Mathilde fancies her chances in the game of spell-counterspell against your standard issue shaman, and even if it's dispelled it can be recast. Also a bullet is a heck of a trump card during a casting duel, as Mathilde demonstrated during her Magister examination. It's not guaranteed - none of the plans are - but nor is it doomed.
It would depend too much on circumstance to make much of a plan ahead of time, but Mathilde has a fairly substantial suite of abilities that should be able to block or douse or bypass light sources.
I don't really understand here. How does a revolver help if a shaman inside the citadel or down in the Caldera starts counter-spelling or dispelling the Burning Shadow? The Shadow plan explicitly doesn't involve getting artillery in position to fire, so it wouldn't be available to call down on a distant caster
Or does dispelling/counter spelling requires that they're within a few tens of meters of Mathilde with line of sight? That would be interesting, if problematic for our own dispellers.
How does she block the afternoon sun at the gates though, without being even more obvious about it than not blocking the sun? Still, I was talking about relative difficulty, so that doesn't really matter. If it's no harder to carry in heavily equipped dwarves than it is for Mathilde to go in alone, then we should look at the possibility of smuggling small hit squads of elite troops into defended locations in future. Even a small unit of dwarves at the right place at the right time could make a critical difference.
It's not noon yet, only almost noon. This should mean that the sun should still cast a small shadow over the entrance we would use. It would be a simple matter of going to a shadowed part of the wall, going invisible and walking along it.How does she block the afternoon sun at the gates though, without being even more obvious about it than not blocking the sun?
It's not noon yet, only almost noon. This should mean that the sun should still cast a small shadow over the entrance we would use. It would be a simple matter of going to a shadowed part of the wall, going invisible and walking along it.
Actually, given the proposal to use substance of shadows here, can't Mathilde just get the engineers to knock together a huge bomb that's the size of a dwarf engineer and all his gear, so a couple of barrels worth, if not more.
With such a massive bomb, would Mathilde need an engineer with her, or could she just drop it off at the west gate of the Citadel, light the fuse and then run down into Grobi Town in disguise, with the explosion being known to be large enough to collapse the gate house?
This is a valid, and would definitely succeed in blocking any reinforcement. The only problem would be the structural integrity to the Citadel. The Dwarves consider the danger to be low, but can't outright say that it won't risk the structure as it hasn't been maintained in three millennia.