"Samurai with Bows. Basing Advice needed" Topic

I'm re-basing a pair of 28mm samurai armies that I did a long time ago. I did settle on 4 foot figures per 50mm x 50mm square base.

When I did the army, I painted 32 samurai with bows, per side, as 2 units of 16. My question – is this even realistic? Did samurai proper(as opposed to ashigaru) ever act as a bow unit, or did they just use whatever weapon they felt like at the time?

From a practical point of view – would you guys mount them as pure bow units(4 per square stand), or would you just mix them in with other samurai with swords/yari?

I would focus on rules that you are going to use and what they say

I seem to remember that unit structure was pretty flexible. Samurai would be in charge of Ashigaru bow units, but also some Samurai units. In Sengoku period probably no Samurai Archer units, but more likely earlier. Actual units were small and arranged in a number of ways to form bigger units that were mixed – the bigger units is generally what most wargames represent.

I have only looked at skirmish rules, but I doubt many large battle rules are accurate historically (killer katanas is supposed to be very well researched) so I doubt that it is that important what you do

John

I totally agree with jwebster.

Rule sets that have nice linear troop formations that represent a Roman cohort or a Greek phalanx are not really that good at representing the looser formations of ancient barbarians, dark age war bands, or samurai forces.

Jwebster says do what your favourite rule set indicates and don't sweat the accuracy too much. I concur.

By the Senguko period it was ashigaru that made up the formed up archer units. There are descriptions of samurai archers in the Imjin wars, but they were more individualistic combats.

Depends wich era you are talking about.

Thanks for the advice. I got Battles in the Age of War, which doesn't have Samurai with bows at all, which certainly fits in with Bowman's comment.

I'll probably keep them as 4 x 4 bowmen, and figure out some early scenarios for them.

HI Lucius

Just updated my go at rebasing some of my bow-armed ashigaru

link

Cheers

Based on EValerio's work on the Takeda Screens ( TMP link ), it looks like you'd have a few smaller squads of samurai archers strengthening a couple big squads of Ashigaru archers:

There's one small squad of samurai archers out ahead of the mass of ashigaru archers as skirmishers and sharpshooters.