Art De La Guerre

[MarkK]

Admittedly my knowledge of Chinese warfare is sketchy at best, but what is the justification for Qin inf. being impact troops rather than the universal polearm? Not that I am above using them as such as this is an army I'll be putting on the board at somepoint, just curious.

[KevinD]

The Qin army (pre-unification) was known for very strict discipline and very aggressive tactics. There’s some recent scholarship that argues they used forlorn hopes to break enemy formations followed by aggressive attacking by phalanxes rather than the 1979s era interpretation based on the earliest Xian findings that they used mixed formations of close combat at infantry supported by crossbowmen. (I do wonder if they really were phalanxes armed with pikes rather than dense blocks of close combat troops armed with dagger axes, swords, etc.)

I think Impact Elite is a fair representation of them, potentially subject to revision to Pike if recent interpretations become more widely accepted.

Very interesting army and period (Warring States and the previous Spring and Autumn Annals period).

[MarkK]

So as Confucius say 'it is how you act not how you are armed.' Yes I would have thought pike would be more appropriate given the 3.7m length.

[ethan]

I was reading somewhere else where there was an argument Ming should have pike as well. I wonder if there is a more general theme of Asian armies maybe should have some pike options...

[Zoltan]

I thoroughly recommend the 2024 Netflix documentary Mysteries of the Terracotta Warriors. Lots of "historical re-enactment" sequences interspersed with the archeology and the story telling. Some of the pole arms shown seem to be very "pike length".

It's painstaking work but there has been some progress since I visited the buried army site forty years ago.