[quote=Maxwell]
Ah-ha, but while a longbow might have range, it is helplessly inferior. I dare you to cave in a man's head with a flimsy longbow - now, a steel arbalest on the other hand... Plus, you know, pavises and kettle hats are badass.We are the orcish foreign legion.
[/quote]

Dude, rate of fire. The English routinely dominated crossbow wielding armies in the Hundred Years War and the English and Welsh were sought after as mercenaries all through the era as a result of their proficiency with the weapon. The bottleneck wasn't the inferiority of the Longbow (and orcs are stronger than the typical Englishman) but the training of longbowmen from childhood. It was actually cheaper to arm peasantry, thus trained (and the English nobles set up a system of rewards for it) with longbows and they were rapid fire and could penetrate steel. Ask the French at Crecy and Agincourt all about it. 

The crossbow, by contrast, is more sophisticated tech, more expensive, but does not require a skilled person to use it. It might have greater penetration, but it also is slower firing. It is -not- superior in range, because the longbow can be effectively volleyed in an arc and brought down on the heads of the enemy -- also, longbowmen tend to be skirmishers and mobile and can fire over the walls easily, by drawing less power on the weapon. The longbow has versatility in its favor. Also, I think that if any orc tribes hunt with bows, they'll be able to wield extremely high draw longbows that, with bodkin type arrows (chisel points) can penetrate steel plate and will fire quickly. And my guess is that there are plenty of primitive hunter tribes of orcs that know bows. A crossbowman with a pavise can duck behind the pavise, and be shielded from direct fire of a similar sort, but a longbow unit can arc that fire up and over, as indicated before.

Part of the reason we're doing this thread before character sheets get made is to make sure we're all on the same page a bit with this stuff, and to sort out these doctrinal issues before we get to the character building phase.