What do you think about Pollaxe as a standard weapon for soldiers...

Not for line troops expecting to engage in melee on a regular basis. A pollaxe needs room to swing and precludes the use of a shield, and thanks to the greater weight is more awkward to thrust with or use one-handed than a spear. Lack of a shield lends more value to armor, increasing the cost of equipping each man, which in turn encourages a higher level of training to ensure they don't simply get dogpiled and stabbed in the eyeslit. This means casualties are more costly.

Overall less than ideal for the basis of formation fighting, although not unworkable. The weapon is more suited for use by a subdivision supporting the primary force, which would bear a lighter, more wieldy weapon in conjunction with a shield.

no kurwa, ty kozojeb

>implying mercenary hoplite groups werent a thing throughout Greece and Turkey

The pollaxe was a knightly duelling weapon, it's too short to be of any use in formation and its techniques boil down to "poke them with the stud on the butt of the pole for a bit until you find an opening to swing the hammer bit real wide"

Which is exactly why more useful variations like the halberd exist.

muh spear and sheild

Fucking pointless against powder, while plate cuirass deflects early shot and even in formation a poleaxe can rip the shield out of your opponents hand or trip them while deflecting longer pikes.

I will grant you it's more expensive to arm a group of men with that kind of gear but professional soldiers and mercenaries can afford it.

...

>Fucking pointless against powder

Worked for the Zulus

Admittedly that comes down to the time period. Iirc it wasn't uncommon for lower class german mercenaries to gripe about shitplate once munitions armor was the norm, and once you start moving from Ren. to Pike and Shotte, cuirass and helmet was nearly standard issue.

In the 15th going into the 16th century you start seeing fewer and fewer shields in general use, even with line infantry. Textile armor is much more effective than people give it credit for and combined with jack-chains or a few pieces of piecemeal plate, it's damned effective armor making larger shields less useful in general.

The proliferation of the bill in england and the multifunction polearms through all of europe alongside larger swords is a fair indicator of the changing tide of arms vs. armor as time went on.

You also have to consider that as time went on technology and manufacturing methods improved. An imported Carolingian sword in Scandinavia in the migratory period would have been worth a fortune, maybe more than an entire village.

By the 13th century a common footman could afford a XIV as a sidearm after saving some spare pay for a few weeks or months depending on how frugal they were.
By the time landsknechts became popular, they almost entirely carried a katzbalger as a sidearm and messers were common on german civilian's belts with rapier and buckler being common further west on civvies.

TL:DR; all comes down to time period knigga.

In For Honor, all the player classes are like a solid two feet taller than normal people. This one guy in particular is also probably the tallest character. He's probably like ten feet tall.

youtube.com/watch?v=lM9-1BTE0t8

Zulus had their own firearms and the wooden/hide sheilds played almost no role in their victories as much as positioning and tactical expertise.

The British were also not using armor anymore because of said modern firearms.

Zulu shields are parrying implements or meant to catch and slow thrown weapons. They are not bulletproof in the slightest.

I'm trying to think of exactly what armaments were used by various factions in my homebrew setting. It's sort of a weird anachronistic time where one faction really took to the early muzzle-loading firearm and when a giant war broke out, tercios and firing lines swiftly became musket style trench warfare. Mages were used to heal or protect at times, and there were no machine guns per se, but I want it to be plausible for such engagements to also include heavy cav and dragoons.

I figure the typical soldier on one side was DEFINATELY armed with a musket and bayonet as their primary, with the opposing side starting off with more traditional mixxed units then waning toward wholly long-arm based fighting as the war dragged on.

God that game is so retarded, and so are the devs.

If you're not making a historical setting, who cares? They look cool: go with it.

I thought poleaxe was the umbrella term for weapons that are poles with axes on them, akin to "sword" not describing any one particular design.

I don't think anyone cares aside from nerds. The setting is just rule of cool.

Poleaxe is a specific weapon

No. See:
Poleaxes aren't what most would actually call a polearm, they're two-handed axes with a rear hammerhead, and often a spike affixed to the top. They're derived from Pollaxes, which are weapons used for slaughtering cattle.

a pollaxe is a good tool if your army is conducting a census

I have a lot more jokes about pollaxe I heard from my uncle if you want to hear

Why not pikes?

Why just a pike?
Why not strap a dagger at the end perpendicular to it?

>TL:DR; all comes down to time period knigga.
So, what you're saying, is that it depends on the setting?

ITT the sounds of Gary Gygax's Ghost furiously masturbating over a Glaive-Guisarme-Fauchard-Bardiche.

Drowning out the sounds of all of use doing the exact same thing.

Because I have a massive hard on for Swiss pike and European mercenary companies, and If I was going to draw influences from an Asiatic culture I'd pull from the one I actually care about and go for kick ass warships and an anti infantry artillery piece.

Nah, it's still Europe but at different times.

All Depends On The Edition.

>hoplites
>drafted

nigga get your ass outta here before the Veeky Forums crew comes to smash yo ass

standard weapons for foot soldiers throughout history:
>spears
>pikes (sometimes)
>some other shit stuck to pole
>guns

If by "poleaxe" you mean "polearm with both a thrusting point and a heavy hacking blade, with a dash of hook," the billhooks widely used by late Medieval English infantry would fit the bill.

If you mean the specialized weapon for heavily armored targets which the name specifically refers to, there really wouldn't be much point. A poleaxe generally had a shorter haft than most polearms, usually coming out to a bit shorter than the wielder. With massed infantry, longer reach has a habit of winning out; this is why the Macedonian phalanx conquered from Greece to the Indus. Even the Roman Republic only reliably beat the Greek successors in open combat when they could use terrain to break up the phalanxes' formation.

Tell them that the enemy stole the potato and vodka rations.

If you mean pollaxe as in the two handed pole arm comprising an axe or hammer head, a spike of some kind, a spear on the head end and a ferrule of some sort at the bottom, that's the kind of weapon you'd find in the hands of people who fought as individuals en masse, rather than in formation.

Typically it'd shake out that way because of the flows of social currency underpinning warfare in that time and place, i.e. individuals at or near the top of a pyramidal hierarchy fighting to obtain personal glory and ransom their peer opponents, typically leading vassals and men at arms and their peonry into battle. Everyone's wearing what they can afford to buy for themselves or what their liege has bought for them, force concentration is based on the organisational ability of the constable/marshal/lord of the privy chamber/grand high poobah to get everyone's retinues together, and on the people below him to pull together good retinues/levies when called upon. Pollaxes got so popular during the 100 Years War, for example, that contemporary depictions of martial history going back to Alexander the Great place pollaxes in his hands and in the hands of his Companions. Lots of regal and heroic associations (see Geoffroi de Charney)

In short, blokes running at each other with the expectation that they'll be fighting people arrayed like them i.e. in iron or steel plate harness they bought or had bought for them. Good, very good in fact, for engaging a 15th century milites in harnischfechten when used by someone who's been raised from 7 to be a warrior in every art of melee combat in a society frequently at war and very comfortable with violence.

Not much chop as a formation weapon, as used by the large and tightly controlled armies of the very best of Antiquity. Sarrisae/Pikes/Spears etc are far superior if you've got a bunch of drilled and formatted blokes who need to move as one in order to get shit done.

Pollaxes are for the heavy mob, the flash gits, the knight

Technically it was considerably more versatile than you suggest, and used for more than duelling. It was a powerful weapon against men at arms and milities, which is why they used it for as long as they did when fighting on foot.

The halberd isn't necessarily more or less useful in a vacuum, it just got used for longer because it worked with pike and shot formations (and also some historical halbers have spiked hammers and the converse exists; modern taxonomies have the singular issue of applying current ideas of standardization to early modern, er, lack of it. Think type, not specific model)

Mercenary archers used to have a variant of it, so yes

Spears are common weapons for light infantry and poorer regiments.
Halberds are versatile weapons commonly found in the hands of elites, or infantry that may have to fight knights.
Pollaxes are the most common weapons used to fight armored infantry, but are less effective than spears against lighter infantry.

And pikes have a very important place in large scale organized conflict as their range makes them very good offensively, and their disadvantages can be mitigated in the context of a complete army with supporting forces.

All of these should be common primary weapons for infantry and soldiers.

>spears
>pikes (sometimes)
>some other shit stuck to pole
>guns (mostly used as a spear)
>guns

FTFY

They most certainly are a pole arm.

They're a type, rather than an exact configuration of components with a set length, or weight, or construction, but they're a pole arm. On account of being an armed pole.

I mean if a pollaxe isn't a pole arm then the spears used by French milites at Agincourt and Crecy weren't, because they aren't much longer.

Also the spellings are interchangeable; pollaxe and poleaxe and pole axe all mean roughly the same type of thing. Modern standardisation is vastly, hugely more rigorous than that applied to basically everything ever in history but specifically in our case 13-16th Century Europe.

Poleaxes, especially well-made, were about as expensive as high-quality swords, at least in the late middle-ages. Meaning they were mainly reserved for members of the nobility/knights and not your basic footman/infantry grunt.

Other less elaborate polearms, like pikes, halberds, partisans, billhooks etc. were more common in the hands of commoners.

Too expensive, requires extensive training, really bad in tight formations. Yeah, leave it to champions and elite and give me back my spears and pikes.

This

see also: