Book 2 – Page 103

[eras10]

Well, Cthulu, that was a thorough and well-argued response. I need about 30-60 minutes to respond in detail I don't have right now, but I'll briefly state that your logic hangs on the fact that archers standing on a tower overlooking the atrium can't take aimed shots down into the atrium, but have no other choice but to area fire blindly. I find that pretty hard to understand. It's a high point overlooking your city. Why can't you shoot down directly off of it? That is dumb.

Even if we make that assumption, you've picked on a lot of my points but skipped the part where I outline a more intelligent suggestion, something like this, starting from when Wanda's force bellyflops into the Atrium and Trammenis knows why:

#1. Evacuate (this was right) - leaving GK unable to give chase beyond the garrisson or going after the tower.

#2. Send a force down from the tower to scout. Has a mass decryption happened? Use it to kill anything smaller than itself, like Wanda waiting for you to burn your overwhelming shooting advantage.

#3. At this point, Wanda has two choices: #1. Start decrypting her dragons and available forces to defend herself, or #2. Get killed.

#4. With the dwagons decwypted (or maybe just some of them, if Wanda is smart), pull back the other forces and start area arrow spamming, for a few rounds.

#5. Scout again. Is everything dead? In effect, return to #2.

#6. If siege dwagons start trying to knock down the tower, return to #4. For that matter, the siege dwagons are also vulnerable to being killed in combat by ground forces, kind of like Aretemis' charge, except, you know, actually supported.
Frankly, add pierce to Artemis' stack all by himself and they probably win.

So, even in the worst case scenario, Jetstone had the forces and capabilities required - namely, the ability to kill without enaging in direct hand-to-hand combat, and a massive firepower advantage in doing so - to wipe out GK and kill Wanda - without even having to take on the Decryption gun straight on.

Some of the rest of your counterpoints are fair, but unless you have a counter to the strategy I have mentioned, I still think I'm right.

One other point - people are wrong about Jetstone's objectives in rushing the garrison (Slately's attack), or at least what those objectives should have been. I'm not saying they should have risked Trammenis, but they should have sent in literally everything else. If any dwagons survive Jetstone's turn, Trammenis, the heir to Jetstone, is exactly one move away by air. In other words, any surviving dwagons with two brain cells to rub together would fly after Trammenis and promptly end him and the side. Leaving any dwagons alive in Spacerock would have been really really bad.

[Beeskee]

Oh Titans, it's time for another terrible MS Paint picture isn't it?



I hope this makes sense.

Basically, there's the two types of arrow arcs, both shown when Sylvia and Archer were trading fire with Artemis. Archer went for the high arc when taking out Artemis. Artemis herself was using the lower more direct firing arc. They were all at the same height.


The tower archers have most of the bulk of the tower between them and their targets. They can't aim, since they can't see their targets. They also have the rows of archers in front of them, so they can't aim low. Instead, they were shooting, essentially, walls of high arcing arrows trying to cover the entire floor of the courtyard. The arrow fire was spread out instead of concentrated. It was so spread out that Fud was able to go find Captain Archer and another hobgobwin and return with them alive.

http://www.erfworld.com/book-2-archive/ ... -01-22.png


Tramennis could have moved a line of the highest level archers right to the railing of the tower and had them take aimed shots, but he didn't. The archers stayed in position, all the images in the comic show this. Even the front row of archers is several paces back from the railing. They were all expecting an air battle, and from where they were, they would have had perfect shots at anything in the airspace.

Until the dwagons crapped a hole in the roof and the enemy haxxzored themselves into another section of the garrison, off-turn, the possibility of being able to shoot at the floor of the atrium through the roof wouldn't have entered anyone's mind, let alone needing to. So when the boop hit the fan, there weren't any standing orders to rearrange positions or compensate in any way, and the bad firing angle didn't enter anyone's mind.

Now, if Jetsone didn't play politics, and had Artemis up in the tower advising them regarding archery...



If you're still not convinced, read this again: ...Until the dwagons crapped a hole in the roof and the enemy haxxzored themselves into another section of the garrison, off-turn... I mean, WTBoop... Imagine playing Counterstrike, Halo, TF2, or whatever, and the enemy team suddenly busts out a noclip cheat and moves their entire team through a wall. That is what Jetstone is up against, so I can understand how they were blindsided and the immediate response was less than optimal.

[Chit Rule Railroad]

One other point - people are wrong about Jetstone's objectives in rushing the garrison (Slately's attack), or at least what those objectives should have been. I'm not saying they should have risked Trammenis, but they should have sent in literally everything else. If any dwagons survive Jetstone's turn, Trammenis, the heir to Jetstone, is exactly one move away by air. In other words, any surviving dwagons with two brain cells to rub together would fly after Trammenis and promptly end him and the side. Leaving any dwagons alive in Spacerock would have been really really bad.

Misty's dead and scouting an area would eat up the dwagons' move quickly. Plus, the dwagons aren't scout units, so they don't send back pictures like bats nor know how to conduct a search. They would need to be led by warlords. And since even those warlords wouldn't have any means of instantaneously communicating what they found (keeping thinkagrams open with Maggie would consume her juice quickly, plus she can only watch one at a time), they would need to survive long enough to withdraw so they can get Maggie's attention.

I'm leaving out the question of if the tower spells can't be directed against the garrison on the ground for some very weird reason. Let's just say that would be odd.

Tower spells only target airspace. This was established in an update focusing on Caesar, among other places.

Meanwhile, the atrium and the rest of the garrison were (atrium) or could have been (dungeons) evaced. With the purple dwagons gone, there is no siege to get into the tower. Decap is now out for this turn. Taking the garrison is also out (tower is garrison). At the very least, you have a stalemate. Where does GK get more siege on their next turn, either?

They weren't using siege to get into the tower; they were using siege to knock the tower down quickly, in order to force the King to take off on a unipegataur and get croaked by an archon before the archers had time to croak the archons. Siege is not generally necessary for moving between zones of the garrison, though it's obviously helpful.

If the purples were croaked, then Sylvia would have used the reds.

If the reds were croaked, then GK would have had to take control of the tower. If Jetstone hadn't been using its archers to take out the archons, then the King would probably still be trapped. Note that Ossomer only turned as the siege succeeded in taking down the tower, and naming an Heir only happened after Ossomer's turning made it easier to take out the archons, so if GK had to do things the hard way, then Ossomer might have regarded GK's effort as more noble and may have stacked with archons and kept the Heir-less King bottled up in the tower as GK worked its way up. (Wanda would be needed for that to go well for GK.)

[Chit Rule Railroad]

Even if we make that assumption, you've picked on a lot of my points but skipped the part where I outline a more intelligent suggestion, something like this, starting from when Wanda's force bellyflops into the Atrium and Trammenis knows why:

#1. Evacuate (this was right) - leaving GK unable to give chase beyond the garrisson or going after the tower.

#2. Send a force down from the tower to scout. Has a mass decryption happened? Use it to kill anything smaller than itself, like Wanda waiting for you to burn your overwhelming shooting advantage.

#3. At this point, Wanda has two choices: #1. Start decrypting her dragons and available forces to defend herself, or #2. Get killed.

#4. With the dwagons decwypted (or maybe just some of them, if Wanda is smart), pull back the other forces and start area arrow spamming, for a few rounds.

#5. Scout again. Is everything dead? In effect, return to #2.

#6. If siege dwagons start trying to knock down the tower, return to #4. For that matter, the siege dwagons are also vulnerable to being killed in combat by ground forces, kind of like Aretemis' charge, except, you know, actually supported.
Frankly, add pierce to Artemis' stack all by himself and they probably win.

So, even in the worst case scenario, Jetstone had the forces and capabilities required - namely, the ability to kill without enaging in direct hand-to-hand combat, and a massive firepower advantage in doing so - to wipe out GK and kill Wanda - without even having to take on the Decryption gun straight on.

Some of the rest of your counterpoints are fair, but unless you have a counter to the strategy I have mentioned, I still think I'm right.

Here's your strategy from the GK point of view, assuming that Wanda remains in the hex and GK has a conventional chief warlord bonus - which is what Jetstone would reasonably have assumed.

#2 Wanda is forced to decrypt enough units to repel your scouting stack. Any units you lose become her units.

#4 Wanda uses the hobgobwin-grounded live dwagons and the few decrypted non-siege dwagons as umbrellas for any valuable non-dwagons who are not corpses. If she's decrypted more than a few dwagons, it's because Jetstone gave her too many units in the "scouting" force, and her ability to take the dungeon is accelerated.

#2 and #4 repeat while Wanda leads animate non-dwagons to take the dungeon. Wanda collects the Jetstone forces in the dungeon as GK forces. If the atrium is taken back by Jetstone during this process, that's not a big problem for GK.

At this point, as long as Jetstone hasn't attacked the archons, GK only wants to project enough force into the atrium to prevent Jetstone raiders from destroying corpses faster than they themselves croak. Otherwise, GK is primarily sheltered in the dungeon.

If Jetstone starts shooting at the archons with the tower archers, then Wanda would decrypt the siege dwagons so they can threaten the tower. The siege dwagons would be defended by other forces decrypted from the Atrium, led by ex-Jetstone warlords from the dungeon. This would go differently than the Artemis near-success because of the combination of Wanda's bonus, a decent in-hex and perhaps in-stack chief warlord bonus, and most importantly a coordinated effort between Wanda and the commanders of the siege dwagons. Even with the forces we saw, if Sylvia had coordinated with the dungeon forces, the dungeon forces could have ensured that Artemis would need to fight through more than an unled stack of dwagons to get to the siege stack.

Since GK's forces have a higher proportion of heavies, initiating arrow spam while attacking the siege with a more effective strike force would probably croak (convert) more Jetstone units than GK units, not to mention reducing the chances of taking out the archons before the tower fell, so the arrow spam wouldn't happen after GK applied time pressure by starting to knock down the tower in response to Jetstone applying time pressure by attacking the archons.

Perhaps Trammenis figured, "the tower archers have X rounds of ammo and it will take the siege dwagons Y rounds to take down the tower, and X > Y, so let's spend X - Y rounds of tower arrow spam now before the Y countdown starts, and then spend the Y rounds of arrow spam on the archons, if necessary."

[effataigus]

Even if we make that assumption, you've picked on a lot of my points but skipped the part where I outline a more intelligent suggestion, something like this...

To be fair, more intelligent tactical suggestions aren't too relevant under the context in which the you brought up the original issue. You indicated that there was a problem with the relative strengths of the forces in the comic. If you had indicated that a specific character did not take the perfect course of action in light of knowledge of the future then most people wouldn't have disagreed. The only character that some people, myself included, have a hard time stomaching bad decisions from is Parson.

Or, as you said: Real stories, real characters, making real mistakes.

As far as the numbers discrepancy, we are talking about different pieces, it seems. I'm tempted to agree with teratorn that the heart of the bit that you are talking about hinges upon this:

And if you can shoot at the tower, the tower can shoot at you.

Liberty taken in bold font.

The converse of this statement is definitively not true, and we have no reason to believe that this statement is always true, as drachefly points out.

Erianaiel seems to express a similar confusion...

You, and we all in fact, keep forgetting that the air space around the tower was surrounded by Archons, ...SNIP...
So Tramennis was no fool to order to leave them alone and to not use the tower spells. At least not until after he got the one critical weakness of his side out of the direct line of fire.

The off-turn units in the airspace are sitting ducks against units inside the garrison whether attacked or not. It was only once Slately and his men left the garrison that the archons could return fire.

[drachefly]

And if you can shoot at the tower, the tower can shoot at you.

Liberty taken in bold font.

The converse of this statement is definitively not true, and we have no reason to believe that this statement is always true, as drachefly points out.

Chit Rule Railroad's the one who provided the evidence, though (Caesar's ground attack).

[effataigus]

Whoops... missed that. Good memory, Chit Rule!