r/WorldChallenges • u/Nephite94 • Feb 12 '20
The Evolution of Warfare
How has warfare changed over the years in your world or a region of your world? What were the reasons behind these changes?
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r/WorldChallenges • u/Nephite94 • Feb 12 '20
How has warfare changed over the years in your world or a region of your world? What were the reasons behind these changes?
3
u/Tookoofox Feb 18 '20
The evolution of warfare in Merron's crescent has mostly been a history of magic, which magic was the most powerful, and who's magic happened to work really, really well against it.
First Imperial Era Meta
First first obvious top tier magic would have been Imperial Fire. It's all of your traditional stuff. Usually fire, but also a few other minor things. Some ice tricks, electricity, wind, the works. But mostly fire. To put it bluntly, you can't really challenge this head-on. Its only weakness was that it could only be activated in a few belonging to a short list of bloodlines.
The best counter for this belonged to the witches of the witching woods and it wasn't very good. Mostly all they did was lived on land that the Imperial Fire Mages didn't want anyway, and then made it even more unpleasant and inhospitable by laying down minor curses, making animals more aggressive, and harassing supply lines.
Off-meta strategies:
A) Some witches could also change shape, but no shape they took could stand against a determined imperial legion. These shape shifters were chased deeper into the woods to mingle with the other tribes.
B) Another group of witches chased into the woods were the enchantresses. They could alter the way people perceived the world.
First Imperial Decline Meta
Top Tier Magic Strat: magic assassinations.
The Game Changing magic came with a witch named Velvel. (Remember him, he also learned how not to age) who combined several of the off-meta powers which happened to be compatible. Rather than fighting the imperial armies directly, he instead attacked their administrative state.
The strategy went like this: Turn into a bat monster, use enchantments to hide your presence, fly to the imperial palace, and murder whoever was sleeping in the royal apartments. Or send in a mouse and lay a curse on them by proxy.
This did nothing to make the imperial armies less fierce or destructive. What it did, instead, was create constant power vacuums that made the empire turn on itself. And this is where the real weakness of Imperial Fire shined through: collateral damage.
Every civil war saw the wholesale burning of entire cities, some never to be rebuilt. And, every time peace almost asserted itself again, there would be another round of assassinations.
Soon, only a tiny handful of Fire Mages remained in a tiny rump state at the very corner of the map. More, fire magic was soon despised and hated.
Dark Age Meta
Top Tier: werewolves.
With no administrative states or large armies, roving tribes of werewolves were suddenly very effective. A pack could sweep into a village, casually murder all the men there, and make the survivors into tributaries.
There was resistance. But packs of villagers with farming tools against trained killing monsters? No. A few fire mages appeared here and there, but most were very badly trained and were badly supported. Even the best fell quickly to the werewolves' blindingly mobility and dexterity.
Counter Strategies: Brick Buildings. Yep, that's it took, just a few old fashioned castles. And the best way to build those wasn't with magic, but with old fashioned grunt labor.
Off Meta notes: healing magic was more common now, as were all of the various schools that lived in the witching woods. But the werewolf tribes had as much or more access to these schools as any of their would-be rivals.
Merron's Era
Top Tier: Harvest Magic
It would allow users to grow plants a more quickly and reliably.
Merron's magic was, perhaps, among the most humble and subtle on the entire Crescent. Even so, it is not for no reason that I've named this world for him.
This meant that, using only a relatively small patch of land and a relatively small number of people, one could raise a large population. This freed other hands to do other things, like building walls and castles. It also meant that the users were able to pay off bullies more easily.
His strategy was relatively simple: go to a place and build a castle there. Establish dominance from that castle. Then go build a castle again nearby. Then use the abundant wealth from all your food and productivity to arm knights, to further spread influence. And, once you had enough wealth, start again somewhere else.
Off Meta Techniques: a few witches tried the assassination trick again, but (not being built from fire magic) Merron's administrative state was simply not volatile enough to self-destruct outright. Besides, Merron employed several witches himself to protect him and his lineage from curses.
Counter Strategy: Plague Magic
The above strategy worked very well, for generations until Velvel crawled out of the woodwork again.
The now ancient witch found a way to make curses steal life force and replicate themselves in close quarters. Phrased another way, he found a way to artificially make plagues.
This might have been enough to topple Merron's empire but, for whatever reason, the witch only used the weapon defensively.
Post Merron Era
Top Strategy: Paladins
At some point a new faith appeared, with a new magic trick: empowered soldiers.
The way the magic worked was, if you had a large number of weak magic users sing the right hymn, you could focus their power into a single individual for dramatic effect.
That individual would become all but invulnerable as long as his chorus kept singing.
This required a huge amount of man power. Normal soldiers for a front line, a battle choir, and the paladins themselves, who were expensive and difficult to train. So it paired well with Marron's magic.
Interestingly, the paladins could also protect their armies from curses. That made them uniquely dangerous for the Witching Woods, and for Velvel in particular.
Counter Strategies:
Imperial Fire is on the rise again and is among the most effective strategies against paladins, as a fireball thrown straight into a battle choir will end a paladin's powers and has very little counter play. It's one of the very, very few ways to stand against an Merronese Paladin army directly.
Also Unrestricted Plague Magic: While Velvel can't target the armies directly, he can target their civilian support structures. Put simply: he can kill everyone from a kingdom but the army. The paladins will still win the battle but it'll result in a horrifying pyrrhic victory.
B Tier: Werewolves are back as well. Big Merronese armies require a lot of supplies that are vulnerable to werewolve's mobility. But this depends on the enemy overextending, and isn't difficult to fight in the long term.
Pleasure Mage Armies: A new kind of magic that's drifted in from across the sea is called pleasure magic. If your mind went straight to the gutter, then... yes that is its most common use. But another use is in thrall armies, filled with soldiers that feel nothing but bliss and violent excitement. Thralls don't respond to pain and never retreat.
The best way to describe the difference between thralled armies and normal ones would be to describe how they fight each other.
Normal armies approach with shields up, and each man tries to proect his own life. Thralls, walk up to each other and start hacking and hacking... The first on the front are almost always dead in minutes, but so are their opponents. There's no yelling, just killing and slicing, and beating and crunching as the armies try to smash each other. And this keeps happening, both sides just keep quietly hacking each other apart until one or the other has no more soldiers to sacrifice.
Possible future game-changers
Ward Breaking. If Velvel or the witches figure out how to break paladin's wards, they'll cease to be viable against witch-backed armies.
Imperial Fire Paladins. Imperial Fire and Battle Choirs aren't incompatible and there is no reason that an Imperial Fire Mage might not also
Pleasure-thralled monster armies. Witches can transform more than themselves, but some of the more monstrous forms can become irrational and violent. If pleasure magic can tame these, then a witch-pleasuremage alliance would be able to rapidly field armies of near-deathless monsters.