Crossbows vs. Longbows

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by militarist

Sombre, blah blah blah blah blah

Wrong guy :]

[sector24]

Sorry for contributing to the thread necromancy, but I have to disagree; it does take a lifetime of practice to develop the muscles to draw a heavy bow. I've been doing archery for 3 years. I'm 5'7'' (possibly tall compared to the English of the day) and my draw weight is 38 lbs. A measly 38 lbs. I could not imagine how many hours a day I would have to practice to get up to even 50 lbs. Anecdotal evidence perhaps, but you can't just say using longbows is some easy thing.

More likely the reason archers weren't paid as much is because ranged fighting wasn't as "honorable" a pursuit as hand to hand combat. Despite its effectiveness it was simply looked down upon as an inferior practice and would not command a respectable rate of pay.

[Aleph]

Read about five pages of this and had to go, wanted to post:

Agincourt, AFAIK, was partly won due to a simple difference in philosophy. The French thought that they were fighting a chivalric war and could expect to be captured and ransomed back if defeated, while the English were well and truly in enemy territory and took to murdering the surrendered French knights with daggers and sledgehammers. It's like if one side of a football game all came to the field with brass knuckles and knives and there were no refs to call foul on it... you'd expect that team to do quite well until the other side caught on. This is a problem you won't have in Dominions - there's no honorable surrender.

Furthermore, AFAIK the French didn't even bother deploying their crossbowmen at Agincourt. Certainly, they might have fared better if they had.

Finally, I believe the longbow was never outlawed for use against other Christians by the Vatican, which tells you that the crossbow was doing something right.

[Lingchih]

Please, stop now. Or we'll summon the ghost of MachineGunJoe back.

[Ironhawk]

Bump

[BigDaddy]

I am certain that the ancient crossbow was inferior, I've even seen such on crossbow websites. It was because they didn't have materials that flexed enough to make the bows out of. Modern x-bows flex like crazy. I'm surprised that was an archer earlier saying that thought a long bow was more powerful than crossbow. I assume that includes modern crossbows, which seem to be very sophisticated. But, yes, inferior to a compound bow, I can honestly believe.

[Sombre]

I like to call modern crossbows 'guns'. They are extremely powerful - able to punch through solid wafer at extreme range. There are records of 'guns' so powerful that they can actually fire through more than one wafer, though I assume these are specialised cases.

[vfb]

Wafers? I eat those for breakfast. Rowr!

[Sombre]

Clearly you're some kind of wafer fanboi.

I always check the forums of a game before buying to make sure it isn't being ruined by wafer fanbois. Stop trying to ruin the game!

[13lackGu4rd]

Originally Posted by Aleph

Finally, I believe the longbow was never outlawed for use against other Christians by the Vatican, which tells you that the crossbow was doing something right.

the fact that the longbow was not banned like the crossbow has nothing to do with the longbow being inferior to the crossbow... the crossbow was banned because it was used against honorable knights and pierced through their armor. that's what crossbows do best, pierce thick armor at short range. longbows on the other hand had a much greater range and were not really aimed at piercing thick knight armor, nor firing at knights from short range. the longbow gave you a huge tactical advantage, and changed the way you deployed your forces if you had longbows in your army. while the crossbows just gave you more firepower via mass, and it was effective against knight's armor.

honestly, comparing longbows and crossbows is almost like comparing apples to oranges, they're 2 very different weapons with different goals(in reality, not so much in dominions...).