If you're talking about an opponent in plate armour then there is no wood, nor any bow design, that allows you to actually pierce the armour. Until the advent of gunpowder, most ranged weapons weren't intended to pierce armour, rather they were supposed to hit people in the places where there were gaps.
Not so. Until the reinvention of the longbow and invention of the crossbow what you describe was the indeed the case. The fact this was the case prevented the use of archers as 'line' troops (troops that directly confront the enemy) for everyone pretty much between the times when the Persian Empire rose to power and the Middle Ages. Hitting the gaps in armour at range is not easy without supernatural accuracy, while this prevented
It was for this reason that the crossbow was controversial, in fact the Pope tried to ban them at one point precisely because it could go through the armour worn by knights *and* be used by pretty much anyone.
No, yew makes the best longbows but you can make a longbow out of a great many different woods, I think my longbow is ash. The longbow is to do with the design, not the material.
I am getting the impression you are arguing for the sake of it here. I claimed that it was not possible to make functional longbows out of most wood but it is possible to make smaller bows out of most wood. I never claimed that there were no other woods that could make longbows in the world.
The longbow has to be good enough to offset it's inherent disadvantages (slow rate of fire, high level of training required), it may be that some with woods while you can make longbows out of them do so with sufficient drawbacks as to make them infeasible for military use.
Again, no. The longbow is literally just what the name suggests: a long bow, typically around the same height as the user. You don't need any extra technology, if you can make a bow you can make a longbow, you just need a bit more wood. It was actually during the bronze age that bowyers began to prefer yew as a longbow material, you know, ancient Greece time. It's also believed that the Germanic tribes in the black forest that gave Rome such a hard time were using longbows or something very similar, perhaps the flatbows that Atarlost mentioned?
They did not prefer yew as a longbow material, because they did not have longbows. Nobody did, including the German tribes. If the German tribes used bows it was in the skirmish/supporting capacity for the regular infantry, or else the histories of Romans fighting the Germans would consist of them being turned into pincushions in a serious of Agincourt style defeats rather than being hacked apart with axes, which is what actually tended to happen.
Did you even read my last post?
They had a prototype. They had prototypes for lots of things, including computers but they certainly did not use crossbows on a large scale or else we would have heard of it big-time. At one point they (Archimedes) invented a machine to use the suns rays to burn ships, but that was never used on wide scale either. At some point in the middle ages quite likely someone took those prototypes and actually put them into widespread manufacture; why it was not done earlier is mysterious but probably has to do with the shortage of the needed parts.
No Greek or Roman army ever fielded crossbows to anyone's knowledge.
The field of battle was arguably the most significant factor in deciding the outcome. The recently ploughed land hemmed in by dense woodland favoured the English, both because of its narrowness, and because of the thick mud through which the French knights had to walk...
... As the battle was fought on a recently ploughed field, and there had recently been heavy rain leaving it very muddy, it proved very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as "marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy". The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights had a hard time getting back up to fight in the mêlée. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.
Sounds like Agincourt was won through exceptional tactics and no small measure of luck to me.
Luck and tactics will only get you so far when you are archers outnumbered by cavalry. That is very much rock-paper-scissors in favour of cavalry but that the archers were able to stand their ground and win shows that something has fundamentally changed in warfare. If they had been fighting heavy infantry of the roman/greek style, their victory would be a shoo-in under pretty much all circumstances, because cavalry are faster than infantry which makes them ideal for killing archers in a straight contest but still they lost.
In the ancient worlds archers were used to man fortifications or to support non-archer troops by adding a few extra casualties.
How do you know that nothing like that happened back then? Do you expect any literate ancient society to admit to such a humiliating defeat? The majority of the Roman records on their conquests are essentially just propaganda which is why, for example, the death toll on auxillia was not recorded.
Also, the archers were fielded in a bold manner? Look at the map of the battle in the article you linked. They were literally hiding in the bushes, and it says in the article that they were also protected from cavalry with pointed wooden stakes that had been driven into the ground. Sounds like fortifications to me.
If mountains are molehills then pointed stakes thrown hastily into the ground count as fortifications. By fortifications I mean actual permanent walls and by skirmishing I mean ambushes/hit and run tactics not just using cover in a battlefield to confuse an enemy. The Romans still had an effective counter to fortified archers in the
Tortoise Formation which basically is why the Roman Empire existed on the scale it did, since nobody they were fighting had archers capable of reliably penetrating the shields of the Romans even when firing down from a fortress wall which basically means that they are hitting with the greatest amount of force it is possible for them to do so.
Basically you are using the conspiracy theorists favorite argument, the ancient world people's wars were really dominated by archers but the Romans and Greeks who 'sucked at archery' (your words and true, except for the Cretans) are still the one's writing the history. The reason they are writing the history is because they won and they won because archers in general sucked at that point in history so that being no good at it was no impediment to conquering the known world.
Persians technically won the battle at Thermopylae, they just took such heavy casualties that they had to abandon their campaign, it's called a Pyrrhic victory. Fun fact about that, the last of the remaining Greeks at Thermopylae were surrounded on a hill and bombarded with arrows until there were none left alive.
The general consensus is also that good training and tactical use of terrain (again) were both just as important as the quality equipment that the Greeks had. If either of those things weren't in Greek favour, they likely would've been significantly easier to deal with.
Why did they take heavy casualties when they had such a numerical advantage, if their arrows work effectively while not just sit and turn the Spartans into pincushions from afar and win the battle with no casualties since the Spartans had at Thermopylae no archers of their own as far as I know of. The reason is that the combination of their fortifications and the armour of the spartans meant that their archers were useless and they were forced to engage them in melee.
The Persians outright lost the battle of Marathon to the Athenians+Allies in the previous Persian-Greeks and the Spartans did not even turn up on time there. The wars against the Persians were not decided by a single battle which the Greeks technically lost.
But it does require gross ignorance of the subject matter. The oldest known longbows are made of elm and date to before the climate warmed enough for yew to grow in the region where they were found. Composite bows can be made with even poor bow woods because the wood serves mostly as a spacer between the sinew that bears the tension and the horn that bears the compression. Composite bows are usually not long, but because their strength is vastly superior to any wood they can achieve the same draw lengths in a shorter bow more suited to use on horseback. The composite bow tradition is continuous in the near east from the late bronze age until they were displaced by gunpowder.
You obviously have an internet connection. Try doing some research. Start with Carrhae.
Carrhae was won by a cavalry charge that was so effective because the Romans had adopted their uber-anti archer formation. The Romans were generally of an opinion that they could simply wait until the archers ran out of arrows (the Romans are not idiots, they know that archers are of limited effectiveness). It is a good example of effectively using archers in a supporting capacity for regular cavalry, it is not an example of an Agicourt style victory.
It requires ignorance of a facts irrelevant to the subject matter, I was not talking about neolithic warfare if indeed there even was such a thing and world peace was not the rule back then. You informed me that they had yew longbows back then, which I did not know but does not prove that the ancients had longbows unless we believe that technology never moves backwards. The story is then, they forgot how to make longbows which is hard to fathom unless you remember that the ancient world civilizations are *not* a simple descendant of neolithic societies.
The reason is that the original societies that had the longbows were replaced by the societies of the
Indo-Europeans.
You comment is rather ironic, as "stronger short bows" was part of the argument GC made in favour of bows being useful even for short civs. We've now come full circle. GC has a habit of trying to perform point-by-point rebuttals, but they rarely go well as it just fragments whatever argument he is trying to make and the point gets completely lost (usually over an argument about some secondary issue). My only real comment is that material properties should be used to determine bow effectiveness, and that there is no need to impose an upper limit on size arbitrarily as material properties will do that for you.
I've given some more thought into bow dynamics. My earlier approximation was a little crude so I've been thinking about improvements. I'll probably fork it into a separate suggestion once I'm done as it goes beyond the original scope of this one significantly.
The issue here is that we are talking about a computer game. The limitations on bow size imposed by the materials does not automatically exist simply because we model the properties of the materials, it has to be specifically programmed in.
