Going around the web and gathering info about units gets you in an avalanche of information that can takes years to sort out.
You can research historic battles but most of them are imbalanced in one way or another and its hard to get usable data.
When people ask me how to accurately compare an archer to a footman i have no idea what to tell em. I've built up an arbitrary comparison over the years and its what I use, but relaying it to others or justifying it to superiors is quite a murky realm.
Anybody know of a source that has simplistic comparisons?
100 shortbow archers are charged by 100 swordsmen without shields or arrow stopping armor.
100 shortbow archers are charged by 100 horsemen without shields or arrow stopping armor.
How many of the melee troops roughly would actually make it to the archer line?
We know that if few reached the line they could break it. And this many times is achieved by surprise or particular tactics or terrain advantages. But what does the data look like when these units started out of range and went at each other at a direct line on a level field.
The basic data is hard to come by. Building on top of is actually way easier as you can scale armor up by tapping many sources that have distilled data on arrow penetration rates for the various armors. Even archer accuracy is easier to come by than this.
Any ideas?
