I'm pleasantly surprised to see our fort actually hold out lohan I expected it to. I expected it to fall fairly quickly to the overwhelming size of the enemy force, but as things ended up w out, the enemy force took some time to properly nd. It took a little over ten minutes for each round trip of the row boats, which meant that it ended up taking almost three hours for all the eroops to make ndfall.
It seems the enemy had made a seiscalcution based on the previous yout of the isnd when they scouted us two years ago. Save for the handful of initial nding individuals who had the ability to jump exceptionally high, there haven't been any others who showed up with the ability to potentially siege a fort. That doesn't mean they didn't have individuals who could kill our forces though. There were plenty ed attacks and magic, but it wasn't particurly effective.
My guess is that their fort fighting individuals were probably sent to the other side of the isnd to nd and attack, since our city has walls as well. They probably weren't expeg us to have built a rge fort on this side of the isnd, which resulted in them receiving worse casualties than they expected. Through the fighting, many individuals attempted to simply pass around the fort, and tiheir attacks further up the beach, and into the surrounding trees.
A few of those individuals fell prey to pitfall traps, and others were killed by hit and run attacks from cealed locations. Ultimately, with much of their force preoccupied with the fort, it was difficult to properly mount an attack further out. With their backs to the fort, many also easily fell to the ballistae mounted high up on the fort walls.
Eventually, it seems some anders from their side had had enough, and they began a proper, full force attack meant to simply overwhelm the fortress, and break into it. Some individuals felled nearby trees which were fashioned quickly into makeshift dders for sg the walls, while magic users bombarded the top of the wall to prevent ter attacks.
The initial few dders had burning oil dumped dow the cost of the individual's life who poured it. After a few more cycles of that, the fort fell. I estimate that the enemy lost about a thousand men in that siege itself. The fact they chose to directly assault the fort tells me a lot more info about both our current position and our enemy's.
There are three reasons they would directly storm the fort, rather than simply moving past it. The first reason is that they're ed about their ability to unload supplies elsewhere on the isnd, and the fort's existence would result in so many casualties over time that the losses of just st it are likely less than they would receive by attempting to ig. The sed potential reason is that they're here to exterminate us. I think that's at least a partial motivator, but even if that is the case, they could still sidestep the fort for a time, and siege it ter to kill it's octs. The third reason pys into the first reason a bit, and that is that they're on a clock with their own supplies, and the time it would take to properly siege the fort is time they don't have, for one reason or another.
In actuality, I expect that a bination of all three reasohe motivators for their decision to storm the fort. Looking at it that way, our current pn to stall them out is probably our best bet. Long sieges are won and lost on logistibsp; Normally, a sieging force has the advantage in logistics, because they aren't surrounded. Our battle pn is essentially to flip that advao ourselves.
The Dwarven isnd has probably acted by now as well. Now that the majority of the enemy force has long since left that isnd, they'll be iating with any merary ships that might arrive there with supplies in an attempt to fuse and stall them as long as possible. They'll either lie about the arrival of opposing ships, or even go so far as to make vague threats about terattacks on the supply ships themselves should they refuse to turn around.
Will this turn all the ships around? Probably not. Will some of the supply ships at least be stalled for some time? Probably. With a single supply route suddenly disrupted, we have the supply advaurally. We've stockpiled and hidden our supplies away to outst our oppo.
Their problems will get worse as we tinue as well. They started to repurpose our old fort for their own headquarters. After their successful capturing of the fort, the rowboats began bringing crates of supplies to the shore. They've already begun hauling their supply crates into the fort, and stationed many of their own troops in and around the fort. As more anized scouting parties set out, we've had to fall back quite far as we've tinued losing ground to our oppo in little skirmishes. We haven't lost any troops in the skirmishes, as we've purposefully retreated each time after inflig some casualties on the enemy side.
It's more than just inflig casualties though, it's also causing paranoia. Like both the Japanese defenses of many of their isnds during WWII, and the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war, we're slowly traumatizing opposing troops with the sheer amount of hidden traps and casualties being inflicted on their side. Within a few days, I suspect their troops will be thhly traumatized, and looking for enemies around every tree, slowing their progress even more.
If their troops were hardened veterans with years of military experiehen they'd probably know that their best bet is to simply march forward quickly as a rge group, and clear a whole area as fast as possible. From discussions with Kao's military advisors, I've learhat most of the human armies aren't that. In fact, the majority of their soldiers probably don't even have bat magid likely have non-bat csses, like farmer. The handful of individuals who we saw earlier in the fighting who had used magic were individuals with bat csses, and evehere weren't that many of them.
So when the scripted farmers enter the stant specter of death, their instincts won't allow them to properly sacrifice the few for the many. The correct move is to sacrifice a handful of your weakest soldiers to the traps, and keep up the pressure so we don't have time to retreat a up more traps and ambushes, despite the rough terrain and pre-set traps. Those farmers likely won't follow an order to march to their death though, and will desert the army areat if they suspect that's what they're being asked to do. Meaning that if they want to execute that strategy, they'll be sacrifig their well-trained soldiers to our traps, which is likely a much worse option for them than simply slowing their advance.
From my uanding, bat cssed individuals either work for the military, or as adventurers. Those handful in the military work full time as standing army soldiers, and are well trained. They're also sidered a somewhat valuable asset to a try, given their retive strength pared to individuals who don't have bat oriented magibsp; Uhe situation is desperate, the invading force will probably try to preserve those individuals as much as they , especially after blundering the hat they did during their botched invasion of the beach.
As day turo night, the enemy has set up their own defenses on the beach, and finished unloading their ships. Torches are staked throughout the bead fort, making any sort of sneak attack impossible from our side. However, it also makes it very easy to see what they're doing from a distah our telescope.
They've regrouped their forces, and after the sun had set, their scouting parties stopped their attacks. Ultimately, trying to mahrough booby trapped territory at night would have been a blunder on their part, even more so given the retly gathering cloud cover, so they made the right choice from a normal strategic perspective.
Many of their troops are set up in camps around the fort, but there are quite a fes set up further away. From what I tell, they have their own fgs on some of their tents, with the rgest force occupying the fort and surroundiory. That fg matches the fgship from earlier today, so I suspect that is Rathnd's fg.
What we're about to do is holy quite evil by many standards, but history is written by the victors. Either we'll be the winners, or we'll be evil, which many sider us to be anyway since we're demons. As the night progresses, most of the eroops have fallen asleep. I'll give them a few hours to reach a deep sleep, then give the order.
As we reach the middle of the night, I give the signal, and a goblin begins the half-mile trek down our cramped hidden tuo ighe fuse. We've timed things out once before this. As soon as that goblin goes dowunnel, we'll haul our ballistae to the range necessary, and prepare to shoot it into the explosion. The enemy has set up lots of torches, so we probably won't o ig ourselves, but it'd be foolish to leave that up to ce at this point.
As we execute the pn, I find myself holding my breath as we reach the point where the explosion should occur. The ballista has been moved up, and they've ighe bolt already. An arm sounds from one of the slightly closer camps as someone has probably spotted our ballista with it's fming bolt.
Less than a minute passes and chaos is unleashed on the unsuspeg eroops. A loud bst be heard from the fort, and some stone is thrown up over the walls. Seds ter, the ballista bolt flies out as a bright light shooting through the sky towards the fort. Within a moment, an eerie blue fme rises from everywhere within the fort walls, and climbs quickly into the sky, followed by a loud whooshing sound. With that our soldiers with the ballista retreat into the night, and I watch the se unfold on the beach from a safe distahrough my telescope...