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Let's not get bogged down by tech, and just assume a roughly late medieval tier metallurgy.
How do you think would different fantasy physiologies affect the weapons they use (or others use against them)? Most settings seem to just give other races mostly normal human weaponry and armour while giving them some more unified visual theme, without really considering the efficacy of the equpment in their hands.
Take dwarves for example. Short stature, bulky builds, high strength and endurance. Would poor reach and short arms make swung weapons ineffective? Would they need to rely exclusively on polearms if they were put against normal sized humans?
What about giant races, say 3 metre tall humanoids, what would be the most effective way for them to fight against normal sized people?
Showing all 114 replies.
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>>65166641
My fat, throbbing, hairy, uncircumcised human cock. Every elf, dwarf, halfling, orc, and whatever other godless commie races there are will be brought into the light of civilization through the thorough and relentless dicking of their women (and their effeminate, hairless men, in the case of elves). And maybe a Maxim gun and a Webley for old time's sake. This also applies to any alien bastards that have the misfortune to show up on earth.
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>>65166641
Dwarfs would definitely use polearms. Probably also bows and crossbows what with their strong arms.
Giants could use basically any normal striking melee weapon, albeit making a steel sword or axeblade in their size would be tricky. Maybe it would be cast from bronze. Thrusting weapons less effective (can only hit one target) unless fighting other giants. Assuming sufficient size and human sized enemies, a giant wood club would even be effective. Would also use massive shields and just push smaller foes around, which also serves to make them basically invincible. Hard to imagine how you could defeat a shield wall of 3 metre giants with scutum shields.
Elves are either, depening on the source, something like more dextrous humans, in which case they would use mostly the same weaponry except maybe with a stronger focus on swords, or dextrous but weaker humans, in which case they would suffer tremendously (hard to wear armour, hard to penetrate armour) and would go for windlass crossbows and fortifications. They would likely be beaten by humans or dwarves though.
Halflings are just fucked and would become subjects to martially capable people.
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>>65166896
>Sleeping on effeminate male halflings
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>>65167218
>Hard to imagine how you could defeat a shield wall of 3 metre giants with scutum shields
dig a hole, fill ìt with pointy stick, tar and oil
lead the giants inside the hole, set them on fire.
route out the rest with heavy cavalry.
harrass them with multiple waves of light cavalry until they are gassed out then charge em with heavy cavalry.
war elephants specialy breed for their size,
balistas, formation of men using long and pointy sticks to grab their foot and disrupt their formation.
Lead them inside marsh lands were they are going to be limited in manueverability, tin their numbers with volleys of arrows, poison their water sources,...
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>>65167218
>Hard to imagine how you could defeat a shield wall of 3 metre giants with scutum shields
Why even bother with a weapon at this point. Just give them massive shields, add some spikes onto them, and just have them ram enemy units. They're protected from arrows, their size means they're significantly faster than other infantry, and I can't see any cavalry charge into what's essentially just a huge spiked wall. Other than siege weapons, I don't see how could anyone easily counter it.
Actually I can see humans using some sort of greek fire as a counter. I wonder if that could be effective.
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>>65169065
>A lot of words coming from a yappy member of that midget sppecies who are already indentured as slaves to giants.
There is endless circles that can be spun around how people interpret fantasy races as being on a grainular level so just deciding how low or high or big or magical such and such thing is makes for half the battle when talking shop on fantasy fight stuff but at least when we're on the topic of extrapolating fantasy races to be realistic Giants would not be constrained to living as singular camping cliques of cavemen. Not even real cavemen lived like cavemen.
The giants would have humans out of the mountain areas they live in just fine, there would be able bodied child and intermediate teen giants roaming around living at nearer to human scale to also be needing to contend with kicking down your village's celler doors or a fair few of the nooks you though you could hide in. If they're strong enough to lift a boulder that proportionally sized humans couldn't dream of lifting then they can damn layer themselves in armours of such thickness that it is beyond the strength of any medieval weapon to penetrate, or Giant boots.
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>>65169515
>A lot of word-ack
if you have to exterminate the giants you target, their food, their children, and women.
it doesnt matter if it require fire, poison or disease.
we are adept at exterminating and extinguishing other species
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>>65169524
Human exceptionalism like that would not exist in a universe where there are various kinds humans+ actively present.
You say attack the crops and whatnot as if that isn’t litterally how humans have already been in contests with other humans for all time as is.
>Target the women.
A she-giant is going to be similarly hard to overcome as the guys
>The children
Young giants are going to have super strength in comparison to people.
>Other methods.
They are going to be living in settlements, they will protect their crops and herds from you by those same methods right back at you and again, if giants are not literally stomping humans they will be home basing themselves in mountains defensively with fucking giant rust base walls of rocks and shit
Also frankly the notion of giving giants terminal sickness from interacting with guys who have the sniffles strikes me a deeply uphill battle as well with a how lot of giants already along with the superstrength have an implict superhuman constitution and hardiness to them to match with living out in the woods eating rotten shit and generally being pretty exposed to the elements.
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>>65169524
>Humans are [adept at exterminating] and that will give the leg up over the fantasy race.
Your post is just a no offence invoking raceplay self pick up mantra and also just pretty dumb. You're invoking that a fantasy world's population are going to be brain-dead and unable to adapt or reply in kind or something and that apparently only humans are capable of waging wars or doing harm in a manner that isn't standing in a row and smacking one another.
Humans 'should' be extinct or thoroughly range constrained in a fantasy setting where 5+ other flavors of specialized Human equivalents or more plus monsters, Dwarves settle mountains, Some manner of gribbly goblin buggers reside in swamps, elves would frankly be the upper caste ruling 'over' all of the others and have deep wood kingdoms and Orcs basically would be mangling any attempt at humans to be nomadic herder peoples. Hobbits and kobolds probably would make better metropolitan underclasses as well.
If you expand things out further still, shallows all coastlines and big Delta rivers become contested spaces with Mer creatures, Little faeries and Ents/equivalental spirits would be giving actual teeth to the wilderness pushing back whenever one tries to clear-cut for otherwise viable farmland and extremophile environmental specialists pretty much impose a hard cutoff to where human 'can' live like there being desert attuned lizardmen in the Sararah.
Ironically in most HFY masturbatory posts are written to be the exact way that they would also claim make elves irritating.
>underdogs who are never or rarely allowed to lose
>usually have some blessing by some god(s) to explain their being the best/main characters
>somehow better at everything, even the things other races are expicitly said to be best at.
>Whining and speeches about how shit life is yet how glorious humanity is in spite of it that we can endure any challange. If elves or dwarves do this they're identifed as haughty or stubborn.
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>>65170966
At the end of the day it depends on the population distribution. If every race "spawns" in every location equally, then humans are fucked, because they simply have no chance facing ogres or centaurs. If not, then big migrations will happen and world will find some kind of equilibrium, as "dominant" races will end up fighting mostly themselves. Like take up 14th century for example, tech available to Europeans at that times could be as well alien tech to 14thc stone age Malians, yet Europeans didn't rush to conquer them, simply because they barely knew that shit like sub-Saharan Africa existed, and well, distance factor.
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>>65171258
Anon you do realize there is a difference between a malformed midget and a several meter tall giant? They would have longer legs but there is a size limit. You can't just scale up the human body infinitely.
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>>65166641
Warhammer manlets don't use spears and swords because its gay elf stuff, no I'm serious.
They do forge spears and swords for their human allies but they don't use them.
Even snow manlets use steel javelins against larger monsters in their snowy mountain home.
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>>65171340
Restating myself that Giants are not the same as upsized real people. Not usually I don't think. They are strong. Extremely so, insofar as they're slowed by the tyranny of physics yeah that comes into play to some extent but they're alo slow from just being retarded somewhat. Again, all depending on exactly what you think 'giants' actually entail as a creature type. to be completly anal about size giants would already be strained to do anything but amble forward and certainly not lugging around clubs as big for them as a zwealander is to us.
>There is endless circles that can be spun around how people interpret fantasy races as being on a grainular level so just deciding how low or high or big or magical such and such thing is makes for half the battle when talking shop on fantasy fight stuff.
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>>65166641
The answer is polearms for literally everybody. Not much really changes, the advantages of various weapons remain the same regardless of your own size or physique.
Bows and crossbows for everyone except dwarves.
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>>65171249
>>65169524
Redditron materialists can't even fathom a world where the giants have magnified strength beyond human proportions allowing them to move at proportional human speed because then their power fantasy collapses.
Polyphemus still took a superman to blind, and even then he was able to hurl a boulder the size of a fucking tank a half mile into the ocean, missing a target boat he only found by the sound of cheering off by a dozen yards. He'd fucking obliterate a medieval army all by himself.
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>late medieval
Imagine the comically oversized handgonnes giants could use.
Hell, even in earlier times, havng giant slingers would be devastating.
Elves usually get the ranged role while giants are for melee, but in practical terms, giants would be peak ranged units. Who also stomp you in melee.
Basically, giants win everything forever.
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>>65174897
It’s not that they’re unable to suspend disbelief but it’s the way that they’ll pivot the situation between playing the generic trope straight vs setting of implausibility according to whatever most benefits humans being able to come out ahead.
The silly thing is that non of this posturing about which fantasy race is better matters because the actual war/civilization meta of any world with very diverse fantasy races is going to be some kind of teaming up of different species into combined arms operations like Elven captains & officers tard wrangling squads of orcs or arrangements of people to consensually give a vampire class enough life force to live off in exchange for practical benefits or having a settlement use a tribe of friendly centaurs to buffer themselves against hostile centaurs.
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>>65169524
what if the cyclops were female?
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>>65175780
> the actual war/civilization meta of any world with very diverse fantasy races is going to be some kind of teaming up of different species into combined arms operations
Yes but nobody wants that. Instead everybody wants to have the different races organised into neat and isolated categories.
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>>65175780
That "meta" sounds like a recipe for disaster. Oh sure you might get an occasional empire that manages to tyrannize other species into obedience. The real meta will be each individual race just filling each battlefield role as best as they can.
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>>65168581
Old news
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>Dwarves
Living underground, they're not likely to have a cultural tradition involving ranged weapons
Polearms are technically useful to block passages, but the inconvenience of carrying them in confined spaces is considerable.
They're miners and blacksmiths. They're undoubtedly going to be a metal-rich culture. Heavy armour is basically guaranteed, which tends to lead to a focus on percussive weapons and short swords. Shields may be unnecessarfy depending on how much iron they cover themselves in
So heavily armoured melee fighters with short swords or maces (emphatically not axes; they're living in mountains, not in forests)
>Elves
the classic forest dwellers (which the Noldor are emphatically not, but I digress) are a reasonable match for eastern American tribes. Strong tradition of bowmanship paired with swords (warclubs for the eastern tribes, but elves are a bit more advanced). Polearms oddly weren't that popular amongst the tribes, although the polearm/sword combo instead of the bow/sword combo was prominent in the celtic and germanic realm, so it's entirely in the cards.
Personally, I'd really like to see steppe elves, though. Their physical attributes and culture lend themselves really well to a steppe culture focussed on bowmanship and cavalry. Mongol elves should be a thing.
>Orcs
I'm going to ignore Tolkien orcs altogether because they have the physical atributes of toddlers.
If we go with the mountain of muscle stereotype prevalent in modern fantasy instead, a focus on shock/melee action. Less armour than dwarves since they're altogether less sophisticated, and therefore with a heavy reliance on large shields. Little to no archery, the orcs are focussed on classic polearm (or javelin) + sword/mace action. Basically fighting like republican Rome.
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>>65175889
You’re thinking to much that the fantasy races could be analogous to real life race with all it’s migration and balkanization. Race war doesn’t get so bitter and existential as it does when the races are not basically interchangible and the fight is always in some way over occupation of the same plots of land.
Imagine if you ha the fantasy races and there isn’t humans for you to consider. They all specialize on a different environment….A mountain, a forest, deserts, rivers, You’ve got lizards inland to the desert, troll bog ogre things in swamp area, some kind of deep woods Smurfy mushroom hat goobers, mermaids wnd maybe throw in a weird four seasons quarteted fairy population who only exist during their particular season because fantasy can be wacky some times.
Genuinely how else do those conditions settle out into then some kind of environmentally based parallel habitation? Say Bog trolls gets dominant enough locally to exterminate the smurfs, dorfs, lizards and Mermaids alright…You get left with a lot of land that the freshly singular race standing doesn’t actually use or struggles to reside on and then other Smurfs or lizards or whatever are inevitably going to recolonize the areas or there were surviving members of them popping back up.
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>>65175889
>That "meta" sounds like a recipe for disaster.
In many settings orcs or spirit-less elves are created by elven mages specifically for combat. That it has potentially disastrous results is part of what makes a good story.
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>>65176487
Utter fantasy (heh). You are basing this on dumb caricatures. A "mountain-dwelling" species isn't going to go "oh flat land how horrifying, I don't want that". What do they eat? Plump helmets? Lmao. A "forest-dwelling" species isn't going to say "oh no the forest is in a mountain, I don't want that" or "No trees on this flat land? How horrifying, surely planting some trees is beyond my grasp". Those mermaids? They're going to fight over fishing grounds with every single species that has fishing boats. Centaurs will see a forest and burn it down. Those desert and swamp species are going to be complete savages with no technology, their only real interaction with other species is trade and more likely raiding their more blessed neighbours who won the genetic lottery of being able to thrive in an environment that actually has something to offer. Even if an environment is unlikeable, every sentient population will grow and try to take marginal land. At the very least, whichever species likes their land full of crops is going to have a massive population that is constantly expanding, and will take the lands of all the other ones, because your "mountains" and forests" are just land waiting to be turned into farms.
If you're going to argue that your fantasy people in your head are special and literally can't step out of their cartoon environment, that's your problem, the typical fantasy race is just a human with a funny skin color, ears, size etc.
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>>65166641
Three things.
Magnets, very important in MODERN smithing. I don't mean in collecting river slag. (Magnets lose attraction when its heated enough to ready to dip and create the hard shell)
Second is...
The hammer style used over a long period of time. Used in nail making the hammer gets stronger, and when it's ready it gets used in weapon making. It's an old smith trick, it rings at the tune when struck that an experienced smith knows how dense it feels upon striking. This is individual to each smith on what hammer they make to smith with.
Lastly is their ability passed down from generations of smiths. Normally family, and wen war comes and takes their children they pass that onto people who get close with them. It's said that most of ancient history is lost with smithing because it wasn't passed down. The only ones left reside in the middle east and rural china that still make everything with hammer and tool.
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>>65167570
Bows with shorter draw require much higher draw weights to achieve the same power as a bow with a longer draw and shorter draw weight. That's the reason crossbows often needed a tool to load them like a belt hook or even a windlass, they need vastly higher draw weights to achieve similar power from such a short stroke.
Is your dwarf 2x stronger than an elf, to put the two bows on equal footing?
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It all sounds awesome til a summoner calls forth an army of undead scots with supporting equipments to buttfuck your invasion.
Few things say go fuck yourself as well as a well crewed Mk10 Chieftain just trackfoddering your hoplites as a cohort of scots in skirts hose the remainder with Lewis guns and L7's.
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>>65177328
Humans evolved for a dry grassland environment so them settling anywhere else is unrealistic and bad writing
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I did some math, the most poisonous snake should yeild some 45-100ml per bite.
Its enough to kill some 100 humans(0.025 ml/kg body weight), or a 15mt giant with a single arrow coated in poison if weight scales linearly
Other animals like the box jellyfish, stone fish golden frog could also yeild good venom for that
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Also a team specialized in concealing themself, with blowguns made to maximize penetration 2mm, long steel penetrator should also be able to target a giant and poison them.
You could also use the bacteria inside the mouth of a dragon of komodo to make their flesh rot away
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>>65191324
Humans evolved for a dry arctic environment so them settling anywhere else is unrealistic and bad writing
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>>65189599
The main problem with giants is that after you get much bigger than the world's biggest men ever the inefficiency of the human structure for colossal size means the body's tissues start scaling exponentially in durability, not linearly, or the giant wouldn't be alive to begin with. A giant the weight of an elephant would be able to tear an elephant in half like a pinata.
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>>65169071
>Other than siege weapons, I don't see how could anyone easily counter it.
Marbles or oil.
The bulk and height of a giant means that falls are much more dangerous to them than say, a halfling falling over would experience.
Trip a halfing, they probably just roll on their round bodies while wildly flailing their little legs.
Trip a giant and they could break a collar bone or arm or wrist.
FOOSH injuries would be extremely common among giants because they just physically can't have the bone density to withstand the impact generated by that much weight on that much leverage, hitting the ground.
They'd also be extremely vulnerable to supply-line disruption, they'd need a tonne of calories to maintain fighting fitness. Cut the logistics and the giants will start eating the rest of the army.
They wouldn't be using swords because metals that you can afford in such bulk quantities wouldn't have the material strength to withstand their swings.
Clubs and stone axes would be the order of the day, easy to make out of local materials once they inevitably break and essentially free.
Every time you capture a town, the largest building gets dismantled and it's foundation stones and lumber and whatever rope is around, all get turned into new stone axes for the giants.
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I think picrel is a genuine innovation that makes a lot of sense for Dwarves.
It leans into their engineering skills and is designed specifically to counter their main rival's main strength.
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>>65176111
>Living underground, they're not likely to have a cultural tradition involving ranged weapons
Just because it's underground, doesn't mean they're perpetually in dwarf-sized tunnels. Ranged weapons would still be useful.
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>>65194794
Seems kinda dumb. Elves can fire way faster than dwarves can reload those cumbersome machines. And they would just fire at will, too. Seems like a lot of wasted effort, both in terms of the engineering, as well as in the manufacturing of the much more complex ammo, as well as tactical positioning, suboptimal aiming and synching your timing during the battle itself to maybe counter a volley or two if you’re lucky.
Doubly so when dwarves already carry shields anyway.
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>>65194995
>maybe counter a volley or two if you’re lucky
I think it's not luck based, they can reliably counter a volley or two.
The rest of your points I concede, they're clearly situational and only good for dealing with volleys rather than sustained fire but it does get your vanguard into the enemy lines without being turned into pincushions and then it's melee and typically, fantasy tropes give Dwarves the edge in melee against Elves.
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>>65194995
You can apply that logic to early handgonnes fire carts and cannons but it was apparent that the shock and awe of the artillery and it's lethal force was enough for multiple states of the 14th century to invest in.
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>>65194794
>it spins a twenty foot chain so fast that it blocks 100 percent of arrows that it passes, meaning it completes a full 180 degree rotation every half arrow length
The rotational energy of that weapon alone would make a siege mortar look like a slingshot.
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>>65196977
The chain will be on both sides and you only need to hit an arrow once so it could be half of what you describe. It's still fast of course.
You'd use a very light chain, fine steel perhaps, Middle Earth dwarves aren't said to have Aluminium or Titanium and you're certainly not using mithril for this.
You might be able to use tin though, it wouldn't have to be very hard.
It's basically a whipper-snipper that only has to spin for a few seconds.
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Dwarfs would be incredibly glod engineers, imagine them tunneling under enemy fortifications, making trenches and then tunneling inside the enemy fort in full pl8 armor were cavalry or archers are more limiter
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>>65189548
>a short armed bow can theoretically have a long power stroke
Not realistically. You could make a re-re-re-recurve bow that coils up at the ends to get extra effective limb length but they'd uncoil during the draw which would just reintroduce the problem you were trying to avoid by making a more compact bow.
But that's not the main problem. Physiologically a shorter humanoid can't achieve as long a draw as a taller humanoid, because their arms are shorter so the total distance between at-rest and drawn has a lower maximum. There's no getting around this with a regular bow. A short person must a much higher draw weight to achieve the same power as a taller person, because they can't draw the bow back as far.
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I always imagine dwarves as being heavily armored and fighting in phalanx style formations with polearms. They need something to compensate for their reduced lack of reach. A roman style gladius type of situation is not gonna cut it.
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>>65166641
mostly just size scaling and fancy engravings depending on how poncy the elven gunsmiths are feeling, the best guns are gonna be from dwarves with dual autism's in guns and military history, giants i assume get murdered the moment all the small 'uns get gunpowder so who cares
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>>65197852
>The chain will be on both sides and you only need to hit an arrow once so it could be half of what you describe.
>Chain on one side, Side B
>Rotates to Side A
>Arrow was half an inch short of side B when chain passed
>Arrow passes side B before chain returns to side B
You have no fucking idea how much energy we're talking about. It's to the point where they could NOT put the chain on and just fire the bolt ten miles at the enemy army by preserving all that energy that normally went into spinning it.
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>>65202424
Fuck it I'm bored
Be
arrow lenght l_a=1m
arrow speed v_a=50ms
flail chain number n_c
assume speed of flail inconsequential
It follows that an arrow has a time t_p of l_a/v_2 to pass inbetween flail arms
At n_c flail arms, the frequency of rotation of the flail needs to be at least 1/(t_p*n_c)=v_a/(l_a*n_c) to catch all arrows
Let chain length be l_c
Let chain weight/density d_c be 1kg/m (low end IMO, but whatever)
It follows that chain weight m_c =l_c*kg/m
The rotational inertia of a stick rotating at its end is I=1/3 *m*L^2
The rotational energy of a body is 1/2*I*(2*pi*f)^2
It follows: E=1/2*1/3*l_c*kg/m*(l_c)^2*n_c*4*pi^2*(v_a/(l_a*n_c))^2
The interesting consequences: We should maximize flail chain number. This poses the problem that the speed of the flail is not actually zero and propelling it at all requires additional energy.
Also, chain length enters the equation in the third power, while covered area of a flail depends only on the second power of chain length. We should minimize chain length.
Assume intermediate values of chain length 2m and 10 flail arms, we reach a value of ~13kJ, roughly low .50BMG territory.
The weight of the full fail is then 20kg, quite acceptable, and the frequency of rotation 5Hz, which the chain should probably tolerate.
Also, to a cover a battlefield of 200m width and maybe 30m of arrow corridor height in a non-overlapping grid of flails (that will catch pi/4 of arrows), you need at least 200*30/(4*l_c^2)=375 flails.
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>>65202540
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>>65193344
There is no debate. One of them is probably mocking >>65176487 for making the ridiculous claim that fantasy races wouldn't move out of their biome, and the other one is probably making an unrelated joke about (I assume) Hyperborea being the birthplace of humanity in Conan, the Finno-Korean hyperwar, and a whole bunch of other settings.
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>>65182453
Elves are not the archery race, centaurs are.
Elves are the please don't burn down my forest with me in it race. The only way elves are superior in any fantasy setting is if they're hidden among trees and numerous or with druidic magic.
Faraway Paladin elves can just fuck anything up in a forest. Lock your feet to the dirt and have spiny brambles cover your whole body so you can bleed out all slowly.
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>>65202540
Energy is a poor comparison when talking about such a radically different delivery of it. It's like when people point out something has the "Energy" of XYZ impact ignoring that one has a hundred times the momentum of the other.
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>>65210067
Come on now, you can't expect him to do that, it's clear he doesn't recognize or understand basic algebra. He couldn't even think up a counterargument except to mumble something incomprehensible about muh momentum.
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>>65210067
>Include your own assumptions
I'm not doing your homework for you, I'm pointing out you didn't do it.
>>65210924
>Look you just have to make wild assumptions and fill in gaps with whatever you want because... because you just have to ok!?!
Go back where you came from.
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>>65212752
>The actual ethnicity Dwarves are based on
I feel like that's highly subjective.
Not just whether that ethnicity is good at war but what ethnicity they're based on at all.
What author are you referring to?
Tolkien really didn't base them on any race in particular I don't think.
They're typically portrayed as Cornish miners with a lowland Scottish accent and possibly highland Scottish hair and dress, Jewish hoarding and greed...pick <maritime trading empire of your choice> mercantile instincts
You can point at any literary/vidya/anime/tv/movie source and find a different interpretation if you want, allowing you to render whatever kind of subjective judgement you want about their skill at warfare.
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>>65203357
>He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able swiftly to draw a great war-bow and shoot down a Nazgûl, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship.
Yeah sounds like it.
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Suikoden is pretty funny, they have the most arrogant of elves, in the first game they think they are untouchable because the live in a magical forest that misdirects those that enter it (and when the rebel leader player with the help of a non-asshole elf shows up at their treehouse to warn them of the threat of the Empire they arrest him along with everyone else trying to warn them)
The get wiped out by a "Sun Mirror" weapon, the design stolen from the dwarf vaults by the Empire that torches the forest.
Is later defeated when the rebels face the commander at his fortress and the sun mirror is countered with the help of the dwarfs and their 'wind cannon' shattering it.
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>>65166641
One aspect of dwarf warfare people itt overlook is that it wouldnt neccesarily be outside in an open field. Axes and hammers make a lot more sense in cramped tunnel environments than spears do. Depending on the flavour of dwarf they could just shut the gates to their mountainholds whenever under threat. Make the enemy come to their turf. Add to that that they also could face threats from underground (ie. Natives, Goblins, Local Fauna). Maybe there would be a movement towards more spear usage after prolonged conflict with elves or humans? Cultural and institutional inertia would of course be a factor keeping traditional short range dwarf axes and hammers in play for a long time, despite being subobtimal.
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Dwarves have the problem of being really fucking slow. They have short legs. They can't ride a full-sized horse. They don't generally have draft animals to haul their shit around. That's a big offensive problem: they are going to get outmaneuvered all the time. You'd expect them to do a lot of entrenching and fortification - roman-style walled camps, leg-breaking mines, stimuli, trenches.
They also just... don't live on the surface. In a lot of settings they live underground, in huge interconnected cave systems like the ones we have in the US. Where they do surface it's in fortified positions in inhospitable places like the mountains, with strongholds down there that the surface dwellers don't even know about. They're playing on two maps layered over each other.
In formation on the surface they get raped by harassing units like horse archers.
I'd expect that in formation the flanks would need some kind of combined arms thing to deal with this - a really heavy pavise wall around the edges to deal with projectiles, really heavy crank crossbows to return fire, pikemen to ward off cavalry. If they're really fucking strong I think Roman tactics win again for the core of infantry - shields and javelins to close that they can fling very far and hard, then crushing melee like maces, hammers, and axes.
Humans - they're humans. They are already minmaxing the game's physics system. Guy on horse with armor and lance. Guy on horse with bow. Professional soldiering companies to do hard shit. Conscripts with spears and longbows for the rest.
Elves - are generally depicted as elite experienced warriors, but there are almost none of them left because they are ladyboys with a lower birth rate than the japanese. I don't think they could even hold territory or field armies that stand on their own without magic fuckery and human intervention. So probably just attached to friendly human armies ye olde tier ones with very high quality gear.
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>>65218603
Orcs are 50 IQ retarded unga-bungas. They do not mine, they do not farm, they do not build strongholds, they do not produce weapons. They are primitives and are unable to organize beyond a raiding party without the intervention of some malevolent wizard or dragon or some shit like that. They are big and strong but constrained by african mindset. The upside is that they don't need to do logistics, really. They just need to fight, because they fucking eat people.
If you are a malevolent wizard interested in breaking green bucks and sending them out to conquer the realms of man, you want them in a lot of armor with polearms. They're ideal for it. They're really fucking big and strong - they can wear heavier armor and carry a larger polearm with longer reach than a human. They're great shock infantry. They probably can't field any form of cavalry at all - they're too heavy. You need some kind of attachment of evil humans or dwarves to maintain their gear for them that they won't eat.
Gnomes - these are just dwarves but gay. Usury, I guess.
Goblins - lazy, filthy, backstabbing, servile, constantly oscillating between extreme gloating and pathetic cowardly groveling. Their entire nation would be conquered by 800 well-trained imperial humans until they are later imported as equals by the Gnomes and undermine their entire society.
Centaurs - a man that can never get off of his horse and will not put on armor for tree-hugging ideological reasons is kind of fucked. He is defeated by a chest-high palisade of sharpened sticks. He can't take a castle. I don't see how he could build or run siege equipment. I definitely don't see how he could storm a wall. I don't think they would ever present a serious threat to anyone outside of their home territory, a very limited regional power, and you would have to be very methodical about taking their territory from them - building defensive positions with good communication and roads between them.
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>>65218562
Cave chambers are plenty large enough to necessitate two-handed weapons and thrown/ranged weapons. If they're really strong, have limited space, and access to a lot of metal I would imagine they would be really lethal slingers and just fuck everything up with a fist-sized ball of lead.
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>>65218507
>>65218498
Dwarves must always use weapons that are adapted from workman's tools. Taking this away diminishes them.