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 catbarf wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:I'm not an expert in the field at all, but my understanding was that early guns were inaccurate, short ranged, slow to fire, in some cases could still be stopped by good quality armour and in the early days part of the transition to guns had more to do with training than battlefield ability (easier to train someone to use a gun than a bow, sword, etc). I believe in Asia there was a period of many hundreds of years where bows were still used after firearms were introduced, in spite of bows being quite difficult and time consuming to manufacture.

...contrary to pop history, firearms rapidly became more effective than bows, but were expensive, logistically complicated, and required extensive training to use effectively. Meanwhile bows were comparatively cheap, and peasants already accustomed to using them for hunting and sport had requisite training. I've got a big ol' rant on the subject here.

Basically bows were primarily employed by peasants drafted into militia levies, while the cost and training requirements of guns and crossbows limited their use to professional mercenaries and subsequently standing armies. So it's quite fitting that Bretonnia would use bows, and the Empire would use guns, and these could coexist indefinitely thanks to Bretonnia's social structure. It's not as anachronistic as it seems.

So I was half right saying it had to do with training? Because the fact you could train a soldier to use one was a step up over bow where you had to draft peasants who had a lifetime of experience.

Also when I said "difficult and time consuming to manufacture" I was talking specifically about the Asian bows, where from my understanding they mostly used composite bows which I understand are harder to make than the self bows popular in western Europe.. Though I guess it depends on what infrastructure is already available, making a bow requires ageing the wood, shaping it, joining bits together when adhesives were far less reliable than they are today... but if you already have many craftsmen who can do that I guess they'll be cheap.

My very vague understanding was that bows remained a viable weapon against guns for about a 100 years in Europe, but several hundred years in Asia.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.

And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?

The Leopard at least indicates that the flanderization that was talked about a few pages back isn't quite the case, they haven't gone "Kislev is just bears and Ice" and made everything new involve one of the two (or a combination).

The sled does look better when the ice doesn't move/change, albeit It would have been far better if it was just a flat slab like the concept art.

The "snow" leopard is quite a bit on the nose, though...

 Just Tony wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I like the sleds. The ice there doesnt move like with the canon, it looks more like a normal sled.

And the leopard looks like some kind of hero option?

The Leopard at least indicates that the flanderization that was talked about a few pages back isn't quite the case, they haven't gone "Kislev is just bears and Ice" and made everything new involve one of the two (or a combination).

The sled does look better when the ice doesn't move/change, albeit It would have been far better if it was just a flat slab like the concept art.

The "snow" leopard is quite a bit on the nose, though...

I mentioned in the thread in the video games section, but I reckon the the snow cat thingo is either a companion for Elsa, or something Elsa transforms into, as the cat is wearing the same jewellery as she is wearing.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I agree exactly. The Empire would have to spend MUCH more capital and support resources to field an army equipped like they prefer, while Bretonnians can just call up a peasant levy and have them use their hunting tools.

Do we even know if they have hunting rights? In a lot of europe that was heavily limited for non-nobility!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:So I was half right saying it had to do with training? Because the fact you could train a soldier to use one was a step up over bow where you had to draft peasants who had a lifetime of experience.

Not really. Peasants used bows in the first place because they weren't particularly difficult to learn. Not something you'd master in a week, but massed archery was considerably simpler than the 20+ drill movements needed to operate a firearm, while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with your comrades, while holding a match lit at both ends, while everyone is carrying loose powder.

The 'lifetime of experience' thing is specifically in regards to English longbows, and it wasn't about experience, but the physical development involved in regularly drawing a 150lb bow. The kinds of bows more commonly used in Europe didn't have such requirements. If you had to draft a levy in a hurry, bows were significantly easier to train on, and the peasants were more likely to already have prior experience to draw from.

As far as expense, a composite bow (wood, horn, sinew, and animal glue to bind it) didn't require metalworking, which was a big hurdle for medieval societies. An arquebus required the skills of three different professionals- a woodworker to make the stock (a non-negligible task, since these guns had substantial recoil and a bad stock would split), a gunsmith to fashion the barrel (requiring both consistent metallurgy and precision tooling to cut the bore), and a clockmaker to fashion the action, plus significant time for fitting and finishing. The Chinese military manual Jixiao Xinshu, written in 1560, stated that one barrel per month was the optimal rate of production for a full-time gunsmith. Bows, while requiring skilled artisans to be effective and potentially long drying times for the wood, used readily-available wood and animal products and could be assembled with significantly less labor.

Bows remained a viable weapon in the Middle East and Asia for longer than in Europe mostly on account of doctrine- early firearms were poorly suited to use from horseback (though that changed in the late 1500s with the development of wheellocks), and the Turks, Arabs, and Mongols all emphasized horseback archery as a core military asset. In China and Japan, firearms started to replace composite bows much sooner. In particular in Japan, the Tanegashima design introduced in 1543 quickly became the preferred ranged arm, but the economics of manufacturing guns precluded fully equipping an army with them for the remainder of the Sengoku period, so they were supplemented with bows.

The erroneous idea that bows were displaced because guns were cheaper and anyone could use one is the fault of Victorian scholars, who clung to the English longbow as a symbol of old military traditions in the face of industrialization. And they wrote a lot of utter tripe that continues to color modern views of the Middle Ages and Renaissance on a variety of subjects.

Anyways, one of the things I enjoyed about the Old World was that it wasn't straight medieval fantasy and had that Renaissance style in the Empire. I'm not sure if the setting of TOW is late enough for the Empire to have those Renaissance elements, but if not, I'll be interested to see what there is instead. If the Empire is roughly equivalent to its WHFB incarnation, then that'll make a fun foil for the less technologically advanced Kislevites and Bretonnians.

You really reckon bows would have been easier to train on? I feel like even the most complicated of guns could be taught relatively quickly (not to an expert level of course, but enough to be a danger to the enemy).

I used to do archery, it takes a good while to get proficient enough to hit something at more than a few yards, especially if you're using an unsighted non-compound bow let alone an old style longbow. I started on a modern recurve bow, but there was a kid who started at the same time on a basic longbow and he was lucky if he hit the target at all, and on the longer shots at our club I remember his arrow literally bouncing off at times (target heads obviously). Even on the recurve bow, after many hundreds of arrows practice I was happy to hit the scoring area of the target on those same long range shots and my arrows would barely penetrate the targets (while the guys with much more practice, release aids, sights and compound bows would whine if they missed the bullseye, lol). I think even a thick piece of leather would have stopped those arrows, let alone proper armour.

I'm thinking that the training he's referring to is the actual tactics used, notably "volley firing". I'd say that part would actually be fairly easy to teach--everyone points up and lets loose when a signal is given.

Anyways, one of the devs from TWW3 posted this up:


Is it a name with any significance to those who've followed Kislev lore?

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I used to do archery, it takes a good while to get proficient enough to hit something at more than a few yards, especially if you're using an unsighted non-compound bow let alone an old style longbow. I started on a modern recurve bow, but there was a kid who started at the same time on a basic longbow and he was lucky if he hit the target at all, and on the longer shots at our club I remember his arrow literally bouncing off at times (target heads obviously).

That kid would be considered fit for the battlefield. Remember that we're talking military use; there are no point targets. If you can hit a formation of 500 men from a distance of 75yds at least some of the time, congratulations, you are a professional archer. If you can hit a man-sized target at all, you're an expert.

Early firearms are complicated pieces of machinery with significant training burden. For starters, you are carrying a segment of lit match. This must be kept lit at both ends in case one is extinguished, and it may be necessary to re-light. One end is secured to the gun, while the other is free- and you must take care to ensure the free end doesn't contact lit powder. You are carrying a flask of loose powder, which must be precisely measured to avoid catastrophic failure (ie blowing yourself up). Maybe you have a brace of apostles to facilitate faster loading, but only a limited number. You must load a measure of powder, insert a bullet and wadding, and tamp it down- in that order, or it will render the weapon non-functional. Tamped thoroughly, else your weapon will explode. You must replace the ramrod, then use your priming powder (a separate flask- don't mix them up!) to prime the weapon. If necessary you must blow on the match to ensure it is lit, or adjust its placement as it burns up. All of this gets harder in dense formation.

Plus it's more than just using the gun. Plunging fire is not a thing with firearms, so a significant amount of training goes into rank/file maneuver to facilitate rapid fire. You also need to know your weapon well enough to be able to cast ammunition for your gun's caliber and measure powder effectively, plus maintain the delicate lockwork that enables the weapon to fire, and clean thoroughly to prevent carbon residue from caking up and rendering it non-functional. You need to know how to handle a round that fails to fire (particularly in battle), perform repairs and preventative maintenance on a high-stress weapon in an era where standardization of parts is not a thing, and relight a match that gets blown out or extinguished by rain. And, of course, you need the dexterity to juggle the gun, the rest, the match, the ramrod, and the multiple components of your ammunition, while people are trying to kill you, and where a mistake can be catastrophic.

Firearms (and crossbows, for that matter) only came into common use as the weaponry of professional mercenaries (or a military middle class, as in the Japanese ashigaru) who had the financial backing to afford their weapons and the training to use them effectively and maintain them. For the continental powers of the 1500s, it was much easier to hire these mercenaries than to try to turn peasants into effective crossbowmen or arquebusiers. Even in the English army, crossbowmen were better-paid than longbowmen, as it was seen as a more difficult and professional vocation.

Don't take this as me arguing it's easy to shoot a bow- bows, crossbows, and arquebuses all took a long time to reach mastery, and experts were highly valued. I've done archery as well, and my accuracy is nothing to brag about. But the training requirement just to get projectiles on target was lowest for bows. With poorly-trained levies, it was volume of fire that mattered more than anything else.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:
Is it a name with any significance to those who've followed Kislev lore?

New character, as far as I'm aware.

Iirc, it was really the adoption of the "new style army"(read: a full time standing army) that pushed gun usage to the fore specifically because they had the time to train everyone to a standard.

 catbarf wrote:
Bows, while requiring skilled artisans to be effective and potentially long drying times for the wood, used readily-available wood and animal products and could be assembled with significantly less labor.

Uh, no. A bow from yew tree needs a hundred year old specimen to produce good bows. And even that might produce just a handful of bows, because you need perfect wood for it, no blemishes, knots, cracks, etc. Even relatively small armies of England alone annihilated what yew supply there was in northwestern Europe and nearly rendered yews extinct, and that was in much more forested Europe than it is now, before most forests were clearcut to fuel industrial revolution.

You can make bow from other wood, sure, but it's not going to be as good. That's also why Asians bothered with their composite, glued bows, despite them being less durable and prone to ungluing and falling apart from moisture - the supply of good bow wood was far too small to satisfy demand and they had to make do with substitutes. Ditto with Europeans having to try hard improving metallurgy for a century to make all steel crossbow arms - lack of good wood. It was never 'readily' available.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
You really reckon bows would have been easier to train on? I feel like even the most complicated of guns could be taught relatively quickly (not to an expert level of course, but enough to be a danger to the enemy).

I find the claims of bows being cheap and/or easy to teach extremely suspect, seeing two first European semi-professional infantry armies, the Hussites and Black Army of Hungary, both in 1400s, ditched bows and used mix of crossbowmen and handgunners. You don't abandon something that works to arm huge (relatively) forces if alternative has any upsides at all.

Platuan4th wrote:Iirc, it was really the adoption of the "new style army"(read: a full time standing army) that pushed gun usage to the fore specifically because they had the time to train everyone to a standard.

Mercenaries were first and accounted for most firearm use from the 1400s to mid-1500s, but yes, the Spanish of the mid-1500s, Dutch reformed army of the late-1500s, and the other countries that followed suit in the early 1600s, all made heavy use of firearms.

Irbis wrote:Uh, no. A bow from yew tree needs a hundred year old specimen to produce good bows. And even that might produce just a handful of bows, because you need perfect wood for it, no blemishes, knots, cracks, etc. Even relatively small armies of England alone annihilated what yew supply there was in northwestern Europe and nearly rendered yews extinct, and that was in much more forested Europe than it is now, before most forests were clearcut to fuel industrial revolution.

You can make bow from other wood, sure, but it's not going to be as good. That's also why Asians bothered with their composite, glued bows, despite them being less durable and prone to ungluing and falling apart from moisture - the supply of good bow wood was far too small to satisfy demand and they had to make do with substitutes. Ditto with Europeans having to try hard improving metallurgy for a century to make all steel crossbow arms - lack of good wood. It was never 'readily' available.

I'm afraid I don't see your point. It is simultaneously true that bows required specific high-quality wood to be maximally effective, and that such wood was usually readily available in Europe, and alternatives used when it was not. By the time suitable yew became largely unavailable (early 1700s) bows were already gone from military use. Like you said, bows on the Continent (less so in English use) were often made of wood other than yew- and while it wasn't as good, they did it anyways.

I have not read any accounts that suggest that development of crossbows or firearms was due to an inability to make bows. So what's the argument here?

Irbis wrote:I find the claims of bows being cheap and/or easy to teach extremely suspect, seeing two first European semi-professional infantry armies, the Hussites and Black Army of Hungary, both in 1400s, ditched bows and used mix of crossbowmen and handgunners. You don't abandon something that works to arm huge (relatively) forces if alternative has any upsides at all.

Semi-professional armies with both the financial backing and professional standards for training needed to make use of more effective weapons did so. I'm not sure why you would take that as evidence that bows were more difficult to use; the trend across all of Europe was that as forces became more professional and better-trained, they phased out bows in favor of crossbows and firearms, and assorted polearms in favor of pikes.

As I mentioned earlier, in even the English army- where longbows were well regarded and in great supply- Genoese crossbowmen were regularly hired and commanded significantly greater pay than bowmen. Pay records from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance do not bear out the notion that a crossbowman was easier to produce, as their pay reflected professional experience comparable to engineers or artillerists.

While I see the logic of what catbarf is trying to argue, a lot of it is based on some heavy misconceptions and I don't know any historians (especially military historians, of which I know a few - several of whom have a concentration in this time period) who would agree with him.

Early firearms are regarded to have revolutionized warfare - and society itself - precisely because they are so easy to use. Any illiterate malnourished peasant with two eyes and two arms could be trained to use one proficiently in a very short amount of time (a few hours for basic use, a few days for basic proficiency, and a couple months for "well-practiced") - and the second eye was sometimes optional! Bows, on the other hand, required years of training from a young age and significant amounts of strength and coordination to operate with any degree of proficiency or accuracy - armies in the middle ages were able to muster large formations of archers because they were in widespread use as a hunting tool and there was an established skill base for them. And yes, accuracy mattered. The whole "no point targets" thing was true in the ancients era of massed phalanxes of hoplites and roman centuries, etc. but in the Middle Ages archers were prized precisely because they were accurate and were able to pick out specific lightly armored targets within mass formations that would otherwise not have been accessible to the first few ranks of melee combatants. Archers in the Middle Ages were primarily skirmishers and flankers - not static blocks raining death from afar. They had to be both mobile and accurate by necessity.

His take on whats involved with a firearm is more true of later muskets than they are early handcannons and arquebuses. A Hand cannon was a tube on a stick, you dump some low grade powder down a hole with a projectile (rocks or debris, sometimes cast metal balls), push it in with a ramrod, and set it off with a light (which could be a match, a burning stick, or anything else that burns). Misfires were common, but of less concern because of the low grade powder used. Arquebuses were more advanced, but still relatively simple to use and operate and with minimal risks due to the low grade powders used in early firearms. The lockwork in early arquebuses was relatively robust compared to the later flintlock, wheellock, etc. mechanisms that arose - hardly delicate. The development of volley fire formations made mass adoption simple - not more difficult - as it enabled rhythmic operation of the weapon and probably also involved some "herd mentality" type mental mechanism which made training and operation easier to understand. It was also advantageous to do it this way because there was very little actual "aiming" involved in the use of an arquebus, thus mass formations were more likely to cause damage.- Ironically this brought back the "no point target" paradigm that archery had otherwise evolved beyond. Ammunition casting was likewise fairly simple, armies employed smiths to assist with it, but again even peasants could be trained to manufacture ball ammunition, it didn't take much skill and was a relatively simple process. In any case, peasant lives were cheap - if they blew a hand off or got injured, oh well - his replacement could be trained quickly and at little cost. If the arquebus wasn't cheap to produce or quick to train, it would not have become the dominant weapon of warfare as quickly as it did - put the starving but plentiful dregs of society on a level playing field with the wealthiest and most skilled knight bedecked in plate armor and with decades of experience in horsemanship.

Crossbows likewise required significantly less training and experience to use than a bow or a longbow did, they were however expensive to manufacture and maintain (much moreso than an Arquebus), and still required a good bit of strength which is part of the reason they never saw as widespread adoption as firearms. The reason crossbowmen were better paid than longbowmen was nothing to do with skill, but because each crossbowman (in the typical mercenary companies and military formations of the time) also needed to pay a team of assistants (typically two - one to hold the pavise, the other to ready a second crossbow in order to maintain a steady rate of fire), whereas a longbowman only had to pay himself. As such on an individual basis, longbowmen made more, whereas the crossbowman had to pay out a portion of his wages to each assistant. While many crossbowmen tended to be of better stock than the peasantry, there were still plenty of peasants equipped with crossbows, either because a wealthy lord paid for them to be so equipped in service of his forces or because a mercenary company had a wealthy benefactor that would hire and equipment peasant recruits and take profits off of their fees - this was more typical than you seem to realize. Hell, there were entire peasant rebellions that were enabled by their ability to access crossbows (and also firearms), such as that of the Picards/Taborites during the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. Peasants took to crossbows and firearms precisely because they were easy to use and didn't require much training/skill or strength compared to bows or swords, etc.

This ease of use and mass adoption is what resulted in the collapse of the feudal system, the weakening/extinction of the military aristocrcy, and the failures of their castles and fortifications.

they one thing people forget about it that trained soldieres or veterans were not pound to a nation/country or lord by anything as modern day citizenship did not exist

so if you owned a crossbow and were able to handle it, you just went were the fighting was and fought for anyone that could pay
and when the fighting was done, no one was paying any more hence you walked away to work for someone else

every professional soldier by that time was a mercenary (the word soldier comes from Sold, German for Payment for fighting), even some knights made their living by being payed to fight for whoever needed them (in Poland-Lithuania everyone who could afford himself a warhorse could become a noble knight)

the situation in England was unique up to a point on the situation of peasant and whom they fought for
in central Europe, the ownership of the land you lived could change several times within your lifetime (worst case the people kept fighting for the old lord because they liked him more or just did not bother to go to war for the new one on the other side of the country)
hence why standing armies during wartimes became a thing as those were loyal to the one who payed them
(just keep paying them during peacetime instead of dismissing them and hire a new a new one was not a thing until much later)

Chaos0xomega, I recommend Eduard Wagner's book on Thirty Years War military equipment and tactics, as it gives a good breakdown of the development of firearms and infantry tactics over the 1500s- you are greatly downplaying the complexity of both the technology and training.

Robert Hardy's Longbow: A Social and Military History also directly contradicts the notion that crossbowmen were only better-paid so as to account for assistants, or that bowmen were primarily used as skirmishers (Agincourt and Crecy being two prime examples to the contrary).

I don't want to derail this thread further as we're getting away from The Old World, but if anyone wants to discuss it more I'd be happy to participate in a new thread and provide more sources.

In any case- I would throw out that the stylistic differences between the Slavic-inspired Kislevites, the Renaissance Germanic Empire, and the Arthurian Bretonnians make for some fun cultural distinctions for a fantasy setting, irrespective of their differences in technology.

in Poland-Lithuania everyone who could afford himself a warhorse could become a noble knight

Can you please cite source? That's...definitely not meshing with anything I've ever heard or read.

I'd welcome a thread going deeper into the advance of weapons around the shift from bows to guns. However I think any such thread HAS to draw boundaries for itself. It's near impossible to have a thread on the topic when you're talking about the world advance in general terms; because its always going to have hang ups at different time periods and different nations causing any generalist statement to be rendered wrong just by shifting the target nation/time period.

I think you've got to break it down - country by country - time period by time period and look at it in detail. Overall summary statements are only good if you understand the underlaying concepts

Also worth noting that the Empire and Kislev both have long standing trade and military relations with the Dwarfs.

Bretonnia is mostly cut off from the Dwarfs and influenced by the Wood Elves, no friends of the Dwarfs

Not to jump into any controversy here, but the reason firearms supplanted bows was because they are massively more deadly. An English longbow, as unfun as it would be to get shot by one, can't reliably injure an armored man, let alone kill him. Also, we see the claim it took a lifetime to use a bow bandied about on the internet a lot, it's a myth, and it'll remain a myth no matter how long people on the internet choose to believe it. Archery buffs say they can teach somebody to basic competence within two months, I brlieve them, and I live in the American midwest where bow season is still a thing and people still shoot bows. They don't practice with it constantly. I know the English longbow is literally magic, but no, it still works just like other bows, so no it didn't take years of extra training. Just a huge back and right bicep.

If your historical sources are telling you otherwise, well you gotta remember a lot of them are guys sitting in libraries who don't know much about guns or bows, and you should find some better historians to read.

I wish Bretonnia could be redeveloped as a Renaissance setting in a world completely different from our own and therefore open to lots of differences. Knights who eschew ranged weapons are still totally reasonable, and the development of weaponry and tactics would be very different for them. Unlike your typical 16th century soldier an orc may not go down when shot quite as quickly, or stupid goblin masses may not break or slow when heavily peppered with bullets or arrows simply because they're a different, somewhat dumber species with a very different psychology. Not to mention how crappy firearms might be against skeletons. All this would necessitate different battlefield tactics and developments, and also a different view of ones human neighbors given the world is full of non-human things ready to put the human race out of existence.

Bretonnia doesn't have to be THAT dumbed down and out of step with the rest of the setting. The fluff writing for it has seemed bored with itself since 5th edition's hard turn to simplistic and silly.

Listen, you're not arguing with me - you're arguing with historical evidence. Compulsory bow training in Henry III's England started at age 7 and archers weren't considered militarily proficient until the age of 15. That was actually basically law in medieval England, at least for a time. If it was so easy there would not be so much emphasis placed on learning it.

Its also kinda grossly inaccurate to base your understanding of what was involved in training an archer to be proficient for war in the medieval era by basing it off of modern day competition archery and hunting - for one things the average arrow in the medieval era was something like 3-5 times heavier than the arrows typically used today (from what I understand longbow arrows were somewhat heavier). Similarly, modern archery occurs at significantly shorter ranges (most deer taken with a bow and arrow today are taken within 30 yards, despite the fact that modern bows could theoretically shoot much farther) and with significantly lower draw weights compared to medieval combat archery. Modern compound bows are significantly easier to use and much easier to aim than medieval war bows, and have a lot of design features intended to enable their ease of use.

Modern bows have arrow rests, medieval war bows didn't.
Modern bows have sights, medieval bows didn't.
Modern bows have let-off mechanisms, medieval bows didn't.
etc. etc. etc.

Modern day bows and archery have little to do with medieval war bows, with all their pulleys, d-loops, let-off mechanisms, etc. they have more in common with a crossbow than a warbow(and even then they still don't have all that much in common with medieval arbalests).


As for crossbowmen pay, every source I have ever seen has indicated the pay was due to the maintenance/operating cost of the crossbows (note plural) needed by a sole crossbowmen to operate. I have also seen several sources indicate that the crossbowman had to pay out wages to his assistants, heres a link to one:

Longbowman vs Crossbowman: Hundred Years’ War 1337–60 By David Campbell

and doth I quote:

"Such troops often wore substantial body armour and normally operated in close co-operation with the pavesari shield or mantlet-bearers, whose role was to protect them from other archers or cavalry as they spanned and loaded their weapons. A crossbowman and a shield-bearer were in fact often paid as a team, though the man with the crossbow got more than half of the money. (Nicolle 2012: 30)"

The reference there, in case you're curious, is French Armies of the Hundred Years War by David Nicolle

Now, is it possible that the crossbowman still made more than the longbowman, even after accounting for the fact that he dished out some percentage of his pay to one or more assistants? I suppose so - I don't have any data about actual relative pay rates, I just know that there are reasons that crossbowmen received more coin that have nothing to do with crossbows requiring more training and skill to use than a bow.

Cronch wrote:

in Poland-Lithuania everyone who could afford himself a warhorse could become a noble knight

Can you please cite source? That's...definitely not meshing with anything I've ever heard or read.

referring to the "nobiles pauperes" (powerless nobles), which came to be because Lithuania came up with the idea of creating a standing army with a fighting nobility but not having enough of them in the first place so called man to arms, and those gained nobility after the battles
Individuals that were ennobled usually joined one of the exiting families and used their Coat of Arms and were more just people living on the land of a Magnate/Baron than owning anything of their own (except for their armour and horse)
this was changed in 1641 as from that point only the Sjem could grant nobility

for source, several but I must dig them out (all about medieval/early modern times warfare/history)

Time to take the historical tangent elsewhere please, I am enjoying reading it as much as anyone but this is the News and Rumours thread for The Old War game.

Another new video this time with a brief look of the new Winged Lancers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51AQtU1HhR0


They do seem a little different from the original models, a bit more elaborate, but seems like quite a nice update to them.

The really simple explanation for Bretonnia is that it's a Flanderization of everything Arthurian legend. So no guns, and few crossbows. Lots of rich guys in armor on pretty barded horses, who are more than likely out of their league in open war, but make up for it in bluster (and the extreme work of those who ARE actual badasses).

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The really simple explanation for Bretonnia is that it's a Flanderization of everything Arthurian legend. So no guns, and few crossbows. Lots of rich guys in armor on pretty barded horses, who are more than likely out of their league in open war, but make up for it in bluster (and the extreme work of those who ARE actual badasses).

Yeah, it's magic and courage that has allowed Bretonnia to punch above its weight.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Another new video this time with a brief look of the new Winged Lancers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51AQtU1HhR0


They do seem a little different from the original models, a bit more elaborate, but seems like quite a nice update to them.

I approve! Not that it matters much, lol. Plus I'm pretty biased so there's that.

I wonder if the Kislev focus in the digital game will be accompanied by a rebirth on the tabletop...

 warboss wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Another new video this time with a brief look of the new Winged Lancers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51AQtU1HhR0


They do seem a little different from the original models, a bit more elaborate, but seems like quite a nice update to them.

I approve! Not that it matters much, lol. Plus I'm pretty biased so there's that.

I wonder if the Kislev focus in the digital game will be accompanied by a rebirth on the tabletop...

They have already confirmed that the tabletop designers are working closely with the Video Game designers

 warboss wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
Another new video this time with a brief look of the new Winged Lancers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51AQtU1HhR0


They do seem a little different from the original models, a bit more elaborate, but seems like quite a nice update to them.

I approve! Not that it matters much, lol. Plus I'm pretty biased so there's that.

I wonder if the Kislev focus in the digital game will be accompanied by a rebirth on the tabletop...

We already know Kislev is being made into a faction for the Tabletop The Old World project, though? The new units and designs and such have been made for that Tabletop Kislev faction, they're not something done for the video game primarily, that's the reason it's being discussed in this thread.

Thanks and good to know! I don't keep too close tabs on GW stuff nowadays so I'm glad to hear it.

Closer look at the new Kislev War Sleds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzHYoyWsw0E

2 different versions - one that seems to be mostly just wood and hide armour, one that's much better made with metal armour and feathered banners.

Oh.

Oh dear...