Skystone

Piercing weapons like spears (or arrow or sword points) were highly effective vs leather and chain armor. With proper leverage, focusing a blow (or your opponents momentum) into the point of a spear caused more than enough force to split the links of the chainmail apart and go right through. Certain versions of scale or heavy chain were developed to more effectively deal with this, but generally speaking chain/scale provided only partial protection against them

Miss % doesn't change the debate much at all. Sure, missing a Crushing Blow sucks, but it doesn't happen often so the accuracy bonus from a swarm of spears doesn't make up for much. Also, people vastly overstate the initiative advantage of spears. Being able to move and attack first is nice, but when it's for crappy damage it doesn't matter that much. In a combined arms scenario, where an archer and club unit face off aga

The initiative advantage doesn't make up for the damage loss compared to clubs. If you lined up 4 spear units vs 4 club units, sure 3-4 spear units would get the jump and knock off one of the club units before they could retaliate, but then the 3 remaining club units would crushing blow 3 of the spear units and by the time the spear unit went again they'd be at around 1/3 strength and have lost the fight. They're not balanced at all. It's also bad with s

It's really easy to rename everything...I don't think this is something the devs need to spend even a minute on. There's not exactly a rich backstory of source material to dig from. Like any other game, the pre-made races all have a list of pre-generated city names. When you go ahead and make your own faction I don't think you can expect them to have a good list of city names for you, so all the name-generator is doing is tossing a bunch of random letter

Blunt weapons were usually 1 handed. They had wide swinging arcs and left the user vulnerable after an attack, so a shield helped keep him protected. Two handed hammers were limited to swiss-style polearm formations, or for extremely strong and well-armored knights who could shrug off counter attacks with their armor alone. Maces, hammers and axes were the preferred anti-armor weapons of the era, not spears. Spears were used commonly both 1 and

The problem with swords and counter-attack are several-fold. First, they do the lowest damage of any weapon in the game, which sucks by itself. Second, the numbers for Counter-attack just suck. The damage for swords is already bad, so giving counter-attack only a fraction of regular damage means you're swinging back for a fraction of already sucky damage. On top of all of this, however, is the fact that counter-attack triggers unr

Clubs are game-breakingly good in early-mid game. With proper manoeuvering, your first strike vs the enemy army is usually crippling. The idea of Crushing Blow, as far as I'm concerned, is very good. Allowing you to burst for front-loaded damage allows interesting strategies vs the AI. Clubs, however, already do significantly more damage per normal attack in the first place, so with Crushing Blow you're essentially doing 3-4 attacks worth of spear damage i

Clubs may be a move behind, but it would probably take spears 3-4 turns to match the clubs' first attack. The front-loadable damage, combined with the added survivability of the shield, makes it no contest. There are fights where spears are better or helpful, but if I'd want clubs over spears the vast majority of the time.

I enjoy building loads of cheap units and sending them all over the place on large maps. Leather-armored cheapo-units are easily spammable and can be replenished quickly when they inevitably die, and they're ideal for fighting off enemy armies and razing their cities and allow you to level up other heroes without wasting valuable monster xp hehe.

Clubs are flat out vastly superior. It doesn't matter that the Spears have an initiative advantage and a bit of armor pen. The fact that units become less effective/threatening once damaged means the front-loaded damage (alpha) is far better than attacking more frequently for less damage, even if the average rate of damage were equal (which doesn't appear to be the case). Missing a turn doesn't matter when whatever is going to attack yo