Recruitable Unit Rebalance Version 7.51 Released.

[wombatsSAR]

Always good to leap into the fray very late in the process... (and this is going to be LONG)

First comment, remember that this is a game, not a sim. While many of us would like it to be one (at times, me too!), it is really about having different tactical options and using them as best as they can be used.

Summary of suggestions:
Shortbow 0 AP, -2 precision range short
Longbow 4-6 AP, -2 precision range longer
Crossbow 10-12 AP, 0 precision longer yet
Arbalest 14-18 AP, 0 precision longest
Slings (cheap) same as before
Slings (elite) 10, maybe 4 AP, -3 precision, between short and longbow range
Blowguns - put back at original, up the poison (curare/paralysis?)
New- Tien Chi'n repeating xbow -2 AP, 0 precision, 20 range, mild poison.
rate of fire: 1 or 1.5/1 (fast reload, easy cocking)
====
Important notes: Longbowmen and the Slingers (elite) are elite and should
use the mechanism of having a high resource cost - they should cost as
much as a knight. Not because their equipment is expensive but because their training is expensive! There should only be a few available per turn. The other troops are militia or conscript quality.

Details (or why I'm shoot my mouth off (and maybe foot, too)):

AP - actually, any of the really pointy toys should be AP. Afterall, "AP" is nothing more than a mechanic to describe the physics of taking the force of the weapon and applying it to a very small area. Spear wpns in a charge or vs. a charge should be that way. Picks and the like are AP. All of the bow weapons are AP. Now, modelling that in the game correctly is going to be amusing.

Bows: actually, bows are AP only at close range and after that, they are going too slow to really pierce the heavier armors. However, the arrows inflict rather nasty wounds once they penetrate due to the instability of the flight path causing the wound to be ... complicated. The game can't support this level of modelling, iiuc. Also of note, different arrows were used for different targets. There were bodkin points for heavy armors, broadleaf points for no armor or v. light armors, and intermediate designs for other cases. This also complicates the game modelling problem.

XBows: they ARE long range, they ARE AP at all times. The xbow outranged the longbow. The quarrel is aerodynamically more efficient than the arrow at all points in the flight. IIRC, there was pretty much only one type of point for the xbow. This implies that it didn't really matter much what was used, it would hurt. (and I'm pretty sure the medievals checked this out - there are too many other examples of design improvements in weapons for that to have skipped.)

However, the biggest problem I see is that the troop recruitment methods are broken for distinguishing between these three troop types. Of the 3 - shortbow archers (sba), longbowmen (lbm), and xbowmwen (xbm), the lbm took a hideously long time to train. Recall that the ones used at Agincourt et al were the best of the best, sir! As such, they were HIGH morale, HIGH precision, and few in number. But, there is no mechanism in the game to model this. The sba troops were often levies, or issued bows on short notice, and the bow is a difficult weapon to master. They were lower morale, low precision, and expendable. The xbm were usually similar to the sba except that the xbow is v. easy to learn. So they should be low morale, high precision, and cheap in gold but less so resources. In game terms, one should only be able to recruit a few lbm per turn, while easily able to get many more sba or xbm. The only way I can see to model this is to up the resource cost beyond what the actual material costs are. Note, the national xbm (Marignon, for ex.) probably should be higher morale, better trained, etc. - they're not rabble given the death-dealer.

Another example of how "elite" the lbm were: they could pull a 150-200 lbs bow. This has shown up as distortions in their skeletal structure. The typical shortbow used for war is ~60 lbs. That takes loads of training. These guys were serious about bows. After Agincourt (iirc), the French tried to field their own lbm but failed. They didn't have the infrastructure designed to turn out vast numbers of archers that could then be culled down to those few that were superlative.

I would suggest going with AP 0 for short bows with a precision of -2/-3, AP 4-6 for the longbows with a prec. -2/-3 but the lbm are more highly trained!, and the xbows getting AP 10 or 12 and a prec of 0. Plate was pretty much only good for keeping the quarrel from coming out the back of the armor. The other projectiles operate under pretty much the same physics but just have lesser force behind them.

Slings: they are actually MUCH more dangerous than DomII models them. They are longer range than shortbows. They were noted for causing spalling to plate armors. For flexible armors, they were quite nasty as well. Note, the Rhodian and Balaeric slingers were much like the lbm - they were highly trained units and much sought after. Once the supply was wiped out, they pretty much disappeared from the battlefield. Professional slingers did NOT use random rocks found on the battlefield but instead used either cast lead or ceramic bullets - including incriptions and taunts cast in. If one wanted to mod "historical" slingers into the game, I would propose a range between shortbows and longbows, 10 pts damage, maybe 4 AP, precision of -3, but again, the troops are highly trained so the effective precision should be much higher. Gold cost would be moderate but the resource cost should be high - there are not that many of them.
------ of note: once the numbers of these professional slingers began to fall, the Romans opted to train new ones to use one swing around before launching their missiles. Previous accounts put the number at 3. Prowling the various sites that discuss slinging in modern times, folks claim to not be able to gain any advantage from doing more than once through the arc. I would put forth though that if the ancient slingers did 3, they meant to do 3 and that 3 gave them some advantage. Note that they were trained from a very young age to sling, unlike these modern blokes. The reason for the dropping of the number of swings by the Romans, as I understand it, was to make up in volume what they had lost in accuracy from using troops of poorer training.

Last bit: what of adding the repeating xbow for Tien Chi'n? It would be about as dangerous as the shortbow for impact, shorter range, maybe higher rate of fire, and with a mild poison? Troops were conscripts - point, shoot, run if out of ammo

Just to be complete: Blowguns are probably silly in the context of a sim, but fun as a game mechanic. No army ever fielded them. Why? They suck as weapons. The darts have horrible aerodynamics and the muscles used to propel them are rather weak. The physics of the blowgun are ugly for power projection. Practically, they are extremely close range and mostly used to shot vertically since they have huge, arcing flights. Personally? Leave the blowguns as is. Maybe make the poison more deadly? Mimic curare (paralysis)?

Sources: I'm doing this from memory with the following books and articles being source material. If called for, I can try to dredge through and find out why I wrote a particular bit.

Thomas Hardy - Longbow
Ralph Payne-Gallway - The Art of the Crossbow
2 Scienterrific American articles - one on bows and one on crossbows,
from the late '80's, early '90's (someone
borrowed them from me... grrr.)
Osprey's Military History books - oh, lots of 'em
oops, blanking on the author - The Medieval Art of Swordplay
Arthur Ffoulkes - The Armourer and his Art (iirc)
emails w/an honest to god, working plattner - "So, what about a longbow
arrow hitting your plate?" "Oh, it'd go right through it!"
Several books on ancient warfare - various authors have noted that the
various descriptions of the orders of battle have placed the slingers
BEHIND the sba (e.g. - Trajan's Column). They also describe the wounds
from the slings. Not pretty.
"Rocky" Russo - lecture series. He's also the author of "Achtung, Mustang"
(which is not relevant other than to give him some bonefides) - a WWII
air combat game, and "The Art of War", an ancients - renaissance
minis game. He also actually TESTS his work using replicas - as in
shooting xbows, throwing martio barbellae, and the like. Wish he had
a website...
Prime Mover: A natural history of muscle (have forgotten the author)

[Arralen]

English Longbowmen wheren't a chosen few, they where some bizarre form of conscripts. Longbows won battles by volume of fire, not precision. (very much like machine guns)

Do not use weapons with negative prec in the game. Due to the (not fully known) mechanics of battle calculations, those weapons tend to hit nothing - not even remotedly the square they are targeted at, and generally empty squares. (Try with slingers). Upping the prec of the archers themselves does not really help.

Crossbows do not outrange Longbows:
- Aerodynamics of the shorter, thicker bolt are actually worse then that of a Longbow arrow. Problem with Longbow arrows was(is) that they allowed very small tolerances only, before the deviation in flight path gets to big. Additionally, bolts are much sturdier than arrows
- Longbows where used for balistical mass archery. The thick crossbow bolt looses too much energy when fired in a ballistic arc. Crossbows where fired straight at the nearby enemy, from the second or third row of the shield wall.

[Endoperez]

Are you sure all that armor-piercing stuff wouldn't unbalance the game? It is, after all, a game, not a sim.

This would make almost any ranged unit work against armor. The Ulm is said to be the weakest nation because it only has its troops going for it, and the only thing that supposedly makes them special is their armor.

Also, you wrote up '0 AP' as the damage for short bow. Does that mean that the strength of the shooter is added? Is it added for longbows, too? What about slings?

[wombatsSAR]

re: English Longbowmen wheren't a chosen few -
I will dig up the refs for you. King Edward used less than 10% of those that came to serve when he went to Agincourt, iirc. But, as said, I will dig up the ref. And, yes, in general, bow fire was massed fire. The reason that the xbow was shot in a flat trajectory was because it COULD be shot that way. A flat trajectory comes from a fast moving object, nothing else (short of lift).

re: Do not use weapons with negative prec in the game.
ok, hadn't played with that. I was just considering how hard it is to learn how to shoot a bow properly, as well as the sling. If the xbow was taken as a base, then the others were worse... and since I was looking at it as the ave guy was 10s all around... newbie mistake, obviously.

re: Crossbows do not outrange Longbows:
pretty sure you are wrong on both counts but I'll dig up the Sci. Amer. articles. I need to get new copies anyway. Arrows are even worse than you suggest. Straight out of the bow, they wobble and bend. The path is more or less straight but the arrow flexed quite a bit. Hence, a real need to match the mass of the point, the wood and flex of the shaft, and the pull of the bow. Also, the arrow HAD to flex or it would not shoot true. I _believe_ it began to precess later in flight, but that may be me confounding information.

re : Additionally, bolts are much sturdier than arrows
very true.

re: - Longbows where used for balistical mass archery. The thick crossbow bolt looses too much energy when fired in a ballistic arc. Crossbows where fired straight at the nearby enemy, from the second or third row of the shield wall.
again, I will get the article for you and post the aerodynamic results.

re: 0 AP or low AP
as I recall the damage rules, the weapons would be: wpn base damage + str (if used) + 2d6. I was basically trying to suggest a way to model all the bows the same and still have the xbows do what they did best, which was piss of the knights since they could now be killed by poorly peasants. Well, that it was harder to ransom some dead guy than a live captive. The suggestion might not work out right.

[wombatsSAR]

Ref: Scientific American January 1985 pg 104-110

examples: (from Payne-Gallway, actually) 85 g bolt shot 420 m from a 550 kg pull medieval crossbow. Longbows attained lengths of ~275 m. Article authors cite another historian claiming 2x pull weight xbows were common, fwiw. (note to self - find that guy's book)

Wind Tunnel Test results (so this is science and not conjecture):

Drag/Mass ratios and range (calculated from an 80 m/s start)
(the numbers are approx. since I had to eyeball a graph)

Arrow: >1.5 range ~210 m
bolt 1: ~.75 range ~250 m
bolt 2: ~.72 range ~320 m
bolt 3: ~.70 range ~420 m
bolt 4: ~.68 range ~520 m

bolts 1 & 2 were medieval designs, bolts 3 & 4 were roman. Just to make it clear, the higher the d/m number, the worse the aerodynamic performance.

note: 80 m/s is a rather high speed for an arrow (from the authors of the article). Typical numbers are usually in the 60 m/s range (from me remembering what Hardy's book, which isn't nearly as handy as a journal).

Upshot: xbows flew further and hit harder. They could be fired ballistically just as easily as a bow and would have to be for the bowmen to hit targets farther away. Close shots are flatter just because the bolts flew faster.

[Saber Cherry]

Thanks for the information! I'll have to digest it a while...

I'm suspicious of xbows being fired ballistically, though. You say "Could be fired ballistically." Was there any evidence that they were or weren't? Of course they could be, but with a bow, you pull back the string and kind of have a feel for that arc, as a function of your draw and angle. Firing a crossbow ballistically is like firing a handgun ballistically - possible, but never done (aside from corrections of a few feet of drop, generally calculated by the scope) since you only have control over a single factor, angle. At least, that's how it would seem to me...

I'm particularly surprised at the terrible arrowodynamics (get it? A pun!). This might be mitigated a bit by firing in high arcs, thus storing some energy as potential (immune to drag) for much of the flight, as opposed to firing flat, where the energy is always kinetic (and thus vulnerable to energy loss from drag, proportional to v^2 IIRC).

Anyway, I'll muse over this new stuff... chew on it like cud... maybe build my own longbow out of balsa wood and piano wire, and extrapolate from there...

By the way, Wombats - the combat simulator has the att/def roll bug fixed now Thanks for noting the problem!

[Evil Dave]

Saber Cherry said:
Firing a crossbow ballistically is like firing a handgun ballistically - possible, but never done (aside from corrections of a few feet of drop, generally calculated by the scope) since you only have control over a single factor, angle. At least, that's how it would seem to me...

but that's how rifles and (some) artillery work today.

I'm particularly surprised at the terrible arrowodynamics (get it? A pun!). This might be mitigated a bit by firing in high arcs, thus storing some energy as potential (immune to drag) for much of the flight, as opposed to firing flat, where the energy is always kinetic (and thus vulnerable to energy loss from drag, proportional to v^2 IIRC).

you know one statement of the three laws of thermodynamics is "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game"? same with arching flight: yes, you can reduce *instanteous* drag with the high trajectory, but the time of flight is much longer than a flat trajectory, so drag works *longer*. i'd have to dig up the drag-corrected ballistic equation to figure out what the actual numbers are.

there's also the little problem that for fin-stabilized projectiles, their ability to stay pointed in the right direction goes up as v^2 also, since that term is in the equation for lift. so, there goes their precision.

[Saber Cherry]

Evil Dave said:

but that's how rifles and (some) artillery work today.

I know, field artillery is like that, but they do a bunch of calculations before firing... and rifles have adjustable scopes that account for drop over distance... and medieval xbowmen had neither calculators nor scopes. The only crossbow I've ever seen with a scope was in Deus Ex, and I put it there myself

I think it would be very hard to fire a crossbow accurately with more than a minor (<5 degrees) arc... and any arc-firing requires more training than direct firing, which would defeat the point of cheaply raising masses of untrained crossbowmen. Assuming, of course, that crossbows were used by cheap masses of poorly trained soldiers, which could be another false premise on my part.

Your point on the longer trajectory negating a lower velocity is interesting... it would take several complex integrals to figure out how much energy ends up being saved, if any, by firing at a 30-degree angle or so. It would be much simpler to model in Excel (in .01 second intervals), given the drag formula. I did something like that once, to find the ideal angle to launch a water balloon for max distance, but I have a pretty poor memory...

[wombatsSAR]

Old question re: age of longbows
From Hardy's book, Longbow - arrow heads date back to 50,000 yo. However, bows don't preserve well. Cave drawings show "longbows" in scale but can the artists' sense of scale be trusted??? There are two Mesolithic fragments that have right proportions and geometries to be from a longbow. Various other Stone Age sites have uncovered bows ~175 cm in length, others between 177 and 200 cm. These are ~2,500 BC to 1,600 BC. Hardy goes on at some length about the "pre" history of the bow. Basically, a bow of some length has been around for quite some time, although the date of _the_ longbow's use in England has an unclear lineage.

Important note re: crossbow range - I'm using STEEL bows. If you count only composite bow xbows, then yeah, range is less than the xbow but greater than the lesser selfbow. Steel bows were fairly common about 50 yr after Crecy and available by Agincourt but the rate of fire of a crossbow is VERY poor, the moreso for the stronger pulls. The rate of fire is about 1/2-1/6 that of the bow. They were great for defense or other fortifide positions. Additional note, when used in the field, they often had either mantlets or pavisses to hide behind, or even had ~kite shields strapped on their backs. (Payne-Gallway and Hardy)

re: numbers of longbowmen and are they elite?
I admit that this is based more on peripheral arguments than on % numbers. Firstly, the strength required for using the bow was outside the casual norm and that this str requirement was unique enough to leave its marks in the skeleton. This implies that they had the time to practice their art enough to make a consuming activity. Secondly, ~20% of the English archers were mounted - this implies wealth and decent amount of it, hence, again, enough free time to make training possible. Third, there is at least one example of a longbowmen (probably one of the Black Prince's guard archers) getting his own coat of arms, and other honors (the family name is noted as part of Jodrell Bank in Cheshire). Fourth, longbowmen received higher pay than regular footmen. It was not as high as mounted knights, though. Fifth, "by 1590 Sir Roger Williams was complaining that 'out of 5,000 archers not 500 will make any strong shootes', and 'few or none do anie great hurte 12 or 14 score off'." Lastly, since this is long and circumstantial, Henry V left England with 2,000 knights and men-at-arms, 65 gunners, and 8,000 longbowmen. The army of conquest that Henry could muster had only 8,000 archers out of how many that were in England? It was his choice and I doubt he picked weenie ones.

re: range
From Hardy: (velocity and range, 70 lb bow)
Lozenge Bodkin 46.5 m/sec 180 yd max (sigh, let's mix units)
Long Bodkin 43.6 m/sec 170 yd
Broadhead 38.7 m/sec 150 yd

extrapolation to 150 lbs, still Hardy, ranges should be ~300 yds

re: blowguns
I found the refs in Steven Vogel's "Prime Mover". He _calculates_ a maximum range of 28 m with an impact speed of ~13 m/s, and thus an impact momentum of only 2% that of an arrow. Actual reports from his anthropological colleagues gave measures of 17 m to 30 m. Gotta have the poison.

re: ballistic fire
I think that's just a bias. In both cases (bow and xbow), you train with it and get to see the projectile in flight, hence learning its flight characteristics. I venture that the xbow is easier since loosing an arrow is a non-subtle art all its own whereas firing the xbow is much more easily mastered - it's a trigger! One usually doesn't fire a handgun "ballistically" because there's no need to learn (use a rifle or call in uncle arty) and it's difficult to learn since the bullet is smaller and travels too darn fast, hence you can't see what you're doing.

re: balsa and piano wire
mmm, bad choices. Balsa has low compression and tensile strengths. Piano wire easily cuts fingers when being drawn. However, since it is very light, geek-like muscles can heft it without sweating, and the piano wire could be tuned to play a one-note song.

re: combat sim fix
Cool!!! Maybe I'll find the ambition now to balance out my ... uh ... mod.
if you can call it that. ... I have no sense of propriety. I'll leave it at that.

I'm quitting for a bit. Thanks for reading, all.

[PDF]

Not sure we're going anywhere with this way OT discussions about bolt aerodynamics. What we just need is missile weapons that are tactically different and balanced in the Dom rules frame ...