Editing Mace (section)

== Maces in Warfare ==
The first thing about a mace is that, well, it's a stick with a hard bit on the end that you hit your enemy with. It's about as straightforward to use as you can get, even more so than an axe or spear. At the same time, basic maces are even easier to make than spears. Attach a stone to solid stick, or hammer some metal spikes or a metal ring around the end of it. Like spears, they had a bargain basement quality for equipping militia with cheap backup weapons. Even so, more complex maces made entirely of metal were employed towards the end of the middle ages (more on this later).

Unlike bladed weapons, maces did damage by blunt force trauma. They did not cleave apart or poke big holes into tissue and bone; rather, they shattered bones and pulverized organs. This has some advantages as their blows would often send force through rigid armor, though it was less effective against armor with padding behind it. For this reason, once plate armor became common, maces became one of the go-to weapons used by knights for use in close quarters against other knights.

Maces came in spiked (also known as "morningstars"), flanged and flat varieties. Morningstars and flanged maces had some (if not much) ability to penetrate armor and flesh, but their spikes and flanges were made mostly to dent into armor, not to pierce it; this ensures the strike would transfer as much force as possible onto a small point instead of glancing off, granting you a wider variety of effective attack angles against plate armor, which couldn't handle impacts very well on its own. In Japan, the most common type of mace was the ''kanabo'' and its many variants. These were essentially metal rods fitted with studs; variants made of wood with metal studs are believed to have existed, and would have been easier to make.

With a mace being a primarily kinetic weapon, a blow to the head is extremely dangerous, and has a fair chance of outright snapping the neck or caving in the skull, helm or no. But like axes, you needed a good swing to get the best results; a mace's blow is less likely to kill than a sword or axe strike, though, and a mace strike needs to be moving at high speed with room for maneuvering to do damage. These sorts of maces also had to be more heavily built than swords, which meant that a mace could not have the same reach. So you have a very close-quarters melee weapon which still requires a bit of free space to make the most out of.

Maces were the go-to weapon for the Inca Empire.