Longbowman

At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, roughly six thousand English and Welsh longbowmen loosed an estimated one hundred thousand arrows per minute into tightly packed French knights — and within hours, the flower of French nobility lay dead in the mud. The English longbow, carved from a single stave of yew and standing nearly as tall as the man who drew it, was not a weapon that could be picked up and mastered. Boys began training at eight years old; adult bowmen developed skeletal deformities from decades of drawing a bow requiring a pull of over fifty kilograms. The reward was range exceeding two hundred meters and the ability to punch through early plate armor. In the game the longbowman is a high-damage ranged unit whose effectiveness in numbers is devastating, but he must be protected from cavalry and is helpless at close quarters once his position is overrun.