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Topic: Technology ideas for Med mod II |  |
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wheathin
Prince
Charming
Apr 99
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posted January 17, 2001 12:13
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Just like to point out that regardless of how things actually *did* occur in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the game is about creating your own history. I most emphatically DO NOT want to be forced down a development path that mimics a specifically Western history path. Or even one that mimics a Chinese one.Some tech-tree issues must be resolved - we can all agree that without gunpowder, there would be no guns. There could be no chariot without wheel, or (successful) printing press without alphabet (yeah yeah yeah, the chinese got it. but they didn't use it). But for many others, just because history *didn't* happen that way doesn't mean it *couldn't* have. Part of the fun is in creating civilizations that may be very different from the way history occurred, but that, given the unique geographical and diplomatic conditions of the randomly created worlds, are perfectly plausible. I.e., firearms might have developed in dozens of different ways (Minie balls before flintlocks? Autoloading weapons before rifling?). We shouldn't force players to recreate the exact course of European gunsmithery. = As to the longbow-crossbow dispute: Keep the Crossbow in. But Longbow is not a separate weapon from archers. I think the crucial factor is the ease of training a crossbowman. I tend to regard the English use of longbowmen as opportunistic - there was a large body of skilled archers, for a variety of socio-political and economic reasons that could be called up by the King. Had they not existed, it is unlikely that the King would have created them (hiring, training, etc.) - he would have hired crossbowmen like everyone else! Moreover, the crushing victories in the Hundred Years war were more the result of the arrogance and stupidity of the poorly organized French Knights. They did not have a decent command structure (each knight served at his own pleasure), and they let the English dictate the terms and location of the battles. A refusal to recognize that heavy Cavalry would not function well in mud (Agincourt) or in charges up well-defended hill-top positions (Poitiers) resulted in predictable defeats. Had the French chevalliers been more willing to let lowerclass infantry forces (Mercenaries and levies) get some of the "glory", they might have won.
[This message has been edited by wheathin (edited January 17, 2001).] |
Diodorus Sicilus
Warlord
Steilacoom, WA, USA
May 99
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posted January 18, 2001 01:04
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Wes: As to the actual composition of medieval armies, with the caveat that every number from that period can be fought over by historians and debated as to accuracy, here is some information on "army composition".
First, in all armies the bulk of the troops were infantry armed with spears, shields, varying degrees of armor, and frequently, javelins. This type was both the Town militias and the Communal troops of the Italian city-states. In Spain, the Moslem armies had infantry forces consisting of 1/2 spearmen with large shields and javelins, and 1/2 archers (regular bows) in a second line. The third line of the army was cavalry, somewhat lighter than knights, with lots of light cavalry on the flanks.
As for numbers of crossbowmen versus regular (spear-armed) infantry, at Falkirk in 1298 Edward I had 250 crossbowmen out of 2500 infantry, and another 10,000+ hired Welsh longbowmen. In the town militia of Bruges in 1303, there were 200 crossbowmen out of 1254 troops, while Ghent in 1340 numbered only 65 "bowmen" (type not specified) out of 5000 men. In Christian Spain, an ordinance of 1385 required men with 1/10 the income of an armored knight to show up for military service with a crossbow, but any foot with less income than that to have spear, shield, and, at the lowest level, javelins. A Spanish army in 1374 had 6000 crossbowmen out of 50,000 men total.
In the beginnings of the Renaissance, the Italian city militias in the early 1400s had companies with spearmen, pavisiers (men with spears and large shields to cover the archers) and crossbowmen "in equal proportions of each". BUT by 1476 Milan had 10,000 infantry, of which 2000 were handgunners and in 1482 the Milanese troops in the War of Ferrara had 1250 handgunners, 352 arquebusiers, and only 233 crossbowmen!
All of which is by way of pointing out that most of the infantry from 3000 BC to1400 AD are men armed with a spear and protected by a large shield fighting in close formation. Bows, slings, longbows, crossbows, et al were support weapons which in the Western tradition at least, very rarely won battles by themselves: and that includes the English longbows at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, which in every case were protected by other armored men and defensive stakes. On occasions when longbowmen were caught without the stakes and a settled infantry line, as at Patay by Joan d'arc and a company of French under the Constable of France, they were ridden down and massacred.
I'd also like to point out that contrary to other reports, the Milanese and Italian city states at least, considered the 'handgun" or primitive firearm to be a much more effective and better investment than large numnbers of crossbows. The main reason was that while crossbow bolts or 'clothyard shafts' from longbows rarely penetrated plate armor unless they hit it just right, the lead ball from a handgun would usually penetrate and even if it didn't, the force from the impact was enough to knock a knight right off his horse and crack ribs or skulls under the plate armor. |
Locutus
Prince
Apolyton Borg Hengelo/Enschede, The Netherlands
Nov 1999
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posted January 18, 2001 16:24
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I'd hate to interrupt The Big Fight (Harlan vs Charles), but I have a comment about the tech tree as well 
IMHO the name Computer Age is plain wrong, Information Age is much better. For one thing, the first computers arose, depending of what you use as definition as computer, anywhere between 1800 and 1945 (though most conventional definitions place the first computer at the late 1930s). So to state that the Computer Age starts around 1960 would be grossly inaccurate, the computers of that time compare to the very first computers as a Jet Fighter to the Wright Flyer. More importantly though, Computers are just a tool. Something like a knife was an important instrument in the Bronze Age (just an example, I don't claim to be an expert on Bronze Age technology), yet we don't call it the Knife Age. What is so important in everyday life these days, is information. This is also what computers, among other things (TV, satellites, networks like the Internet), are tools for: they can generate, collect, store and transfer information. So Information is a much more generic term that describes what this Age is all about. Other than that, I think the tech-tree is fantastic, I never thought it possible but it's indeed tons better than the one of MedMod4. Now, let the fighting resume... |
Harlan
ctpmaps.apolyton/harlan
Berkeley, CA, USA
b.02-15-99
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posted January 18, 2001 21:31
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I don't really think there is any disagreement between Charles (Diodorus) and I on this issue, its just a matter of glass half full or half empty. If Charles means that the Crossbow never made up the bulk of medieval armies, I agree. Its just like CTP2 has it: the ranged weapon stood in back and supported the infantry. My point was for several hundred years, in CTP2 terms, the Archer unit would have been replaced by the Crossbowman unit in most places as that ranged unit.Diodorus, the facts you present show an amazing grasp of history, but don't really say anything new. Yes, Edward I had lots of longbowmen- he was the champion of the weapon. Yes, in Italy the handgun was taking off in popularity by the end of the 1400s (recall the Britannica entry I pasted in: "not until the late 15th century did [the crossbow] definitely give way to the harquebus"). The point I was making was that for a long time, when you wanted archers in your army, they were very likely to be crossbowmen, and only with the exceptions of England and India at certain historical times were longbows much of a factor. Thus the crossbow is a much more important weapon, and more deserving to be in a CTP2 mod. I doubt that Charles would disagree with that. Onto wheathin's point, I agree with wheathin. However, in practice we don't even have the tools to make the "standard" history, much less alternative ones. For instance, if I were to make a mod of all of history, one weapon I'd have is the Armored Wagon, a great what-if weapon that did get limited use here and there (for instance the Hussite wars) but never reached its potential. Also, one thing I gathered from my study of history was that there were many paths technological development could take, till about 1500. There was a great variation between cultures. But after that point, the options tend to narrow greatly. More and more the new discoveries rest on all the ones that came before, drawing from more and more fields. For instance, much has been made of the fact that Hero almost invented the steam engine back in the BCs, coming up with a primative model. But to actually make a useful steam engine required advances in metallurgy and many other fields that were the accumulation of thousands of years of development, so there's no way that discovery could have really worked back in Hero's day, no matter what he did. Its like the difference between making a toy glider and making an airplane. Time and time again, after 1500 discoveries happen one after another in logical order, with many instances of the same thing being invented in different places at the same time, in some cases even on the same day! That's not to say there wasn't variability, but that the wiggle room for changing the order inventions were discovered has shrunken down. Getting to your gun example, I'll bet that if we "replayed" history, the development of the gun would have occurred in roughly the same order. There's probably a real good reason why autoloading weapons didn't happen earlier, for instance (though I don't know what it is! ). There would have been a lot of play in the time gunpowder was discovered though since its the kind of thing a single person could have done, but that wouldn't have led to a proper gun until other fields caught up. You can even see this in the similiarities and differences between the Chinese and West in developing weapons from gunpowder prior to 1500 when direct contact really took off.
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Diodorus Sicilus
Warlord
Steilacoom, WA, USA
May 99
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posted January 18, 2001 23:58
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Harlan, one last comment on cross versus long bows: The crossbow predominated in China (mounted and foot), France, Italy, and Germany. Spanish armies used regular bows and slingers mostly, as did all the Moslem armies. In Eastern Europe, the Slavs, Poles, Russians, et al tended more to mounted and dismounted archers, although the city militias did use crossbows. One of the culminating armies of the late Middle Ages, the Burgundian Ordinance Army, had, on paper, about 5 longbowmen for every crossbowman (and the crossbowmen were mounted, not foot) BUT this army tried to combine the best troops from everywherre in Europe in a Perfectionist Mercenary array: English longbows, French knights, etc. This, by the way, also makes my final point: Ifarmies had their druthers, they got Longbows. Trouble is, the longbow, as you rightly pointed out, weren't available as generally as crossbows or regular bows were.
As to why autoloading, breechloading, and other 'advanced' forms of firearms weren't tried earlier than the 19th-20th centuries, they were! Breechloading rifled firearms were designed and built from the start of gunpowder 'handguns', the Austrian army even tried breechloading cannon in 1700-1705, and multi-shot 'machinegun' equivalents were designed by Leonardo Da V and actually built by several states as early as the 16th century. None of them worked. reason: lack of engineering expertese. You can't build precision arms, with the kind of fine tolerances automatic mechanisms and gas-tight breech mechanisms require, if you haven't got any precision tools. You can't build precision tools unless you have precise measurements, and so on and on. The prerequisite advances in a lot of fields like Mathematics, metallurgy, machine tools (any of these sound familiar?) had to be made before advanced firearms, or any other kind of machinery, were possible. I thoroughly agree with you that after a certain point, technological advance becomes so interconnected that it's hard to see how the sequence could be wildly different.
On the other hand, there are a lot of 'minor' technology changes that could have occured at a different rate or been applied different ways: The Hussite Wagon or Russian Gulay Gorod, for instance, or the Munroe Effect conical bullet, to make rifles effective as early as smoothbore muskets were. Had there been a major European War in the 1890s, there might have been steam-driven armored 'tanks' in use 20 - 25 years earlier than the familiar gasoline-diesel types of our history. These, and the very real possible changes in social, political, and economic systems, are where I think realistic "What If?" alternate history can be played... |
WesW
apolyton.net/wes
Huntsville, Al., USA
b.02-15-99
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posted January 19, 2001 06:13
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Good point about the Information age, Wouter.
As for the rest, one of the reasons I am putting in the wonder-units is to give variety to the early part of the game. They would really be great if someone wanted to take the first half of the game and make a AOK-type scenario, where you had plenty of time to build your forces and set up big battles.
If we had a Crossbow sprite, I would put it in as the Medieval age ranged unit, and move the Catapult and Archer back one age. The Slinger I would remove, or put with one of the most basic techs so that you would have something to accompany your Warriors on their explorations. I think the current setup works well enough, though, so I would rather have the Chariot and Partisan done first. | |
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