So this was during the period when we were just seeing some of the last uses of pike and shot tactics in some armies while others had mostly give up this kind of thing to move towards line battle tactics.

So in terms of infantry weapons the most common weapon was certainly muskets of various kinds and we're in a period that's seeing the transition between the older matchlocks and into the flintlock period. As the name suggests a matchlock simply touches a lit slow match to the touch hole to light the gun powder when you pull the trigger. That simple system was easy enough to manufacture making it cheap and so had in the past been the primary mechanism used by armies for their muskets. But they had some disadvantages. Firstly if you want a weapon for something like century duty obviously having to keep that lit slow match on you makes you pretty easy to spot in the dark and is generally inconvenient, secondly keeping the lit slow matches around artillery which would have a particularly large amount of gun powder around could be risky if there was an accident. Lastly they were particularly unreliable in wet weather. A verity of mechanisms were introduced to try and deal with these problems, wheellocks being earliest but they were very expensive and so rarely got used by ordinary soldiers. Others like doglocks and snaplocks were introduced which were a little cheaper and finally flintlocks which managed to simplify things more. But they were still a fair bit more complex and therefore expensive than a matchlock so while armies so while the flintlock was nearly 90 years old by the 1690s armies had been slow to fully move over to using the more expensive weapons. So while a lot of troops particularly in poorer parts of the HRE would still have been armed with matchlocks over the course of the last couple of decades of the 1690s armies were creating dedicated units of fusiliers which were armed with flintlocks who could be used to guard artillery positions. Armies were steadily expanding the use of their flintlocks with more elite units in particular being more likely to get flintlocks to.

Now in terms of bayonets and pikes. Now traditionally musket formations had been mixed with formations of men armed with pikes which allowed the troops to hold positions in melee better, particularly against the threat of enemy cavalry as the musketeers could retreat behind the pikemen who's tight formation and long weapons were difficult to beat by cavalrymen as long as they could hold the integrity of the formation and their nerve. But steadily over the course of the century armies were deciding they needed muskets more than pikes and so the number of pikemen compared to musketmen in an army was dropping in most places. That's also partly because of bayonets. Now the plug bayonet had been becoming more widely used over the last few decades in europe. Simply you'd take the bayonet and drive it into the barrel of the gun. Now that means you've got a spike on the end of your gun making you a lot more dangerous in a melee fight, particularly useful to defend yourself against a cavalryman. But downside is you've got a knife stuck in the barrel of your gun, you can't shoot it. And because you want it to stay there and not fall out its really rammed in there tight. So you can't necessarily swap to get it on and off in a hurry. But at the start of the decade you start to see sock bayonets. Rather than having to drive the end of the bayonet down you barrel they had a little lock mechanism on the outside of the barrel which lets you fit it over the gun, usually with either a little zig zag mechanism so you put it on and twisted or sometimes a little spring that put it in place. Either way you could put the bayonet on and while it'd be a little more difficult to load without cutting yourself you could still load and fire the musket with the bayonet fixed. So these spread throughout europe and by the end of the decade many armies in the HRE were using them extensively. A result of this was with sock bayonets replacing plug ones a lot of armies decided they didn't really need pikemen anymore and some armies in the HRE would completely abandon pikes.

For infantry armour had mostly fallen out of use. As the primary threats on the battlefield were increasingly musket balls and round shot, the former required very heavy armour to stop even at longer ranges and armour could do nothing about a cannon ball. So while in previous decades some pikemen in particular had still worn breastplates and Morion helmets both as i said earlier pikemen were increasingly less commonly used and they were less likely yo wear armour. Musketeers rarely wore more than a thick coat or perhaps a leather buff coat on occasion.

In terms of artillery 2-6 pounders were generally the most common sizes of field artillery and smaller guns were more common in this time than in later periods. Heavier artillery, 36 or 48 guns for example, were often used as siege pieces. Artillery was also becoming steadily more important and effective means of more precisely adjusting the aim of such guns would slowly begin to develop. Grape and canaster shot wasn't very common yet so the guns were mostly just loaded with sold round shot.

For cavalry broadswords and backswords were common weapons. In the eastern part of the region you might see the odd sabre coming over from Poland, a design which became increasingly common. Cavalry might also often carry either a pistol or a carbine. Weapons like lances and axes weren't as common by the 1690s in the HRE as they had been in the past. But they were more common further east so you might still see for example a Hungarian cavalryman in Austrian service with one. Dragoons were traditionally mounted troops who could then dismount to fight from foot with carbines or muskets. But by the 1690s dragoons increasingly preferred not to dismount and were used more often as regular cavalrymen, though they still sometimes kept a carbine for firing form horseback.

Although cavalryman still sometimes wore armour it was less common and less heavy than it had been historically. Heavy cavalry cuirassiers still sometimes wore breastplates and lobster-tail helmets were still worn by some cavalry. But beyond that cavalry increasingly went unarmoured with only thick coats or buff coats which could resist a sword cut but nothing much more.