Longbowmaidens

Battlefield Role: Long-range Infantry

Weapons: Yew Longbow, arrow quiver with 28 arrows and a sword as a sidearm.

Outfit: Hard-leather vest, boots, vambraces and archery gloves.

Skill level: Advanced skills in archery. Basic skills in sword fighting.

Affiliation: Only available in the northern regions of Arandolia, where there is an already present longbow tradition.

Doctrine: Artemis' Way of the Huntress

Strengths: Great range. Average accuracy. Their powerful longbows can penetrate light/medium armour and mail with ease.

Weaknesses: Vulnerable in close quarters combat. Specially against cavalry units.

Longbowmaidens are a great choice of ranged units to have in any amazon army. Their longbows, usually made of yew and being about as long as the overall height of the archer wielding it, are powerful enough to easily pierce right through a skull at up to 300 meters away, being quite precise for such sheer force within a 200 meters radious.

Farther away than that mark, the shot starts to get hard to hit with relative good accuracy, but such a thing isn't a problem when shooting at easy targets such as tightly packed formations of amassed enemies. Therefore, Longbowmaidens are already very deadly individual sharpshooters, while in large groups those fierce archers can literally rain death from the skies, blocking the Sun with their arrows and piercing through anything but the heaviest kinds of shields and plate armour.

On the other hand, it isn't very easy to assemble an entire Longbowmaiden regiment. It takes an average of at least 5 to 10 years in order to train anyone to properly use a longbow at its full potential. Aside from that, any Longbomaiden recruits must already be tall, strong and with good far-reaching vision, while only the northern regions of Arandolia have the archery tradition of shooting arrows with longbows instead of common shortbows.

So why spend several years and a lot of expensive yew wood in training and equipping a careful selection of tall and naturally strong women as Longbowmaidens instead of simply fielding common archers with flatbows, or crossbowmaidens with crossbows? Well, a Flatbow Archer can learn to shot in half the given time, while a Crossbowmaiden can easily handle a crossbow in less than a couple of months if trained right, but none of the two can get even near within reach to shoot a Longbowmaiden using their weapons without the Longbowmaiden shooting them first. The longbow is almost ridiculously overpowered when in comparison to any other available missile weapon, both in reach, power and pure awesomeness. Some might still think they are far too demanding of a weapon, but those who are fierce and badass enough to wield it know very well how much it is worth every last minute of strenuous conditioning and training.