(TFT) Miscellaneous Comments

[David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com>]

​Various thoughts:

* On one-hex charges: remember that the characters may have been charging
toward each other for six turns, and just happen to have finished last turn
two hexes apart. For more realism we could say that to get double damage
from a charge the characters need to either start three hexes apart or at
least one of them must have not been engaged during the previous turn.��
Would that work?

>> a
​
n impaling attack is far more effective in killing an opponent than a
slashing attack is.

​Not sure that's true: the stab might hit something vital but it mi
ght also
miss everything critical and the slash is very likely to open up an artery.

What slashing attacks can't do is penetrate ​decent armour. Against
unarmoured opponents they were fine, hence their use in the gunpowder era,
by Japanese who only wore light wooden armour, by stone age cultures like
the Aztec, Inca and Polynesians.

​"​
​
If you look at history the spear, halberd and even the pike were never the
dominate weapon in the field post bronze age (Greeks and Romans) ...
​
The fact is they just weren't as effective as the cutting and bashing
weapons in producing damage."

There are so many things I disagree with here it's hard to list them all.

​* Romans aren't bronze age. Not sure if this affects your argument
.

* There's a bewildering diversity of polearms. Even if no individual type
is dominant, add them all up and they're huge.

* Halberds were pretty important for quite a while​. When hardened 
plate
got good (I suspect this is the time you're thinking about) then halberds
couldn't penetrate but they didn't just die out, they mutated into the
pollaxe, which is basically a halberd optimised for armour penetration. The
pollaxe (not poleaxe, it's from a Danish word meaning "head") took over
from it for a while before guns made the armour go away and opened up the
field again. These are all pole weapons.

* If a halberd is not a cutting weapon, what is? If you want a bashing
version, it's called a lucerne hammer.

​* Spears were very big during the dark ages. I don't know what oth
er
weapon you'd call dominant.​ Sure, short stabby swords and proto-ar
ming
swords and the occasional axe were all about but none of them beats the
spear for importance and ubiquity.

>>
​
As far as bronze age cavalry goes, other than horse archers, they really we
ren't
>> very effective until the Goths brought the stirrup with them as they
​>> ​
invaded the Roman Empire.

* There's a long gap between the bronze age and the Goths.

* There's also a substantial gap between the Gothic invasion of the empire
and the Avars bringing the stirrup to Europe.

> ​
Imagine, if you will, a knight without stirrups trying to charge someone.

* Don't need to: they existed and we know what they looked like. They were
called a deghan (Persian), clibanarius (Western Roman? I forget) or
cataphract (Byzantine). There were definitely effective without stirrups,
though admittedly stirrups later made them better.

---
David (the other one)

Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"