but real one-on-one combat against a lone pikeman would prove pikes stupid weapons to bring to a knife fight.
Pikes were surprisingly effective in one on one combat.
Notwithstanding professional European mercenaries or Chinese/English martial artists. In a one on one fight, a good trained Pikeman would win.
They were the weapons that won wars until guns got big. Their medieval image as the conscript's weapon is more or less correct, but the Pike itself was by no means ineffective. It was rather vulnerable to cavalry and archer/crossbow fire; but not by fault of the Pike, but the people holding them. Then renaissance comes along and everyone's a professional.
The advent of this rigorous organisation, training and effective orders meant that pike blocks could now advance quickly in looser formations, close up to face off cavalry and change facing directions.
And when they fought each other, everyone died.
I2amroy is also right in that any professional pikeman or soldier whose general gave the slightest care about keeping alive would have a backup weapon. Pikemen were often, however, conscripted peasants basically only given a sharpened log and told to wave the pointy end at the bad guys and hope you don't get killed for the sole purpose of creating a wood-and-meat shield between enemy cavalry and actually valuable units like crossbowmen. Their secondary tactic for when they were caught at close quarters was to hope someone nearby died bloodily enough for them to smear it all over them and play dead.
Generals who understood the value of Pikemen didn't care for their backup weapon. They carried shortswords for the most part, with some like the Landsknechts even employing good use of men wielding Zweihanders to fight within their own Pike blocks. But what was always doing the killing was the Pike. This also stands true to most armies across the world when they used spearmen too. A good general would care more about their training.
A well trained block of pikemen was more useful than a well trained block of swordsmen. The soldiers who were most likely in any army to be peasant conscripts were the archers, not the pikemen.
Pikemen at their peak were by far anything but meat shields; they were the core of the army that was capable of facing off everything. If an enemy unit like heavily armed infantry managed to get beneath and through their Pikes, their short swords were more or less useless; their formation would break, enemy units would overpower them and they would die against their better equipped foe. This was the case historically across the world.
If we are going to start seriously mechanically penalizing someone holding a 14-foot pole, it will mean that they will be completely unable to react to something simple like sidestepping around someone. On the other hand, a 14-foot reach is basically enough to reach 2 or even 3 tiles if you reach, considering that we now have tentative 2x2x3 meter tiles. (Each tile being roughly 6.67 feet wide or long, and 10 feet tall.) That would make the whole notion of a "first strike" pretty real, and basically play out like reach weapons from D&D.
I would say that Pikes would be a lot like the armour user skill; an inversely proportional value between the skill and the ease of use of the weapon would be good.
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Topic: Study on the effectiveness of Knives vs Swords (Read 6208 times)