Bow values

[geala]

Hi,

it's my first campaign in AD 1257 and I like it, what a huge amount of labour it must be to get such a huge and elaborated mod. However, negative critique is always much easier than creating things, and so I have some remarks.    I hope you are not too cheesed off by my questions.

I like the armour data so far, it's good that the best harnesses are very expensive. I think the relation of protection, optics and price is mostly logical, but in some cases I feel the data is not congruent with the "real world". Why has a thick coat of raw leather or felt much less protection than a thin linen tunic? Why have the sandals with naked legs (very nice you made some, even nicer if there were also naked legs with light shoes - would be good for my Gaelic campaign  ) more protections than stout leather shoes with leather wrappings around the shin? But ok, all minor things.

What I really don't understand is the data of bows. I searched the forum and found a thread about ranged physics but it soon started to discuss the much beloved "longbow" theme. I read in the thread a statement (from Ritter Dummbatz) that you cannot take the damage data alone, but should look at the pd, the higher, the better the bow. Could you elaborate that a bit more? When I look at the strong hunting self bow with 2 pd, 8 damage, about 70 speed rating and 97 accuracy and compare it with the (much more expensive) Hun bow with 4 pd, 9 damage, about 50 speed rating and 94 accuracy, I'm a bit baffled. (I'm not on my comp and the data is given from memory, Im not sure tha speed is totally correct but it is in that range.)

On the field I cannot find big differences with the two bows, except that the Hun bow is much slower and less accurate (that's my fault, cause he is slower), as the stats say. The self bow seems not to be less powerful. The Hun bow would however be a composite bow with wood, horn and sinews and much stronger and easier to shoot than a short bow only made of wood (as a self bow is). A pure wooden bow can never reach the same power as a composite bow when of the same length. That's the reason the big Welsh and English bows (later called "longbows") were so long (btw the best book about "longbows" and other bows that I read till now is "The great Warbow" by Strickland and Hardy)

I also don't get the logic why the Hun bow is slower than the wooden self bow. Stronger bows were not pulled much slower, you only needed much more strength and good technique to pull them. Therefore the powerdraw 4 requisite is absolutely correct, but I think that should be it.

I will change the bow stats for my next campaign but I think there is a system behind your stats and I don't want to create pure imbalance. Is there a discussion that I overlooked and you can link or can you say something here about the bow values?

 

[oroboros]

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,213966.0.html here was a little bit of talk concerning bows

 

[Cuthalion]

What baffles me right now is that there's a Hun bow in 1257. 

 

[geala]

Thanks so far, so there are hidden stats. Hmm, difficult to decide then. I think the Hun bow is a placeholder for the different but similar central-Asian bows, a special kind of composite bow. The name "Hun" was not used in the middle ages only for the group of late antiquity people that we name Huns, but in a broader way for many eastern people. So I think "Hun bow" is possible as a term in the game.

 

[Lazyman]

The best indication of how good a bow is , is the power draw requirement, I believe it goes like this.

Mongol Bow>Hun Bow/Composite bow (could not see any difference/Self bows

I have never played with a Longbow so IDK, but it certainly is not as powerful as the Mongol bow .

Personally, the only thing I find strange is the super long draw times, but I guess that is for balance.

 

[Caeled]

The best indication of how good a bow is , is the power draw requirement, I believe it goes like this.

Mongol Bow>Hun Bow/Composite bow (could not see any difference/Self bows

I have never played with a Longbow so IDK, but it certainly is not as powerful as the Mongol bow .

Personally, the only thing I find strange is the super long draw times, but I guess that is for balance.

Has any of you guys ever actually used a strong bow?
Yes. you can draw a 120 lb bow as fast as cou can draw a 35 lb bow. Until you start tiring.
And trust me, you will start tiring damn fast.
That's the reason why expierienced longbowmen hold a certain pace in shooting, so they could go on for an hour and more.
Count that in, and don't simply multiply the possibilites of a single shot.

 

[Lazyman]

When horses can go around full sprint for the whole battle......

 

[Cuthalion]

I still have a translated (from Kipchak Turkish) archery manual at home which awaits reading. Maybe I can find some bow names which were used among the Mamluks of the following century.

Heck, David Nicolle interpreted some illustrations (or descriptions as well...? I should do my homework) according to which the Turks had a little guiding rail to hold to the bow's grip in order to shoot little darts instead of whole arrows. This would make a nice add on as well, but even more useful would be – and now one of my favourite topics – to include the element of taking cover against a volley of arrows, which is IMHO one of the major functions of archery in the first place (and I mean more than rising shields, I mean being slowed down, being less inclined to attack etc.) ...and without this, balancing realistic shooting pace, draw weight and damage is quite a bit awkward.

 

[Lazyman]

The rate I remember from his book is 5 every 3 seconds, or maybe the other way around?

 

[geala]

The best indication of how good a bow is , is the power draw requirement, I believe it goes like this.

Mongol Bow>Hun Bow/Composite bow (could not see any difference/Self bows

I have never played with a Longbow so IDK, but it certainly is not as powerful as the Mongol bow .

Personally, the only thing I find strange is the super long draw times, but I guess that is for balance.

Has any of you guys ever actually used a strong bow?
Yes. you can draw a 120 lb bow as fast as cou can draw a 35 lb bow. Until you start tiring.
And trust me, you will start tiring damn fast.
That's the reason why expierienced longbowmen hold a certain pace in shooting, so they could go on for an hour and more.
Count that in, and don't simply multiply the possibilites of a single shot.

Exhaustion was one of the arguments in the English late 16th c. debate for and against arquebuses instead of warbows. And a very good one because soldiers in war campaigns often are exhausted even at the start of battles. It's much easier to shoot a firearm when exhausted. The warbow of the 15th and 16th century was a monster, with pull weights of 120 to 170 lbs, only very well trained persons could have been good with it, and would have dropped in effectiveness really quickly when exhausted.

But to simulate exhaustion by slow drawing is not a very good method. And exhaustion while using other weapons or horses is also not featured in M&B, as Lazyman had pointed at correctly. You cannot fight also in close combat for a longer period without extended pauses, especially with armour and heavy shield.

 

[Harith]

I have practiced archery and I am 16. I train for about an hour and a half for two days.... now the bows are definitely more accurate and easier to wield..... but I usually get tired at the 45 min (currently) after a continous training of shooting... then I have 20 men break and I do another 30 min or so and finish the day.

I can tell u I can feel my shoulder muscles, biceps and chest muscles are worked up. After a hour of trainin I usually start to even miss and not just slow down.

I shoot about 6-8 arrows a minute and thats when I practicing fast believe it or not.... so if u find a book about a mamluke that shoots 3 arrows per 5 seconds.... its probably wrong.... one thing for sure he isnt aiming and battles didnt last two minutes and so they would need over 2k arrows if they shoot at this rate....

battles would usually go for about 6 hours (with regiments rotating) and then they would stop to collect the wounded or dead... unless ur fighting the mongols who will annihilate the army or when the two sides are really high on morale and so they dont stop until the enemy flees

 

[Cuthalion]

Probably wrong...? And aside from that, in six hours battle you wouldn't shoot the whole time, even if there was no melee combat yet. But this is IMHO another aspect of the problem I mentioned earlier: You don't shoot only to kill nowadays and I'm pretty sure people didn't do this back then either. The effect of an enemy taking cover and being less mobile then would surely have been used in the middle ages. The attempts of Turkish archers to draw out enraged knights from the track and kill them once they're surrounded is the first proof in the sources which comes to my mind.

 

[Harith]

Probably wrong...? And aside from that, in six hours battle you wouldn't shoot the whole time, even if there was no melee combat yet. But this is IMHO another aspect of the problem I mentioned earlier: You don't shoot only to kill nowadays and I'm pretty sure people didn't do this back then either. The effect of an enemy taking cover and being less mobile then would surely have been used in the middle ages. The attempts of Turkish archers to draw out enraged knights from the track and kill them once they're surrounded is the first proof in the sources which comes to my mind.

how many ppl do u know can do the same????? hes the elite of the archers... ppl like him are in the olympics and are pros who proabably spent trainin from the age of 12 on archery.... its like a sixth sense to them...

in medieval times, u had no one like him except for the elite soldiers.... those renowned men like the janissary corp or royal mamluke corp or even knight..... they practiced for hours and days and they only make a small proportion

for regulars who made the majority of the army, it was ppl like me.... the archers would be professional with their bows but not elite like him. Beside, can he go shooting like this for 5 min??? I doubt that he will still be able to go on and not miss. These targets are really close and in a battle, ur usually very distant from the ppl because ur placed on a hill or 50 meters away in order to give u time to grab ur sword once they charge ur line.

Even if we would to take the english longbow, all men were forced to practice archery on Sundays.... now I can bet u that they are not even half as good as me.... men like the guy in the vid take very loooong periods of time to master unless ur a genius with the bow which makes 1 in a million. The shortest time to get as good as him for a normal person with average skills would be 3 times a week and practicing since the age of 17 for 4 years.

 

[geala]

In case of the English warbow: only a small proportion of the able bodied male population were taken for combat. Guess whom? The best archers of course. It existed an elaborated system of contracts for the soldiers. Don't think that the people in the medieval times were fools who took everybody who wanted to join combat. The archers on the battle field were a lot better with the bow than most of todays barebow archers. That's also the reason that in Europe only the English could bring the bow to great importance on the battlefield. You needed very strong bows and a lot of them to create a significant impact against armoured foes. And you get a lot of them only when you have a huge pool of possible candidats, most of them not very well versed, but still enough who were able. There are reliable reports from the 15th century that many professional archers didn't aim for men but for faces (otherwise a person in plate armour is difficult to hurt). We often hear of dead lords in cases when they lifted the visor or removed the bevor to get more air to breath.

I don't know very much about eastern bows and bowmen, but I think there was also a big pool of very good archers because the bow was a common weapon.

When we look to other European countries except England, we see bows used but not to a great extend. Single users might have been very good with their bows, which often were well crafted and strong recursive bows, but there were never enough to be of great importance on the battle field. Therefore the crossbow was more important, especially for militias a better weapon which could be used with less training. However, a strong crossbow was a heavy, slow, expensive and delicate weapon, whose power to penetrate plate armour was not that impressive. A reason why the crossbow was replaced by firearms in an astonishing short time after the firearms revolution of the later 15th century.

Ok, I'm sorry for the wall of text, back to topic: a strong bow was not pulled slower than a weak bow, the user just needed more power and technique, aka much more training. If a bow needs pd 6 instead of pd 2, that should be enough to simulate the necessary training.

 

[oroboros]

First, I have to say I don't know anything of bows besides trying once to shoot with some and aiming to hit a target in 30m distance but instead hit the cow that stood 30 m to the left of the target, figuratively said. But it seems a little hard for me to grasp that a bowman should be able to shoot with a bow of eg. 50 pound draw weight exactly as fast as with a strong warbow with 150 pounds draw weight for the same amount of time and arrows. I don't know. I can also swing a 1,80m/2.5 kg bidenhaender almost as fast as a longsword, but it's almost and not exactly. I still feel the "heavyness" of the sword at the end of the swing more and need a little bit more time to recover than with a 1,20m/1.4 kg longsword. It's not that significant but it's noticeable. So, I think it is not that bad, that stronger bows are somewhat slower than not so strong ones. And even if the bowman could draw and shoot as fast with both bows, how long would he last with a 150lbs bow vs. a 50lbs bow as far as speed and continuity is concerned? And this problem you have to incorporate somehow into the game. Think of a siege, for instance, where you fire 500 arrows and everyone with the exact same speed.

The guy with the hun bow in the vid uses a bow that has something in the range of 50 lbs draw weight, I would assume, maybe I am wrong. Such a bow would rather bore a knight to death before doing him some harm while even the =/>150lbs bow is highly controversial to have made any impressions on an armoured knight at all, if the arrow didn't "catch his eye" or something along that line. I would love to see a vid from this guy where he shoots a 180lbs composite bow from horseback at slightly moving and completely armoured human targets, covered behind their shields, in about 50m distance and see what hee can do then and how fast he is and how long he lasts. English archers were supposed to shoot 10-12 arrows/minute in volleys, ie. 5-6 seconds per shot. I think this is quite good represented in the game (besides volleys which would be a nice thing to have). And for the Hungarian guy with his bow, well, it's already in the game and called "hunting bow", with that you can shoot as fast as he did and do the same comparative damage as he would have done with his bow were he not a real life guy but an in-game archer instead, whereby I am somehow inclined to think that the hunting bow delivers more damage in game as compared to what the composite bow of that guy would do in real life.

By the way, have any of you maybe played skyrim as a ranged guy? Now that was sloooow for a booooow.

 

[Cuthalion]

As Caeled already mentioned, the difference in drawing speed between a 120 lbs bow and a 50 lbs one isn't significant. But since it apparently causes some confusion: The fact that we have reports about (horse) archers being able to shoot lots of arrows in a short time (and we have training manuals for this area of study, not only biased chroniclers!) doesn't mean that they shot thousands of arrows in a battle situation, it simply means that they were trained to be as skilled. It also means that in a hit-and-run situation the (short!) "hit" part could be really intense if the guys were able to send over three times as much arrows than a less-trained group.

Here the draw weight isn't overly important either if it's about harrassing the enemy and taking out guys that don't have full body armour or don't take cover fast enough. No one would take the risk of being badly hit while relying on his armour and the archer's low draw weight. One more point: Horses. Unless you cover your horse as well (and admittedly horse armour is utterly scarce in the illustrated sources) you can be screwed up quickly, too, even if the archers should have children's bows.

 

[geala]

@ oroboros:
Modern tests are always problematic, it depends very much of the materials used. We never can be sure that they simulate the medieval materials well. Nevertheless, a few years ago a group of persons I knew made private tests with a longbow, crossbow and an arquebuse against steel armour with 1, 1,5, 2 and 3 mm thickness each. Many breastplates of the 15th c. were about 1,5 to 2 mm thick, limb armour about 1 mm, helmets fronts from 2 to 3 mm. The bow had a strength of 120 lbs (I could not draw it but there are persons who can draw and shoot accurately also with 180 lbs bows today. You have to be very strong and experienced however. I don't think such a strong longbow would make much sense if shot from horseback), the crossbow of 1000 lbs, the arquebuse was a reconstruction of the weapons typical for the late 15th century. The bow was able to penetrate 1,5 mm steel with the typical arrow of the English archers (which was not the often portrayed bodkin but an arrow with two small sharp blades, better for penetrating plate), the crossbow sometimes 2 mm, but often not very deep. The arquebuse penetrated even 3 mm. Shooting distance was about 20 metres. I think the more typical 150 to 170 lbs warbow would be on par with the crossbow, sometimes able to kill knights in hardened steel plate armour from short distances. We know from battles of the Wars of the Roses that some knights were killed by arrows. To penetrate it was necessary to hit the plate straight in 90 degrees, so that the projectile did not glance off. This ability to let tips glance off was a great advantage of plain plate armour. But the knight in your example in 50 m distance would be rather well protected even if a shield was not used (shields were seldomly used when in plate armour, the protection was enough without it, a shield is a rather nasty piece of equipment and without a shield you can wield a deadly polearm). He might have even been well protected from the firearms of the day in that distance, cause the heavy bullets lost energy fast.

Edit: forgot this, I tried to use the bow in Skyrim, but I prefer to play in 3rd person view only and it is still not so nice to shoot a bow in this view, although much better than in Oblivion. So I went back to a lightly armoured (fur armour, steel helmet, no boots) hand to hand warrior, who often gets his guts ripped on master, especially by enemy archers.  I don't bothered about the bow speed, but presumably that's because of the fact I had no comparison.

Edit 2: Wars of the Roses, not Rose Wars, mmpf

 

[oroboros]

Hm, ok. I agree on the importance of material but I don't know of any incident where an arrow pierced plate armour and killed the one wearing it or even pierced porperly hardened plate armour at all. As far as I know there is no archeological proof for this This could very well be due to a battle situation or the very well shaped armours. Did you fire at a breast plate, i.e. hardened steel and shaped like a breast plate or just a sheet of metal? The warbow from back then is highly controversial as concerning how high their draw weights actually were. On the Mary Rose for instance they found well over 100 warbows from 1545 which had on average a draw weight of ~70lbs, with just a few of them nearing the 100lbs or a little bit more. This according to the opinions of experts who explored the finding, not me. I know that there are guys around who can shoot with a 180lbs or even higher draw weight, today. And they don't look like He-Man either, so it is a little bit hard to understand why the bows on the Mary Rose were so weak. Maybe it was the case that many archers could shoot a >150lbs bow back then, too, but for battle it was useless because of the quick tiring rate of the archer who used such a bow and therefore they instead preferred a somewhat weaker bow with which they could shoot the whole day long, as they were supposed to kill/incapacitate unarmoured horses or people on some distance for which a high penetration power was not necessarily needed, and not heavily armoured people on close distance. Don't know, just a theory of mine.

Most of the arrows+bows of the time (1257, that was the time I meant, therefore shields and such) couldn't even pierce a riveted mail hauberk and if a padding was added the chance got near to "mission impossible", and this on a distance of 20-30 metres on a still standing object, ie. a patch of mail without padding beneath it nailed to some piece of wood. This tests don't take into account that the wearer moved around all the time, most probably wore some padding beneath, and a body is actually not made out of wood and if he was 20 metres away from you, you had just 1 chance to hit him incapacitating or you would be dead. I don't think that archery back then worked this way, ie. to wait until the enemy is closer than 20m and then they would lose their arrows. Plate armour was indeed at times so well made that even early hand-held firearms couldn't harm it that's why they had many small field artillery pieces from 30-50 mm caliber with which the job could be done.

 

[Lazyman]

@Harith; In the case of the Mamluks, ALL of the mamluks would be practicing from a very early age, its what they do, they lived for war .

 

[Harith]

@Harith; In the case of the Mamluks, ALL of the mamluks would be practicing from a very early age, its what they do, they lived for war .

yea but, not all of them.... these are the royal or elite mamlukes.... u can have a mamluke who is as professional as a normal fighter.

I dunno, but being a mamluke means ur owned..... not ur en elite like a knight.... get?? So I dont think all the mamlukes were elite. But I do believe that many of the elite corps, if not all, were mamlukes in the 13th century up to the 17th in the middle east