General Interest Questions

[Morbio]

OK, I know a lot of well-read people read this, so I thought I'd ask a few general interest questions that FoG has made me think about.

Slings
How big were the stones / rocks that slingers threw? I'm imagining a minimum size of a golf ball and maximum of an tennis ball.
Were they artificially shaped or rounded, or just in raw form?
How many stones would a typical slinger have for a battle?

Javelinmen
How many javelins would a typical javelinman have? I'm thinking maybe 5 or 6.
How would they carry them (there are only so many shafts one can hold in a hand)?
Finally, what would they do when they've thrown all their javelins? Run off to a secret stash and get some more? Sit back and watch the show? I know in FoG that all skirmishers seem to have an infinite supply

Bow-armed Light Horse
In FoG I often seem to send Bow-armed LH into attack LF... but what are they fighting with?
Are they using the horse as a weapon and just riding the skirmishers down? Do they merely shoot arrows at close quarters? Or do they have a sword or other secondary weapon?
If a sword, what's the difference FOG-wise with these Bow-armed LH and other LH that are armed with Bow and Sword?

All thoughts gratefully received

[Blathergut]

Sling stones were small. If you know what Easter chocolate eggs are like, they were almost identical. Slightly oval, same size, a bit heavier since they were lead. If they went to stones...you'd look for similar sized I suppose. I don't know of any such in museum collections. Lots of the lead ones though...when my gr5 class goes to the museum here they get to handle them in a lab...so can't be too rare!

[Blathergut]

How many....whatever would fit in a pouch I suppose. Often they had names or little msgs carved into them...like...here's one from flavius or whatever...

[MesaDon]

I think once upon a time I asked about missle units running our of arrows, javelins, etc. I got yelled at (figuratively speaking) and micely told it was a stupid question. Better luck to you.

[TheGrayMouser]

I think once upon a time I asked about missle units running our of arrows, javelins, etc. I got yelled at (figuratively speaking) and micely told it was a stupid question. Better luck to you.

I think ammo depletion is own of those tricky things in a game like this this..Sure, how long could javelineers realsitically skirmish if they only had 4-5 darts in game terms, I shot? 2 ? You could abstract the abstarction and say well, they can fire 5 shots because it is assumed that not everyone is firing, but that itself is problematic.....also the game has no definitive scale so you really could not say that so and so unit has 200 men and thus 1000 darts and track it that way either...

Perhaps if it was abstractly done, and say everytime a unit fires there is a 30% chance that it is now "low on ammo" and then shoots at reduced effectivenes the rest of the game... Of course the lists would have to be rebalanced....

Howver, it is well documented that skirmishers generally were able to pick up rounds off the gound, either their own if they advanced toward where the enemy had been or even using rounds fired at them.. ( I think the GMT games allowed picking up used ammo)

BTW I am not against such a "realism" feature, I just have no idea how it could be implement in a satisfactory fashion....

[deadtorius]

For what its worth I did read once that the Parthians had supply mules or horses loaded with extra arrows bundled in nice quiver sizes. The horse archers would shoot till they ran out than scoot back and reload. Now it did not happen on mass but with small groups so the shooting was fairly constant. Caesar had planned on using ballista's to shoot down the supply animals from range since they stayed out of bow range of the enemy archers. I would suppose the same could apply to javelin men who could have had reloads kept behind the front line so they could fall back and move up again keeping a fairly steady supply of missiles going.
A big question is how did the front line boys fight and not die from fatigue, obviously there must have been some means of pulling back your front line or a mutual break in the action. No one really knows for sure.

[TheGrayMouser]

How many....whatever would fit in a pouch I suppose. Often they had names or little msgs carved into them...like...here's one from flavius or whatever...

Its little things like this about history that i find so intersting, ancient greek slingers writing little nasty messages for their targets, much the same as airmen and submariners did on their torps/bombs
Take that Flavius, Eat this Tojo, great stuff

Did a little reseacrh on slings, appears they had a greater range than most bows, and a higher velocity as well. They were also considered particulary nasty as the wounds they caused were signicant: striking bone could fracture it, in soft tissue the stone would sink right in like a small caliber bullet, and be very very difficult to extracate

[MesaDon]

I think the Persians had supplies on camels for skirmishers. (Read something like that someplace) Just interesting idea but it would be hard to implement and add more things to go wrong with the program itselfs .... that being said ..... AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW the heck with it.

[kujalar]

Arrows were also collected from the field whenever possible.

At Hastings the bowmen ran out of arrows. William had bows but Harold did not and nobody shot arrows back at Williams bowmen

[kujalar]

A big question is how did the front line boys fight and not die from fatigue, obviously there must have been some means of pulling back your front line or a mutual break in the action. No one really knows for sure.

If you can keep your adrenaline pumping you propably endure, but after that when you get some relax time, your body lets it go. It is also a part of tricks Hannibal propably tried at Zama when he kept his last line of veterans out of combat while 2 first lines were beaten by the Romans.

I remember when I was first time playing paintball in a forest as a young boy. I managed to walk/run/crawl 8 hours with only 1 meal break between the fighting Man I was sick the next week. Now I know what it means to overstress your body.

[rbodleyscott]

Bow-armed Light Horse
In FoG I often seem to send Bow-armed LH into attack LF... but what are they fighting with?

Daggers/short swords mainly.

If a sword, what's the difference FOG-wise with these Bow-armed LH and other LH that are armed with Bow and Sword?

More a matter of attitude and experience than anything else. FOG capabilities are not based (just) on equipment carried, but on skill and willingness to use it. However, most steppe nomad LH were armed with sabres. (Or in the case of Skythians, a horseman's axe with handle up to 3 foot long). They were not averse to getting stuck in when the situation merited it. Hence we give them swordsmen capability to reflect this experience, skill and willingness.

LH without a close combat capability are those that we deem less prone to mix it hand-to-hand - and hence less practised and less capable if they did so.

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With regard to the issue of ammunition supply, in the TT game design, we decided to avoid the record keeping required for ammunition recording, partly as we have experience of it from earlier rules - it tends to add to the inconvenience of playing the game without, in practice, adding much to the realism.

As has been mentioned above, troops did not necessarily all shoot their missiles at once, and there were various ways in wihich they could resupply themselves. In practice, during the course of a battle, running out of ammunition does not appear to have been a very major issue in most historical accounts. (Though, of course, it could be significant on occasion).

Certainly, in games with ammunition rules, it tends to have more of an impact than in historical accounts. Hence, mainly for simplicity, but with some historical justification, we left it out of the TT rules.

It could have been reintroduced in the computer game, as computers can easily keep the necessary records. However, as the PC game is supposed to be a close port of the TT game, the designers presumably decided not to do so.

[deadtorius]

I for one am glad you didn't add extra book keeping that really does not make the game any better. I have tried rules that had both ammo depletion and fatigue, you end up with a game with no real victor as both sides can't shoot and are too tired to fight. I prefer the FOG approach myself.