The (Eventual) Crossbow DLC

The title says it all. Eventually, crossbows, in all their glory, will be added. But, the question, and topic, is with their implantation, will we also have pavises? (All games call these, ‘tower shields.’)

Now with crossbows, we know that a bow in-game should take, at most, six seconds to nock, draw, and loose (the amount of time it takes an English longbowman to loose, making ten arrows a minute) but a crossbow takes longer to reload, nock, and loose (anywhere between ten seconds on weak crossbows using your hands, all the way up to thirty seconds with a windlass that can rip through plate armour like butter) Thing is, how can a crossbowman defend himself? Likewise, an archer? Both are basically fucked in close combat, and ranged takes a few seconds to ready another shot.

The answer is a pavise. A giant man-sized shield that makes it impossible to be hit while behind, but there it comes as a drawback. Pavises are stationary, and once placed, you’d kinda be stuck since pulling it up and moving it would take both hands.

This of course is no problem if you’re doing Prizbyslavitz, Vranik, or Siege. There being an archer is viable-ish. It’s the rest of the game that becomes a concern. How can a crossbow be viable if it takes thirty seconds of uninterrupted action to get ready for the next shot? Well, you’d have a pavise of course. But, say you are alone at a Cuman or bandit camp. Now it becomes more useless then throwing mud at a castle wall in an attempt to break it down.

So the main question of this topic is: When the crossbow DLC drops, will it have pavises or no? Should it have pavises?

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It would be an interesting mechanic…essentially, you’d be placing a stationary landscape object from your inventory, kind of like the bird traps, or how people would like a packable bedroll.

But, I doubt they would implement windlass crossbows, or even ones that use a goats-foot lever. We’ll likely either get hand-cocked ones, or (fingers crossed here) ones spanned with the use of a hook on your belt. A step up in power from most of the bows in the game, and no stamina required after the crossbow is loaded, with a tradeoff in an additional 30-40% load time.

Anyway, if the official DLC doesn’t include pavises, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a mod created to fill the gap.

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