Archery

[Nick Harbud]

Who knows?  I t might make the games faster, not just from missing out a chunk of factor calculation cum dice rolling, but by eliminating the oft-witnessed phenomonem of skirmishing indecisively with one's opponent until the last turn when everything charges in.

Of course, if you are one of these touchy-feely skirmishing wargamers, you will probably think this makes things worse, but there you go... 

[Nick Harbud]

Eliminating ranges above 80 paces or cutting out preparatory shooting, at least for archers, will have little effect on the big crunchy melee armies but will be deadly to archery-based armies, e.g. Hundred Years War English, who will accordingly just stock up on knights, billmen, handgunners, pikemen etc. instead of the now-useless archers. 

Yes, one really needs to look at what made good archers really good.  Certainly for later HYW English longbowmen there are at least two hypotheses, neither of which involves a longbow.

• It was not the bow, but the stakes (and occasionally the mud).  Compare Agincourt or Verneuill with Patay or Formigny.  (Incidentally, a similar line of reasoning says that cavalry were not rendered useless by machineguns, but by barbed wire.)



• One could deploy them as men-at-arms in a hand-to-hand melee role.  They were not as good, but they were much cheaper and one could generally get hold of a lot more of them.  (The side with the big battalions generally wins, etc.)

Some of this might be extended to other good archer types, eg Achaemenids, Vikings, etc.  I mean, if one is going to take the axe to a key point in the rules, one should really not be too bothered with preconceived ideas on troop classification.

[aligern]

If the archers were so useless then why did the French imitate them, why  did the Burgundians hire them, why did the Italians hire Hawkwood ?  If what they wanted was cheap men at arms then hire varlets instead.
If the archers were so ineffective then why did English kings keep legislating for the provision of bows and for the training of archers? Was it just to keep them off the streets?

Roy

[Nick Harbud]

I would favour something along the lines that medium to long range missiles would potentially introduce disorder into the target, but also potentially provoke them into a charge on shooter.

Id also want to see target priority for missile at med to lo g range being to aim at other shooters, ad I'm pretty convinced that the tactics show Shooting off' as the first order of business for missile troops.

And id save killing for close range, or even just subsume it into combat effectiveness - depending on the movement distances allowed.

I know some of my fellow wargamers can be quite bloodthirsty, but can we get away from the 'killing' please?  I mean, no matter how good a body of archers are, they are not going to 'kill' an unengaged enemy body.  If they start causing significant casualties (that is, more than 1 or 2, and enough that the target considers it is 'losing'), then the target will either withdraw or charge.

If the former, it suffers a morale penalty.  (Hard for the general to convince everyone of his competence when they are all walking backwards.)

If the latter then the effect of shooting on chargers normally finds a place in most rules and is factored into the melee result.

One could make one's archery rules as simple as this; the archers advance and anyone in the way either charges or withdraws.  Alternatively you could use some dice (or the Optio equivalent.)

[Nick Harbud]

If the archers were so ineffective then why did English kings keep legislating for the provision of bows and for the training of archers? Was it just to keep them off the streets?

Dunno.  Why did the English yeomanry stop training to use the bow when there was such an obvious demand for men with such a skill?

[Justin Swanton]

One could make one's archery rules as simple as this; the archers advance and anyone in the way either charges or withdraws.  Alternatively you could use some dice (or the Optio equivalent.)

I was going to shut up and just follow the discussion until you mentioned Optio (I can hardly resist an invitation like this, can I?)

Optio has three ways of inflicting badness on a unit: by terrain disorder, which disrupts the unit's fighting formation but leaves its morale intact; by loss of morale, a direct result of having lost a charge or melee fight; and by shooting, which involves both loss of order and morale.

Shooting ranges are determined using the grid. Here are the short (stronger blue) and extreme (fainter blue) ranges of a longbow. Each square is about 50x50 yards. In this example a command group of 3 archer bases behind stakes faces off against a command group of 3 French knight bases.

Each turn has three phases followed by melee. A missile base can shoot once per phase. When shooting a missile base inflicts fatigue hits on its opponent. At short range a longbow base inflicts 3 fatigue hits on a French cavalry base. To indicate this a fatigue marker - a square with 4 different coloured sides - is placed on the base. For the first fatigue hit, the green side is positioned facing forwards of the target base. For the second, the marker is turned so the yellow side faces forwards. The orange side indicates the third fatigue hit and the red the fourth. Here the cavalry get markers with orange sides frontwards (3 hits).

In the next phase they get 3 more hits, passing through red to green and yellow. When a base gets a fourth hit it becomes disordered, indicated by pushing the figure base back on the underbase.

In the following phase the cavalry get 3 more hits, going through orange and red to green. They have received a fourth hit again. In this case they are already disordered and so receive instead a combat hit. 2 combats or half as many combat hits as the number of bases in a command group immediately inflict a morale hit. The morale marker is moved down one interval on the base with the morale scale.

Doing the maths, the French cavalry will lose all their morale in about 7 turns and rout. That's quite a long time. But more to the point, if they charge the longbowmen, they will receive minus modifiers for being disordered and for running into stakes. In a charge knights score 4 combat hits against longbowmen who give 2 back. With 2 minus modifiers that becomes 2 vs 2 and the charge is drawn. In melee the knights inflict 3 for 2, which becomes 1 for 2 and they lose melee, suffering morale loss. So arrow fire will not kill or even rout them, but it will make them ineffective by the time they hit the English lines.

[aligern]

The English yeomen continue on with archery until the end of the sicteenth century. However, it is in decline from say 1530 onwards. The reasons for this decline are much debated, but seem to be from two directions:
1) the men got. to like archery practice less and less as prosperity increased. Socially peopke had better things to do with their time, economic activity, reading the Bible, being proto Victorian Dads etc. Its also true that after the WotR there are less wars in and around England so who wants to practice when you are not going to go to France and Tudor England is in a state of good public order with milutarism pisitively discouraged.
2) The king wanted arquebusiers. This may have been as much fashion and needing to look like a Renaissance prince rather than some medieval backwoodsmen. Tvwas post 1500 and  thus the pike and shot period and zhenry knew it. In times of national emergency the bowmen were called out, but the professional captains generally preferred arquebusiers because that was what they were used to.  I wonder too if improved armour designed to resist bullets may not have made the bow less effective ?
The archers had, after all, been dominant fir 200 years up till their obsolescence.

Whatever the cause bows appear less and less on the battlefield. I really do jot buy the short range idea. That's because a bowshot is an impirtant military distance. When you got closer than that thins started yo happen. At Towton one side moves back a little to get out of range and let the others waste their artows. That would not have much point if arrows were ineffective at long range. 

Roy

[Mark G]

I have to agree with roy on this, clearly longbow.en were something special, if probably also overrated in most rules.

But equally, it was a damn hard thing to master, and that training and dilligence (and pay) would move them well up the professional soldier scale.

Equally I think, bog standard longbowmen were not much cop as anything, and I think we miss a huge amount if we view the weapon as the important thing, and ignore the professionalism.

Ditto pretty much every other weapon combination you care to name, I would add

[Erpingham]

• It was not the bow, but the stakes (and occasionally the mud).  Compare Agincourt or Verneuill with Patay or Formigny.  (Incidentally, a similar line of reasoning says that cavalry were not rendered useless by machineguns, but by barbed wire.)

A slightly odd set of comparisons but the general principle is fair - archers in an open field which provided good going for cavalry were unlikely to stop them.  Archers behind stakes or pits or ditches or with some terrain advantage (like a hedge or standing in a marsh) have a pretty good chance.

• One could deploy them as men-at-arms in a hand-to-hand melee role.  They were not as good, but they were much cheaper and one could generally get hold of a lot more of them.  (The side with the big battalions generally wins, etc.)

If they were just cheap men at arms, why give them bows and insist they trained with them?  Give the bill hook or a pointy stick.  Bit lost as to what you're reaching for here.

[Patrick Waterson]

If the archers were so ineffective then why did English kings keep legislating for the provision of bows and for the training of archers? Was it just to keep them off the streets?

Dunno.  Why did the English yeomanry stop training to use the bow when there was such an obvious demand for men with such a skill?

Possibly because in 1596 Elizabeth I abolished it as a weapon for the army.

Roy's points about longbow archery becoming less effective against improved armour, and handguns being preferred for their effect, seem valid to me, as Japan saw a very similar pattern of progressive substitution after muskets were introduced c.AD 1540.

[aligern]

And simiarly we see Japanese arquebusiers operating behind fences when dealing with cavalry.

The factors that have been raised in English longbow superiority in its golden years are:
1) its a big bow offering more velocity and or weight in the arrow. Arrow weight might well be important, especially when shooting at long range at a 45% angle and depending upon gravity for acceleration.
2) Mass shooting. There seems no doubt that the ability to put say 10,000 arrows above a target at the same moment has a considerable effect on the opponents' morale as well as causing casualties. We should not latch on to numbers as being essential too readily as the longbow's first impressions were made when it was in relatively small numbers and they were hired in smallish groups by Italians and Burgundians.
3) Defences. Once there are large numbers of archers they improve their position with pits, stakes, hedges in order to prevent an opponent getting melee troops to them in good order. As much as anything the field defences may have worked by holding the attacker in front of the archers at close range.
4) Training and professionalism. English training regimes look as though they are more rigorous than those of other lands. they would have produced archers that could input more power to the shot, shoot faster and for longer.
5) arrow and bow technology. I don't think that earlier bow cultures all had the range of heads, for example , that the English developed.
6) Command and control. Its difficult to believe that massed archery can be effective without some effective system of controlling the shoot.
7) Combination of the archers and men at arms. This has to be well done for the archers exist to degrade and disorder ( I think Mark says this) the enemy melee troops,these still need to be dealt with hand to hand.

Add all these incremental  advances together and you have a very powerful weapons system and I stress system. The weakness of wargames rules is that they often just concentrate on the archers shooting down opponents. Doubtless they can do this against unarmoured opponents such as Scots spearmen, but against armoured opponents the effects should be to reduce them to the point where the English men at arms have a significant advantage.
Roy

[Nick Harbud]

...instead of the now-useless archers. 

This needs to be challenged.  Bows without longe range are hardly useless or to be compared with a troop type armed with the generic 'other weapons'.  For example:

• Under WRG 7^th for each casualty per fgure (CPF) in support shooting the archers knock between 25% and 30% off their target's melee effect
• I believe that under WRG 6^th each ¹/₂ CPF has a similar effect.
• Under DBM (v2.0) Bow have a better AP against mounted than many other infantry for the same number of ranks.  They are the only infantry who can destroy Light Horse and the English variety are the only infantry who can quick-kill Knights in good going.

This seems slightly better than useless.  However, more interesting to me is the perception that archers can only be effective on the wargames table if they can emulate an artillery bombardment at 240 paces.  Try it out, see what happens.

[Erpingham]

This seems slightly better than useless.  However, more interesting to me is the perception that archers can only be effective on the wargames table if they can emulate an artillery bombardment at 240 paces.  Try it out, see what happens.

I suspect that the scepticism depends a lot on whether you edge toward the simulation end of the spectrum rather than the game end.   Why change the rules if you don't think the old theory represents reality better than the new one?

From a game mechanism point of view, if the rules are designed to recreate , say, the effect on cavalry by archers by allowing them to engage from 240 paces (albeit at reduced effect) and you simply reduce that to 80 paces, I would suggest what will happen is archery will become less effective and the game balance will change.  Whether this is a good thing or not would probably depend on whether archery was over effective to start with.  Players will respond to the change variously to maximise the opportunities of their archers to get hits at short range (regardless of historical precedent) and probably load up their archers with optional extra armour, weapons, equipment and morale upgrades if allowed in army lists to make them more robust in melee.  In other words, if you want to test the short-range school argument, it mat take more radical rewriting than dropping long range shooting options but not making other adjustments.

[Patrick Waterson]

Furthermore, the sling, which under WRG 6th and 7th has only one range (short; 120 paces) will outshoot every other weapon except for artillery, which itself is comparatively rare.  Slingers already do well against archers (because of the shield ) but being able to outrange them completely would make WRG 6th and 7th into a slingers' paradise.

Bring it on, says the owner of an Inca army.

This seems slightly better than useless.  However, more interesting to me is the perception that archers can only be effective on the wargames table if they can emulate an artillery bombardment at 240 paces.  Try it out, see what happens.

From a game mechanism point of view, if the rules are designed to recreate, say, the effect on cavalry by archers by allowing them to engage from 240 paces (albeit at reduced effect) and you simply reduce that to 80 paces, I would suggest what will happen is archery will become less effective and the game balance will change.  Whether this is a good thing or not would probably depend on whether archery was over effective to start with.

It is already quite hard to make significant things happen with archery in WRG rules; defeating an opponent purely by shooting is rare under 6th and impossible under 7th.

  Players will respond to the change variously to maximise the opportunities of their archers to get hits at short range (regardless of historical precedent) and probably load up their archers with optional extra armour, weapons, equipment and morale upgrades if allowed in army lists to make them more robust in melee.  In other words, if you want to test the short-range school argument, it may take more radical rewriting than dropping long range shooting options but not making other adjustments.

It may even require readjusting short-range/point-blank archery to new levels of lethality.

We need to consider carefully the battlefield function and effect of massed archers.  What exactly was it?  Where and how did it fit into an army's tactical repertoire?

[Dangun]

The English yeomen continue on with archery until the end of the sicteenth century. However, it is in decline from say 1530 onwards. The reasons for this decline are much debated, but seem to be from two directions:

I'd also add to that list, that a ruler wants to maintain a monopoly over legitimate violence. So its not a great idea to train the peasantry in an effective weapon - the long bow - that said peasants can make in their back yard. They might use it on you. Far better to give less trained peasantry a weopon you can take back - a crossbow or gun - after they have done the dieing for you.

Also, while it might look like this is economically unsound because guns are expensive and the peasantry practicing on the weekend looks cheap, as campaigns lengthen and manufacturing improves, it might make economoic sense to invest in a higher ratio of weapons to training?