The Zerg Swarm of Harchong

Castenea wrote:Issued might be going a little far for the pikes, I would expect that the pikes are in the baggage train along with the cook pots and squad tents. Pikes being rather awkward to carry if they are not expected to be used immediately. I would expect that most of the peasant levies are armed with little more than their eating knife until the day before battle.

Aoes that mean that the Mighty Host ate not only unable to train but eat and sleep as well?

That would seem to leave only one other activity for the Mighty Host and I don't think the residents of the Border States are going to be happy about it.

Serioulsy, The Mighty Host has been stuck in one place since the the great canal raid. I don't know of any military that thinks letting their soldiers lie around for months doing nothing is a good idea. It's pretty safe to assume that the Mighty Host will have been spending time training.

Don't forget that Desnair used the same force mix as Harchong, although apparently with rather more heavy horse. The RSA would have developed methods for dealing with horse-archers. Why Harless & Co. thought they would have forgotten them I'm not sure. Perhaps because they bought Clyntahn's assurance that the Sword had shattered the RSA?

That said, I suspect Don was referring to the MHOGATA, not the old Harchong regular army.

JeffEngel wrote:

n7axw wrote:There was never a serious question as to whether or not they had pikes. The real issue is whether or not they knew what to do with them.

The traditional emphasis of the Harchongian army has not been pikes, but calvary armed with arbalasts and horse bows, and for shock, lances.

I would suspect that the reason for this is that the most likely use of this army was putting down slave rebellions.

A pre-SoS Siddarmarkan pike block would go through them like s**t through a wyvern.

Don

You're going to back the pike block over horse archers? The horse archers have more range and more mobility. Granted, the situation is very different if the horse archers and the pike block are fighting in an alley, but that's rather exceptional.

Now, if you put some of your own missile-armed infantry inside the pike block, things look very different. I don't recall how well prepared a typical traditional RSA unit was with those; I assume it wasn't a foreign notion at least.

Louis R wrote:Don't forget that Desnair used the same force mix as Harchong, although apparently with rather more heavy horse. The RSA would have developed methods for dealing with horse-archers. Why Harless & Co. thought they would have forgotten them I'm not sure. Perhaps because they bought Clyntahn's assurance that the Sword had shattered the RSA?

That said, I suspect Don was referring to the MHOGATA, not the old Harchong regular army.

I'd figure the old regular army, if it had pikes - to the extent it had pikes - knew what to do with them. But it was at least a fairly minor component of that old regular army, and when they filled out to be the Mighty Host, whatever poor sods got armed with pikes initially had at least some chance of being trained by people familiar with the use of pikes.

Force mix for Desnair versus Harchong would be very relevant. I took it that Desnair emphasized heavy cavalry so much more that Siddarmark really didn't have to make much use of ranged weapon infantry. I'd suppose the RSA was well enough prepared to use them inside pike blocks in case of attacks by medium and light cavalry, without having had to face that so much from Desnair. Against Harchong, what would be an occasional, exceptional sort of threat from Desnair would be the normal form of cavalry attack.

I'd lay better odds on the (Siddarmarkan) pike plus arbalest/bow/arquebus formation over an attacking Harchongese horse archer one, and would figure that that's more likely a typical pre-Merlin hypothetical encounter between the RSA and old Harchong regular army. (Boy, we need HFQ badly.) I'd not read Don as posing that match though, and I'd rate that as a closer thing than he sounded like making it.

Harchong's army was small for the size of Harchong, with dated weapons and aimed primarily at internal control. Like Siddarmark, it was relying for foreign influence on an old reputation - it was just a much older one. All that said, as dated units go, its horse archers would age so much more gracefully than Desnair's heavy cavalry or Siddarmark's pikes.

From the description of the fight in the Kyplynger, Desnair's mediums are damned fine archers, and there are as many of them as heavies, possibly more. Even for an empire with more gold than brains, heavy cavalry is expensive. Also, it's niggling at me that even their heavies carry bows as well as lances, but that could just be me getting confused again.

In any case, my impression was that the Desnairian horse were less than half heavy cavalry, and that the rest was weighted more to medium than light.

In passing, I'll go a bit further and venture a guess that, in Desnair, light cavalry is drawn from the equivalent of the Scots moss-trooper, and not particularly respected by their more aristocratic commanders. There's no evidence that there was any real effort made to get much use out of them, anyway.

JeffEngel wrote:

Louis R wrote:Don't forget that Desnair used the same force mix as Harchong, although apparently with rather more heavy horse. The RSA would have developed methods for dealing with horse-archers. Why Harless & Co. thought they would have forgotten them I'm not sure. Perhaps because they bought Clyntahn's assurance that the Sword had shattered the RSA?

That said, I suspect Don was referring to the MHOGATA, not the old Harchong regular army.

I'd figure the old regular army, if it had pikes - to the extent it had pikes - knew what to do with them. But it was at least a fairly minor component of that old regular army, and when they filled out to be the Mighty Host, whatever poor sods got armed with pikes initially had at least some chance of being trained by people familiar with the use of pikes.

Force mix for Desnair versus Harchong would be very relevant. I took it that Desnair emphasized heavy cavalry so much more that Siddarmark really didn't have to make much use of ranged weapon infantry. I'd suppose the RSA was well enough prepared to use them inside pike blocks in case of attacks by medium and light cavalry, without having had to face that so much from Desnair. Against Harchong, what would be an occasional, exceptional sort of threat from Desnair would be the normal form of cavalry attack.

I'd lay better odds on the (Siddarmarkan) pike plus arbalest/bow/arquebus formation over an attacking Harchongese horse archer one, and would figure that that's more likely a typical pre-Merlin hypothetical encounter between the RSA and old Harchong regular army. (Boy, we need HFQ badly.) I'd not read Don as posing that match though, and I'd rate that as a closer thing than he sounded like making it.

Harchong's army was small for the size of Harchong, with dated weapons and aimed primarily at internal control. Like Siddarmark, it was relying for foreign influence on an old reputation - it was just a much older one. All that said, as dated units go, its horse archers would age so much more gracefully than Desnair's heavy cavalry or Siddarmark's pikes.

JeffEngel wrote:

n7axw wrote:There was never a serious question as to whether or not they had pikes. The real issue is whether or not they knew what to do with them.

The traditional emphasis of the Harchongian army has not been pikes, but calvary armed with arbalasts and horse bows, and for shock, lances.

I would suspect that the reason for this is that the most likely use of this army was putting down slave rebellions.

A pre-SoS Siddarmarkan pike block would go through them like s**t through a wyvern.

Don

You're going to back the pike block over horse archers? The horse archers have more range and more mobility. Granted, the situation is very different if the horse archers and the pike block are fighting in an alley, but that's rather exceptional.

Now, if you put some of your own missile-armed infantry inside the pike block, things look very different. I don't recall how well prepared a typical traditional RSA unit was with those; I assume it wasn't a foreign notion at least.

Agreed. The pike blocks did need missile thowing troops in support and Siddamark had those. The first troops that could fight without supports are riflemen.

Don