Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Canada
[X] Drive them before you
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
To crush your enemies
To see them [X] Drive them before you
and to hear the lamentations of their women!
The original quote being
"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters." - Ghesgis Khan
Last edited:
[X] Drive them before you
[X] Drive them before you
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
Honestly, both your commentary and my own have rather convinced me.
Because either way we're gonna see Ling Qi go full on "The Sound of Silence" on the Barbarians and reenact Stephen King's "The Mist", one just also involves use including the mobile fortress that is Shen Hu and his spirits, the desperate thanks of the other appraisal noble, and also look great for following the objective of "defend the village and its inhabitants". Ling Qi is very much built to take hits and keep on coming. Ten Ring Defense definitely is going to cap out its Qi Regen in this battle, we are a flying "you have lost line of sight", and have the ability to keep them here and drag whatever raid they are on off-script. Potentially even capture one if Shen Hu's "sleepytime" art can be made to work.
We're also definitely not going to be "hard defending" from a wall, we're gonna be a wolf herding and corralling our foe so that once our help gets here we can rip them apart with gusto.
Yeah, I'm actually kinda pumped for the idea of being a Winter Wolf-kinda set up and getting to watch what happens when three Imperial Greens do the Imperial thing and perform a multi-pronged attack on a bevy of Barbarians.
[X] Let them come
Last edited:
Black Noise
Curious
- Location
- About 1AU from Sol
[X] Drive them before you
Reasoning here; I think both options are fine for most scenarios, with "Let them come" having better average outcome spread since it's playing to our strength, but it comes with a few worse worst-case situations:
EDIT: also frankly our war is shit and these barbarians can totally plan circles around us, going for the tactics denial strat evens the playing field a bit even if it costs us quite a bit of personal risk.
Reasoning here; I think both options are fine for most scenarios, with "Let them come" having better average outcome spread since it's playing to our strength, but it comes with a few worse worst-case situations:
- Setup time letting the barbarians pull off a siege-breaker, and as good as our defense is, tanking something like that isn't our specialty.
- Other bad result is locking us down while part of their force goes to raid the relatively undefended other villages. We'll be able to mount a counter-attack but that plan is explicitly costly in time.
- The mystery leader is green 6 or something specialized in leadership and army support, effectively removing our ability to rout the barbarian forces (which is the whole point of the plan after all).
- There are even better hidden aces our senses didn't detect, and we're walking into a kill-squad aimed exactly at champions trying a direct assault.
EDIT: also frankly our war is shit and these barbarians can totally plan circles around us, going for the tactics denial strat evens the playing field a bit even if it costs us quite a bit of personal risk.
Last edited:
I just want to make sure people realize that Drive them before you involves Ling Qi charging basically half the enemy force single-handedly while ignoring the ongoing fight in the village where the enemies outnumber the defenders and civilians and defenders are actively being killed. It's not clear if it's a losing fight or not, but that's the thing, we don't know how it'll turn out while we charge forwards.
Put another way, it's not just risking Ling Qi's personal safety. It's also leaving our forces unaided while they're fighting for their lives. There are valid risk calculations where that's an accepted price to pay for the attempt at a potential early victory, but I'm not sure everyone understands that's the risk actually being adopted if the vote wins. It's kinda possible the main force Ling Qi charges could fall back in front of her advance, lead her on a wild goose chase, and the remaining enemies could still wipe out the village.
I'm sure she'd break off instead of pursuing too far, but there wouldn't be much stopping them from coming back. That's an unlucky result, but... those are possible, and compound with risky maneuvers.
Put another way, it's not just risking Ling Qi's personal safety. It's also leaving our forces unaided while they're fighting for their lives. There are valid risk calculations where that's an accepted price to pay for the attempt at a potential early victory, but I'm not sure everyone understands that's the risk actually being adopted if the vote wins. It's kinda possible the main force Ling Qi charges could fall back in front of her advance, lead her on a wild goose chase, and the remaining enemies could still wipe out the village.
I'm sure she'd break off instead of pursuing too far, but there wouldn't be much stopping them from coming back. That's an unlucky result, but... those are possible, and compound with risky maneuvers.
Kai Merah
Hound Hearted Hedonist
- Location
- Somewhere in the corners of my imagination
Hmm. This is a difficult choice. I was leaning towards driving them before us, but I'm not actually sure that our nobles and Shen Hu can manage the situation on the ground. And as mentioned by another poster, I'm a little concerned that if we take injuries or casualties of our Reds and Yellows here, that will probably affect the rest of our campaign.
I'll vote this for now, so it has more of a fighting chance.
[X] Let them come
I'll vote this for now, so it has more of a fighting chance.
[X] Let them come
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Let them come
The words "High Risk of Overextension" are looming very large in my thoughts right now, I do not wanna fuck with that. .
The words "High Risk of Overextension" are looming very large in my thoughts right now, I do not wanna fuck with that. .
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
Inserted tally
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
The matter of a siegebreaker hitting the village and losing the infrastructure of this village or even most of the physical village entirely is something that I'd be willing to accept it we keep the loss of life to a minimum which hopefully "Let them come" would do, as our keeping them bottled up here and should they go for a siegebreaking lightning strike is likely denying them something later such as a prohibitive amount of qi or time to do so again.
And the plan would be to keep their force, either the majority or all of it, restricted to an area that Ling Qi is able to defend well. Some red or lesser threat might make it through but if we are able to bottle the greens with harrying and cut-and-run tactics than we'll have done an enormous amount to allowing the other villages to evac. Because there are explicitly other messengers going around letting people know whats up.
If the mystery green is capable of kicking our teeth in because we are routing their forces, they are capable of kicking our teeth in no matter how we approach them. And the idea of a kill-squad set up is something that again, is outside our knowledge and ability to handle and shouldn't be included in any plan. Those kind of "Worst case scenario" can be discarded as should either happen in any scenario there is nothing we can do about it and can both be summarized as the equivalent to "the worst that could happen is we die", so we shouldn't bother discussing either because "fleeing for our lives because we're gonna get killed" is implicit in any decision.
The actual worst case scenario is that while we engage the Greens and attempt to board-wipe the reds and yellows we are kept busy by them tag-teaming us and one goes to toss an art here and there against the noble who is on the backfoot and free up their friend to finish the village raid himself. Or we are mired in fighting the Greens while the mooks who scatter after the initial assault to vanish into the woodwork and either kill our reds and yellows or join another raid and potentially being the tipping point for that raid. Those are the "Worst case Scenarios" that we should actually be concerned with.
I'm also personally interested in getting to see how it will look for Ling Qi to go full "I am going to treat you like dangerous prey to be herded" on top of watching how a coordinated fight with Shen Hu and another Appraisal goes.
And I imagine with the wealth of the Sect, rebuilding a village so long as the people are still around is likely not as hard as finding the people so while infrastructure loss is bad, PR that heavy civilian losses over light would bring would likely be worse. So I'll take the Barbs popping a siegebreaker to destroy everything from the foundations up or forcing Ling Qi to fall back because she was nearly fried to a crisp, in exchange for Civvie's being evacced by our Reds and Yellow.
These guys are outnumbered, but I think we can trust mudboy to protect the people well enough (disregarding infrastructure damage).
So what's our other green up against? The ally/enemy summary is not clear.
However, textually we have note that there's 1 green + at least half dozen yellows harrying him.
So to summarize enemy composition
| Red | Yellow | Green | Mystery | |
| vs Shen Group | 40 | 12 | 2 | |
| vs Inner Disciple Group | Guess ~20? | ~6 | 1 | |
| Unaccounted | Guess ~40? | ~7 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | ~100 | ~25 | 3 | 1 |
[] Drive them before you
We are near Shen, therefore this is diving straight into 2 greens, ~18 yellows, ~80 reds (gas tanks weee), and aiming for a rout such that everyone including the Inner Group fight else pulls back. Need to make sure we do not overextend and end up in a 1v4 green fight without support. We also need to make damn sure that we actually catch the greens otherwise it's entirely possible to win the drive back engagement while our backside fight looses (e.g. the Inner Disciple Group getting beat up)
[] Let them come
Attempt to herd the 2 greens / 12 yellows / 40 reds around Shen. This is very similar numbers to the initial BINO fight, with the big difference that they are more mobile and we don't have surprise since we pre-spooled.
Honestly I would prefer a measured defeat in detail attempt on Shen's fight similar to what we did in BINO pt. 1, but that doesn't seem to really match up with Let them come.
TBD
Last edited:
Snow
Doka
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[x] Let them come
The part I underlined is what convinced me to pick this option. Specifically, that this option is not a passive or reactive one; it is still an aggressive move pushing them back, but carefully instead of recklessly. It's slower, certainly, but I think also less likely to result in anything going wrong.
[X] Let them come
- Location
- PA
Hrrm.
So as I understand it, it's down to this: Basically, barring a peer specced to ruin our day with a SUPER BANG ATTACK, chances are the main way things go wrong is that the enemy rolls us with Aces that we can't actually fight, in which case our choices kind of don't matter that much.
Now, the thing these Cloud dudes are known for is mobility, but we can match that mobility, I think?
There IS a concern about if we go defensive they can go 'on to the next point boys!' and bail out and hit elsewhere. Thing is, didn't we leave our Xan Wu behind to gaurd another villiage? Given that we went THAT route then, I think we should double-down on that, and plant ourself here, and if they try running on to the next location aka where our turtleboi is waiting? They run into ANOTHER stall and lose even more time. Especially if they're 'bailing' by basically bypassing this base we're at to dive deeper into our territory and hoping they can dodge us again on the way out. Which uhh, if we have the mobility to catch them we will utterly ruin their day courtesy of having to fight Ling Qi with reduced Qi reserves and whatever injuries they got in diving deeper.
But that only works if I understand the directions and moves on the map properly.
So as I understand it, it's down to this: Basically, barring a peer specced to ruin our day with a SUPER BANG ATTACK, chances are the main way things go wrong is that the enemy rolls us with Aces that we can't actually fight, in which case our choices kind of don't matter that much.
Now, the thing these Cloud dudes are known for is mobility, but we can match that mobility, I think?
There IS a concern about if we go defensive they can go 'on to the next point boys!' and bail out and hit elsewhere. Thing is, didn't we leave our Xan Wu behind to gaurd another villiage? Given that we went THAT route then, I think we should double-down on that, and plant ourself here, and if they try running on to the next location aka where our turtleboi is waiting? They run into ANOTHER stall and lose even more time. Especially if they're 'bailing' by basically bypassing this base we're at to dive deeper into our territory and hoping they can dodge us again on the way out. Which uhh, if we have the mobility to catch them we will utterly ruin their day courtesy of having to fight Ling Qi with reduced Qi reserves and whatever injuries they got in diving deeper.
But that only works if I understand the directions and moves on the map properly.
I think that assuming that everything is about "strongest person wins" and that tactics are irrelevant and that we can just one v. everyone the enemy with no concern as long as they don't have anyone much stronger than us would be a bit of a mistake.
Also, my feeling is that if they did decide to back, then as long as we're in good shape that's actually good. We can always go into stealth and follow them, and possibly drop sneak attacks and harassment if needed to discourage further assaults.
Black Noise
Curious
- Location
- About 1AU from Sol
So a few things here, in order raised:
- Siegebreaker is something that we can reasonably guess requires a lengthy ritual setup, and the result doesn't have to be physical; a spiritual A rank battlefield nightmare mode will fuck us up right along with the rest of the forces here. Denying the possibility of that has value.
- If we're playing defensively and prioritizing soldiers and civillians, it is much harder for multiple strong opponents to gang up on an out-of-position LQ. Granted if there's suddenly a lot of high level greens present the situation is fucked, but the whole point is that it won't be that much more fucked if we're on the offense. The reason for that is:
- LQ is extremely mobile and even more slippery; keeping us busy with distracting fights just isn't something that can happen below actual-peer level (and not trash appraisals). Especially since the aim of drive is to break their force by dealing as much damage as possible and not let them regroup and adapt. A scenario that boils down to "but what if we fail every objective of option X" isn't a valid argument.
- Our ability to control a force as highly mobile as barbarian raiders from a defensive standpoint is decidedly limited; we can prevent them from doing much within our (admittedly large) range, but splitting their forces in multiple directions and playing keep-away is definitely a tactic they could adapt to deal with us only being able to hold one position at a time, which is at best this single village when there's another nearby (possibly already under attack) and the one further south with Xiulan and Zhengui.
1337Procrast
Fire Emblem Enjoyer
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Drive them before you
