Speculations

This I member was one of the better ones, good notice.

 

Your opinions are wrong! Give them both a second chance.

 

I think I tried Dungeon Lord and didn’t like it. I’ll take another look.

I like dungeon core books but they don’t feel like the base building of The Land or Life Reset.

 

My problem with most books that deal with base building neglect so many aspects of a real base. There's a game that I've played called Stronghold. I think its one of the best base building games. Has economy, military, morale and even food aspects.

 

That's a fair point.

I think authors need to find a better balance between realism and story. That line tends to be pretty warped in a lot of kingdom builders.

One of the things I see used often is the gun trope, where essentially modern weapons are put into the hands of peasants that use them to mow down all opposition (an opposition that usually has less capacity to adapt than primitives on earth). Which is fine if your character happens to be a professional gunsmith used to crafting guns with medieval tools. Most often that is not the case.

Beyond the gun trope, main characters often liberate the serfs, and recruit heavily amongst them to establish an army/ workforce. Which is a great idea, except most of them forget it takes 10 farmers to feed 1 anything else during lean times. As any european noble could have told them, if the farmers aren't back in their fields in time for harvest, there will definitely be starvation come winter. Starving peasants have a tendency to die, turn to banditry, heck sometimes they even rebel out of sheer desperation, hopelessness and anger. Doesn't matter how noble or ignoble their lord is.

A good townbuilder should take such things into account. Survival isn't easy.

 

As a fun sidenote. Guerilla fighting has been brought up many times on this forum as a tactic to be adopted by the village. I won't say anything for or against that here.

What I will say is that if I absolutely had to fight an opponent with guns and other technological advantages, that would be a scenario in which adapting guerilla fighting tactics would make a lot of sense as a way to negate some of their advantages. Small ambushes where the medieval troops use the terrain, lay in ambush, put up traps, raid outlying farms/villages/businesses to force the opponent to break their army into smaller units or take continuous damage etc. Urban warfare would also negate the range advantage, so sieges would be important as would infiltrating their cities. None of that will allow medieval troops to match up equally to men with machine guns, but in a scenario where I have many times the number of troops, I don't have to trade equal numbers in order to break the back on the opponent.

 

I absolutely agree that taking serfs and having them act like soldiers is so far outside the realm of any form of reality. You would have to train them, arm them, give them armor, and thats without taking into account logistics of any kind.

 

Well you can have peasants fight assuming they have been trained as levies. As I understand it though that's usually the freemen, often required to bring and maintain their own gear.

Serfs weren't trained as warriors nor did they have the gear, so they wouldn't fight on the front. Sometimes they serve as slingers though, pelting the enemy with rocks and bullets.

 

Look at Magellan, IIRC. He had guns and was killed by Filipino natives with sticks.

 

True.

Another somewhat similar conflict (albeit on a much larger scale) could be the vietnam and korea wars. Often the natives fighting the western troops had little more than outdated weapons from ww2 or earlier, but they still did massive damage with simple traps, ambushes and raids.

As did the Taliban decades later, with a far greater technological disparity.

As long as you can afford a somewhat higher loss rate than the opponent you can fight back and win. Or delay them.

 

Guerilla fighting, the mist village can't really do a lot of it. They can skimish and slowly fall back to the village but then they are in a seige. Long term gurilla fighting relies on the enemy not wanting to commit full genocide or having a position the have to keep that pins them in place. Then gurilla fighters can hide in the wilds or in the local populus. however the mist village cant do that, if they hide in the hills / forest they loose the place of power and the mists. and the golbins will be killing / enslaving the entire population so they cant fight on from there.

 

I agree fully. Another issue with guerilla fighting is that while it allows the weaker side to fight back, its usually a costly strategy. It works great for someone like the Taliban because they can have homefield advantage and have time to prepare their strikes. But even with that in mind, they have managed to kill around 3000 coalition (nato and a few other us allies) troops in return for losing more than 50.000 people.

If we count the local troops (which includes militias, tribal warriors and others with a modicum of training) for the west, it looks much better, but the Taliban is still only trading at a slightly better than 1-1 ratio against a fairly generous enemy. A harsher enemy could have dealt with civilian support for the insurgents even without stooping to genocide. With minimal civilian support insurgencies die.

For the village and its 200 warriors to engage in guerilla warfare against an alliance counting their troops - including professional soldiers, at least for the bugbears and trolls - in the hundreds of thousands is an exercise in futility. No level of tactical or strategic acumen will bridge such a gap.

Much as they had against the lich, the village needs allies.

 

I have a NEW SPECULATION!
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Aleron will never finish a book on time nor will he finish this series with the amount of books he said he would like to write. It’s impossible to write fast enough due to getting his fancy tickled all the time. Bromances are a fatal addiction for this series.

 

This is a speculation thread, not a certainty thread.

 

cpn needs to learn

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That entirely depends on weather you expect them to live through the fight, or if you expect them to waste enemy resources (cannon fodder). Only thing you have to teach cannon fodder is which way the enemy is.

 

even the best solders will die to spears and crossbows(bouth literally need very litte if any training at all. its just point and shoot. And all is bout the numbers. in narrow spaces skill becomes less inportant. Plus cannon fodder can delay the enemy quite a bit.

 

You are right about crossbows being an easy use weapon. Spears the other hand are a different story. yes you can hand a spear to anyone and they can use it, but anyone with real training will almost always win, barring lucky breaks.

 

yeah, but I'm thinking about 4 vs 1 or 12 vs 2 or 1 etc... you don't even need to kill just harm/ cut etc.. those attacks will mount up together. Id imagine at very least lvl 3-5 proficiency with a weapon for every levy/or non combat dude.
Also add poison to the blade and this becomes an equalizer

 

Crossbows are expensive and their ammo can be, too, I’m guessing.