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I seel the following happening:

Core knights get cheaper.
a elite greatsowrds power level of infantry appears, maybe even as a rare choice.
Peg knights move to special
Hippogryph can be purchased without riders.
Maybe giving brets one more magical option, maybe lore of the lady. or fire.

 -Loki- wrote:

jprp wrote:
Point is brets are the "weakest" looking range in fantasy (and are based on one of the lamest nations on earth!).

You consider your own country 'the lamest on earth'?

Bretonnia is a blend of medieval France, Brittany and the UK. Not to mention a healthy dose of British history, like the crusades and the quest for the grail.

Albion is WH uk.
The Arthur (and Robin Hood ) legends originate from france and were incorporated into british myth much later.
And uk IS fairly lame as a nation as it happens (some great individuals but god awfull governments for the whole of my lifetime and a weak disunited general populous).






Automatically Appended Next Post:

MarsNZ wrote:

jprp wrote:


Really? Ive only been in the hobby since 84, thanks for the insight.
Point is brets are the "weakest" looking range in fantasy (and are based on one of the lamest nations on earth!).
Its a FANTASY game and ive never understood the attraction of a non fantastic "race" when you have loads of "monster" races to choose from.

FANTASY=MONSTERS
SCI-FI=MONSTERS AND ROBOTS its as simple as that.

What a stupidly oversimplified and rather inaccurate post. Bretonnia are based on a 'Lame' nation, funny cause a lot of their lore comes from old Arthurian stories originating in the British Isles. I'm sure you overlooked that fact to take a stab at your culturally superior neighbours again, too bad they didn't start a war so your 'comedians' could flog that horse to death as well.

Dont mention the war.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 -Loki- wrote:

jprp wrote:
Its a FANTASY game and ive never understood the attraction of a non fantastic "race" when you have loads of "monster" races to choose from.

FANTASY=MONSTERS
SCI-FI=MONSTERS AND ROBOTS its as simple as that.

About this... you never realized that all popular Fantasy settings have humans? You never stopped to think why?

Fantasy settings are less fantastical when there is no baseline relatable race to compare the fantastical elements to.

Humans do that the best, because we are humans. Seeing how powerful an Orc is to a Beastman Gor doesn't have the same impact. Throw a human in there, and you get a sense of just how powerful they are, because you can see how powerful each is to the human.

Not to mention, when you've got three entire evil races based around being humans (Warriors of Chaos, Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts), it's sort of hard to cut humans out.

Popular-safe?
The presence of humans usually in the starring role in fantasy is a show of weakness on the author if they were braver they would go true high fantasy, im not saying every book ever written from a human perspective is bad just that if they had taken a more "alien" base line then it would have been more special. Similar problems with films that start in the present day or use modern terminology-eg the dreadfull Dungeons and dragons films.

jprp wrote:
The presence of humans usually in the starring role in fantasy is a show of weakness on the author if they were braver they would go true high fantasy, im not saying every book ever written from a human perspective is bad just that if they had taken a more "alien" base line then it would have been more special. Similar problems with films that start in the present day or use modern terminology-eg the dreadfull Dungeons and dragons films.

So J.R.R.Tolkein was a weak fantasy author? Terry Pratchett? Piers Anthony?

I can name dozens of fantasy authors who told strong human-centric fantasy stories, and dozens more whose stories, while centered on 'other races' (that were almost always 'human with some cosmetic difference') that promenantly featured humans. I can't think of a single one who told a strong fantasy story without any humans (or 'humans with some cosmetic difference) at all.

I've seen a few try, mind you. But without the human reference it becomes incomprehensible and weak.

jprp wrote:
Similar problems with films that start in the present day or use modern terminology-eg the dreadfull Dungeons and dragons films.

Probably because they didnt put effort in the D&D films?

DukeRustfield wrote:
But semi-fluff, it was a long time before guns outpaced bows. Long long time. They were just so unbelievably inaccurate, expensive, difficult to use, train. Look at the casualty rates in the American Revolution. I think more people died from Overpoliteness than actual bullets.

The accuracy of the bow is vastly overstated among wargamers. Soldiers and generals, who's professional success and their very lives depended on being as effective as possible, stopped using bows and started using cannons and firearms. If that isn't pretty evidence that bows were inferior, I don't know what is.

That said, the muskets that came to dominate the fields of battle were nothing like the handguns available to Dwarf and Empire armies.

And cavalry can be whatever you want. This is a world of magic. And knights. If a bowman, however sucky, cost 1pt, Brettonians would be studs. If knights cost 1/2 point, Empire would be conquered tomorrow.

So they start cloning horses and hire a zillion dwarfs to make armor. On the job training for the knights.

Yeah, it can be balanced with point adjustments.

I mean, right now you've got heavy horse that cost 3 or 4 times as much as a guy with a halberd. That's nothing like the cost of actually outfitting a knight and keeping him and his horse fit and healthy, compared to a foot soldier. But that cost represents the current difference in effectiveness, and also the ratio of knights to foot infantry GW want to see in the game.

The idea that you could build a put a trebuchet in the field for the cost of about 20 guys is just laughable, but again, game balance.

A Bretonnian rewrite will do the same, balance for game concerns, not real world costs. Any maybe add in a new unit or two.

It took a long time for guns to usurp bows and crossbows. They were cheaper and had comperable damage capabilities to earlier firearms(better in some cases)

Early guns were inaccurate and lost killing power at long distances. Archers could blanket an area with arrows fairly accuratly, and Crossbows had the ability to crack armor.


Yes, people started using guns more often. But that was because the weapons were improving, and there was a psychological factor with them. They were scary to face.

By the 1500s guns had definitly surpassed bows(although crossbows continued to be used regularly)

In the 1400s guns and crossbows were roughly equal in effectivness. Particularly steel crossbows.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Magical Rambo Knight

I think that this should be the name of a comic strip.

It was also easier to use guns, you just point and shoot. You spent a day teaching a person how to use a gun and they knew it for life. Using a bow properly however took a lifetime. But Bretonnia is a backwards land which doesn't have a lot of metal/smiths/gunmakers as they have to import people from the Empire, no one there is able to make guns that work.

 Grey Templar wrote:
It took a long time for guns to usurp bows and crossbows. They were cheaper and had comperable damage capabilities to earlier firearms(better in some cases)

Early guns were inaccurate and lost killing power at long distances. Archers could blanket an area with arrows fairly accuratly, and Crossbows had the ability to crack armor.

Your initial statement compared only bows and firearms, and then commented on the effect of firearms in the ACW - the 19th century. By editing your statement to include crossbows (which were the real competitor with firearms, bows were already phased out by anyone that could afford to do so) and restricting your statement to the 1500s, then its reasonable.

Yes, people started using guns more often. But that was because the weapons were improving, and there was a psychological factor with them. They were scary to face.

Outside of a small number of instances in the earliest days of their use, the fear factor is largely overstated.

The weapons were improving, and more importantly gunpowder was becoming more common and much cheaper.


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welshhoppo wrote:
It was also easier to use guns, you just point and shoot. You spent a day teaching a person how to use a gun and they knew it for life. Using a bow properly however took a lifetime. But Bretonnia is a backwards land which doesn't have a lot of metal/smiths/gunmakers as they have to import people from the Empire, no one there is able to make guns that work.

The skill achievable with a bow, and the number of people likely to do it, is frequently wildly overstated in nerd circles. Both because of general bias to English history and their longbowmen, and also because 'super deadly longbowmen' seems to be a really catchy meme among nerds. Longbowmen were nothing like as super deadly as people like to believe. Agincourt is just one battle in a long history of war, and there it wasn't longbow as much as field position and mud that saw it dominate the field.

Ranged weapons in general weren't really that deadly, in general. The number of battles in which the decisive factor was a ranged weapon is extremely rare. They were nice to have, as having greater damage potential at range would force the enemy to come at you in a pitched battle, giving you considerable advantage when the combat blocks met each other.

The greater story of war is cannons replacing the older specialist ranged weapons (be they bows, crossbows, firearms or anything else). In time muskets came to replace melee troops.

welshhoppo wrote:
It was also easier to use guns, you just point and shoot. You spent a day teaching a person how to use a gun and they knew it for life. Using a bow properly however took a lifetime. But Bretonnia is a backwards land which doesn't have a lot of metal/smiths/gunmakers as they have to import people from the Empire, no one there is able to make guns that work.

The skill achievable with a bow, and the number of people likely to do it, is frequently wildly overstated in nerd circles. Both because of general bias to English history and their longbowmen, and also because 'super deadly longbowmen' seems to be a really catchy meme among nerds. Longbowmen were nothing like as super deadly as people like to believe. Agincourt is just one battle in a long history of war, and there it wasn't longbow as much as field position and mud that saw it dominate the field.

Ranged weapons in general weren't really that deadly, in general. The number of battles in which the decisive factor was a ranged weapon is extremely rare. They were nice to have, as having greater damage potential at range would force the enemy to come at you in a pitched battle, giving you considerable advantage when the combat blocks met each other.

The greater story of war is cannons replacing the older specialist ranged weapons (be they bows, crossbows, firearms or anything else). In time muskets came to replace melee troops.

Totally agree with you there, outside of Warhammer I'm a university medieval history student, the main strength of bowmen was that they could flood an area with so many arrows that eventually one was going to strike a knight in a weak spot, crossbows and gunpowder weapons took so long to reload that they couldn't achieve that. But the only way they could show that in warhammer would be to give bows multiple shots, and killing blow, but like strength 2.

Corrected

jprp wrote:

FANTASY=BRAVE HEROES (most usually knights) SLAYING MONSTERS

Humans are essential to fantasy. Even if you are going for something you call 'high fantasy' (I don't know why you'd use that term since it doesn't exclude humans) demi-human and humanoid races are simply metaphors for internal aspects of humanity like the very-human struggle between good and evil (to name one).

I would see it as more as a crutch to only use demi-humans or humanoids rather than working with the facets of human nature through using humans themselves.

 sebster wrote:

DukeRustfield wrote:
But semi-fluff, it was a long time before guns outpaced bows. Long long time. They were just so unbelievably inaccurate, expensive, difficult to use, train. Look at the casualty rates in the American Revolution. I think more people died from Overpoliteness than actual bullets.

The accuracy of the bow is vastly overstated among wargamers. Soldiers and generals, who's professional success and their very lives depended on being as effective as possible, stopped using bows and started using cannons and firearms. If that isn't pretty evidence that bows were inferior, I don't know what is.

That said, the muskets that came to dominate the fields of battle were nothing like the handguns available to Dwarf and Empire armies.

The bow went out of fashion because it was a highly technical weapon that required a high degree of training, and ironically killed too many people on the battlefield. In contrast firearms require very little training and prior to the advent of rifling were wildly inaccurate, though the amount of smoke generated was useful in creating confusion, leading to battles being decided on morale.

I'm pretty sure bows were not dropped because they killed too many people.

The Pope tried to get crossbows banned, rather unsuccessfully.

 grimgrimly wrote:
Corrected

jprp wrote:

FANTASY=BRAVE HEROES (most usually knights) SLAYING MONSTERS

Humans are essential to fantasy. Even if you are going for something you call 'high fantasy' (I don't know why you'd use that term since it doesn't exclude humans) demi-human and humanoid races are simply metaphors for internal aspects of humanity like the very-human struggle between good and evil (to name one).

I would see it as more as a crutch to only use demi-humans or humanoids rather than working with the facets of human nature through using humans themselves.

Lol-and in your "Fantasy" i suppose your the Damsel that needs rescuing.

Humans are not essential to fantasy, what your talking about sounds more like mundane fiction.

Name a single decent major fantasy realm that doesn't have humans.

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The skill achievable with a bow, and the number of people likely to do it, is frequently wildly overstated in nerd circles. Both because of general bias to English history and their longbowmen, and also because 'super deadly longbowmen' seems to be a really catchy meme among nerds. Longbowmen were nothing like as super deadly as people like to believe. Agincourt is just one battle in a long history of war, and there it wasn't longbow as much as field position and mud that saw it dominate the field.

Ranged weapons in general weren't really that deadly, in general. The number of battles in which the decisive factor was a ranged weapon is extremely rare. They were nice to have, as having greater damage potential at range would force the enemy to come at you in a pitched battle, giving you considerable advantage when the combat blocks met each other.

The greater story of war is cannons replacing the older specialist ranged weapons (be they bows, crossbows, firearms or anything else). In time muskets came to replace melee troops.

IC, so it is the 'general bias to English history' which allowed the horse archer to be the dominant soldier for the best part of 2000 years in Eurasia. And no doubt in your mind the move to full plate armour has nothing to do with the power of the longbow.

To claim that the field position and the mud were more important that the longbow at Agincourt is just idiocy. The position was chosen to take advantage of the longbow - among other factors relating to the campaign, like being out numbered and underfed. No doubt you believe field position and mud was more important than the machine gun in the battle of Passchendale.

As for your claim that cannons replaced older weapons, this is correct but not in the sense you are claiming. Cannons allowed central authorities to enforce their will without the necessity of prolonged and protracted sieges. This in turn meant that the feudal practice of militia's was no longer needed, which in turn meant that martial training was no longer needed, and indeed was actively discouraged. It is noticeable that in areas in which central authorities struggled to impose their power - the Balkans, Central Asia, Northern India etc - the bow persisted.

Oh and the musket did not replace melee troops, the bayonet did that.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Name a single decent major fantasy realm that doesn't have humans.

Define Realm in your question.

Examples would be Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, Inheritance, etc...

And anthropomorphic fantasy doesn't count.

jprp wrote:

Lol-and in your "Fantasy" i suppose your the Damsel that needs rescuing.

Humans are not essential to fantasy, what your talking about sounds more like mundane fiction.

So a non-response and an insult. Bravo.

You just won a free collectors' edition plonk signed by me.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Examples would be Lord of the Rings, Warhammer, Inheritance, etc...

And anthropomorphic fantasy doesn't count.

im glad i asked for clarification before going further as there are many Realms eg D&D Abyssal realms-(basically Demon planes of existance for those unfamiliar) within well established Fantasy backgrounds.
What you are asking me for is An entire setting ie Game/litarary world, universe or multiverse-sadly as i sit here i can think of none that are well known and/or commercially prominent but that only re-enforces my view that the "Human angle" is a gateway for people with weak imaginations to be drawn into the genera.
Because something sells doesnt make it good (just look at the music industry) i feel im perhaps not stating this as well as i might but when i refer to high fantasy what im getting at is that the more removed from real world life or history the Fantasy is the "Higher" it becomes, so things like Robin Hood wood be at the extreme bottom end, it is infact Fiction rather than fantasy (everything in the stories could have happened but it didnt-although many think it did).
You mention anthropomorphic fantasy which made me laugh (i assume you mean Red Wall or similar) but as has been pointed out earlier most popular Fantasy is prettymuch that when you pick it apart- Elves, Dwarfs, Orcs etc are pretty much human stereotypes given slightly animalistic form and in Tolkiens writings for instance done in a very racist way (Orcs are the black animalistic masses and the white men of the west are noble and heroic, almost every evil man has dark skin-Haradrim etc, the elves are even whiter and "more Western") obviously this is due to his upbringing (up to 7 ithink) in "old" south Africa and a high level of christian input.
The more removed from "real life" the greater the scope for fantasy, removing humans is a good first step removing human morphs like elves halflings and dwarfs would be a bigger step.
Thats a lot of waffle thats probably not convinced you any mor of my original point which was-
Models of humans or humans on horses no matter how painted are very dull to look at-why have a vanilla man on a horse if you can have a vampire on a horse or a half demonic mutated spikey chaos man on a chaos horse-why have men at all when you could have towering immortal Daemons or tree spirits or mutant rats or Orcs-why have a horse if you can have giant lizards or slaaneshi steeds???

Yes, a vampire or a daemon on a horse is more "fantastic" but it really is pointless if humans don't exist in the setting.

We have to have a reference point for the Fantasy to be good. Otherwise it can get really wierd.


What if I wrote about a Fantasy where the inhabitants are bug people, everything in the book is completely made up. Animals, plants, etc... Nothing described in the book bears any resemblence to anything ever described by man.

The book would be awful and confusing.

You claim the inclusion of humans is evidence of a weak imagination. Thats just rediculous. If it were true, we would have Fantasy stories with no humans everywhere. The fact that Fantasy/Sci-fi sells very well and contains most of the best fiction written seems to dispute your assertion.

I think you must not like Fantasy period.



And Robin Hood is not Fantasy and I've never seen anyone claim it to be. Its a legend thats been passed down in the oral tradition(and is based in reality of some sort)

All good writing, whether writing for a game, novel, whatever, needs the reader to be able to relate to it. If they can't relate to it, they won't empathise with the characters, and if they don't do that, they won't extract any emotional 'reward', for reading it in the first place.

Could you create a setting with nothing human about it? Of course, but if there is nothing in it for the reader to relate to, then it's a pretty pointless exercise. That's not because of a lack of imagination on the reader's part. If anything it's a lack of technical skill by the writer.

I fear jprp, you have a somewhat confused idea of what the role of a reader is. They do not use their imagination. The writer uses their imagination to create a world, and their technical skills to relate that world to the reader. The reader simply reads the words, visualises what the writer has communicated, and attempts to engage with it emotionally.

Just going back to the topic at hand... in the middle ages it was quite common for knights to dismount and fight on foot in small super heavy infnatry units, but this was mostly as individuals rather than units or formations. They used the horse more as a means of getting to or from the battle as marching in heavy armour would tire them out before they even got there.

There are some exceptions of course... french knights sometimes formed tight shield-and-lance formations.



So certainly potential for knights on foot... they might (in a future army book) do it as one type of knight starting out on foot, with mounts an optional upgrade?

Invoking my faux rights as OP, I'm going to ask that the discussion about fantasy, and whether it be good or not is based entirely on the races portrayed, be stopped.

Seriously. The discussion of tactics semi related to brets is fine, but whether or not whatever fantasy story is good or not is entirely off topic.

 marielle wrote:
The bow went out of fashion because it was a highly technical weapon that required a high degree of training, and ironically killed too many people on the battlefield. In contrast firearms require very little training and prior to the advent of rifling were wildly inaccurate, though the amount of smoke generated was useful in creating confusion, leading to battles being decided on morale.

That's not even slightly true. First up, to describe all gunpowder weapons in one category before the advent of rifling is just silly. A hand cannon is quite different in accuracy and effect to a Brown Bess.

Second up, your sweeping generalisation of bows as a technical weapon that took a long time to master is an even sillier generalisation. Bows were in use for more than 50,000 years, across an incredible range of societies. In that time they were used militarily in a broad manner of uses. The status and pay of archers ranged greatly, at times they were among the highest paid of the lowborn troops, at other times the least well paid.

Lastly, the use of noise and smoke in battle was a factor, but to describe it as the reason they were used is, once again, just silly. Like everything else in battle, they were used because they killed people, and did it in a way that suited the armies of the day.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 marielle wrote:
IC, so it is the 'general bias to English history' which allowed the horse archer to be the dominant soldier for the best part of 2000 years in Eurasia. And no doubt in your mind the move to full plate armour has nothing to do with the power of the longbow.

You think the horse archer and the archer performed were comparable combat units? You're being silly.

And there's no doubt in my mind that the rise of full plate armour was driven by increasing economic and technical capacity, and not longbows.

To claim that the field position and the mud were more important that the longbow at Agincourt is just idiocy. The position was chosen to take advantage of the longbow - among other factors relating to the campaign, like being out numbered and underfed.

And now you're misreading things in order to score little debate points. Don't do that, it's both lazy and rude.

The longbow was used extensively throughout the 100 years war, and when field position and other factors worked to its advantage, the English performed well and sometimes, like at Agincourt, they won remarkable victories. But many other times it was nowhere near as effective.

As for your claim that cannons replaced older weapons, this is correct but not in the sense you are claiming. Cannons allowed central authorities to enforce their will without the necessity of prolonged and protracted sieges. This in turn meant that the feudal practice of militia's was no longer needed, which in turn meant that martial training was no longer needed, and indeed was actively discouraged.

Siege warfare went away with the invention of the cannon? That's not even slightly. Siege warfare changed with the advent of the cannon, but it never went away.

Nor were cannons a factor in the decline of feudalism. The decline of agriculture as the primary means of wealth drove the decline of feudalism. Which in turn saw the military move from feudal levies to centrally controlled.

Which is another thing nerds do - assume because they like military history that military history must drive all other history, when it's far and away the other way around.

It is noticeable that in areas in which central authorities struggled to impose their power - the Balkans, Central Asia, Northern India etc - the bow persisted.

So it isn't technological and manufacturing limitations that continue the use of . Which is why the Indians and Asian dominated over the European armies with the muskets. Which is why all those European nations, upon fighting the bow armed troops of the Americas and India said 'woah man, our muskets and cannons are only the product of central authorities enforcing their will, and those bows are kicking our asses', and they started using bows? And why none of those local populations ever looked to get their hands on firearms ASAP.

This is silly. Stop being silly.

Oh and the musket did not replace melee troops, the bayonet did that.

You put the bayonet in the musket, you know.