longbowmen-a truely amazing weapon

[Jon Shafer]

I gave them some defensive (range 0) bombard also. Makes them good offensive and defensive weapons, and I've found it works well.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Beeblbrox

And yes as has been mentioned, I would be very surprised to see any child pull a modern composite bow. I have very recently taken up archery, and as yet can barely pull the string back let alone aim the damn thing!

It sounds like you bought too strong a bow. For target use you don't want a powerfull bow. Also you could try a different technique. Push the bow away instead of pull the string towards you. Japanese bowmen do it that way.

[Zylka]

I find all of this history very interesting

[sabrewolf]

trip & others: what values did you use for the crossbowmen? with which tech did it come and what do you replace it with? same questions about the longbowmen...

[Doctor Bob]

Actually. It was the french knights who were marching through the sticky, spike trapped marshes and were shot to pieces by an English Longbow ambush. The french were then finished off by the English troopers. Agincourt was a very well prepared battle Henry V set up against the French.

[dunk]

Originally posted by Beeblbrox
And yes as has been mentioned, I would be very surprised to see any child pull a modern composite bow. I have very recently taken up archery, and as yet can barely pull the string back let alone aim the damn thing!

I didn't mean a 4 year old. I've known quite a few kids (10-15 years old) who have gone bow hunting.

Maybe you're using to powerful of a bow? They do have varying strengths.

Originally posted by SpencerH
I have to disagree, compound bows did not make the longbow obsolete, they were not invented until 1967. You may be thinking of composite bows which were present in Egypt by 2800BC (so they didnt make the longbow obsolete either). The longbow was made obsolete to some extent by the crossbow and eventually muskets that required less training and experience and could thus be employed by larger groups of relatively untrained soldiers.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of just archery. I don't know what kind of bows people used for hunting, target shooting and so forth in the 1800's, but now almost everyone uses compound bows.

[Grumbold]

Civ III would be a more interesting game were there a greater variety of units. I'm not a fan of the Firaxis approach of reducing Civ back to basics. I have hopes that eventually we will see similar things to Medmod appear. That made CtP2 a much more interesting game, with many specialist units available without tying them specifically to fixed countries.

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by sabrewolf
trip & others: what values did you use for the crossbowmen? with which tech did it come and what do you replace it with? same questions about the longbowmen...

Well, first thing I did was double all attack/defense/bombard values, which allows more accuracy (i.e. Warrior is now 2/2/1 instead of 1/1/1).

The values I have:

Longbowman (English UU): 12/2/1 BStr 6 BRng 0 BRoF 1 Cost 5
Crossbowman: 10/3/1 BStr 4 BRng 0 BRoF 1 Cost 5

I would have made the Longbowmen much stronger for a much higher cost (to reflect the training it required to learn the skill), but that would have probably made the game too unbalanced, so I tried to keep things within reason.

[Grumbold]

I'm interested why you gave the crossbowmen a slightly higher defensive value. In the period when longbowmen were in the field I was not aware there was any difference in the armor worn. In later centuries the crossbowmen tended to get metal breastplates and helmets but that was in the days of early powder weapons.