How Would You Defend A Mountain Fortress?

[boer]

As previously pointed out, this task can be divided into 2 things. Defending against a commando raid and defending against an army. About the commando raid I don't have any suggestion, but against the army I do have some.

I would like to use a tactic that was used in the Alps in WOI. That is, dropping avalanches on top of that army. First make shure that you're the one who controlls the weather. Make with the weather a ring of hard winter around your fortress and make shure that the mountaintops are covered with loads of snow. Then when the whole army is in a valley, preferably asleep, use something like soundburst (in WOI they used mortar-shells) to create avalanches. I don't think the common goodie-good guys can outrun an avalanche or survive having 4 meters of snow on top of them.

Of course this is the ideal moment to send in some (expendable) forces so the few survivers can't rescue those burried ones. Hell, you might even send in a few BEFORE the avalanche.

Also, this is an ideal moment to send your petdragon on a raid to kill off those 1600 odd wagons supplying the now reduced army. One good aimed breath on each wagon will do just fine..

Now alot of those goodie-good-doers are burried alive and those who survived only have the equipment they had picked up while running from that avalanche. Might be a good time to send in your epic forces to make shure their champions didn't survive either.

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Indeed, Boer, many different kinds of environmental hazards can be used to supplement the defenses quite well!

I would also imagine that many of you all here can design the various cohorts and such, as you desire. Be creative! I would be interested to see what many of you come up with. I have put off this particular scenario as I am swallowed up in work, so there is time for people to continue contributing thoughts and ideas.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[mmadsen]

There are at least two natural resources here that no one has tapped yet.

One: The cities. If they are politically expendable, convert one into vampire chow. The legions can deal with 600 vampires. They may have more trouble with 600 vampires and 120,000 vampire spawn.

This has come up multiple times, Andor. It's a good idea; it's just been "tapped" already.

Use regular teleports to dump a ton of magma on those damm standards. Use teleport enchanted arrows to teleport highlevel enemies into the magma pit.

Interesting.

 

[DarkDragon]

For the leader, I would have gone Paragon Infernal with levels of Blackguard myself, but that is just me.

How badly do we want to win?
If bad enough, then make one of the high level followers a Shadowdancer. You then start systematically start creating a legion of shadows under your control.
Take out one of the cities, or both if you don't care, now you have 100,000 shadows.When the legion goes to sleep attack from the ground, five shadows to every man staying completly silent and then move tent to tent.
I don't care what level you are but you can not deal with a million shadows trying to wipe you out.
Start opening gates back into the Valleron homeland and taking out cities there as well.

 

[mmadsen]

If bad enough, then make one of the high level followers a Shadowdancer. You then start systematically start creating a legion of shadows under your control.

Someone mentioned the Shadow solution earlier, and I assume it would work well, but is it any better than the Vampire solution?

 

[The Iron Mark]

How much area do you think this army takes up? I want to know how big I must make my Epic Army Killing Spell.

 

[Tiberius]

How much area do you think this army takes up? I want to know how big I must make my Epic Army Killing Spell.

Big-radius, big-damage epic spells have correspondingly large spellcraft difficulties. I was designing one epic spell for my druid to use to scour cities from the land, and ended up with a Spellcraft DC of 315 or so. IIRC, it did something on the order of 60d6 damage from three different energy types in a 1-mile radius spread, required ritual help, included a backlash, cost XP, and had a casting time of 100 days 10 minutes. It's not worth trying to take out the whole army at once.

-Tiberius

 

[The Iron Mark]

Remember, we can use the gold from our 50th level commander to have some +200 or so Spellcraft item. Are we restricted in how much money we can dump into one item for our troops, commander, etc.?

 

[The Iron Mark]

Also, do you think a cone or a spread would be better at mass destruction?

 

[mmadsen]

Big-radius, big-damage epic spells have correspondingly large spellcraft difficulties.

Well, Rain of Fire, at DC 50, should kill most ground troops, shouldn't it? It hits a two-mile radius, doing 1 hp/round (for 20 hours). How long does it take ground troops to run two miles? Twelve minutes? That's 120 rounds. And the survivors have probably left behind equipment and supplies.

I was designing one epic spell for my druid to use to scour cities from the land, and ended up with a Spellcraft DC of 315 or so. IIRC, it did something on the order of 60d6 damage from three different energy types in a 1-mile radius spread, required ritual help, included a backlash, cost XP, and had a casting time of 100 days 10 minutes. It's not worth trying to take out the whole army at once.

Unfortunately, I think the epic spell system is flawed, particularly in including the DC-10 base for each seed combined in a spell. This makes the combination of two 1st-level spells as complex as a 12th-level spell, not a 2nd-level spell.

If you want a powerful spell then, you don't want to use multiple spell seeds; you want to pump up a single one. An epic fireball might be:

Energy (DC 19)
Increase Range +400% (+8) -- from 300 ft. to 1500 ft.
Increase Area +400% (+16) -- from 20-ft radius sphere to 100 ft.
Increase Casting Time, 10 minutes (-20)

That's DC 23 -- pretty darn easy -- for a 10d6 Fireball with a 100-ft. radius with a 1500-ft. range -- assuming that Increase Area increases the radius linearly, not the area, and assuming a spherical area of effect costs no more than a bolt.

If we bump up the area even more, we can get a 200-ft radius for DC 43. Each extra 20 ft. of radius adds four to the DC.