Good for Kueli, we need lieutenants willing to take the initiative every once in a while.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
The plan is sound, time is on our side, the omens are good. It'll be hard to fuck up the battle badly enough to actually lose, we should focus on closing it out without any blunders that diminish our glory.
I would tend to stick with the plan. After all, not much his changed and we have WoG that the plan makes sense.
I am also not sure wether we the second option will work. We would need troops that are able to disengage and that are fast enough to go around the lake quickly.
[] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
Honestly, we're currently winning, we still have cannons pounding Jinhai and we have reinforcements incoming there's little reason to try to be to clever here.
I imagine the historians will skip over this portion of the fight... though the part where Jinhai rides through his troops spuring them on while no one gives a fuck seems like something some might include if we win.
Concerning the vote, I dont like pushing our levies on too much. If they get too demoralised they might break at a lucky counterattack. No need to risk stuff like that. Dont really know yet what else to do though.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
I was wondering at this point what forces we haven't committed yet, and also how much time has passed with this update (to try to have a more clear idea of when our reinforcements show up)?
I was wondering at this point what forces we haven't committed yet, and also how much time has passed with this update (to try to have a more clear idea of when our reinforcements show up)?
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
No reason to increase the complexity of the plan given it seems to be working currently.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
-[x] Mages prepare an attack on Jinhai's artillery.
Added the artillery magic. Ideally we execute just as the Hari Nat banners form up somewhere visible for a double morale whammy.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
-[X] Mages prepare an attack on Jinhai's artillery.
The mage strike sounds like a good idea. If we push forward we will at some point end up in range of his guns, and we have already seen that this can be pretty devastating. Added.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
-[X] Mages prepare an attack on Jinhai's artillery.
[X] Continue with the plan, and hope that Kueli distracts enough for it to actually work… and go closer to the front. Kiralo is tired of waiting, and he wants to apply more pressure to the other generals. They need to push their men, stumbling if need be, into the fight if this is going to work.
Something we should ensure is that when our reinforcements show up that they are actually ours, because if there's only a few of them then it's possible they could be Jinhai's troops having snuck up behind us.
Imagine one is a bird. Look above the scene, but do not do so too proudly, for the skies above a major battle are not a safe place. People could send spirits up, and then they'd have to come back down, to report what little their eyes could see, the details that often could not resolve themselves: but every detail counted, and so in the skies above a battle, there was often a war for control of information, for control of how things flowed.
A wise commander could find spirits that would not be so easily dispatched, that could see and hear and present the entire battle in moments, without any of the long and complex sending and retrieving. Thus had Kiralo won a great victory.
But suppose one was a bird that would not be attacked by spirits, well then, what would one see? Clouds of dust, and fighting, and men dying where they fell. It was chaos, and yet above the battle, patterns could be noticed.
Like a man kicking over an anthill, you would see so very much activity, and yet to so very little obvious purpose.
It would take time to see the way that cannons were as the boy pouring from a water bucket and watching the ants scurry around them. It would take inventiveness to turn the raid from behind, the swarming swath of horses into some plague of midges or biting, swarming flies.
Above the chaos, you saw not merely the chaos, but some upper level of it. But what you didn't see, especially if you had a bird's brain, was the pattern. What you didn't see was the way it all seemed to be moving inexorably towards a conclusion.
The Gods planned, and so did men, and when one met the other, then it was disaster for men. But if the Gods had a purpose, Iemato the Skeptic argued, in the far land of the Sea Barbarians, then why did they not make it clear?
Perhaps, said a Csiritan philosopher, answering such a charge three hundred years before Iemato made it, people were just not looking carefully enough. Signs and symbols were not visible from above, either, but what could be told was desperation, and panic, and fury even if the sounds did not always carry.
Or they carried too far, as spirits spread out in every direction, screaming and moving.
But if human beings even a hundred miles away could pay little mind to the results of such a battle, then what is it to ask what a bird thinks? Or wants. If it views, it views without the intelligence of a man.
To a bird, the chaos is just more reason to stay away, to keep out of the way, but little more.
Humans might wish for a bird's eye view, might pontificate later on this great battle, or what the hesitation of the troops said about humanity's ability to kill (far, far later), but birds? They just wished to be out of the way.
Birds could not know the hearts of men, could not feel the way that the blood and carnage all seemed at last to be pushing towards some conclusion, towards some bloody end.
*******
"Forward! Forward!" a sergeant yelled, as at last the enemy began to give way. There was only so far they could go, and behind them, though they could not see it, their camp and their flank and their retreat were all threatened. Men died in those moments, struggling forward or running back, and arrows were starting to tell a real deadly toll.
General Fuling of the rather very common Lineage Sheng, watched the battle from his position. Back from the troops, but close enough to feel the chaos, to hear the occasional yells as this or that soldier had to be forced into continuing the attack. It was just what he expected, this general who had been esteemed by the Emperor for putting down a heresy, as the Heretic Hunting General--one of many such common names of valor--this general who now watched the battle and thought of just what a true army could do.
He cleared his throat, and rubbed at his helm, glancing over at his standard-bearer and his boy, who ran messages. If he survived, he would have some reputation from merely being in the winning army, and some reputation from his cool care.
He took a breath, gesturing for a servant to bring water, as he knew that his own troops would have no recourse to. But it was known that the best way to get a peasant to fight was to promise him a meal and water at the end of it. And there was no way to get water to the thirsty men as the sun, cruel in its power as the day wore on, slowly approaching noon, attacked all and sundry with no care for the righteousness.
One side fought for the Emperor and the Gods, another for nothing more than a Prince's ambition. But that didn't matter, did it? Nor did it matter that he was there, for he knew the true monster who would benefit from it.
Kuojah of Lineage Ainin, had made the army and the world weak with his schemes for bureaucracy and growth, and in doing so had ignored that while gold was more valuable than silver, that no economy could survive without silver.
No nation could survive without an army, and more than that, the endless tide of barbarians could only be stopped by violence. Kill the Sea-Raiders, yes, but, the General thought, with an ambition that overmatched his current fight, considered it won and moved onto the next bold stroke, an invasion.
It had been tried once, and it had failed, but so? That did not mean that it could not be done again, and the Sea-Raiders could make good slaves and a base for further trading, if that mattered so much.
He let out a breath. "Tell the men to push forward. Offer doubled rice wine rations to those men that are noted particularly for their valor."
Now was the time to strike.
*******
Far above? What did the bird see? A large part of one section give way, at great cost, and then retreat. The rest of the army moved in desperation to close the gap, but there were not enough people without shortering their flank even more, and that meant that they gave up ground as Kueli kept on wheeling around, daring the enemy light cavalry which had been repeatedly humiliated to try against him.
*******
Kueli knew it was something of a bluff. They couldn't go all the way to the camp without running across some furious resistance, and looting and plundering would gain them nothing. But as long as there was an arrow and a dead man, they would have to divert more and more attention.
Now there were two…
A shout, and Jinhai's left began to fold in, retreating, bunching up as if they were going to curl up in a defensive ball.
Or as if they were going to swipe out, and clear a path for… retreat? Or for the last of all last stands.
Kueli wiped his brow, breathing heavily, his second horse of the day already all but ruined for any more work today. He was exhausted, and yet he knew that the day was far from over.
"Keep harassing! We almost have them."
*******
Far above, what could a bird see? A bird could see that on the horizon, to the left of the lake that was now Jinhai's last refuge, there were raised banners. An army approached, though with the smoke and the length of it, only a bird could see that it was far thinner than one would think, a line of troops stretched like skin over a starving man.
Perhaps a thousand, if a bird could count to a thousand, and many of them having ridden hard.
Of course, even the hardest riding could not equal what a battle would do, but what people on the ground would see was the banner.
A light blue, and a deep, rich brown, all around a symbol of a large and powerful spirit of rocks and earth that had once been the symbol of Hari-Nat.
The symbol of an entire province.
Jinhai's men seemed to recoil, and then they began to bunch up.
******
Defense, or offense?
Kiralo looked nervously, with the eyes of a man, not a bird, through a binocular at the scene. If Jinhai was pushing outwards, what if he ran into the forces of Hari-Nat and chewed them up? If he was going to retreat, defending himself the whole way, then Kiralo could bleed him all the way to the end of the battlefield and beyond.
It would be folly, but perhaps Jinhai knew it couldn't be the army? Could he know? If so, could he hope to destroy Hari-Nat and then turn around and finish off his pursuers?
If so, it was madness, but madness that would lead to thousands of deaths or more before at last it fell apart.
A trail of deserters, the blood and misery of a slowly dying army…
If he was trying to attack, then Kiralo needed to preserve the Hari-Nat forces. He didn't need more deaths.
If he was trying to defend, though, then the Hari-Nat arrivals needed to be ordered in a way that would allow them to link up with Kueli and serve as a threat, boxing him in from a further direction.
Basic strategy, as any military philosopher would agree, involved leaving the enemy a way out, yes.
But Kiralo didn't want a scattered army. He wanted them to surrender, or at least break in a way that they could be salvaged.
What does Kiralo do?
[] Write-in the commands for Hari-Nat, Kueli (if you wish) and the army as a whole. Currently your right-wing is unoccupied, the enemy having begun to withdraw, as if trying to recreate a bunched form of a line, but from a very different position than they started, one that would not truly protect their camp all that well. It's rather distressing, and surely Prince Jinhai knows…
*******
Left attack #1: 1d100+5+0+10=43
Right Holding #1: 102
Jinhai's Left Holding: 1d100+5-10+12=42
Jinhai's Right Attack: 87
Cannons v. Cannons: 1d100+5+10+10 vs 1d100+5+5+9-10=85 vs. 10
You have certainly a way with words though I admit that I sometimes feel a bit lost in regards of just what exactly you want to tell me with them and even more so when it comes to making my own plan...
In regards for plans, I am tired to think of anything but I think that it might be a good idea to let Kueli push into the enemy camp. A lost camp has in my experience a way of destroying enemy morale that little else has though of course we have already pushed the poor man and his ill treated Rassit to the limit multiple times and I guess a camp might not be the best thing to be caught in if the enemy counter attacks...
