They didn’t have to account for the leather, since the Pirate won by knocking Knight to the ground, and then shooting him in the face.
The Spartan vs Ninja one was ridiculous. For one, it was an apple to oranges scenario. The most annoying part was the reenactment. The Spartan is looking around. The ninja jumps out of the tree and then…
RUNS AT HIM SCREAMING RRRRAAAAWWWRRRRR!
I’m pretty sure an actual ninja would try poisoning him or getting him while he was sleeping or something. Like I said, it was apples to oranges to begin with, a Ninja would lose hands down in a straight up fight (okay, if he was tricky and the conditions were right he may get one or two), but given that they’re assassins and infiltrators a good one likely wouldn’t let it get to that point (ignoring the likelihood of a Japanese man being able to infiltrate a group of Greeks).
The “weapon scores” are often bad enough, I refuse to take the “simulations” seriously 
I haven’t seen anywhere near all of these, but I voted for “Atilla the Hun win over Alexander the Great” because that episode drove me nuts. Atilla’s genius was mostly political; his military success was a function of the inability of military leaders of Asia and Europe of his time to come to grips with the standard Hun hit-and-run techniques.
When they compared the two sets of warriors, they compared that standard Hun warrior to the typical Macedonian soldier, with arms, armor, and tactics designed by Alexandar to be maximally effective against the Greek and Persian armies he was facing. But if there’s one thing that’s clear about Alexander’s style, it’s that he didn’t have a standard set of tactics. He stuck with one set a lot when they were working; but when a situation arose in which they didn’t work, he quickly developed new and effective strategies to deal with those situations.
Upshot: Alexander isn’t someone who would try to bring siege weapons to bear against mobile light cavalry with powerful composite bows. :rolleyes: . Attila might have won a battle or even two while Alexandar figured him out, but the war would go to the Macedonians. I don’t know what tactics he would have worked out, but neither does their computer.
Voted for this one for this reason. And also, he BLINDED the Spartan, and still lost?
Black Egg scores zero kills!
I watched most of season 1, and quit watching. I did find it informative to see them do weapons damage tests, like watching how a sword really could cleave a pig carcass in half. But the problems arise after that.
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Sometimes their testing methods were not quite even. For instance, they wanted to rate the effectiveness of two swords, so they rigged a pig carcass on a rope to slide/swing down where the sword wielder could strike the pig. So far so good. Person 1 useds sword, gets good clean cut clear through carcass. Hurray. Then Person 2 gets up for the same test, but they use the same pig. The problem is, half of that pig was missing, the hips and legs were severed in the previous test. So the momentum and mass were different as the carcass came into range, and therefore the blow from Person 2 was less effective, and only did a partial cut. But was that because the blade was less effective, or because there was less momentum from the pig to carry past the blade?
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The simulations depend on how you rate the weapons, but we don’t have insight into how much tweaking the numbers effects the results. Take one that should be fairly balanced as an example, Spetsnaz vs Green Berets. Both are elite modern military of the same era, both use similar weapons, both have hand to hand and armed skills developed for similar situations. Both rely on intensive training to craft effective teams. So for developing their skill ratings, they took 1 Spetsnaz and 1 Green Beret and ran them through a shooting test, then scored those two individuals and used them as representatives for the whole team. Sure, on that 1 shooting test, that 1 Spetsnaz slightly outperformed that 1 Green Beret, but is that because Spetsnaz have more discipline and a higher level of performance as a whole, or is it just a case of statistical divergence?
How about instead of rating the Samarai a 4 with his pole sword, you rate him a 4.5, or instead of rating the Viking a 3 with his throwing spears, rate him a 2? (Are the ratings in whole numbers? I forget.) Why not run a blanket of simulations where you tweak the ratings a bit and see if the cummulative results vary much, or if the outcome is consistent? Sure, they run 1000 simulated encounters, but change up the weapons and skills ratings slightly, to check sensitivity of the model. If a half a point variation in one weapon rating skews the results to the other side, I would question the reliabilty of the model.
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The reinactments sometimes were ludicrous. They want to have one reenacted confrontation to dramatize every weapon of each combatant. So they have do do preposterous things like have the sneaky, silent, attack-from-behind Ninja go running and screaming at the Spartan, or have distance weapons usually miss so the opponents can move to close engagement, even if those weapons were rated as that combatants primary or most effective.
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And has already been mentioned, they didn’t seem to account for the difference of tactics or the use of environment and the role that played in each competitor’s strategy. A knight on a ship on the high seas is going to be at a severe disadvantage, but a pirate in an open field outside a castle is going to be less effective. If Alexander the Great is known for his amazing ability to adapt tactics to the opponent and conditions he faced, then sticking with tactics he is documented to have used isn’t necessarily fair when pairing him against a completely different opponent.
So I stopped watching.
All valid criticisms but, really, just watch it to see pigs get hacked and ballistic gel torsos get shot.
The simulations are lame, the results sketchy and the trash talking has made my eyes roll in complete rotations sometimes but the actual weapon tests are usually entertaining enough.
Ate opponent’s brains and invented cocaine! Plus, Napoleon was, like, 3 feet tall!
Yes, I know he was average height for the time
Maybe someone who watches this more can tell me, but aren’t these mostly 1 on 1 battles? Because the individual Roman legionnaire wasn’t maybe too dangerous, they were dangerous by the thousands in a testudo formation. I don’t know how tough an individual Mongol light cavalry was, but I’m guessing their strength lies in a bunch of them.
1-on-1 or small (5-5, 6-6) battles. Which, yes, means that fighters who tactics relied on mass formations get shafted. Usually right through the chest.
I think the deciding factor was the effectiveness of a cavalry charge against a clipper ship.
Oh yes, I totally blocked out the trash talking. Ugh!
Well according to my computerized simulations of warfare effectiveness*, a group a spearmen behind a wall can sink a modern battleship 1 in 4 times.
*[sub]AKA Sid Meier’s Civilization [/sub]
I always thought we had to have some North Korean posting on the dope.
THe worst thin about the program is that I always get the fantasy of how good a show like this could with real historians and doctors and not the guy commenting on a guy’s pinky-finger bruise when the head is five meters aways and the lungs have fused with the enemy’s sword.
I “like” some of the teams the have for a warrior. If they had a Saracen vs. Sohei match up, one team would have a guy who is 1/8 Egyptian, and the other would have a fat kid who really likes Japan and wants the Sohei to use his chi powers. Some teams are more qualified, though.
Merciful Christ, that is a retarded show.
I vaguely recall a Halloween-centric Zombies vs Vampires episode.
Yep, last option.
How so? It is demonstrable through folklore study that vampires could take out zombies with all deliberate speed.