The Miniature Wargaming Editor

Game Idea Bot is a twitter feed that several times a day tweets out randomly generated game ideas. As you might expect, a high percentage are just crazy … others, not so much.

If you’ve ever wondered why the French (and Scots) could get their butts kicked by English Longbowmen but never get around to adopting the technology, a new paper in the Journal of Law and Economics could explain it. It costs $10 to read the article, but the abstract alone will have you thinking:

“For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior crossbow. This longbow puzzle has perplexed historians for decades. We resolve it by developing a theory of institutionally constrained technology adoption. Unlike the crossbow, the longbow was cheap and easy to make and required rulers who adopted the weapon to train large numbers of citizens in its use. These features enabled usurping nobles whose rulers adopted the longbow to potentially organize effective rebellions against them. Rulers choosing between missile technologies thus confronted a trade-off with respect to internal and external security. England alone in late medieval Europe was sufficiently politically stable to allow its rulers the first-best technology option. In France and Scotland political instability prevailed, constraining rulers in these nations to the crossbow.”

Lots of general good advice here.

I recently discovered that — due to a cache issue — MiniatureWargaming.Com has not been properly displaying in a lot of browsers. Apparently, the server has been delivering old versions of the blog depending upon how a visitor accesses the site. Under some circumstances, the error made things appear as if the site had not been updated since October. I didn’t notice it because everything looked fine the way I access the site.

The problem is pretty distressing to me because I take pride on updating Miniature Wargaming on a daily basis. I think I’ve got it straightened out right now. Everyone should see a post for the current date after 6am EST (actually, I write the posts earlier than that; I just set them slightly into the future).

If you don’t see the current date on the post, first hit F5 to reload your browser; it may still remember the mistake. If it is still not working, please let me know in the comments so I can look into it some more.