How can warfare be conducted amongst elves without significant loss of life?

The country that elves call home is divided into different city states, each with their own individual cultures and traditions. Civilization is highly advanced, and the population of elves is significantly large. The various nations of elves form a loose confederation that is meant to instill trade, cooperation, and peace amongst themselves. They have been far more successful at this than other races, such as humans, orcs, dwarfs, etc. Most diseases can be easily cured, and resources are in abundance due to magic. Nevertheless, it is not a utopia. Rivalries between states and plays for power occur just like in other species, and can result in conflict.

The population of elves is significantly large. However, they are vastly outnumbered by the other races that inhabit the planet, some of which they are not on good terms with and attack them on occasion. They also reproduce very slowly. They live on average for about 500+ years, with females capable of producing children every few decades. Naturally, open warfare and drawn out conflicts can potentially devastate their population in the long term. This can leave them weak and undefended against other races, and prey to their machinations.

Based on these conditions, Large loss of life need to be avoided to maintain the population and resources need to be maintained without being significantly depleted. How best to achive these goals for the elvish nations?

They command the weather; their operations are early typhoon season(s).

Options: 1: The overwhelming majority of fatalities from medieval and ancient war was from disease, infections, and hunger. If elves are largely immune to these due to some combination of innate health, superior logistics or just flat out magic, they will loose far fewer people in any given campaign, without this being inherently a huge edge in battle. Note that this does make them much, much better at sieges than anyone else. Because "Not dying from the shits" was the hardest bit of siege operations.

2: Elves in fact, have perfectly normal fertility. They can, however, only reproduce when there is an elven Ka available for rebirth. - You know the egyptian system of multiple souls? One goes on, one is reborn. The number of elven souls-that-are reborn is fixed, because it is the same ones being born over and over, so the population is fixed. Catastrophic reversals on the battlefield directly cause baby-booms.

3: Just straight up routine resurrection. Takes a year to grow someone a new body in a oversized jar, but..

Restrict the majority of the conflict to formal and impromptu dueling and occasional assassination.

The elves don't have the numbers to field large armies but with their long lifespans they have plenty of time to train as professional killers. If an elvish city state wants to fight another city state, they don't send an army, they send a couple dozen of the most lethal warriors they have. These warriors sneak into the enemy city, challenge their opposite numbers into duels, and break into the homes of the enemy leaders and kill them in their sleep.

When outnumbered, the attackers will flee or use special tactics to eliminate their enemies one at a time. Head to head massed combat is considered vulgar and a fight involving a hundred combatants on both sides is considered large.

Most of the fighting is done in urban settings so medical help is often only a couple minutes away. Duels don't require a death so much as they require a surrender. The only real casualties are the administrators and politicians and only if they continue to advocate war after their champions have fallen.

I'd also go with traditional weapons like bows and daggers coated in a sleeping potion (lethal to non-elves, natch) and an emphasis of hit-and-run tactics with no severe damage to structures. One clan raids a fortress belonging to another, the battle puts most of its defenders to sleep but with few if any actual casualties, and the raiders leave some awake to carry the sleeping back to their home city. It's a fight for influence and territory, not a total war. Sure, the losers will have to eat stale bread for the next few years, but the elven line endures.

Using poison or any kind of drug to knock somebody out is actually kinda tricky. Too little and they just get groggy. Too much and they never wake up. This was actually an issue in the 1800s as doctors tended to soak a rag in chloroform, drape it over their patient's head, and then see what happens. Occasionally, it flat out killed the patients. It wasn't until John Snow, the Cholera guy not the Undead guy, actually did studies on this using an eye dropper and a paper air filter did we get a good idea of dosage. But I digress, the point is that a powerful knockout drug can be lethal or useless depending on the dosage.

This is not to say poisoning is a bad idea. If you've got it on hand and are trained in it's use then poison can give you an edge. Rather, keep in mind that just slathering nightshade extract on an arrow doesn't mean that the enemy will get the full dose. The arrow could just graze, only partially penetrate armor, over penetrate, or even hit someone with an immunity. Likewise, a perfect 3 inch penetration on the torso is also possible so it's not possible to adjust the potency to always work as you want it.

Also, don't limit yourself to just knock out poisons. Severe dizziness, vomiting, partial paralysis, and even outright pain can be incapacitating. As long as they can't fight you can tie them up for later.

A good approach would be rather than trying to fight large sieges try to cut off key resources the enemy needs. This was Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman's approach in the US Civil War. Instead of trying to outfight the Confederate Army he decided to cut off the flow of supplies by things such as destroying railroad tracks and burning and pillaging crops. An army needs food and supplies in order to fight so part of an Elven Army trying a similar plan would do something like dam an important river their enemies use to ferry supplies or pillage and burn crops on enemy land.

Another idea would be as someone pointed out earlier instead of having the battles fought with huge forces, send in trained assasins to take out key political figures.

Those tactics can kill far more people than battle. TBH, the question of internal strife is besides the point - *lots* of human societies have had extremely ritualized and very low fatality warfare within their own cultural context. Depending on the kind of society you want, you could easily have elf-on-elf violence be one big military exercise fought with baited weapons and arrows enchanted to turn into a cloud of red paint just before impact. The question is how this all works when strife involves outsiders.

Heck, if you want to make thinly-veiled commentary on modern drone warfare, maybe elves just dont fight. That is what golems are for.

edited 8th Oct '17 5:46:33 AM by Izeinsummer

The idea of champion warfare is an potentional idea. It was, and is, used by low-tech societies to decide the outcome of conflicts. In an "primitive" society is lots of people being killed and/or injured in battle an disaster. It is much better to have only a few champions fight. Especially for an race like Elves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_warfare

There's a name for that?

I'd agree with the champion warfare, either that, or make it so that combat between elves is highly ritualized, to the point where it's less combat and more competition. Something like the coup sticks used by Sioux natives, where the entire point was to score a touch on the enemy without killing them, then escape unharmed.

That does not help the elves in non-elf wars...

• Well, I guess Elves would prefer to use Champion-warfare against other elves in order to resolve "less serious" matters. Just send achampion or two.
• Against non-elves is there a very likely risk of the entire, or atleast an sizeable chunk of the entire very slow-breeding elven population being massacred due to different fighting mentality. It is time for the pointy-ears to fight dirty, with hit & run tactics, raiding, scorched earth & guirilla warfare against the enemy and only ever go into hand-to-hand-combat if you outnumber the enemy by like 20/1 or something... Let the enemy die by starvation and loads of unseen arrows.

Maybe in addition to champion warfare and dueling to cut down on the numbers, inter-elven warfare takes a page out of the Aztec’s books, where the point isn’t “deliberate killing” so much as “hostage-taking” (the Aztecs needed sacrifices for their Blood Magic, but clearly the elves would just hold people hostage for ransom) or maybe “slave-capturing?”

edited 20th Oct '17 9:01:29 AM by Sharysa

Everyone uses Nerf Brand, whoever gets more points win.

edited 20th Oct '17 10:47:20 AM by RAlexa21th

Europe did have an extensive tradition of ransom taking mid-battle. It usually worked but even in practice tourneys you'd have people die.

Usually the ransom was only for the nobility, though, and 90% of the other fighters died. The Aztec hostage-taking was on a much larger scale, which is why I mentioned them.

edited 20th Oct '17 11:31:23 AM by Sharysa

A race with a long-lifespan and small reproductive ability will likely avoid warfare and other things that might get them killed. Ants, for example, are very warlike and often employee We Have Reserves because they don't live long anyways and there will be other ants to replace them. In addition, the vast majority of ants are infertile, so they can't pass on their genes directly anyways. Sentient ants would be a cultish Proud Warrior Race in all likelyhood, far more violent than humans (which is saying a lot).

Elves would have the opposite effect: They're going to be more afraid of dying than us humans because they have the potential to live long (meaning, caution has more of a point) and because they don't reproduce quickly (meaning, dying is more of a burden to their species).

Outright wars between Elves would be uncommon, though I think assassination would be a lot more common. Wars would involve a lot of decisive strikes and precision, not to avoid killing the enemy, but to avoid getting killed.

A lot depends on what the elves are like in general. Often elves are the best-of-the-best in fantasy settings, in terms of magical ability, physical fitness, eyesight, hand/eye coordination, the works. Given that, you can explain that they lose very few people in wars with non-elves, since the other side would need something like 10-to-1 numerical superiority just to have a chance of winning.