The equipment of the average citizen soldier

that or the city-state in question is quite small but prosperous in mountainous terrain, allowing a more elite corp of fighting men to sufficiently protect their territory.

I'm thinking ancient Greek states mostly.

It's completely fine, provided you remember that the average citizen soldier is not the same as the average person in society. Also if you can afford mail, then you are pretty much certain to be packing a sword of some sort as a sidearm.

As this user points out, in virtually every ancient or medieval society most soldiers were equipped at their own expense. Military service often was baed on your income bracket, owning a given amount of property obligated showing up to muster with a certain level of equipment.

Warfare is an expensive business, you need the gear, supplies and time for training. In more modern times the common grunt is stereotyped as very lower class but for most of the past they were economically better off than most people in society. Serfs, slaves and the poorer freemen may make up the bulk of the population but they are not the guys who do the fighting for the most part.

Ask the military-coinage slavery complex.

The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has the army and the treasury may conquer the earth.

Depends on what the indigenous weapons of hunters and urbanites are, and weather there is an extensive horse-riding culture.

If you have lots of sheep herding then slings would be part of it, whereas if citizens regularly participate in javelin throwing as part of sports competitions then use those. Lots of forests and poaching? Bowmen it is. Have lots of nascent workshops to make mechanical parts; then crossbows work well.

As for cost; I would imagine cloth armor with a few thin metal plates would be easy to swing. Looking at early Roman hastatii would be a good start for what a citizen could afford as gear.

You aren't getting longbows without the right wood: European yew.

What if you are Nippon?

How basic weapons are expensive for soldier? You think modern mercenaries use muskets and curvy swords?

The city-states of Germany were pretty rich until the discovery of America shifted the trade routes.

Fuck, that means settings where Europe doesn't exist can't have longbows, then.

Shit.

I think you mean italy.

The Indians invented longbows long before the Welsh did, and they didn't even use tree wood.

>Leather armor
Stop that. This is not even clips vs magazines autism but a completely false thing.

Swords are generally expensive, so a spear or axe would make more sense than a broadsword.

That is, unless the sword was being passed down the family, and/or the swords were recycled from previous owners and sold on the cheap (due to poorer quality).

>multiple grenades
I dunno man, are they really going to need more than one? They can always share the nades, and imagine the hookers and blow we could buy with that grenade budget.

And that's without getting into the vest. Soldiers need a helmet, sure, but are they really going to be getting shot in the chest that often? I hear that most deaths in combat happen because of artillery, so we probably aren't getting our money's worth. We might as well just spend that cash on something more valuable, like hookers and blow.

No, hardened leather armor is a real thing, it's just worse and far less common than the padded armor that real medieval soldiers wore.

That depends on the type of battle it is, if it's a common city siege, then disease would be the number one killer for most of human history.

Citizen soldiers mostly are either the Rich or the volunteers. Most poor people don't volunteer for shit that will pay bad and has a chance of death.

>I'd say this depends on on the era. Late middle ages/early renaissance swords had gotten a lot cheaper than in the early middle ages if I'm not mistaken. Military doctrine would also play a role I imagine.

Spears were not used over swords due to price, it was due to practicality. Spears simply made better war weapons.
In fact, warspears didn't use much less metal than swords, their blades were actually pretty large.

Depends on setting.

>Late middle ages/early renaissance swords had gotten a lot cheaper than in the early middle ages
Yes but especially in the late middleages swords tended to be sidearms. So instead of just a sword a soldier was more likely to buy a pike and a dagger, just because otherwise he would be useless in a formation.

The samurai class were considered to be citizens. everyone else was simply cattle to be managed/executed. armament for Samurai lords was obvious as the quintessential samurai image. the outfits would thus become less ostentatious as you went down the hierarchy. this of course ended when you reached the lowest tier of the samurai class where they simply own a sword and a kimono. and that's regardless of whether or not you consider Ronin to be a legitimate part of the samurai class.

basic gear for samurai: Katana, a preferred weapon (spear, Bow, etc.), maybe a cheap chest piece at the lowest.

basic peasant gear when conscripted: a spear (if it has a metal tip then their lord is being generous).

>b-but real history didn't have leather armor
No, you're pretty autistic.

First off, gambesons. Secondly, swords and chain are actually pretty expensive for the average peasant to consider. Swords are more difficult to make than axes or spears, and more difficult to use. There is a reason swords were seen as status symbols. Chain requires a significant amount of time and material to make.

Depending on the size or wealth of the army it could be reasonable, though I would replace the broad sword with a single handed straight or short sword. It would be cheaper and better for shield fighting.

Nah man. The bow was the main weapon of the samurai for the entire period they were actually in military service. They only started jacking off to their swords once they didn't have anything better to do

Dont listen to that idiot. There are plenty of woods that make quality bows. Rock maple, ash, ironwood, ect. Yew isnt even the best bow wood, that would be, osage orange.

Mail is more labor intensive than plate

So would
>gambeson
>kettle hat
>spear
or
>axe and shield
be more reasonable

soooo, if and when your city/state/kingdom/whatever gets invaded you just go, not my problem, and walk away?,,,

more or less.

Having both sets of weapons works as Well. Jack chains are good for cheap armour.

what is looting the less victorius
what is second hand
what is messer
what is inheritance

NEW swords were expensive, pre-owned swords on the other hand could be in a price class more suited to the needs of the less wealthy.

If you really want the peasant feel then have the spears be scythes that had the blades be turned 90 degrees up, so like spears but with a longer slashing end. Farmers could go to their local smith and have it done if they were revolting.

They were part of the Holy Roman Emperors domain once

>Farmers could go to their local smith and have it done if they were revolting.
You'd think they'd go and have a bath first, rather than going THAT far.

Spear and shield is best since you can block arrows and outrange people, but an axe is a good secondary weapon.

Farmers are always revolting though.

I came here to laugh at you

Yes, but now they're REBELLING!

You run into the woods with your family with your cattle and the stuff you can carry and you return afterwards.

Maybe your village got burned down.
Maybe the lord of the Village is dead and there is a new one.
Maybe nothing happened

But you sure as shit saved your life.

Most of the time an invasion happens Peasants aren´t slaughtered en masse just because. Modern Nationalism didn´t exist. You didn´t feel loyal to your country or king as people do in modern time.

>NEW swords were expensive, pre-owned swords on the other hand could be in a price class more suited to the needs of the less wealthy.
This depends on the where and the when.
Example; during the Migration Period when maille was the most advanced form of armor anyone had, swords WERE pretty pricy, but as time went on to what most people think of as the actual “Middle-Ages” in fantasy literature you’ll find that steelworking advanced enough (as well as basic changes in economics meaning there were more people with more money) that swords were no longer “nobles only” weapons. Really good quality swords indeed were pricy, but “more money means higher quality objects” is a general truism of human history applying to pretty much everything.
Even some periods that people think were all about swords being expensive (Japan’s feudal period) actually often had different causes.

tl;dr If your setting has full plate armor then your swords aren’t rich men’s weapons anymore.

the concept of defending your own predates the written word, not everyone was a self-serving coward before the invention of (nationalism and propaganda), as you so elegantly put it,

Standing up to a couple of armed knights as a poor farmer is suicidal, not brave.

I always wondered why the HRE didn't just take Denmark, if only for map-painting purposes.

You're right, but if I can play the devil's advocate that's probably not what that guy meant. If you're some guy living in Toulouse and the English are besieging your city, of course you're going to grab a pointy stick and defend your city. You however cannot afford enough fucks to care about whatever your king is doing in Flanders. You feel nothing in common with the folks living there, other than the fact that you serve the same king. Nationalism changed that, and in the 19th century something that happened in a postage stamped meme region in the North-East of France became the affair of every citizen. So to go back to your post that guy responded to...

>soooo, if and when your city/state/kingdom/whatever gets invaded you just go, not my problem, and walk away?
From the perspective of a medieval peasant:
>City
Nah mate, that's where all my shit is and where my friends and family live.
>"State"/kingdom
Lol, who cares? That's the affair of the kings and the nobles. I'm just here tending to my fields/running my shop.

The resurrect-o-nomitron (Sims) is supposed to let me bargain for the souls of the dead. What kind of bribe would be appropriate for the soul of a demigod (Maui from Moana)?

Yeah and when you stand up to a raiding patrol with your Peasants bro´s the soldiers will either A: rek your shit and burn everything down because now they are angry
B: Get help immediately or get help after you saw them off the first time

So either you get fucked immediately or you will get fucked harder by their re-enforcements.

If they are in a good mood soldier might just take a few sheep and leeve Or even pay for it if they are in a really good mood.
. If you resist your whole village will get torched.

cowardice is the way of the future, only the cowards will survive and prosper, never fight if you do not outnumber the enemy 10-1 , the meek shall inherit, this sums it up well?

Maybe a giant enchanted weapon that gives you shapeshifting powers?

Cowardice is universal, from Homer to the Modern day.

A more likely weapon combo would be spear and a small hand weapon like a knife or hatchet. Just giving the untrained mooks a longer spear so they can poke from farther away is more effective than trying to train them to fight with spear and shield.

>only the cowards will survive and prosper
But will they reproduce? There's a good reason why men are generally more aggressive and more self-sacrificial: evolutionary pressure. The coward runs to live another day, but he will not fuck. The woman on the other hand revels in violence among men, as it's the best guarantee that she gets to fuck a winner.

I know this will never happen because it hurts precious feefees, but I'd really like to see some research delve deeper into this hypothesis on human reproduction. For example, are women aroused by male-on-male violence? I can imagine women borderline creaming themselves during a particularly bloody boxing match for example, especially if they know the men involved. It would make perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective.

it is in mans nature to be cowardly, overcoming nature is what makes a man great, going with the flow is what makes a man mediocre

gladiators were sex symbols for a reason

I've had him demand a weapon of equal power to Maui's hook. Because of the drawback I took, giving him my weapon would cause me to lose all my powers or the remainder of the jump, which sounds like a sufficiently cruel deal. Thanks!

If you allready have a wife, and you manage to keep her safe from harm in the woods, there is a much bigger chance that you will have another child then when you go and fight heavily armed riders only armed with an ax.

Your wife won't leave you because that's heavily frowned upon in pre-modern society. If you kept her safe she will like that even if you did not fight anybody for it.

One grenade is good. More is better. If you have situations where you need a grenade (building or trench clearing comes to mind) you're likely going to be in that situation several times.

The big change with swords happened all the way back in the 10thC, with the shift from expensive and tedious pattern welding to making swords froma single bar of metal. This made swords far cheaper and easier to make, and by the 12th/13thC swords were well within the reach of any freeman.

During the period where pattern welding was the only way to make long blades, mail was far more expensive than swords- one French source from the 8thC says that a mailcoat cost 20 times more than a sword. Wargear was really expensive, which is one reason why fighters tended to be well off.

Untrained mooks wouldn't be fighting at all. They would be an expensive liability and arming the proles is a threat to the social order. There is no mass conscription, armies are warrior nobles and their retinues or well-equipped militia raised from merchants and freeholders who train regularly. You want motivated and skilled troops with good kit, not wasting lots of money on yokels who will get slaughtered, rout or revolt when they could be working the fields. Look at virtually every medieval peasants revolt (Hussites excluded) to see what happens when plucky peasants meet an actual army.

>If you allready have a wife
That presupposes certain institutions with enforced monogamy, a structure that favors men more than it favors women. In pre-modern societies without formalized marriages and codes associated, in times of war or in societies where women can easily divorce men this won't help you at all. You know for example Islam has a specific revelation declaring it's totally okay to fuck another man's wife if and only if it's a prisoner of war, right? And something tells me these women didn't exactly mind it. Women love a winner, to the point where the loser is barely even human to them.

If you want more recent examples: look at all the women willing to fuck Nazi's in Europe, or all the Japanese women hopping on American dick after WW2. Who cares that these foreign invaders shot their husbands and sons just a few weeks ago, they're winners today so they get the pussy.

The architects behind "oppressive" patriarchal systems know this and create stability precisely by "oppressing" women and effectively locking up their destructive tendencies. That's the tragedy of the human condition: our hardwired instincts presuppose a state of being we overcame thousands of years ago.

best, answer, ever, i tip my hat at you in an approving manner good user

>Wargear was really expensive, which is one reason why fighters tended to be well off.
I remember once reading that “war was a rich man’s game, and when it was mostly rich men playing it they were all so much more civil with each other”.
Basically a dry comment on how chivalry and ransom-taking ended when middle-class mercenaries and infantry support became more and more important, because rich people didn’t give a fuck what happened to the “hired help.”

I’m pretty sure that’s just a nostalgic look at things and that really it was changing technology and tactics that altered chivalric practices, but the quote always amused me.

Real question; when did conscription actually become common then? Was it ever common?

Shouldn't you be calling them females? That's what you guys usually do.

Basically, when proper flintlock muskets started getting used by everyone. Armor, always the single priciest part of a soldier’s kit, became basically useless. All you needed was a gun and ammo, which took MAYBE a few months to train a guy to use if you were super lazy and didn’t drill your armies professionally like Britain or Prussia did.
Warfare turned into mass-fire battles of attrition, flanking, and enfilade in an attempt to basically drown your enemy in bullets, leading to the need for tremendous amounts of manpower to tip the scales, thus the common usage of conscription.

That said, the best armies actually were mostly still volunteer ones.

do they self-identify as female?

do not be so quick to label people you have never met, it could possibly hurt their feelings

Don’t feed the trolls you fucking moron.

You'd run but yeah, most peasants would leg it and maybe return when the dust settled. They wouldn't really care which side won either, and the victor wouldn't care too much about them.

So what you're saying is we should issue grenades only to units that will likely find themselves in those situations, thus having enough grenades while also having the money for our crack! Genius.

Most of the women I've met find violent men to be Meatheads at best and dangerous/scary at worst. Most people just want stability, the ability to provide in hard times and emotional intelligence. The whole idea of fighting= impressed women is pretty much a male fantasy.

But feel free to call me a pussy nu-male liberal cuck if you need to. Whatever helps you live with the insecurity

You're forgetting the hooker budget too. You need something to do all that coke off of.

High and Late Medieval warfare is a bit hard to classify. On the one hand, excellent armour (especially in the 12/13thC before more effective tin openers came into use) meant that it was quite hard to actually kill or disable enemies quickly. Chivalry stressed the importance of honourable conduct towards defeated enemies, which was also good financial sense given the value of ransoms. These factors combined to make warfare a lot safer, especially for the wealthy and for over a century tournaments were fought with sharp weapons aslittle more than pre-arranged private battles. Some chronicles even report actual battles being suspended because knights are actually getting killed and this is going too far. This is the extreme end of the trend but does show a belief in a kind of sanitised warfare. So in one sense it was a civilised if bloody game between gentlemen and their help (who were middle class types and thus fairly respectable).

On the other hand, the building block of strategy revolved around the raiding and despoiling of your opponents lands. Economic warfare and eroding a lord's legitimacy by showing he could not protect his people was accomplished by harrying said people with fire and sword. Violence against civilians was the basis of warfare, punctuated with skirmishes, sieges and the very rare pitched battle between armies. This is all very well for well-equipped knight's who can expect good treatment but less appealing for the ordinary serf whose home and livelihood went up in smoke everytime his liege got into a squabble.

Spear, Sheild, Leather Armour and an open faced Helm is about what you could realistically expect for most common foot infantry.

Pike, Dagger/Short Sword, Sheild, Chainmail and open faced helm if they are drilled.

You're right, how could I forget about that? I must be doing too much cocaine. Or not enough cocaine.

>what is cuir bouilli
>what is japanese armor
>what are leather buffcoats

this

moron

As others have said, FUCKING CONTEXT? Since you went with full helm and maille as an example of average, I'm assuming high medieval. The nations being city-states doesn't give much useful information.

Seriously, it unironically depends on the setting.

If iron is abundant and their industry is great, sure, maille over gambeson is reasonable. If not, you'll still want gambesons. Gambesons do require less manpower, but also require more farmland for the flax.

Spears are overwhelmingly the primary weapon of choice for rank and file soldiers, swords, maces, or hatchets being a sidearm. Spear-like farm equipment even more so, if those soldiers were levied from peasants.

Longbows required fewer man-hours and expertise to make, and can be made only from materials found in a forest, but require higher strength overall. Crossbows require a greater variety of resources, but the average peasant could be trained in its use w/o needing much strength.

Full helms require a lot of man-hours, expertise, and resources. Maille is easy, since you can divide the task among a bunch of apprentices and kick out material quickly. Helmets require solid sheets of metal, either hammered into shape as a large piece or riveted together.

Answer questions about your society, like how much farmland it has, if it has copses for bows, how much iron it has, how many smiths it has, how the army is raised.

"Peasant" can mean many things, from an unfree serf who is bound to the land and only a little better than a slave, to yeomen who may employ many serfs of their own, and who are are financially indistinguishable from the lower nobility. Landed peasants (far more common than is generally believed) would have been expected to possess arms and be reasonably well-trained in their use. And they would have had nearly as strong of an incentive to fight as the nobility... unless they thought they could get a better deal under a different lord.

Peasant militias were common in almost all pre-modern societies, and were of a much higher quality than the stereotypical pitchfork-rabble.

Yeah, that stuff you posted is mostly steel.

I was speaking mostly from the soldier’s POV, not the noncombatant’s POV.
Speaking generally, full-scale war has always fucking sucked more for people caught up in it who weren’t fighting in it directly.

..as for OP's question, there really shouldn't be such a thing as "average" here, since they wouldn't be using standardized state-issued arms. Some would be very well equipped, some reasonably so, some poorly equipped, all depending on their status. Those with little stake in the society would most likely not be involved in fighting, but perhaps utilized in some support role. Though you asked about "citizens," which would most likely not include these people.

>Maille is easy, since you can divide the task among a bunch of apprentices and kick out material quickly
Drivel. Mail was incredibly expensive and required a skilled craftsman to draw the wire, putting the links together at the end was a sliver of the work needed to make a hauberk. It needed good quality iron and a month or more to make.

True, but the difference here that rather than being collateral damage medieval noncombatants were actively targeted in preference to engaging opposing forces.

What really matters is if the citizens are forced to train with the longbow their whole lives. The longbow is not a weapon you can learn to use after a week or two of basic training. It is a big mean son of a bitch that requires a literally spine-deforming amount of muscle.

It was not 'meant' to be hard to use, its invention just predated (by quite a bit) the 'point and click' interface of a crossbow.

well you've clearly never tried to make mail

Generalizeed conscription? French revolution.

I've made maille. My dad is an enthusiast, and owns a couple very antique pieces. It is true that the better the iron quality, the better the result. However, brittleness is something that would get worked out enough during the wire-making process that by the time you were making rings, you were unlikely to get pieces breaking.

Especially in comparison to plate, maille was faster and easier to make, especially with help.

Making the wire was done in a couple ways, and while both were intense, neither were particularly complicated. One was slitting the wire off of a flat plate, which tended to result in rings that have distinct edges, often with a triangular cross-sections. The other was drawing a billet through a drawplate. Sometimes slit wire was drawn through a plate. It is not difficult to teach, but it is strenuous to perform. It's exactly the right kind of work to have two or three less experienced guys to do at once, as long as one has the material.

Stitching the links together is the easy part, and also the most time consuming. It's easily split up into tasks for several people. The joints of a hauberk might be done by the master, or by a more experienced apprentice, but the vast bulk of it was easily distributed. Riveting was the bitch that required the most experience. That's something which the master should handle, or very experienced trainees. Even then, that's something which _can_ be done on separate parts of the piece by multiple people simultaneously.

If one person was working on the piece, maybe with an assistant, then yeah, it'd take a while. There would be diminishing returns on increasing the number of hands on it, but it would go faster with more people.

While it is certainly likely that smiths in the employ of someone needing arms would be constantly producing suits, it is plausible that a kingdom with an appropriate industry would have a group of smiths and apprentices working simultaneously to make new maille.

...

where's the steel there faggot

Common folk are far more likely to have weapons that can do things besides murder and armor that isn't made of metal. Because metal is expensive.

Brigandine vest, spear or axe, full helm, oval shield. Most archers likely using self bows.

Gambeson is the best option for low cost peasant armor