed arrowheads. These bodkin points did a good job at piercing various armors but were inferior to a broadhead for inflicting wounds (we're neglecting sepsis here). The xbow did it by sheer force. Afaict, there were no bodkin point quarrels. One design sufficed for all applications.

Thus, my recommendations for a sim that longbowmen and composite bowmen have higher resource costs to reflect their long training times. Their projectiles should be AP but of low value to simulate the fact that the resulting wounds were of lesser severity. Even short bows should be AP but without the draw weight behind them, they couldn't do all that much. Spears and lances should be AP when used in charges. By precise definition, so should spears in static melee but the impact velocities probably don't make it worth defining that way, at least not for human wielders.

One obvious "flaw", as it were, is that the battlefield is so short that the effective ranges of the various missile weapons are ... modififed. This truncation results in the combatants starting very close together resulting in the effectiveness of bow fire being compromised. This could be hacked but I'm not sure if the game would support that???