Editing Spear (section)

== Spears in Warfare after the agricultural revolution ==
[[image:Greek_Hoplites.jpg|thumb|300px|left|A Group of Greek Hoplites demonstrating the phalanx formation.]]
First off, a general fact. Spears are designed to do one thing: poking the enemy to death. They do this very well, but they are pretty poor at other things. If they run at you, or you run at them (or better still, are on a horse running at them) that momentum makes the poking all the more effective. Two-handed spears can be longer, up to 7 meters and like a Pokémon get a new name, '''Pikes.''' One-handed spears leave the other free to hold a shield for better protection (granted, there certainly were ancient example of pikemen also holding shields, though they certainly weren't actively blocking with them and were just worn while hoping for attacks might end up into them).

In melee combat on foot spears have one big advantage as far as weapons go: reach. With a spear you can attack your enemy from further away than you could if you had an axe or sword. Your blade, after all, is at the end of a shaft of wood at least a meter and a half long. However, if your enemy should get past the point of your spear and has a sword, mace, or axe, you are at a big disadvantage and are generally screwed. The best way around this fact is to gather up a bunch of spearmen and stand shoulder to shoulder, with more men behind you in case you miss. Thanks to the length of the spear and the simplicity of its combat use (stabbing) it was possible for those in the back ranks to fight over the shoulders of the guys in front of them. These formations can be very resistant to cavalry charges since one: you can stab the guy off his horse. Two, horses' momentum is working against him, increasing the strength of the stab the faster he rides towards you. And three, horses often balk and shy away from charging headlong into spears killing the momentum of their charge and of the horses behind them. A major downside of spears is their cumbersomeness. Due to their length, spears work very well in narrow avenues, but are impossible to wield at very close quarters. That's why elite or well equipped spearmen usually carried short swords or daggers for when enemies come really close or their spear broke in the middle of battle (being made of mostly wood they tended to do this quite often).

Another important fact about spears is that they are dirt cheap and easy to train with. A perfectly adequate steel tipped spear could be made by a village blacksmith or farrier in about three hours. [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|A good sword]] would take a whole lot longer to forge, more iron and fuel to heat, and generally require a more skilled smith. If you want to raise a bunch of conscripts or [[militia]] and can't/don't want to pay a lot of money training and equipping them, or you want it done fast; a spear is your go-to weapon. They are so ubiquitous in ancient warfare that in China, as the Qiang, it is called the "King of Weapons" in the classical weapons quartet (the others being the Jian sword, Gùn staff, and the Dao sabre).

Unlike with swords, axes or bows, spear wielders benefit the most not from the personal skill, but from discipline, as their strength is usually in formations that prevent their foes from coming dangerously close. While technically spears are a hard counter to cavalry, medieval knights [[rape|utterly curb-stomped]] undisciplined spear-armed militiamen, while similarly armed but heavily-drilled Italian and Swiss mercenaries with pikes [[anal circumference|royally buttfucked]] any heavy cavalry stupid enough to charge them... from the front. That is of course the other problem with spears: because they work best in tight formations, outflanking and hitting the side of the formation is often a slaughter as the tightly packed men can't turn well to adjust to the new threat on their side. Alexander solved this by putting lighter troops on the flank, later the Europeans would use hand gunners to help repel charges. Swiss, however, solved this problem completely by training the everloving shit out of their soldiers so their pikemen blocks could switch direction in a matter of seconds, turning former flanks into new front and vice versa, all while RUNNING at the enemy in perfect formation (something no other spearmen in history had ever done before, though the descendants of [[Vikings|these nutters]] would later adopt the idea). They were so OP at their time, other nations ''waged wars'' for the right to hire them and in fact the modern Swiss constitution makes it outright illegal for the Swiss to serve as soldiers for other nations, with ONE exception: the Swiss Guard who have been guarding the Pope ever since 1506, yes, over 500 years, making them one of the, if not the, longest serving military units in history.

Spears were also perfectly functional naval weapons used by marines. Two vessels that came alongside for boarding actions would often have teams of fighters as dedicated spearmen to stop enemy soldiers coming on board by jumping between ships and clear spaces on the opposing vessel for their own swordsmen to board themselves.

Spears are often portrayed as being used overhand, meaning that if you point your fist outwards the tip is pointing down. While this may sound like a bad idea, as it creates an incredibly unwieldy angle to use your weapon at, limits your thrusting strength and does not allow you to stab as far as an underhand grip, it does allow to stab over your shield and this style of spear use was widely practiced by the Greek Hoplites. (as the picture above shows). This is incorrect and a common misconception, spears, unless they were Macedonian sarissas, were held in phalanx formation at around belly height, underhand. As a nice trick it also doubles as throwing stance (so you can launch your spear in surprise attack without telling it to your opponent with a sudden stance-change). Speaking of which:

===Spears at Long Range===
So far this has all been about spears as melee weapons. Spears can also be thrown, though for best results you usually need specialized spears. Thrown spears (or '''Javelins''') are typically shorter and lighter than melee spears, but heavier than arrows. They don't have the same speed or range, but since they are heavier they can make quite an impact. Regular one-handed spears while not designed for it, could be thrown too, though at far less distances, and throwing your main close combat weapon at enemy is usually a bad idea, unless he retreats or is a giant hulking elephant you don't want to face in melee.

Notable users of throwing-spears were Roman legionnaires, whose ''pila'' were specifically engineered to sink into a shield, bend at the long, flexible barbed tip to make removal just about impossible, and then detach from their handles. This served the three-fold purpose of making the ''pilum'' unusable for the enemies thus attacked, ruining any shields they happened to sink into, and being nearly impossible to treat without heavy surgery off the field, and these were the days before penicillin, meaning you were more likely to die of infection even if the surgery went well. For these reasons Pila were effective at inflicting significant losses even on armored opponents.

Other famous throwing spear users were the Aztecs who used the ancient atlatl to throw stone-tipped spears with enough force to penetrate Spanish steel mail or brigandine armor. There is some evidence that Ice Age humans who first developed atalatls in the region could use them to penetrate into the armoured hides of glyptodonts (basically really big armadillos), resulting in an extinction overkill event for the large mammals. The people of the Iberian peninsula were also famous historically for the use of javelins, and even kept using them from horseback to some degree while absolutely everyone else was shooting guns while mounted instead. Native Americans also used these. Ancient Greeks and Romans had leather straps called an amentum as a similar throwing device. Many throughout history experimented with better ways to throw spears.