My WOTR Forces So Far...

[coopman827]

Since Thanksgiving I have spent a lot of my spare time painting on my WOTR Perry plastic infantry.  I have finished up 60 archers, 54 billmen and 36 foot knights in a little over a month's time.  That's really good production for me. I haven't painted any 28mm figures in years, preferring 15mm for most of the periods that I game.  I'd appreciate some comments on my force composition.  I've read thru the various WOTR threads here and I gather that its difficult to know for a fact what the percentages of each troop type in the armies actually were.  My goal is to field reasonable/realistic forces for each army.  The above totals would give me 5 archer units for each side, 3 billmen units for each side, and 2 foot knight units for each side.  Does this seem reasonable?  Thanks for any comments.
Clay       

[Agent Brown]

Probably too high on the dismounted men-at-arms. Very roughly, archers should be at least 50%, bills 40% and MAA 10%. I would perhaps take one unit of MAA and spread them amongst the bills, giving you four bills a side and one MAA.
But as we have almost nothing to go on except educated guess-work I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[MerlintheMad]

Imho, your current mix is perfectly reasonable, at the "high end" for MAA. "Billmen" is more of a catch phrase, to most students, I'm discovering. How literal the unified existence and deployment of "billmen" ever was remains arguable. And if so, when or at what point were "billmen" organized as such? My theory is that the increased presence of "bills" (guisarms of all variants) shows the decreased use of the warbow. I've even referred to "billmen" as "failed archers", but that is probably an extreme pov. No doubt, some archers opted for the hand weapon over the missile weapon, and it was permissible. So having a lot of "billmen" could be seen as mostly men who used to muster with the longbow (if not the warbow, i.e. the most powerful draw weight weapons) but no longer do so. That would make your "archer" percentage larger. I understand that the term "archer" is applied even to men who appear on the muster rolls without bows and arrows. Perhaps someone here can point us to a source for that snippet from my memory?...

[Captain Blood]

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=59060.0

A lot of knowledge and discussion poured into that thread on precisely this topic. If you can't find the answer there (which you probably won't, because the general consensus is 'nobody knows for sure' / 'there is no right answer') then you probably won't find it anywhere 

Feel free to add any fresh knowledge or insights to the sticky thread though. Would like to keep the learned discussion on this subject all in one place if possible. Thanks