Crossbows vs. Longbows

[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...

[Horst F. JENS]

Originally Posted by 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.

Actually, arrows (and bolts) are rotating. That's the reason you put the little feathers on the end of an arrow (usually 3 feathers for an arrow, 2 for an bolt). The feathers are slightly curved to give the projectile a spin in flight. This spin stabilize the flight.


As for armor-penetration, different arrow tips are used even today for different purpose. There exist hunting arrow tips (three or two razor-sharp bladed to cause flesh wounds), "sport" tips (cone) to penetrate (not too much) a target and blunt tips for bird hunting (stun rather then kill).

I have once seen historical special designed "armor-penetrating" arrows... those things had practically a pyramidal-shaped steel needle on it's top. Certainly not cheap or easy to produce.

Possible solution for Dom3 regarding armor-piercing longbowmen:


Create a new unit type "Elite Longbowmen" with armor-piercing longbows. Damage still lower than a crossbow but AP. Good stats, but more resource and gold cost than a "normal" longbowmen.


Off-topic fact:
bowmen used to urinate on the arrows to cause infected wounds.

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by Horst F. JENS

I have once seen historical special designed "armor-penetrating" arrows... those things had practically a pyramidal-shaped steel needle on it's top. Certainly not cheap or easy to produce.

You mean bodkin-heads? The cruder examples look a bit like a medieval nail with a socket at the base. I'm hardly an expert, but I'd have thought that the various barbed arrowheads would take more time to make.

[Horst F. JENS]

Originally Posted by Gregstrom

You mean bodkin-heads? The cruder examples look a bit like a medieval nail with a socket at the base. I'm hardly an expert, but I'd have thought that the various barbed arrowheads would take more time to make.

You are right. So bodkin arrows should cost less resource and do less damage than "normal" arrows, but bodkin arrows should be armor-piercing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodkin_point

[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.

[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).

[Agema]

Originally Posted by cleveland

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).

Fair enough. I've not run tests, but I've had cavalry knock a lot of HP off well-armoured thugs in games I've played: in one game one took 30 damage from 3 cavalry on first contact. Although I appreciate that may be unlucky.

[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.