Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
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TimEd
Meteor maker
What's your favorite Mathilde bit?
Also to clarify, you have only mostly read the threadmarks and not the other posts right? I just wanna ask what a view not influenced by the thread memes could be.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Uh, intercepting artillery in mid-air never happens, barring truly absurd luck with your own artillery (even then, it costs the shot of your own artillery to do). And while cannons can malfunction, it's uncommon and a lot less of an issue than a major miscast with battle-magic. Plus, it's far easier to replace a cannon than it is a battle-wizard.
And sabotage? Really? Literally anything can be sabotaged, including wizards. Actually, especially wizards, who can be corrupted via dhar or Chaos, and counterspelling/dispelling is literally standardized sabotage in the middle of a battle.
And no, not everything is subject to the whims of magic. I mean, sure, up in the Chaos Wastes it wouldn't be surprising to see a cannonball be turned into a snowball in midair, but that's in a specific region where basically anything can happen, and it has more to do with it being disturbingly close to the realm of Chaos than the Winds of Magic (though in that region, the distinction between the two starts to blur).
Winds of Magic are not literal winds, and unless you've got a Storm of Magic going on, you should not expect random, ambient magical effects to significantly impact artillery.
Now, you can argue that heavy rainfall can render cannons unreliable, which is fine, but heavy rainfall also renders handguns and pistols unreliable, and can even seriously affect crossbows and bows, too. But no commander wants to go into battle in the heavy rain unless it would hurt the enemy more than themselves.
Burned_Cookie
Very tired girl.
- Location
- Plato´s cave.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/It/Its
Depending on the terrain, heavy rainfall can even render non gunpowder based infantry unreliable. Have fun fighting in ankle deep mud.
Fuck heavy rain in general.
TimEd
Meteor maker
These are true when not facing against magic. But against magic? The metals alone should naturally be Chamon filled.
And on the others, I mentioned it in response to you mentioning counterspells as a counter to spells. Don't talk about artillery as if it doesn't have a counter as well.
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K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
Yeah, ask the French at Azincourt😏
K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
Sure, wizards can see the cannon bolts really well. But given the speed of a cannon bolt it doesn't allow to intercept it midair. Are there any mention in WHF of cannon bolts being intercepted in flight?
As in they exist, but tend to directly serve one lord or mercantile party. The kind of nationwide organized horse chains of the Pony Express is essentially head of state priority rather than public use for mail.
Orcs and beastmen mostly.
- Location
- France
IIRC the Slaaneshi daemon we fought after Vlag explicitly dodged them one by one, but I don't think human wizards can match the blessings of the Dark Prince
TimEd
Meteor maker
I was under the assumtion that the wide umbrella of "artillery" included the more primitive missle artillery due to the increasing absurdity being assigned to its effects. And they are much more unreliable than propelling solid ammo.
Well, it is understandable considering how risky that is without governmental backing. Just imagine sending a single rider being spotted by beastmen, orcs, or any other gribblies they consider common place.
Also, this assumption of them not having a Pony Express equivalent is just that. An assumption. They could have it, but maybe slower, or just tied into merchant travels since they can travel in bigger groups compared to solo dedicated messengers. Or just use single rider messengers rarely or something.
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SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Does Gotrek literally parrying a cannonball out of the air count?
K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
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- He
I didn't know Gotrek could do that😏 In this context I thinking more of cannons shooting to intercept artillery fire.Does Gotrek literally parrying a cannonball out of the air count?
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
First of all, i had in mind truly powerful wizards, like Archmages. You would need absurd amount of artillery to equal one.
Those are also really unlikely to miscast. While Imperial great cannons don't explode daily, they are certainly unreliable. Helstorm Rocket batteries are as likely to hit your troops as an enemy is, and helblaster volley guns are as finnicky as skaven tech. I think you underestimate how often artillery malfunction happens in non-dwarf forces.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
The mud was a problem at Agincourt because the mud there sticks to stuff like glue. It made walking around in armour exhausting.
SakSak
Unbound
- Location
- The Cold Wastes of the North
Regarding the reliability of artillery versus wizards, going by previous examples, I could not on a quick look find any mentions of friendly artillery blowing up catastrophically.
Whereas I believe there is still a part of the village of Drakenhof that is still on/spontaneously occasionally? catches fire because a certain Light Wizard Magister managed to miscast quite badly.
What is being said of artillery may very well hold true in real life, but this is the Empire.
This is a thing:
Clearly, they know a thing or two about cannon making that real life of roughly equivalent tech level never did.
Whereas I believe there is still a part of the village of Drakenhof that is still on/spontaneously occasionally? catches fire because a certain Light Wizard Magister managed to miscast quite badly.
What is being said of artillery may very well hold true in real life, but this is the Empire.
This is a thing:
Clearly, they know a thing or two about cannon making that real life of roughly equivalent tech level never did.
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K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
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- He
That was my point, yes.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
No, Empire cannon definitely explode. How often they do so is up for debate, but they're definitely not much better than IRL and are probably worse.
Interestingly, if you go by TT rules (8th edition) a wizard who uses the maximum dice every turn, but only casts one spell each turn is about three times as likely to explode as a cannon is.
Ah, ok. I thought you were referring to the oddly common belief that the mud made the ground slippery so that knights drowned in armour and similar.
Darth.
Definitely a heretic
- Location
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The only reason that cannon is that big is because GW has no sense of scale. Also, I think the Dardanelles Gun built by Orban for the Ottomans to bombard the Theodosian walls would disagree. That thing was built in...1452? And last used as recently as 1807. It isn't the only giant cannon ever built, but it is the most famous.
The reason giant cannons weren't too popular is because you can get a dozen cannons for the cost, materials and labour that one super-cannon would eat up, a lot more cannonballs for the same material as its ammunition and they're easier to transport and the dozen cannons can be in a dozen places at once. Also the larger cannons took hours to reload. The Dardanelles reportedly took 3 hours to reload between each shot. A smaller cannon has a much higher rate of fire. Even for a primitive 15th century type.
And yet giant bombards similar to the Dardanelles Gun were more common than you'd expect in the 14th century.
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And, on point, Orban was probably killed by one of his guns blowing up during the siege.
- Location
- Greece
Humans prefer awesome but impractical to boring but practical a lot of the time, I guess.
- Location
- US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah, I totally forgot about the Lustria offer!
You're right of course, but I feel like this is the longest of shots amongst the possibilities. She's got a better shot than literally anyone else getting through to the lizards though. I think the posting would be better for a Gold or a merchant though. Most likely the governor will make an ungodly amount of gold for however long they manage to live before the next poor bastard takes over. As a Grey, going to Lustria seems a little out of character tbh. There's plenty of mysterious to investigate yeah, but no great impetus to do so when mysteries abound near home too, along with all the usual threats to the Empire.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Is there a way we could use the Waystones to chip off a small portion of their total output in to our boy Ranald? The winds of magic are after all just shattered pieces of Tzeentch and we've already proven to be able to feed Ranald's power with some of Mork's own. Not sure how safe that would be but it sounds like a totally harmless little scheme.
Darth.
Definitely a heretic
- Location
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Only in specifically this kind of fiction (Quests, SI time-travel fanfics etc where people want to wow the "dumb primitives" with "magic"). In real life we're brutally practical for the most part when it really counts and there isn't political pork and corrupt bribe money being shoveled around.
Real life awesome is understated. Real life awesome is 3 Liberty ships being completed daily during 1943 and each taking an average of 42 days between keel to launch and that one publicity stunt actually taking just 4 days.
Mass production is what's really amazing. Quests and fics tend to depict the actual research/invention as the hardest part when it's nothing of the sort. That's the easiest part. They'll take 5 years to research guns for the first time and 2 years later have the entire army or at the least army divisions armed with said guns. Like, no, that's not how it works XD. At a certain point throwing money/quest currency/shinies at the problem isn't enough.
- Location
- Greece
I mean, I agree that real awesome is understated, but I think saying that people are brutally practical is survivor bias. A lot of rulers and inventors in history go for the flashy option. Its just that the brutally practical options are those that, ya know, succeed, thus being more than footnotes in history and affecting future standard practices. Majority of humans prefer flashy even when political pork is on the line, its just that it tends to cost them said political pork when someone who can see past flashy decides to go for the pork.
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- Location
- North Wales
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Mathilde hasn't even begun looking at the Waystones just yet, so it's kind of impossible to guess at what's practical and what's not.