Slitherine

I have some questions, both historical and game play related, about the gradual decrease in the portion of pikemen in infantry units.

From a gameplay perspective, I'm wondering why the ratio of pikemen has no effect on the melee effectiveness of a unit. As things stand, a unit with 50% pike is just as good at fighting infantry or repelling cavalry as a unit with 20% pike. The game is well designed and everything was clearly thought out, but I'm having a few difficulties figuring out what abstraction is occurring, and whether or not this is a fair representation. I know that during the 30 Years War, army commanders tried (often in vain) to maintain the 1-2 ratio of pikes to muskets in their infantry units. Why was this, if not because they were more effective in battle? But this doesn't answer the question of whether that higher ratio of pikes was desirable for protection against cavalry or to combat infantry.

So I see a number of historical possibilities that the game is attempting to abstract:

1) Less pikemen are needed to fend off cavalry. This could be because the socket bayonet is widely adopted. Or, it could be due to incremental improvements in firearm technology leading to a higher rate of fire. As a result, cavalry were less willing to trot into contact as before but instead relied on speed once within range. This led to their discarding armor in favor of mobility, which left them more vulnerable in melee.

2) Pikemen are not useful during a firefight. Charges would occur when one side felt like it had a sufficient advantage to close. Whatever fear advancing pikemen may have caused was offset by their tactical inflexibility. While musketeers could stand and fire or charge, pikemen could charge or... stand. The latter choice would be psychologically untenable.

3) Related to the above, at some point, European infantry seemed to lose the willingness to engage in prolonged hand to hand combat in the open field; perhaps this was related to the discarding of armor. In any case, as infantry charges became more often decided by moral resolution and initial contact than prolonged hand to hand combat, the pike lost its usefulness. A greater proportion of musketeers would provide that moral advantage before contact.

Still, these theories don't cleanly answer a couple of questions in game terms.

1) Why does a unit of 20% pikes repel cavalry as readily as a unit with 50% pikes? Why does a unit with less pikes do just as well in melee against infantry?
2) Why doesn't a unit that includes pikemen get any kind of POA bonus against infantry? As things stand, the pikemen may as well be armed with pitchforks or clubs, receiving no POA bonus vs foot. Granted, they cancel out swordsmen and heavy weapon POA when steady, but it's still odd that they are fighting musketeers on even terms in melee.

Of course, I could be wrong on some of the above details, and I'm clearly not an expert on the history here. Anybody have some insight to clarify this with?

SnuggleBunnies wrote:
1) Why does a unit of 20% pikes repel cavalry as readily as a unit with 50% pikes? Why does a unit with less pikes do just as well in melee against infantry?
2) Why doesn't a unit that includes pikemen get any kind of POA bonus against infantry? As things stand, the pikemen may as well be armed with pitchforks or clubs, receiving no POA bonus vs foot. Granted, they cancel out swordsmen and heavy weapon POA when steady, but it's still odd that they are fighting musketeers on even terms in melee.

Hmm couple things come to mind:

1) 20% pike will cancel cavalry POAS's as well as 50% pike but 50% pike will be a Kiel and get a POA advantage (sliding up to 100 POA based on the percent of the troop that make it a kiel ie pike sword and HW's)
WHy? don't know, one could presume the shot are just as well sheltered in a unit with 20% pike and or have MORE fire power weakening the charge? Again, as you touched upon , so many factors come into play...

Same versus infantry vs infantry

2) To some degree this is true but for the most part a P&S unit is more versatile and will be better than say an all heavy weapons unit or a spear unit.
The no POA thing could be a design decision that P&S are the "default" "combat value" and everything else revolves around them. Again, kiels will have additional POA's vs other infantry
P&S , especially later musket varieties will eat up mere melee only units (not that there are too many around anyhow) I find that highlanders, and even the impact foot style French battalions really need some luck as they get blasted apart by the regular musket P&S units greater.

50% pike units are not keils if they are standard 500 man units. And yes, poa cancellation is effective against melee units, forcing them to charge through musketry only to engage on even terms. But in an infantry vs infantry fight, musketeers have both greater firepower than pike and shot, and are on even terms in melee.

SnuggleBunnies wrote:But in an infantry vs infantry fight, musketeers have both greater firepower than pike and shot, and are on even terms in melee.

Not quite: The Pike and Shot get a +1 cohesion test modifier against everything. The musketeers (if Medium Foot) get a -1 cohesion test modifier vs heavy foot in open terrain. Thus the musketeers are much more likely to disrupt than the pike and shot if they lose a round of close combat in open terrain. Their main vulnerability, however, is versus cavalry. Pike and shot are the ultimate all-rounders and largely immune to cavalry.

We take the view that once very deep pike formations became obsolete, anti-cavalry was the only remaining really viable role for the pikes. Yes, we hear of "push of pike", but the tendency as the English Civil War progressed was to reduce the proportion of pikes in favour of more musketeers, so push-of-pike can't have been that great by then - probably the number of pikemen had already fallen below the threshold at which they would more effective as an anti-infantry weapon than having more musketeers. I simply don't buy the idea that pikemen were harder to recruit/equip than musketeers - the reverse was in fact true - poorly equipped armies always had a higher proportion of pikemen.

Many French, English Royalist and Austrian units were fielded without any pikes, long before the introduction of bayonets. The French infantry doctrine being highly aggressive, it is hard to see how such units would be effective if the pike was a vital anti-infantry weapon before the introduction of bayonets. Louis XIV's pikemen are recorded as having discarded their pikes and picked up the muskets of their fallen comrades whenever the opportunity arose - very likely because they felt like "a spare ***** at a wedding" while carrying a pike.

Moreover, the design policy was always to give the benefit of the doubt to the more modern units at the expense of the obsolete units. The last thing we want is for obsolete unit types to be more cost-effective than the latest types. If they are less cost-effective that is right and proper - they must have been for the historical development to proceed as it did.

I chose to think of it more as in the early era, armies needed 50% pike to stay safe from cavalry, but as the unit drills improved, much smaller packs of pikes were necessary to fend off cavalry charges. That's just what makes the most sense to me as to why the earlier eras couldn't have just dropped to 20% pike and still have been safe. I like the socket bayonet theory as well.

GamerMan wrote:I chose to think of it more as in the early era, armies needed 50% pike to stay safe from cavalry, but as the unit drills improved, much smaller packs of pikes were necessary to fend off cavalry charges. That's just what makes the most sense to me as to why the earlier eras couldn't have just dropped to 20% pike and still have been safe. I like the socket bayonet theory as well.

There are many other issues that come into play as well. Off the top of my head I think these two issues would have been very important too;

1) Limited supply of Arquebuses/Muskets. All of these nations were pre industrial, and did not have the capability to produce vast quantities of these new weapons. Even in the 1680s some armies struggled to equip all of their men with the required allocation of muskets (Jacobite Irish for one).

2) Conservatism. Most armies throughout history have been very slow to adopt new tactics and weapons. Generals prefer to rely on things that are proven to work well in actual combat.