The Spear -- worth it?

If you search the forums there's been plenty of talk about spears.  General answer is that Spears are fine, you just need to build units that take advantage of their perks.  The Spear's Reach is generally less valuable in design than the Armor Bypass.

In my designs they Spears are used with Shock Troops.  Mounted with High Initiative.  Done right, spears unit can wipe half of the opposing forces before the AI even gets to take its turn.

Axe and spear units can use the Rush (from a men faction) ability to position themselves for Cleve and Impale.  Shield Bash by other units can also be used to position enemy units.

Thank you. I'd not paid attention to penetration, nor thought of shield bash manipulation. I stand correctedand educated

I would actually counter that a good portion of the boards think that clubs are OP. I wouldn't say that spears are bottom of the barrel, but there is concern about weapon imbalance.

I have my preferences (in order: swords, axes, spears, clubs). I don't think any are overpowered, and I'm thrilled they really feel different. But I know one poster in another thread was adamant that clubs are overpowered and axes suck. Here's why I disagree:

Axes can often get two or three attacks with cleave, they usually get their attack in first (over clubs), and they don't lose their next turn when they cleave. I'm not going to insist axes are necessarily better than clubs, but I definitely prefer them.

Perhaps the weapons aren't perfectly balanced, but they are very close IMHO. The one exception (again IMHO) is non-ranged staves. I've never had a use for them. (If I'm missing something about them, please enlighten me!)

Max Damage is a * a / (a + d) which makes increasing attack linearly increase damage output while decreasing defense hyperbolically increase damage output.

Even if you put a 2/3 multiplier on defense, higher attack is preferred. For clubs vs spears (5 vs 6) you need 30 armor before spears do more damage.

For mace vs boar spear (14 v 9) it never intersects, spears do less damage even against armor. I didn't bother doing the math for higher tier weapons but I suspect something similar.

Armor Penetration is kinda useless.

Clubs are fine, excepting the Bash portion, which is what's considered a bit OP.  When junk city defenders can One-Shot at will there's a problem.

The problem is that 33% is too low. Bash doubles the attack value which approximately halves the value of the armor. Besides it performs two of these attacks in the same turn. So it's effectively 50% armor penetration + a double strike, and also performs both of these before the defender gets to counter attack, reducing or eliminating the counterattack nearly as well as spears do.

Abilities never cause a counterattack.  Bash is an ability, not a regular attack, so there is no retaliation at all.  So when bashing, a club has the no retaliation ability of a spear.

I was of the opinion that weapon balance was fine. Then this last game a city militia one-shot my sovereign!

Agree magic weapon glass city militia are a bit silly. They should have a mix of best non-magic weapon and patches of 2nd best armor IMO. Forteress should also have "regulars" are a bit higher level, perhaps 2*city level.

@StevenAus: You are right. I forgot that.

I have found club units to be much more effective than spears for trained units. Initially they cost nothing, and their upgrade path is always before spears in the tech tree (exception 1st magic weapons upgrade which I typically don't invest in for a good while).

Champions are a bit different, and I prefer the versatility of high initiative sword + shield units as they have many abilities spells and such. Sometimes my champions have clubs, occasionally a really good ax or ranged weapon, almost never a spear.

Absolutly ... and they have benefit agains almost 4 legged animals ,  is a no sense that the spear dosn't have any benefit against cavalry .

Just finished my first full game of Elemental LH, after restarting after a disastrous start of my first game (ala, WTF IS ESSENCE, etc). So after an 8 and a half hour game, here's what I noticed. Played on Normal/Normal and went for a Spell Victory. Also was playing a custom race that allowed 1 handed spears.

For dealing with mobs, spears are just great (at least with men). With proper positioning, spear troopers annihilate city militia with proper use of impale. Especially with the 1 handed spear perk, you just can't go wrong. A single unit of Heavy Cavalry with spears performs the same task. Seriously, after a certain point, the only things that were killing more enemies than my spear-wielding women were my Storm Dragon and my Sovereign.

But the main thing with the spear is that in order to effectively use impale, you should probably have an initiative bonus, either from a commander, or light armor, or both. Using spears as men is probably better because using Rush is a very powerful skill.

However, hammers are great for single target annihilation (trolls, ravenous spiders, etc, come to mind). For massive crowd control, Axemen infantry + Cavalry Spears probably work best. Cavalry for the impales, and then Axemen for cleaving.

The one weapon which is always forgotten is the crossbow.

It is a onehanded bow with more ini-penalty and a little bit more damage. And the shot which goes through 5 units in a line.

So why is it not used?

Because you cannot equip 2 of them in your 2 hands.

There is only shields atm and well what good do shields do on ranged units?

Of course one could try to mix the "Guarded Strike" with Crossbow+Shield+DefenderTrait Units, but well why?

You can get high initiative BOWS with much more impact much easier. And also why would you use guarded strike on your ranged unit anyways? Except when enemy is on your feet? And by then why even have a ranged weapon?

Also:

Seriously 5 units in a line? When does this happen, please tell me?

5 in a line is rare, but 2 or 3 is pie if your crossbowmen are cavalry.  

I've said it before, I'll say it again: spears are my preferred weapons. The single biggest factor is the better initiative than anything except swords. Impale has its uses; I find it quite handy for finishing off one unit and doing damage to another. You can kill off dangerous but low hit point immobilized heroes from two tiles away when attacking a city, for example. But initiative is by far the most important factor. I tend to have melee heavy armies which need to get to the enemy to kill them. Spears get five moves for every four which clubs get, which can be significant. Spears also don't lose a move after using their special ability. On top of that, if there is any congestion on the map, because clubs move late, even with friendly units now being able to move through each other, clubs frequently end up one tile behind, or in narrow maps they may be unable to join the attack at all for one or more moves. I infinitely prefer spears which actually hit things to clubs which get left behind. In a close battle the spear immunity to counterattacks can be helpful as well; it's correct special abilities are immune to counterattacks, but the cool down on the club special ability means that they may be exposed for several counterattacks, and some AI troops have devastating counterattacks.

This changes somewhat for me when you get decent metal shields as clubs are one-handed (assuming you have metal to build troops with metal shields). At that point I tend to train a mixture of spears and one-handed weapons, either clubs or maybe swords (if I have access to decent swords).

The other exception might be if you have a ranged troop heavy army, where you may be able to position your troops so that your lower initative melee troops can wait for the enemy to come to them and still get the first attack. But in the "normal" case where you want your melee troops to take out the enemy ranged troops as quickly as possible, I prefer spears to other weapons.

Swords were nerfed a while ago because nobody used anything else.  After that, spears were all anyone was using, so they got nerfed.  If you look through the history, you'll find plenty of threads of people complaining about spears being OP.  Axes and Blunts were rarely used because of their weight before they got rid of the weight system, but now they're pretty good.  Sometimes to get the units to line up for Cleave or Impale, you have to bait them.  It's best to do it from the start before blows are exchanged.

In my experience though, clubs don't need those extra moves.

One good bash can cripple or destroy an opponents army. So when the opponents turn is up, there counterattack is all the weaker. That combined with the ability for clubs to use shields means that they overall are more durable in my opinion.