Combat-Writing Thread

Thanks for all the advice, man! It's gonna be a lot of help.

There are some other Umbral Horde things I was wondering about, which could end up on site RP's as well:

Namely, the whole incident with Erdengard.

After the death of Caine, the Umbral Horde splintered - Reiji's Fina Horde ran off to Siberia, Aaron Cascade turned his Branch into a large mercenary army, Elwood entered the more heavily forested areas of India, Tobias' Umbral Horde Blivia started operating out of a bunch of islands near Brazil, and this leaves Antonius, Caine's long suffering chief advisor. His Umbral Horde Carta ran off to Baja California, chased off drug cartels from the area, and started trying to build a city which would come to be called Erdengard.

A deal was struck with the Mexican government - Antonius causes no trouble, and deals with any and all cartels, and pays out a large sum of taxes once Erdengard is reasonably done, and helps give the Mexican armed forces some magical expertise. Then he gets autonomy in Erdengard and the surrounding area.

Antonius agrees to this.

Among other things, he opens Erdengard up to the Mexican civilians to live there if they so choose, retain their culture, religion and customs, be guaranteed safety by the Umbral government and given money monthly for the choice.

The history out of the way, as Erdengard gets to be about 75% complete, an issue comes up that leads to battle.

A group of very rich American vacationers decide to go to the rumored "Cathedral City". They promptly make utterly tremendous asses of themselves - they almost kill one of the high priests, Corpheus, damage some unholy icons and artifacts, use some stolen magical artifacts to smack around security personnel, and endanger Mexican citizenry with their driving throughout their stay.

Antonius, having none of this, has the five of them executed for their crimes.

And it turns out two of them were related to wealthy members of the Trump Administration. So Donald decides to send 15000 troops down to Erdengard to raze the "den of terrorists and Satanists".

Antonius by this point has 5200 of his battle priests available, and he can call on 200 of Reiji's sorcerers (long range specialist Squishy Wizards), and 500 of Aaron's crazy mercenaries.

So with all this in mind...

Would there be any way to show people trying to halt the Battle at Erdengard? Is there a drastic international more or custom invading such an underling / vassal state would be breaking? And even going forward with it, I want to show that, even with magic involved, the Umbrals have a long shot at actually keeping Erdengard.

However ultimately Trump micromanagement in it causes an Umbral victory when everyone else figured the city was finished.

...Should I decrease the numbers of soldiers involved? I suspect I might not have a good concept of the scale of such a thing...

Edited by NickTheSwing on Dec 9th 2020 at 10:00:34 AM

In my story the north half of the country is finnish Lapland-type tundra and the south half is mid-Finland type forest. The country has western and southern coast like Finland, but also a north coast similiar to north Norway. Time period is based on 1930s-1940s but not in the real world. There are no fantasy or scifi elements involved.

There's a civil war going on and the bad guys have driven the less-bad guys to the forest half and they're stuck at stalemate, as the bad guys are unsuccessful in their attempts to break through the enemy line because the forest gives the defenders advantage as they can hide easily and use motti tactics and Vietcong-escue traps.

Simultaneously the less-bad guys can't advance to the tundra because the terrain is too open and the bad guys will pick them off hundreds of meters away if they enter the fells as the tundra is too open and has no decent shelter for the attackers, and they could be seen dozens of miles away, depending on the place. The less-bad guys' navy can't attack the bad guy-controlled capital because most of the navy is destroyed or under bad guy control and the capital is heavily defended.

At this point the bulk of both armies are conscripted civilians and the bad guy leadership only has one professional military tactician and among the less-bad guys most of the competent leadership is abroad or dead. The north has rapidly worsening famine because pretty much all agriculture is in the forested half, while the less-bad guys have a shortage of equipment because a large chunk of the country's factories are near the north shore.

The middle-of-nowhere-civilians of the south are mostly uninvolved because they live kind of medievally and the politics and economies of their country haven't really affected them (nothing has changed for then and they don't believe the bad guys getting into power would change anything) but some of them have enlisted for the south army and some of them are nothern agents who sabotage the less-bad army, while there's a resistance cell in the north that starts growing larger as the villain goes further and further to stay in control and take the rest of the country.

The situation doesn't change much until the government-in-exile (which leads the less-bad army in the south) makes a deal with the dictator of the country they're staying in and receive military aid from him, troops and weapons.

What kind of aid would the less-bad guys need in order to break the stalemate and advance through the tundra?

Tanks and airpower, easy.

I meant on the tactical side also. How do the ones that aren't in the tanks get through? How do you fight in that kind of terrain in general, without getting annihilated from far away?

Edited by Nukeli on Dec 19th 2020 at 12:41:43 PM

Tanks and airpower, really.

Tanks were originally invented in WW1 to cross No Man's Land, what you're describing is literally their ideal use case.

When you have to cross swathes of wide open terrain under enemy observation and fire you use a mixture of artillery bombardment and airstrikes to do your best to suppress enemy positions while moving the tanks up to destroy them for good. Infantry generally follow behind and are mechanized with transports of their own be that an APC or an IFV or more likely some kind of truck or halftrack since this is roughly WW2 era technology.

Once the infantry are close they dismount and begin the process of capturing the enemy position proper and mopping up and presto, you're now in possession of a new grid square.

Edited by LeGarcon on Dec 19th 2020 at 5:42:20 AM

Is the bad guys not getting control of the forest area realistic?

I'm mostly sure about the less-bad guys not getting the tundra because it's too open and defenders on felltops have all the advantages (and i can propably come up with a reason why the other side doesn't have enough resources to attack), but i'm not sure if the less-bad guys successfully holding the forest edge is realistic. Everybody is from the country, through not necessarily from the area, and both sides have trained soldiers from the country's original army.

Edited by Nukeli on Dec 19th 2020 at 12:43:44 PM

As for holding the forest that depends on what kind of forces the Bad Guys can commit to an assault. Vietcong-esque tactics are great for harassing occupiers and gumming up logistics chains but they're not sufficient to stop an actual full borne assault.

Remember the United States absolutely crushed both the Vietcong and the NVA in almost every open engagement, the loss of Vietnam War was ultimately due to political pressure back home and not because of any poor performance in the field.

It's also worth remembering that the Vietcong mostly fought in areas ostensibly under American or South Vietnamese control. They were not the front line defenders, they were the stay behind forces fighting a guerilla war against occupation forces.

If your opponent has tanks or airpower or mechanized support and you're just a bunch of guys on foot pulling hit and run attacks in the forest then frankly you're gonna get overrun.

That being said that tundra works both ways, a strong defensive position on the forest side could just as easily prevent the bad guys from crossing it too.

But again that really depends on the kind of forces and capability the bad guys have.

Edited by LeGarcon on Dec 19th 2020 at 5:49:10 AM

By "Vietcong-esque tactics" i meant horrible traps, small mines that wound you horribly but leave you alive, and motti-style ambushes when the enemy tries to come through. Both sides of the war also have a few people behind each other's lines.

The soldiers in the forest have the same weapons as the soldiers in the tundra, mostly. They don't have as much artillery because they had to retreat quickly in the initial battles, and as i said there's not much navy and the navy doesn't matter that much in this specific situation. The air force is mostly intact though i didn't think about the numbers each side has.

Edited by Nukeli on Dec 19th 2020 at 1:21:34 PM

Horrible traps and small mines and an emphasis on wounding rather than killing are good tools for someone trying to make day to day life for an occupying force hell.

Not so much for someone trying to make a first line of defense against an enemy assault.

But everything else makes sense?

I just need to justify why the less-bad army, while still capable, gets stuck like that when the enemy is mostly conscripted citizens (and for that reason larger before the less-bad army starts conscripting. The bad army is a communsit uprising and the people in the north support them, for the time being). I haven't really defined their resources yet, but a large amount of the bad army's equipment is captured from the less-bad army, gotten from defectors, manufactured once the industrial cities were captured, and people's hunting rifles. Most of what the less-bad army had before getting help is whatever the military had at the moment, the conscripts' own weapons, and what they could manufacture in the cities on south coast.

Edited by Nukeli on Dec 19th 2020 at 2:11:39 PM

Counting in the fact that the tundra works both ways and assuming both sides are dealing with somewhat limited amounts of materiel and serious hardware then yeah I think so.

So there's a WWII campaign that could act as a useful reference: the Petsamo-Kirkenes Offensive in October 1944. It's not a 1:1 match for your scenario, obviously. But you can take inspiration from any of the following elements:

• Numbers: The Soviets had the manpower advantage over the Germans, which was rather necessary for an offensive. Your less-bad guys hold the agricultural regions where most of the population would be,^* Assuming that the country is more like '40s Europe and less like the US, where farming was much more mechanised and involved fewer people and much of the rural populace had migrated to the industrial centres. so we'll assume that they have the advantage on this count.
  • It's not just about brute-force assaults, by the way. More troops means more units you can move around the battlefield; some of them are bound to find gaps in the defences that the enemy doesn't have the manpower to cover.

• Armour: Actually not nearly as useful to the attacking Soviets as you'd think. Tanks could move cross-country, sure. But they needed ammo and fuel, which were delivered by trucks. And in a region where the roads were few and far in-between, that meant that armoured assaults could only go so far before they're forced to rely on the infantry.
  • One saving grace was that the Germans had very little armour themselves. It's extremely difficult to beat a defender with armoured support, without your own armour: even if they start losing, they could simply retreat with their superior tactical mobility and then counter-attack while the attackers are still exhausted and out of formation. Read on for how to counter this.

• Logistics: Open tundra means few roads and railways; let's assume that your attackers already had a working road network for their logistics in the forest. So what's the solution? Reindeer. Lots of reindeer. The Soviets used reindeer sleds to carry supplies for their infantry units through the snow, as well as transporting casualties to aid stations. Keep in mind that you'd also need to bring along their food, which would take up a fair amount of space.
  • But honestly, seaborne logistics would be the game-changer: it's a lot easier to transport lots of stuff in one go by ship than by trucks or even trains. Both sides would know this, and there's a fair chance that they'd concentrate on attacking/defending the port cities accordingly.

• Weather: Do you attack when the temperature is warmer, but the ground is softer and harder to move through? Or do you do it when the ground is frozen solid by the extreme cold? Do you wait for clear weather? Or do you wait for the fog to hide your movement from the enemy? If the enemy has the advantage in air power and artillery, then you might opt for the latter. And you know this already, but the cold can kill you just as dead as any bullet (especially if you're bringing in troops from other regions who aren't used to it).

• Artillery: At the opening of the battle, your attackers would need to use their heavy artillery to suppress and destroy the enemy's, so that their forces could, y'know, move forward without getting blown up.
  • After that, it gets a bit more complicated: dragging heavy artillery and their ammo through the snow was pretty much impossible, so the infantry units had to rely on lighter stuff that could be dragged by reindeer (like 120mm mortars and 76mm guns) to suppress enemy defences as they charged down the final stretch.
  • As a bonus, artillery can lay down smoke cover to block the enemy's line of sight on the open tundra. Keep in mind that the tundra isn't always flat: there are hills, depressions and riverside embankments where troops can take cover.

• Air Power: Pretty important for dropping high explosives in places where your artillery can't go. On the other hand, the defenders would have their own air force to answer with. And on this kind of terrain, the attackers might not have the luxury of dragging along anti-aircraft weapons to protect them. So unless their air force is strong enough to protect them from enemy aircraft all the way, they might opt to attack while visibility is low. Engineering units can also construct forward airstrips as you advance, allowing cargo planes to bring in supplies.

• Special Forces: The Soviets made good use of their elite troops in this operation. Airborne and light infantry infiltrated the German lines in small units, mapping out their forces and fortifications and performing sabotage. Naval infantry conducted amphibious raids on German-held ports, crippling their ability to resupply by sea. In this scenario, you have the friendly resistance forces for these roles.
  • You'll especially need them to blunt the enemy's superiority in armour and air power. Sabotage their supply depots. Ambush the trucks carrying their fuel and ammo. Launch surprise attacks on their crews and mechanics while they're not in battle. Lay mines on connecting roads so that the tanks can't move to intercept your attack. Bring your strengths where their weaknesses are at.

• Camouflage: Take cover by day and move by night. Use whatever ground contours and patches of woods there are to hide. Maintain radio discipline, especially from reconnaissance units behind enemy lines. Keep fires to a minimum. It's not easy to stay hidden out on the open tundra, but it's not impossible, either. And having an attacking army suddenly appear out of nowhere right in front of your face would be pretty terrifying for any defender.

If you want a big, flashy move to turn the tide with one blow, I'd probably go with a surprise amphibious landing on the enemy's strategic port(s). Have a bunch of veteran infantrycritters hop on cargo ships, supported by whatever naval and air forces you could scrounge up. Drop them off on the enemy's least-defended harbour, let the enemy freak out and move their forces to retake it, and then launch your main overland offensive across the tundra. But it'd be a very long shot in a scenario where the enemy had control of the sea.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Dec 19th 2020 at 6:16:33 AM

So I'm writing a Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid story...

Bear with me. I know it's fanservicey schlock. I'm just putting it out there because a few of the terms probably wouldn't make much sense to people who don't know what it's about.

I just need a critique on Ensifer's (the bad guys) military doctrine. Considering the organization is remarkably...thin when it comes to numbers, I needed a way they could realistically wage aggressive war, and then I remembered Sri, the Artificial Arm created for Akira. And then I remembered it was created by her family's corporation. And then I remembered 'oh yeah, her father's the Big Bads right-hand man.'

So here's what I came up with.

Ensifer's raiding strategy is to park their carriers a good distance off the coast from wherever they're about to attack. Then they launch hundreds and hundreds of mass-produced Artificial Arms into the midst of the enemy city via missiles/drop pods/whatever I choose to call them. Now, under normal circumstances, the Artificial Arms, when attuned to a Liberator, obey that Liberator's commands. When not...

Well, the most complex order Ensifer has managed to make stick with them is 'don't attack other Artificial Arms'. Otherwise, they're berserkers that savagely lash out at everything around them. They're heavily armored, bristling with weapons, can throw cars like baseballs and feel no pain.

Once the Artificial Arms have thoroughly wrecked shop, Ensifer moves to step two: remotely deactivating the Artificial Arms and sending in their troops. At this point, the defenders are exhausted from fighting, and suddenly a bunch of Power Armored guys come charging in to mop up and actually accomplish objectives: holding strategic points, capturing people, hunting hidden pockets of resistance, stealing valuable assets.

If all goes well, the relatively small number of actual soldiers are in as little actual danger as possible since the initial onslaught of mindless expendable drones have broken the back of the enemy before the first human boot hits the ground, the actual soldiers finishing off their exhausted opponents with a final hammer-blow of tanks, aircraft and mechs.

Edited by krimzonflygon2 on Feb 6th 2022 at 5:39:20 AM