>Giant kingdom vs human kingdom >Kingdoms are similar to

How large are the giants, and how does their population compare to the humans? These are pretty vital bits of contextual information.

>>52129869
That depends. How big are the giants? Are we talking 10 feet tall, 20 feet tall, or titan size?

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Boxcutter swords.

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>>52129891
Rather large for you.

>>52129869
How similar to France the human kingdom is besides landscape and size?

>How could the human kingdom defeat the giant kingdom?

Trebuchets.

/thread

>>52129885
>>52129891
10 feet tall. Humans are more numerous.

>>52129869
Giants require a staggering amount of food to remain functioning. I don't have the tactical experience or historical knowledge to really think of how to use that to your advantage (in terms of cutting them off from their biggest supplies or the like) but I'm pretty sure it's a weakness someone could exploit.

>>52129921
Hell, if the giants aren't that big, you might be able to deal with just a lot of longbows.

>>52129932
Never mind then. Just a lot of dudes with longbows dakka-ing down the giants.

Spears and distance weapons, ropes and traps to tie them down...

Anything designed to cause bleeding would be good too. A giant might be tough, but a dozen barbed arrowheads that make nice, bloody wounds would drain them.

The classic human technique of the battle of attrition would be key. The giants might be individually stronger and more powerful, but humans could outlast them. Fuck pitched battles, use groups of skirmishers to ensure giants never had a chance to sleep or recuperate, chase them down, give them a few more wounds to bleed... Heck, poisons, toxins or getting the wounds infected would be super effective.

Same way humankind has always dealt with large predators that dramatically outclass us.

Hide and hope they all starve.

>>52129869
>How could the human kingdom defeat the giant kingdom?
Square-cube law.

>>52129932
Bows immediately become your friend, at that size your high numbers allows you to abuse ranged weaponry while it would be far less effective for the giants, who would need to get close to truly use their natural advantages.

Bow-Calvary might actually be decently effective on the open field, too.

>>52129869
Fairly easily. If this is "low fantasy," the giants have to follow the basic laws of nature. They probably have single children, like most large creatures, and have gestational periods as long or longer than that of elephants. If your females are pregnant for two years or more, and you need thirty-five or forty times more food than humans, a war of attrition against those humans is a terrible idea.

Couched lances will wreck your shit even if you're four meters tall and way four tons. Destruction of arable land would hit the bigger species harder and faster.

The war wouldn't last more than two years before the Giants sued for peace.

>>52129968
*weigh, not way. And if the giants are a mere three meters tall the humans won't even need to kill them with heavy weapons. Longbows and famine will deal with the problem quickly enough.

>>52129992
Are not longbows 14th century?

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>>52129869
>Low fantasy
>Fantasy
>12th century technology

GLORIOUS Saint Louis strikes down the Giant King, converts the other Giants to Christianity, becomes Rex Franciae et Gigantiae and destroys Cairo during the 8th Crusade (this time not dying of dysentry because by virtue of being a literal Saint he can cast cure disease). Centuries later France becomes known as a land of men one and a half times the size of their neighbors who faintly smell of garlic

Deus Vult, but in a VIRTUOUS and JUST way that even the Saracens can come to respect.

Yes, I know it's a century early. Shut up.

>>52129934
>>52129952
>>52129962
>>52129968

All this shit. If the giants are that much larger than people that they can't easily be killed by massed archery, they're going to require an absurd amount of food on a daily basis. So much food that agriculture would find it impossible to satisfy their needs.

Humans just do what they always do: outlast. Let the Giants roam the countryside as hunter-gatherers while small bands of people poach, steal, or destroy whatever foodstuffs they find. Eventually the giants will eat themselves into an evolutionary bottleneck, and then they can potentially be wiped out.

>>52130016
That is their heyday. If it's 12th century crossbows are more likely. Which might not be a bad thing given their relative ease of use.
I could see the giants rocking some 2×4 long bows and scorpions though.

>>52130016
Oh, I have no idea. >>52130089 sounds right.

If the giants are 2x the height of humans they would be 8x the mass and food usage. That is only about the same as horses or cows. I don't think you are suddenly going to starve them out if they are in the ~1/8 the numbers the food economy would suggest.

Also, I don't think the bow spam would work well. Humans can pretty easily put on more armor than bows and crossbows can really overcome and I would assume giants even in just thick padding would be practically immune. Bow spam is also ignoring that giant archers are going to fucking own human archers in terms of range.

I would think other factors at the strategic level or other biological differences are where you would want to look for advantages. Things like lack of giant sized pack animals would be a major difference in logistics. Things like large differences in endurance or intelligence between humans and giants would also matter for what is even possible to plan around.

>>52131244
Ballpark number; a ten-foot-tall Giant would eat six times as much as a human of the same age and gender in a high-activity agricultural life. They'd just be unsustainable in any reasonable numbers in 1100's Normandy.

Even if we assume that it's as simple as saying there are 1/6th as many Giants as Humans (and there wouldn't even be that many, due to complications like you've mentioned and a number of others), it would still be the story of Ivanhoe retold with half as many Saxons.

And all the Saxons are naked.

And they can't gather in groups larger than a few hundred.

And their only travel option besides walking is the ox cart.

>>52131244
Calvary would be humanities ace in the hole

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>>52129932
>10 feet tall
Nigga that ain't giant. There are smaller bears and humans take those fuckers down with spears.

Jack the giant slayer was a shitty movie but damn did they get giants right. 100 feet tall and smart enough to strap on armor and siege a fortified castle by just throwing goddamn trees at it

>>52133954
>larger not smaller

>>52129932
>>52129869
http://immortalpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Titan_Cast

The immortals setting did it pretty well, poison dipped weaponry and mobile siege engines are pretty much the way to deal with the issue, or get a bunch of cavalry with long lances and turn them into pincushions
That being said you will always have losses fighting one

Long spears and arbalests. GG.

>>52134004
>Long spears and arbalests. GG.
What happens when the giants wear armor like?
>>52133954

>>52129869
The same way we beat neanderthals.

Through dick.

>>52134089
Arbalests are giant, extremely powerful crossbows. What do you think happens if they wear armour?

>>52134114
>giant, extremely powerful crossbows.
I'm sure a 6 inch man would think his splinter-shooter would think it powerful, but its probably going to be more annoying than anything.

>spears
Im going to try and kill you with a toothpick, and I'm only going to stab you around ankle level

>>52134135
A field arbalest has a poundage of around 400-500 lb, the really big siege ones around 2000. The spears aren't there to kill the things they're there to control their movement.

Ancient man hunted mammoths in herds with flint spears and shitty low poundage shortbows.

Our species was defined by poking bigger things to death with spears.

>>52134089

Then you focus fire on the eyes and face in general.

If giants respond by wearing heavy full face helmets, they lose vision. Send deducated assault teams with huge cleavers and axes to go for the hamstrings. Use traps aimed at feet level.

If they start wearing big wee booties - use flaming projectiles

If they go full heavy metal, which would be damn hard - then carriage mounted balistae are your friend. Combined with all of the above.

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>>52129932
>10 feet tall
>big but not so big you can't fuck them

Nice

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>>52130016
Nope, the Cymri used them for hunting since ancient times, it's only a big ass composed self bow, the training of the bowmen is the only problem but with the tech of 12th century France it isn't a problem. Also crossbows, even the puny low tech ones, would be useful as fuck in sieges, even low skilled and weak defenders could injure a giant.

>>52129869
Get some niggas wit fast horses and torches to burn the fields and run away

If it cant be resolved with extreme kinetic force, teleporting it into space, or starving its a mathematics problem

>>52134544
>Traditionally it has been argued that prior to the beginning of the 14th century, the weapon was a self bow between four and five feet in length, known since the 19th century as the shortbow. This weapon, drawn to the chest rather than the ear, was much weaker. However, in 1985, Jim Bradbury reclassified this weapon as the ordinary wooden bow, reserving the term shortbow for short composite bows and arguing that longbows were a developed form of this ordinary bow.

The main contemporary opinion is that proper longbows didn't start showing up until at least the 13th century, anon.

>>52129932
That's barely bigger than a guy on a horse. Spear infantry and lance cavalry should do the trick.

>>52135713
Do you know what happens when you drive a car into a cow?

Rusty arrow tips, next!

Go Vietcong on them. Shit-stained spikes in hole are your friend.
Don't get baited into open battle, because we don't wanna loose our precious fighting force. Destroy any bridges that can support the giants weight. Abuse landscape, using narrow passages, higher ground and rivers to outmanouver the fiends.
Use a lot of light cavarly, fire from a distance, use smokescreens and toxic gases, just like Mongols did.
If you can, loot the corspes: take armor and arms, melt it and create weapons for your own men.
In case of their sieging our city, harrass them from flanks and go Robb Stark on their asses before they storm the fortress. Again, play dirty, use a lot of fire and tar, burn them like the Demolisher.
Burn their crops, kill their serfs, let them starve.
The only downside is that the knights might be arrogant dicks and get themselves killed.

>>52135966
Cavalry does not equal horse riding kamikazes.

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>>52134456
>Implying there's a limit to how big of a giant you can fuck
m8

>>52134210
Mammoths were also beasts, not sentient beings.

>>52129952
>Humanity dealt with large predators by hiding
>not by getting a bunch of your faggot friends to murder it with rocks and sharp sticks and rocks attached to sticks

>>52129869
Convert them to Christianity

>>52137746
You mean sapient?

>>52129932
The same way we killed everything that was larger than us throughout history.

We cut it down at the knees.

>>52134626
>britbong maintains british exceptionalism

I know there's more to the classification that that at its heart, but it really reeks of that on the surface.

How could the giant kingdom defeat the human kingdom?

>>52138288
Cut them some slack, Anon. Their crown hasn't been worn by a Brit since the 11th century, you know.

>>52141160
Define "beat." They could try for a Reconquista, like the Spanish against the Moors, but if the terrain is more French that wouldn't work very well. The best thing for them to do would be to hole up in the mountains, build giant(!) walls on any convenient passes, and murder the fuck out of anyone less than seven feet tall.

Most wars just aren't worth fighting. If the Giants are firmly entrenched in the cold and infertile bits of the country, and they're too mean to be easily driven away, why try to drive them away at all? The Giants would win by default just because it would be too troublesome to take their land.

>>52141417
delet this right now

Ballistae and trebuchet. Not even a giant can handle sharpened logs and burning rocks being hurled at it from behind a wall.

>>52129941
>Just a lot of dudes with longbows dakka-ing down the giants.
If they're well armored this isn't going to be effective.
They've also got longer legs and stride, They can probably run down your archers.

>>52141160
Try to promote infighting.
Tell a powerful duke or two, you'll put him on the throne if he helps you win the war.
Then just murder all the nobles and establish giants as the noble class.

>>52141585
Human-sized plate armor is and was ridiculously hard to produce. Even the Hellenic and Romantic plate armor, which was literally a single molded plate hung across the front of the torso, completely disappeared after the Fall of Rome because it was too expensive. It didn't become economically viable again until the 13th century, one hundred years after the time period we're supposed to be considering. Plate armor that a Giant could wear would be particularly hard to smith because increasing the area of the armor also makes it exponentially more difficult to work the metal. Any given Giant would have a mail shirt, the same as any given Human.

>>52141720
>Plate armor
Chain and a shield would still be tough.

Fuck, at giant levels of strength, you could put enough leather and padding in to fuck with archers.

>>52141911
The point is; functional Giant-scale armor would be much more expensive to produce soldier for soldier, and we've already established that Giants would have a shitty economic situation due to their caloric needs and their trouble traveling over land.

Although that makes me wonder about naval stuff. How did the twelfth century French do it? I don't know anything about that, can anyone enlighten me?

>>52141999
>The point is; functional Giant-scale armor would be much more expensive to produce soldier for soldier
I haven't actually run any numbers and it's been years since I had to remember the formulas for this stuff but I'm pretty sure that's not actually true. Assuming that the amount of armor needed to protect a soldier is proportional to their surface area and that the number of soldiers is inversely proportional to their volume then wouldn't giant soldiers be cheaper to armor on a per-unit basis? I dunno, this is just some back of the envelope guess stuff.

>>52142518
Oh, I guess if there were 1/6th as many dudes, and they were 1.6 times wider, 1.6 times taller, their armor would cost two and a half times as much. Back of the envelope stuff, but the Giants are in a better position than I thought. Maybe this wouldn't be such a cakewalk for the Humans.

>>52142917
Conversely the giants won't be able to benefit as well from economies of scale in their industry and metalworking. Mining especially would probably be hell for giants, though I wonder if they'd be better at large-scale agriculture. They basically are their own oxen. But I suppose one benefit of pack animals is that you can feed them different foods than you feed people.

>>52129943

https://youtu.be/4roqTB4eqH0

lol

>>52143128
Would the Giants even have industry and agriculture like we do? Humans behavior has to be pretty heavily affected by how much we need to eat vs. how much we can produce. Would a species of 10-foot-tall supermen just behave like Humans on a larger scale, or would they end up like The Elder Scrolls? Just chilling in their boxer shorts with their herd animals, occasionally hitting the well-armored dwarves with entire trees.

>>52147357
That's a pretty important, fundamental question to answer before answering the OP's "Who would win" but unfortunately I don't know of any way to begin answering that other than "it depends on the setting". Maybe if we could compare the sociology of Megafauna with very similar smaller relatives that could be a jumping off point but I'm not sure what clues you could glean from fossils.

Otherwise, I can't think of any particular reasons why they shouldn't just be Large Humans with all the trappings that includes. I think you could easily justify it if that's how you wanted your setting to work (and indeed it's how they pretty much always work). Say, harder to pump blood up that high to their brain so it's atrophied relative to a human. Or that human progress has been driven by needing to solve problems that giants don't have. I don't think either of those are complete answers on their own but they're good enough for worldbuilding.

I do think that giants would be driven very strongly by their need for food. If they don't have agriculture of some type they're probably going to spend a huge majority of their time grazing and following migratory herds. I think that's a good justification for them developing some sort of technology and civilization even if it doesn't follow the same process as humanity. More efficient food gathering frees up resources and manpower that can be applied to increasing the efficiency of food gathering and... boom you've got an agricultural revolution and technological advancement.

>>52129966
>while it would be far less effective for the giants, who would need to get close to truly use their natural advantages.
Greater size and strength means the ability to use larger bows with a greater draw. This in turn means greater range and power. Giants would be a nightmare to fight in a ranged battle, you'd be getting shot to pieces before you were even close to being in range.

>>52147357
OP specified a kingdom of giants. This implies a certain level of cultural and societal sophistication. Generally you don't start getting kings until you have permanent habitation and agriculture. Therefore we can assume that the giants are at least somewhere around the same level of advancement as the humans.

One possible reason for this could be that giants are simply more intelligent than humans. If their brain to body size ratio is the same as that of a humans than a giant would have a larger and more powerful brain. They could well be more advanced than their human neighbours in certain fields (they would need to have fairly advanced agricultural techniques in order to support permanent habitation for instance.)

>>52149815
Could you build such big bows at all?

>>52132093
>>52133900

Depends. If they are simply 10' tall, and 1300 pounds, with similar joints, muscles and connective tissues to humans they would be dangerous up close comparatively fragile. They'd be about twice as strong as a human but, compared to their body weight, rather weaker. The result would be they'd need much thicker bones and connective tissue, and even then would risk breaking a bone from short falls. They'd also have trouble getting enough oxygen to sustained athletic activity. Arrows, however, would be of limited use. Much like trying to bring down a cape buffalo, you'd be best to run and let 'em bleed after a hit.

But let's toss out that for a second and look at it the other way.. a ten foot tall human with the exact same physical capabilities as a 6' tall human. He can run, jump, fall with only modest danger and swing his limbs at, proportionally, the same speed.

That's fucking terrifying. They'd have bones with strength that rivals steel, connective tissue like Kevlar and would be around seven times the physical strength of a human, with a heart like a hydraulic plump and lungs that offer three times the gas-exchange efficiency of a human.

Most weapons would have a lot of trouble. Arrows would be pretty much pointless, being shot into muscles with three times the density of a human. Swords, lances and pikes could cause some damage but remember they could use spears far longer then anything a human could, and wear armor far thicker while keeping their 'carried weight' down to around 30% of body weight. They'd also be faster then horses across very short and very long distances.

>>52152824
Sure. You can build a really big bow with nothing more then strips of wood, horn, glue and some line. A catapult is basically just a really big bow that only has one arm.

The increase isn't purely linear. The poor ballistic coefficient of arrows means after a certain point adding more energy really doesn't do much.

>>52130030
I'm okay with this.

>>52152975
Sized-up Human organs wouldn't sustain a Giant, but I'm leery of just saying that every bit of them is directly improved. At this point, we're just talking about Tolkeinian Elves, and that doesn't really fit into the low-fantasy setting that OP wanted.

If we consider >>52150074 as well, maybe the Giants are (sorry) gentle giants? Quiet, thoughtful, slow to anger, a little clumsy. They've got crop rotation centuries before the Humans figure it out, and maybe have some concept of germ theory. They're probably working on Chemistry while the Humans are still fiddling around with Alchemistry.

I still can't imagine a war going well for them. 12th century France was a powerhouse, and two sigmas of IQ won't help you protect the farmland you desperately need from the ravening hordes of dwarfs, or win a battle against a force that outnumbers you six-to-one.

>>52133954
Those Giants aren't my type. I understand the appeal, but my suspension of disbelief gets autistically broken with Giants/monaters/mechs being too big. I think every what a weird chip on their shoulder about something that makes fantasy too weird for them, and that's mine. I like my Giants to cap at about 10 feet.

>>52129869
Poison arrows.

>>52129869
dig networks of tunnels to infiltrate giant camps and settlements to commit sabotage. giants are too big to fit in the tunnels to chase you.

>>52152993
Why wouldn't they be able to build efficient bows to match their size? Because of their increased strength they'd be able to come up with different wood working techniques that are different from humans.

>>52156843
That's not really how woodworking works, and that's really not how physics works.

>>52156843
>>52157363
I bet they could make some kickass slings tho. Or a shepherds sling or that aztec spear thrower weapon.

>>52157903

Slings might be the ranged weapon of choice here...especially against humans. a 10-15 foot giant would use stones the size of your fist as sling ammo.

>>52158556
A very small and sickly human can attach a sling to the end of a two meter pole and use it to fling five kilogram balls of fired clay. If the giants had sticks twice as long, slings twice as long and balls twice as heavy they could probably kill a dude in full platemail.

>>52158740
It's not the bow that is the problem. With lots of glue and lots of wood they could make very large, powerful bows..

It's the way arrows fly though the air. Their drag is too high and density too low for them to move at very high speed though dense air, so they lose energy quickly after launch.

>>52155402
>>52155346

>Giants are wicked and oppressive rulers of an empire where all questions of law are settled one way:

>On the basketball court.

>For ages men have fought to try and win respect, but with only superior fundamentals and teamwork it seemed like they could never win.