Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] FIRST LINE: Caldera
[X] THIRD LINE: Eastern Valley
[X] SECOND LINE: Hold
[X] THIRD LINE: Eastern Valley
[X] SECOND LINE: Hold
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Personally, I'm amused that Belegar, the dwarf king brought up by arch-conservatives, had the character-development moment of "Here are some good and sensible arguments for withdrawing and harrying the enemy forces, due to the indirect and subtle tactics that I learned from you, my human friend," but the way the vote is going, Mathilde is going to be like "No. We hold the line and crush them with weight of metal."
BelegarQuest: "dafuq"
MoneyB: "You do remember that after she took command of the Sylvania expedition, she relied almost exclusively on artillery for the remainder of the campaign?"
BelegarQuest: "Are you telling us that our umgi cat assassin wizard is also Gustavus Adolphus?"
BelegarQuest: "dafuq"
MoneyB: "You do remember that after she took command of the Sylvania expedition, she relied almost exclusively on artillery for the remainder of the campaign?"
BelegarQuest: "Are you telling us that our umgi cat assassin wizard is also Gustavus Adolphus?"
That's a recurring theme with us. Remember when we had all sorts of epically insane plans to prevent reinforcements to the Citadel and ended up just burning everything.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sometimes the simple and obvious solution is the best one.
- Location
- Berkeley
One thing to remember with the coming fight with the Orks is that if they just attack at a trickle limited by the speed they can enter the gate, our artillery and ranged weapons kill them all before they get into their range. If they wait and group up, they're either doing so in prime range of our siege (a rather dumb choice even for Orks) or they do so in an area that we can hit with the shadow.
Yes, there are places we can't hit with the shadow that could hold a lot of Orks and the time it takes for enough Orks to enter for the loss to be crippling is long enough for Orks that have made it in to start attacking, but they would need to make some very odd choices to actually exploit that. They can attack with numbers too few to make it close to our defensive positions before getting mown down, they can group up out of range of our artillery and need to march through a large area that can be affected by our shadow, or they can try to group up in an area that is out of our shadow's influence but will still be within the effective range of our siege and runelords. Those are basically their options, and from that I don't see a reasonable scenario where they don't take beyond horrific losses before they can deal scratch damage to the dwarves.
Yes, there are places we can't hit with the shadow that could hold a lot of Orks and the time it takes for enough Orks to enter for the loss to be crippling is long enough for Orks that have made it in to start attacking, but they would need to make some very odd choices to actually exploit that. They can attack with numbers too few to make it close to our defensive positions before getting mown down, they can group up out of range of our artillery and need to march through a large area that can be affected by our shadow, or they can try to group up in an area that is out of our shadow's influence but will still be within the effective range of our siege and runelords. Those are basically their options, and from that I don't see a reasonable scenario where they don't take beyond horrific losses before they can deal scratch damage to the dwarves.
I think there is a difference between 'your style' and 'we have a shit ton of range artillery.'
Mathy plays to her strengths, and today, that Strength is not all that subtle.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Good post. It's also worth reminding folks that before they can assault the Karagril or Karag Mhonar positions, they have to get through the rocks blocking those entrances:
And once they open a breach, it will be a narrow chokepoint; Mhonar doesn't have Grapecannon mountings, but Karagril sure does, so Karagril should be a complete slaughter until they get rid of the choke. So they'll have to widen the breach before they can do anything useful to our forces. And they have to do all of this while under our guns -- I don't think we can hit everything from the Citadel, but we have the cliff of the Eastern Valley available to us:
It shadows the eastern quarter of the Caldera from the Eye of Gazul, which sucks, but it is convenient high ground to emplace artillery on for firing on the Karagril/Mhonar breakthrough positions, which is nice.
So we have a whole bunch of roadblocks in place before the orcs can close to melee, and most of those roadblocks have to be dealt with while the Waaagh is under raking fire.
- Location
- Australia
If our artillery really is that long ranged and the Caldera is that small, we may get another advantage: corpse clogging. The sheer amount of firepower concentrated in that choke point will result in a lot of bodies, bodies that'll pile up and slow the advance of the orcs, giving us yet more time to shoot into them. Not only that, but I remember my mum telling me that on big battlefields, it was sometimes an actual thing that the battleground would get literally soaked in blood from men and horses (warhorses was the topic that led into it). The ground could very well end up muddy, making an already arduous choke point even more so.Two more points worth noting:
-A falconet from the sixteenth century has a max range of roughly 1500m.
Our cannon are larger.
The caldera is only 2 km across.
There is a good chance that at maximum range, our cannons can reach the entrance to the Caldera from the Citadel using roundshot.
And if we're massing upwards of 30 guns in one defensive battery, that is going to get bloody fast.
BEFORE they get close and we switch to canister.
Best we make sure that they don't get murdered by enemy casters.
They will likely be more important to this battle than it first appears.
-At the Battle of Flodden Field in the 16th century, the Scots were only managing a shot per minute from their cannon.
The English, with lighter artillery, were managing 2 or 3 times their firing rate.
That's something to keep in mind about artillery performance.In Niccolò Machiavelli's The Art of War, the Italian Renaissance writer observed that "small pieces of cannon… do more damage than heavy artillery. The best remedy against the latter is making a resolute attack upon it as soon as possible…"[12][13] As was the case at Flodden in 1513, the Scottish siege artillery could only fire one round a minute, while the English field guns could fire twice or even thrice as many.[14] Guns also had to be moved back into position after recoil, and the speed of this would reflect the gunners' experience.[14]
Cannon operation - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
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You know.. this is no longer Mountain Vietnam scenario, where we're conducting search and destroy scenario
This fckn Stalingrad. And its gonna be glorious.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Yeah. Honestly, I would not be completely surprised if on a particularly good roll the hinderances add up to the point that the orcs physically can't break into the Karags before the terrain is too much of a mess for them to meaningfully try and dig in.
Like, the Karag entrances aren't all that big. A few hundred orcs stacked/packed deliberately could block the entrance - you have to think that after the first ten thousand they're eating heavy penalties to even get to the entrances.
I think Eye of Gazul will burn the bodies.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Ideally we'd want to put the second line on a position where it falls inside the range of the Eye, because that way if the line falters or is overrun the breach can be sealed by Dwarven Hell. I don't think we have, but I'm not sure there's suitable terrain regardless.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
If the Eye of Gazul could burn the bodies outside Karagril and Karag Mhonar, we wouldn't be having this conversation because the orcs couldn't assault those Karags in the first place.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
That's still quite a lot of ash, but we're thinking about the tens/hundreds of thousands hit by artillery at the Karag entrances.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Time to really really hope that the additional casualties inflicted by the Caldera artillery in that time-span are enough to offset the longer term impact of bleeding their advance through the Karags. I had really liked that character moment.
Also, it isn't explicitly confirmed that Mathilde's suggestions will be followed, but her word does have a lot of weight, and Boney might not want a "your choice doesn't matter" vote.
Also, it isn't explicitly confirmed that Mathilde's suggestions will be followed, but her word does have a lot of weight, and Boney might not want a "your choice doesn't matter" vote.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A thought about Karag Mhonar, Bok might help us there which ever option we take. It seems to have spent a long time keeping Greenskins and Skaven out before I don't see why they would start letting them in now.
You might note I was responding to a post talking about the whole Caldera.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
You're right; my mistake.
That said, with Mathilde in the command chair, she can completely control what Burning Shadows does and does not effect. I can imagine her leaving any corpses put where she judges them convenient and getting rid of them where she wants them gone.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
Honestly if it wasn't for the 800k snotlings, I'd say withdraw is the best option, but with all that fodder soak up traps and such it's simply leaves the dwarfs tired and out of places to run while several hundred thousand orks are right behind them.