Who among the Go4 will be the one to get killed first?

Henry Brown wrote:

n7axw wrote:The Harchongese don't have several million rifle armed / angle gun / artillery rocket armed, well trained troops.

In terms of weapons, their situation has improved. But the gap between the two sides is still widening In the EOC's favor. The training has improved, particularly in the atea of discipline, but nobody on the Temple's side has figured out how to beat the ICA which means that their leadership sucks.

As for their mumbers, their agricultural sector is primitive to the point where to recruit the numbers you seem to be implying, they would starve the country and would be unable to feed their army to boot. Then too, the population disparity between the two sides is not as wide as you might believe. The Temple Lands and Harchong between them have less than 300,000, 000, certainly not a Chinese style advantage over the approx 200,000,000 on the allied side with both the allied military and economy a whole lot more efficient than the Temple side.

So what it amounts to is that the Temple is about to get its arse kicked in the coming campaign season. By the end of it, only the Temple lLands and Harchong will be left in the war and Harchong will have to rebuild its army.

So will the allies be able to overrun Zion? Yep. If .not this year, then next.

Don

Actually I think there was text-ev that the Harchongese army is over a million men. But it was extremely badly equipped, especially in terms of rifles. Duchairn has been working to re-equip them but I am pretty sure that when the spring fighting commences only a portion of the Harchongese army will have rifles. The key question is going to be: "how big a portion?"

Harchong's contribution is, according to Duchairn's people, in the 1.5-2 million range, based on the amount of food they're eating/requiring. Almost entirely made up of peasant and serf conscripts. Most of them armed for ranged combat are equipped with bows, but are only trained for mass volley fire, rather than individual accuracy. IIRC, the Harchongese departed with under 100k rifles, and a lot of them were in the hands of the "Military Police" units.

Don't remember exactly where, but it's in a conversation Duchairn has with Magwair, post-Canal Raids. Just the two of them.



Huh ... does anybody remember seeing anything to do with Trynair lately? I think he might actually be the first to go - Clyntahn has been reluctantly persuaded that Magwair and Duchairn are still vital for the war effort (and nobody else would want their jobs, and in Duchairn's case, there's probably not many people capable of replacing him in the first place), but Clyntahn doesn't really need Trynair anymore - or, at least, his immediate value/importance is significantly lessened and not as apparent, while Trynair has the Grand Vicar and thus controls the only legal counterbalance of Church authority against the Grand Inquisitor.

I have been lurking around for awhile and thought I would get this off before HFQ is released.

My prediction is Maiwwair is assasinated on the way to St. Kylmahn's foundary. It is outside of the temple so Merlin or Nimue could do it but my guess is it may be one of Aiviah's teams.

If someone else already brought up this idea then I second the motion.

Akgrampy wrote:I have been lurking around for awhile and thought I would get this off before HFQ is released.

My prediction is Maiwwair is assasinated on the way to St. Kylmahn's foundary. It is outside of the temple so Merlin or Nimue could do it but my guess is it may be one of Aiviah's teams.

If someone else already brought up this idea then I second the motion.

I'm not sure that I agree that Magwair will be the first to die, but he's the second most likely of the Go4 to be a target of opportunity. Anyone with a rifle could take him out if they catch him outside of the Temple.

Trynair leaves the Temple occasionally - he visited Dynnys during OAR at his home in Zion to warn him that he needed to hobble off to Charis as soon as it became possible, for example. Since he clearly isn't as powerful in the church's political circles as he was before Clyntahn went after the Circle and terrified the entire vicarate, Clyntahn may just have him eliminated if he feels Trynair is obstructing him or the Inquisition in any way.

Duchairn would actually be the easiest to kill, since he leaves the Temple on a regular basis to see how his good works are doing, but that would incense the people of Zion. If Clyntahn had him killed and it was well known that he ordered it - had him arrested by the Inquisition and tortured to death for example, the Grand Fornicator could find the citizens of Zion rather... irritated with the hordes of inquisitors and Temple guardsmen in their midst, and with the Grand Fornicator especially...

Charis will have to dig him out of his suite kicking and squealing when they capture the Temple. Dialydd Mab can give him a proper sendoff to Hell.

Kytheros wrote:Harchong's contribution is, according to Duchairn's people, in the 1.5-2 million range, based on the amount of food they're eating/requiring. Almost entirely made up of peasant and serf conscripts. Most of them armed for ranged combat are equipped with bows, but are only trained for mass volley fire, rather than individual accuracy. IIRC, the Harchongese departed with under 100k rifles, and a lot of them were in the hands of the "Military Police" units.

Don't remember exactly where, but it's in a conversation Duchairn has with Magwair, post-Canal Raids. Just the two of them.

SPOILER - MAYBE??
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I believe the current figures are that the MHoG has 600,000 rifles, some of them the new St. Kylmahn models, the rest muzzle loaders. The remainder have bows, pikes, and even slings. Their numbers are approximately 1.6 million, and so a million of them are currently targeted for use as cannon fodder. That's not going to be popular with those million serfs if they figure it out!

Of course the Harchongese government doesn't want any of those serfs to come home, so turning them against the jihad would be extremely useful for the allies. How RFC would finagle such an outcome would be interesting reading...

Is it possible Clyntahn might be the first to go? If Maigwair recalled a chunk of the Army of God to the Temple(ostensibly to protect Zion from Marine landings off of Hsung-Wu's Passage) he'd be in a good position to seize the Temple and remove Clyntahn from power.

The main reason I can see for this not to happen is it wouldn't make for a good ending to the series.

McGuiness wrote:The remainder have bows, pikes, and even slings.

Those slings might not be very ineffective if you issue the slingers with small enough grenades. I seem to remember the British army doing this in WW1.

Henry Brown wrote:

n7axw wrote:The Harchongese don't have several million rifle armed / angle gun / artillery rocket armed, well trained troops.

In terms of weapons, their situation has improved. But the gap between the two sides is still widening In the EOC's favor. The training has improved, particularly in the atea of discipline, but nobody on the Temple's side has figured out how to beat the ICA which means that their leadership sucks.

As for their mumbers, their agricultural sector is primitive to the point where to recruit the numbers you seem to be implying, they would starve the country and would be unable to feed their army to boot. Then too, the population disparity between the two sides is not as wide as you might believe. The Temple Lands and Harchong between them have less than 300,000, 000, certainly not a Chinese style advantage over the approx 200,000,000 on the allied side with both the allied military and economy a whole lot more efficient than the Temple side.

So what it amounts to is that the Temple is about to get its arse kicked in the coming campaign season. By the end of it, only the Temple lLands and Harchong will be left in the war and Harchong will have to rebuild its army.

So will the allies be able to overrun Zion? Yep. If .not this year, then next.

Don

Actually I think there was text-ev that the Harchongese army is over a million men. But it was extremely badly equipped, especially in terms of rifles. Duchairn has been working to re-equip them but I am pretty sure that when the spring fighting commences only a portion of the Harchongese army will have rifles. The key question is going to be: "how big a portion?"

I'm not a real numbers guy, so the following figures are only rough "in the ball park figures.

Harchong has roughly 600,000 rifles. That includes about 90,000 St Klyman breechloaders. Their total force is over 1.5 million Which means that the remainder are armed with horsebows. arbalasts, and, would you believe, 60,000 with slings that throw rocks.

What this means is that by the time the Mighty Host takes the field, the alliance will have more men armed with rifles than Harchong.

The Mighty Host is facing a tough situation. Most surely they are better off sinse the AOG started providing trainers, but still tough.

Don

n7axw wrote:I'm not a real numbers guy, so the following figures are only rough "in the ball park figures.

Harchong has roughly 600,000 rifles. That includes about 90,000 St Klyman breechloaders. Their total force is over 1.5 million Which means that the remainder are armed with horsebows arbalasts, and, would you believe, 60,000 slings that throw rocks.

Hey, they have lived or died, that lot, on their ability to hit and kill small moving animals with those slings for dinner. For years. I'm sure a competent rifle operator with ammunition is going to be a deadlier proposition than a competent sling operator with (mighty cheap) ammunition, but they needn't be set at naught.

I'd also hope and suspect that all the competent sling operators have the grounding to become competent rifle operators if the nearby rifle operator drops the rifle on account (e.g.) of having his head blown off. I read the Red Army had just that attitude when it came to more men than rifles, and Harchong's cut from the same stolid mold.

What this means is that by the time the Mighty Host takes the field, the alliance will have more men armed with rifles than Harchong.

Well - assuming those numbers aren't improved on on the Temple side by then, anyway. Still, it's something. I'd caution against setting the Mighty Host's officers at naught either, but I think we can grant the Allies' officer corps a lot more experience, better doctrine, and more support for being rational than the MH's.

The Mighty Host is facing a tough situation. Most surely they are better off sinse the AOG started providing trainers, but still tough.

Don

Oh yes. The worst of it though isn't so much the infantry situation as the artillery one though. Rawb's note about sling grenades may help out that somewhat ("foot field artillery"!) if it can be made to work. It did for Drake and Flint's Belisarius under somewhat similar circumstances.

n7axw wrote:I'm not a real numbers guy, so the following figures are only rough "in the ball park figures.

Harchong has roughly 600,000 rifles. That includes about 90,000 St Klyman breechloaders. Their total force is over 1.5 million Which means that the remainder are armed with horsebows arbalasts, and, would you believe, 60,000 slings that throw rocks.

What this means is that by the time the Mighty Host takes the field, the alliance will have more men armed with rifles than Harchong.

The Mighty Host is facing a tough situation. Most surely they are better off sinse the AOG started providing trainers, but still tough.

Don

The alliance's rifles will certainly reap a savage harvest from the MHoG, but their artillery will devastate them. Since the rifled cannon have a range that allows them to hit the MHoG before the bad guys can even see them, the allies can kill Harchongese with no danger to themselves until they run out of ammo. So calling them cannon fodder is more accurate than most people realize.

I'm concerned that the MHoG will be split into two or possibly three separate armies. One might be sent to reinforce Dohlar through the Border states, one to reinforce Kaitswyrth, and the last to help Wyrshym. Hanth is in no position to face those kind of numbers - he's too spread out now, and needs a friendly visit from a seijin to tell him where Ahlverez and his remaining troops are.

I sincerely hope that the last shipment of troops that left Chisholm is headed for Thesmar, or that DE helps Hanth drive the Dohlarans out of Evrytyn and back into Dohlar before continuing north to finish off Kaitswyrth. I thought Symkyn would handle that by himself - it's not like Kaitswyrth has regained his nerve over the winter, and he's facing a larger and better armed opponent now.

BGV will kick butt because he's a member of the inner circle!!!! I realize DE can't handle the Big Reveal, but Hanth certainly can, and Symkyn might be able to. The generals all need to be part of the inner circle or have a high ranking member of their staff who's a member and can slip them the info they need. Otherwise the seijins will have to fly back and forth daily as the action heats up. Eventually the allies are going to get badly hurt because two seijins just aren't enough.

I got to thinking about slings, and their range and effectiveness, so I looked up on Wikipedia and was quite surprised at the information there.

Ancient peoples used the sling in combat—armies included both specialist slingers and regular soldiers equipped with slings. As a weapon, the sling had several advantages; a sling bullet lobbed in a high trajectory can achieve ranges in excess of 400 metres (1,300 ft).[17] Modern authorities vary widely in their estimates of the effective range of ancient weapons. A bow and arrow could also have been used to produce a long range arcing trajectory, but ancient writers repeatedly stress the sling's advantage of range. The sling was light to carry and cheap to produce; ammunition in the form of stones was readily available and often to be found near the site of battle. The ranges the sling could achieve with molded lead sling-bullets was only topped by the strong composite bow.

Caches of sling ammunition have been found at the sites of Iron Age hill forts of Europe; some 40,000 sling stones were found at Maiden Castle, Dorset. It is proposed that Iron Age hill forts of Europe were designed to maximise the effective defense of slingers.

The hilltop location of the wooden forts would have given the defending slingers the advantage of range over the attackers, and multiple concentric ramparts, each higher than the other, would allow a large number of men to create a hailstorm of stone. Consistent with this, it has been noted that defenses are generally narrow where the natural slope is steep, and wider where the slope is more gradual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sling_(weapon)

I thought that a range of 10s of metres would be good, but they can apparently can go up to 400 metres, although I would be surprised if that was well aimed, probably more like muskets.

I think we need to keep in mind that Duchairn has been building a power base of his own among the common folk of Zion as well as the artisan class. Whether he deliberately set out to create a counterpoint to Clyntahn's power is quite besides the point; the simple truth is that it now exists. True, Duchairn's power at this point is entirely based outside the formal CoGA structures, which could imply that Clyntahn will remain unaware of its existence, or that, should he learn about it, that he will be unconcerned precisely because it is based among the city's commoners (and we know that Clyntahn holds everyone but especially commoners in contempt). On the other hand, Clyntahn is known for being jealous of any power not in his possession or under his control, so who knows how he might react should he discover Duchairn's power base?