E: How plausible is Russian intervention, even given time, for a cut off force?
We can't really assess that without a lot of information about the international situation that we, well... don't have.
Regarding specifically the concern about the siege costing AP: Yes, as I've stated, if the siege lasts longer than five months...you will need to spend the AP to maintain mobilization.
Do you think you can crack Victorian logistics in five months or less?
Depends. If they left enough food to feed their whole army for a month in Toledo, say... well, that's about enough to feed what's left for five months. Cloud, silver lining, et cetera.
It will. In any event, that level of specificity of interpretation demands specific writing that wasn't really present. As it was presented, I will interpret it as intending the OWE for harassment campaign.
OK, what about a write-in like:
[] Ongoing harassment and probing attacks to force the Victorians to exhaust their supplies, followed by a decisive attack supported by Old World Equipment after they are deemed to be sufficiently weakened
Would that do, and could that be done with a single charge of Old World Equipment?
-As we have kind of just seen, its more possible that they'd sally out for a final shot at dying well if we refuse battle and just wait them out.
--Is there any reason we can't park some artillery near them(or ships, if they're near the river enough to get significant amounts of water) and just keep shelling them until they come out? They can fire back, but in a siege situation their ammo is limited while ours isn't. Just shell them around the clock until they give up and surrender or give up and charge out?
Poptart said:
Stuff like this is below the level of abstraction. If your ships are on bombardment duty, then they'll do this.
Basically, to continue a reply to
@veekie, it's safe to assume that if you're besieging an enemy, you're bombarding them. The catch is that the number of artillery guns we have available, even with our whole army and fleet, aren't really enough to force an army of... 15-25 thousand men or so... dispersed over a large number of separate positions to give up.
Also, realistically, we can't actually cut them off from water. The entire area will have plenty of creeks and small rivers and the area gets enough rainfall that they can probably just set up cisterns to
catch that rain for drinking water if they work at it. Now, they may run out of
clean water (aside from rainwater), but that's a horse of a different color.
I'd rather preserve the lives of our soldiers rather than some nebulous min max thing to get more ap at the cost of lives.
Bear in mind how much 1 AP can
mean. We spent a total of 5 AP to avert a major famine last year, saving from the sound of it tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. By my count,
this entire war has cost us 6 AP worth of diplomatic outreach, mobilization costs, and arms manufacture. Future projects potentially saving tens or hundreds of thousands of lives in the short or long term may materialize.
I don't know the exact number of military casualties I'd accept in exchange for +1 AP next turn, but it's definitely not "zero." Probably somewhere between one thousand and three thousand, given the present state of our army- three thousand would be too many troops to lose, but one thousand would be comparatively light and replaceable losses.
I know this sounds cold, but basically, if you're not willing to accept that some of your troops will get hurt or killed in wars, you can't fight them to begin with. The easiest way to keep a warship safe is to never sail it anywhere and never fire its guns; the safest thing a soldier can do is resign their commission. It would be no act of madness to accept, say, two or three thousand casualties to end this war in one month rather than let it drag out for four while the Victorians try to figure out a way to make it stretch even longer.
Note that we have
already lost something like three thousand soldiers, just from the casualties taken fighting the Leamington force, Probably another significant list added to that from the Battle of the Raisin, given that the Victorians
did succeed in forcing the river crossings, some of them with armor.
One more thing worth remembering is that, in addition to the imminent threat of Russian intervention of some sort?
The Vics do have zeppelins.
A hydrogen zeppelin the size of the Hindenburg has 10 ton cargo capacity and can travel at about 100kmhr, with a range of 1400km.
And we have no aircraft for interdiction.
Four zeppelins of that size, making a trip a day can drop off forty tons of supplies every day.
...
No. Seriously, no.
Why not? Because one well placed surface to air missile battery would blow them out of the sky. They wouldn't be able to keep up an operation like that for any length of time. If we caught them doing it, it would be easy enough to set up a SAM site or move missile-armed boats out to intercept. Or even to order an intercept mission by our three remaining jet fighters.
I agree that is probably what they have planned. Not Detroit harbor, but the canal. Block Commonwealth logistics.
...what canal?
Remember the map.
Our supply lines run up around Michigan, through Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, down through the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair, down the Detroit River and into the docks of Detroit. There is no canal involved.
Victorian supply lines run overland to Buffalo and through Lake Erie, or through Lake Ontario and the
Welland Canal (which bypasses Niagara Falls) and into Lake Erie likewise.
What I doubt is that they have that much in the way of explosives lying around anymore.
These are Vics after all; they have no organized arty, no combat engineer corps, and IEDs are a primarily defensive weapon.
Not really something you're likely to see.
Given that Poptart never decanonized
The Fascist Cheetah, I think this is an unwarranted assumption on your part.
It would not surprise me if the Victorians tended to oversupply their armies with demolition charges.
Either way, we can probably tell.
A ship rides high in the water when it's empty compared to when it's full. This is something anyone with a set of binoculars should be able to tell; we can probably estimate any cargo to the nearest couple tons.
This is not a realistic way to measure the load level of a freighter capable of carrying
tens of thousands of tons of cargo (e.g. a big laker) to within one or two thousand tons. It would be difficult if not impossible to determine whether those ships are completely empty, loaded with two thousand tons of explosives, or loaded with two thousand tons of rocks for ballast that the crews couldn't be bothered to remove from the holds.
