In tight formation, vs other formations. A Spartan Hoplite would do comparatively poorly out of formation. 300 was pretty inaccurate. :eek:
I think they’ve run out of ideas. Last night I saw “Pirate vs. Knight” - pirate armed with grenades and a blunderbuss amongst other things.
The ad for next week is “Mafia vs Yakuza” featuring tommy guns, pistols and hatchets.
What next? Hatfields vs McCoys?
Ripped Shirt Kirk vs. Darth Vader
I don’t mind the trash talk, but I hate the sermonizing. Knights were not chivalrous crusaders for good. They were feudal lords who fought each other for land and power.
The whole Samurai vs. Viking episode pissed me off to no end, too. They just relied on memes and legends instead of reality. A huge chunk of the Samurai mythos was made up whole cloth after the Warring States Era so the samurai could still feel relevant in an era of total peace - before then, Samurai had no problems with fighting dirty. (And as a matter of fact, Samurai effectively went extinct because Oda Nobunaga introduced modern warfare weaponry and tactics. His successors held on to the idea because the whole “serve your lord with unflinching loyalty” meme was too useful to throw away.)
The Spartan v. Ninja episode did a huge disservice to both sides, too. A Spartan’s not going to attempt a battle outside of formation, and a Ninja’s not going to charge head in unless he 1) assessed the situation and determined that it was the only viable means of attack and 2) was planning to take his target out in a suicide attack. It’d be much, much easier for the ninja to disguise himself as an armor bearer and poison the Spartan’s food. Even better if this results in the Spartans getting paranoid and killing every servant they can get their hands on.
I wish they did matchups of compatible battle tactics.
Did anyone else watch Deadliest Warrior two weeks ago? I recorded it and finally got around to watching it today 
The only part I have a problem with is their giving the knight the crossbow. I was under the impression that knights considered the bow and arrow a “cheap” weapon, a weapon that a person with minimal training (compared to the knight’s lifelong training) could use and dispatch a knight with.
With the advent of crossbows, which required even less training, I figured the era of the knight would have ended.
Furthermore, I always thought knights considered the crossbow an honour-less weapon.
So did 15th century knights use crossbows as a means of attack? I find that a little hard to believe…
(I guess if they wanted to give an edge to the Knight because the pirate had firearms, that works, but I maintain that if that were the case, they shouldn’t have faced off in the first place).
Will bump this for you.
Not really certain of the answer. The show specifically talks about French knights, as opposed to British ones. Although with the Norman invasion, there’s some intermingling there.
Archers were a component of the battlefield. The Battle of Agincourt is widely regarded as having turned on the competition between English longbow archers vs. French crossbows. The crossbow has potentially stronger power and is a lot easier to learn to use, but it takes longer to reload because of the mechanism to cock the bow. English archers had to spend their whole lifetimes (starting in childhood) to develop the skill to be strong and accurate, but they could shoot 5 times faster. But archery wasn’t particularly a skill of the knights; rather, it was a skill of the peasants who fought with the knights.
Okay, I’ve watched a few more. Then discovered there’s an internet Deadliest Warrior response show, where they take questions from the web board and make a web program response where they answer the questions.
From that program there has been a little more discussion on the matchups chosen and the simulation methods. (See, for example, Spartan vs Ninja.)
The matchups are not the same style because the show producers are going for “rock, paper, scissors” vs “rock, rock, rock”. (Yes, that was their example.) So the difference in styles is picked to see how that plays in. Rather than have a Spartan against a knight or a Viking.
There have been tidbits dropped on the simulation software, but not enough to really explain things. They took simulation software designed by an RPG game company, Slitherine Software (called “Slitherine Studios” on the show, for some unexplained reason). The software is a Monte-Carlo type simulation that they imput parameter ranges and then let the software compare out the results.
The software does address three aspects: overall strategy (big picture combat), tactics (second-by-second fighting), and technique skill (how good are they at what they do). Somehow the numbers they input relate to those three aspects. But not enough information is given to be more clear.
Also, stealth is used as a negative factor against the opponent. It is factored in against the opponents perception and accuracy. Again, not enough details.
What I can’t see is how fighting style and agility is really taken into account.
I’m also particularly ticked by their little acted scenarios at the end that is their demo summary of the 1000 battles. It is designed to show all of the weapons, so right there you are not going to see every weapon being effective. But what annoys me is the stupid things they put in. Like in the Spartan vs Ninja, at one point the Ninja turns to run away from the Spartan, he jumps up onto a log, then jumps and does a flip and then a roll onto the ground - for no apparent reason! He’s not jumping over anything, he’s not avoiding a blow, he just jumps and flips because “he’s a ninja”. :rolleyes:
Regarding results, I haven’t particularly been happy with the results, but tried to find a silver lining. I notice, for example, that Pirate vs Knight
boiled down to technology. Most of the kills were by the blunderbuss and the grenado - gunpowder. That makes sense to me. In a stand up close contact fight, the Pirate is at a serious disadvantage. Regardless of his skill with his cutlass, the Knight is trained in close quarters combat against swords, axes, etc, and he has armor and a shield. There’s no way the Pirate can stand against him. And the numbers back that up. Ignoring gunpowder, 90% of the kills go to the knight. Even factoring in the flintlock, over 85% of the kills go to the knight. It’s only with the blunderbuss that can penetrate the armor and the grenado that can stun and disable the knight that the pirate has a chance.
I also wonder about the way the simulator incorporates defensive weapons use. The numbers in the results table only show number of kills by that weapon, but apparently don’t reflect the use of a weapon that disables or weakens the opponent so the kill can be taken, or the use of a weapon as a defensive aid to prevent being killed while another strike is delivered. An example of this is also in Spartan vs Ninja. There are zero kills assigned to the black egg. Which is accurate, in that the egg is not a killing weapon. But that does not reflect how effective that weapon may or may not have been in helping the Ninja evade or strike the Spartan. It just gets tabulated as “Kills for Black Egg: 0”.
Another example is in Yakuza vs Mafia.
The Mafia got more kills with an ice pick than the Yakuza got with the Sai. But what isn’t shown is using the sai to block the ice pick, or even better, block the bat.
So while I enjoy seeing the carnage the weapons can inflict, I’m not convinced the simulator accurately reflects the real fighting styles of the combatants or how a fight would really play out.
Quite frankly I was surprised by the carnage some of those ancient weapons inflicted (assuming the balistics gel dummies are any indication. I suspect it doesn’t quite mimic the tensile and shear strength of muscle and tendons, just the density and viscosity). A katana slicing somone in half Kill Bill style is pretty fucked up. As is using a war hammer to make someone’s head explode like a ripe melon .
I have only seen the Viking vs. Samurai, but how realistic is the assumption that the average Viking would be covered cap-a-pie with chain-mail? That stuff was expensive.
Regards,
Shodan
Especially with the modern combat episodes like Yakuza vs Mafia, Special Forces vs Spetsnaz or IRA vs Taliban. The weapons are not so different that I would think they would play that much of a role at all. Modern combat seems much more dependent on tactics and cover than which assault rifle has a slightly higher rate of fire. IRL, I don’t think combat would play out like the live action Call of Duty game they portray.
msmith537
They do some testing on pig carcasses. The katanas do cut clear through the pigs. The Ninja sword almost cleaved a pig on the first try. The katana for the Samarai cleaved 3 pigs in a pile. Yeah, I think the ballistics gel bodies are pretty accurate. They use those same simulators for things like land mine and weapon effectiveness testing. And forensics.
Why do you think armor was invented? Not just because it looked cool.
There are a number of theories on Agincourt. I remember seeing something like a History channel presentation that the mud made an unhorsed knight immobile, and they got guys in period armor on the field of Agincourt when it was wet to prove both that and that the long bow arrows could not pierce the period armor, but their immobility compared to unarmored longbowmen with knives was a hopeless mismatch as reflected by the numbers of dead on each side.
I was thinking of the pigs when I wrote that. Still pretty fucked up.
I’ve never seen ballistics gell first hand. I’m sure they are accurate mimmicking the effects of a projectile fired into a human. But if I pulled on a BG dummies arm, would it come off more easily than an actual human arm?
All I’m saying is some of those weapons did the kind of damage I would expect to see in someone who got hit by a train or something.