Grimoires & Gunsmoke: Operation Tolkien Ch. 41

scribbles

I'm half tempted to delete this comment >.>;;;

Yeah, the Duchess was set up. Poor b!tc#. Their best shot with the army they have is build Scrounger and Kobold Warrens near paths of advance and keep the dragons and wyverns hidden until they can pop out and ambush flyers. Acceleration doesn't seem to be an issue for them and they don't have to kill all the enemy aircraft, just minimize their own losses. Force the enemy to burn down the forest in order to advance. Being hidden is worth far more than being fortified in this war. Illusion magic must be used to hide the dragons and the evidence of their habitation. The patrols are simply going to be feeding mages to enemy snipers. The only real way to deal with the raiders would be to have patrols stay stealthy and have the mages with them send up some sort of signal for wyverns to come and engage the raiders. That's the only set up that has a chance to find and engage US spec ops. It's going to be a long retreat for the Imperial forces.

I'd say they have a late Medieval to Renaissance style army with elements of modern air support. A loose formation would do just fine against soldiers armed with bayonets if they got into melee. The problem comes when they get pinned by a company of soldiers and their shield keeps getting pummeled by recoil-less rifle fire or their patrol gets flanked. If the mage looks distinctively magical you can bet that they'll be targeted first by snipers if they can't detect mundane attacks or intent to kill. You are correct that these armies are nearly useless against the US armed forces. The fact that they still use beasts of burden to move supplies and runners to pass along messages puts them at a severe disadvantage. They'd have to disperse into forested and rugged terrain and have the wyverns and dragons wait in ambush for anything flying. Traps and roadblocks would have to be used liberally. Hide your soldiers in Scrounger or Kobold dens near the paths to limit how far they'd have to charge in the open. They'd have to play this like Vietnam, where the US lost way less than the Vietcong but left after being denied victory for so long. That took a long time though.

tibbish

10m spread makes sense if you want to keep your armies from getting wiped out from artillery or bombs BUUUUT means they won't be able to fight effectively anymore on a large scale. They're still medevial-ish melee fighters with medevial-ish melee tactics and what works for a modern post WWII Earth military with lots of ranged firepower, common long ranged comms, and mechanized transport won't work for them. They need to mass arm up with guns or gun like equivalent (same for cannon and missile), get trained properly to use them on a large scale, get common and wide spread long range comm access up, re-tool their industries, re-train their generals, etc etc etc. That and their political leadership, which appears feudal and rather incompetent for the most part, is terrible and kneecapping them all the time. Short of having enough magic to wave a hand and kill off large chunks, if not all, of Earth's forces they're basically guaranteed to lose any which way you look at it. The interesting part IMO will be what happens after the fighting is over.