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Also known as Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA, it simulates the life-or-death feel of combat that would have been commonplace in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and up to the early modern era.
Using the sword in historical fashion was working out well until a historical spear-fighting enthusiast showed up, aiming to increase the realism.
Unless he also showed up with a phalanx of his buddies it could really still go either way.
Spears aren’t very portable and have a distinctive minimum engagement distance. Since people tend to, you know, need to be able to enter buildings, they were not a popular dueling weapon choice. This is probably in no small part why swords hung on so long for that purpose even after they’d been supplanted as a primary battlefield weapon by pretty much anything else.
Spear (or more likely, pike) beats sword on the battlefield, provided you have enough of them to present a nice prickly wall to the enemy to prevent them from closing the distance, and big open space to do it in. One on one, a competent user of any shorter weapon only needs to parry your spear once or grab it by the shaft to get inside your effective range and then he can stick his sword in your spleen at his leisure. That’s why martial arts that even bother to include spearfighting tend to start prospective wielders off with bo staff techniques — unless you’re going to be good at bonking your enemy with your spear’s shaft you’re going to have a tough time of it once he gets up in your face.
And, watching from afar, the archer smirks.
The rumble of approaching cavalry hooves dampened his amusement.
That’s why you keep their numbers hidden and voluminous. You know. Like Stormtroopers that can actually hit something.
To follow up: horse archers win, period.
Fearless, lightning-fast war ponies that’re so fond of meat, they bite at will. (Hun, var. First Nations)
Optimized bows that can punch through plate at all ranges and small form factor to promote confoundingly unorthodox combat maneuvers (Hun, Saracen, etc.)
Supreme technique (eg. multi-knock, hand quiver, etc.) allows mounted archers to fire 5 arrows in ~3 seconds (Saracen [Crusades era, IIRC?])
Bows were invented to improve upon the spear via increased target distance and risk-mitigation. Simple as.
(FWIW: Militarized cavalry was only one way the colonizers kept the sub-classes in line, as well as giving those not-as-rich-as-royals someplace to send their extra crotch fruits.)
