Defy elven forest-fighting tactics! (Now open to my players)

[mythago]

A fast-moving river is a tactical advantage all in itself.

As others have said, dam it and divert it. Build a dam and culvert to take the river off-course slightly; it'll quickly cut itself new banks, and the plants and living things now in its path are going to be unhappy campers.

You're downstream, right? Back the river up. Build a dam and flood it up toward the forest.

 

[tauton_ikhnos]

1. Build rolling walls. Think of it as a vertical wall set on top of a raft... except that the raft has wheels. You've got a ton of wood there. Line those rolling walls up, with tower shields hung on it in case of emergency, and start establishing a beach head against the forest.

2. Cut down trees within your beachhead. You don't have to cut down a million square miles, just enough that elves have problems shooting at you. If one orc can cut a tree down in about two hours, and needs an hour of rest afterward, then 400 orcs can cut down about 1200 trees per day. A dense pine forest has about one tree per 50 square feet, so that's a 250 ft x 250 ft square that they can clear each day. Have soldiers with tower shields guard them, of course! Within a few days, you should have more than enough room around the keep to keep the elves at bay.

3. Boat soldiers should have tower shields up during transit. Those things give total cover for a reason.

4. Repeat steps 1 & 2 for beachheads along the river.

5. The best part about cutting down some 1200 trees per day is the approximately 8 tons of firewood that represents per day. After the first day or so, build yourself a bonfire around the keep. In Mother Orcland, dutch oven cooks you!

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, mostly my ideas were to be used in conjuction with the others, but:

disease, you'd need magic, and stalking blue said no magic.

I dunno, we do disease pretty well in our own day and age without magic. Athens was defeated by disease, after all. You just need one thing -- say, if you've got a contact with a sewer-dwelling Aboleth, I'm sure there's things growing there that wouldn't be good for Elves. The aboleth bottles it, you expose a captive to it and 'allow' it to be rescued...and then wait...if the opposition doesn't have magic, they're at least not fighting at full efficiency, and it'll take 'em forever to track down the source. If you get lucky, they could even die...just one critter from a diseased place, or with a disease attack, and you're in germ warfare, moneystyle.

Disease works on things other than humanoids, too. Disease the trees, disease the animals, suffuse the environment with a plague. Elves succumb easily...you don't need anything too potent.

As for poison, that's probably best when pared with the above 'flood the forest' idea. Control the river, divert it, slow it down, OR, just get a druid with some vipers...elves are so trusting to the beasts of the wood, and so very frail....

The themes are similar -- they're frail. Hit their Fort save, hit their hp's. They're altruistic -- bring them to you, instead of going to them.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Let's try looking at this from another perspective: how are the elves pulling all of this off?

They have skilled woodselves who know the terrain and are friends of the forest.

The forest is friendly to them or at least not hostile to them like it is to you.

They have the support of some kind of elven society behind them--giving them food and equipment.

They have a defensible position in the river fortress.

They know that your goal is to take the river fortress and in order to do that, your supply lines follow a fairly predictable path (the river, etc).

So, let's look at these things a bit more closely:

The fortress--how is it supplied? Assuming that water isn't a problem because it's in the river, they still need to get food. They probably have stores but those are limited. What kind of stores do the orcs think they have? Starving them out is a possibility and unless they have a secret passage leading under the river, or a magical device to resupply them, you can prevent their resupply, even more easily than they can harass your supply lines.

Second thing about that fortress: what is it built of. It's probably got walls of stone but most would have wood buildings inside. Since you're going to have plenty of pitch from cutting trees down, catapulting flaming projectiles inside on a regular basis is sure to hit something sooner or later. It doesn't cost much and doesn't require a lot of effort, why not?

Third thing about the fortress: what are the prevailing winds? If you can cook up some noxious smoke, you might as well do it from a place where the wind will carry the smell into the fortress. This will mostly be a psychological tactic rather than a chemical attack (though if you can get your orcs to collect poison oak or poison ivy to toss on those fires at the right time (or maybe even mount the fire on a raft of logs and set it to float right up to the base of the fortress's walls), you might be able to get a harmful rather than annoying smoke. Even if not, however, anything to make the enemy disspirited is a good thing.

Fourth thing: You have more arrows than they do. If nothing else, you have a whole forest to cut down and make arrows out of. In the fort, they don't. So, have snipers with heavy crossbows take a shot at anyone who shows his face or any vulnerable portion of his body along the walls. If you end up injuring rather than killing a lot of them, that's not a problem. Every wound you inflict has a chance to become infected. Every infection has a chance of spreading. They'll do the same to you but you have more soldiers than they do and probably can get enough arrows that you can afford to take every shot--you don't have to wait for a good one.

But enough about the siege. That would be easy to deal with if it weren't for the guerillas hounding your supply lines.

Now the historical response to the guerillas would be to use collective punishment to destroy their public support and to use the advantages of a ground-taking army to destroy their bases of operation. People raiding your supply line near town A? Ask the people of town A to turn them in. If they don't, burn the crops and crucify every person in town A (except maybe the young women who you take as slaves). Now the guerillas are attacking in the vicinity of town B? Do the same thing there. Sooner or later, someone will turn them in or they'll run out of sympathetic villagers to give them food and supplies. When that happens, they'll become more desperate and will either have to spend more time hunting and less time raiding or it won't be enough for them to just destroy your supplies, they'll have to capture them--which is a lot harder.

That tactic doesn't seem like it'll work for the elvish raiders. They have no towns that you mentioned. The only thing that would appear remotely like the townsfolk is the forest. So how can you deal with that?

If the forest is alive, which it seems it may be, perhaps you can negotiate or intimidate the forest. If it's living, there must be some kind of spirit or sense that can either be trained like an animal or intimidated like a person. For every attack you'll clearcut a mile of forest. Or maybe you'll just ring the trees, stripping off their bark in a ring near the ground and then waiting for them to die. That would be easier for you but just as deadly to the forest. (In fact, just ringing the trees and leaving them to die could be a solution to the forest moving around problem in itself. Presumably, only living trees wll move and a line of dead, non-moving trees would serve as a fairly good trail marker). Or something like that. Or perhaps you could get some bark beetles and threaten to release them unless the forest stayed put and became neutral. Or just release them. They could do some serious damage over the course of a few years. But it's harder to negotiate with the forest and none of that may work. If not, it's worth a try since you're likely to do most of that stuff anyway so it's not as though you're taking on much in the way of extra work.

For the elves, since they obviously don't have fields and pastures, they must either be hunting and gathering or just don't need to eat. There's nothing you can do if they don't need to eat but if they're hunting, making it a standing order to shoot every animal you see, and to trample over or burn every edible plant could make an impact. If nothing else, they'll have to hunt in areas away from the territory you frequent which will mean that they'll have to spend more time in areas further away from you and will need to travel further (and incur greater risk of detection) and won't be able to raid as frequently.

 

[Sejs]

Re: the river.


If you're upstream, kill everything you can that's within arms reach - animals, birds, you name it. Anything you don't eat, let it sit around for a couple days so it'll start to putrefy, then chuck it in the river. Make that river so chock full of disease that it could be cut into blocks. Then just let it feed the forrest.

And of course continue burning and clear cutting as you can.

Never follow your opponents into restricted terrain. If they come to you, chase 'em off (not that difficult), and when they retreat into the forest, light it on fire after them. Your camps should always have a couple hundred feet of clear land before hitting the woods, anyway. Just repeat it as you go. Drive 'em off, burn the forest at their heels. They should get the message sooner or later.

 

[daTim]

Have your Orcs only work on dark cloudy nights cutting down trees. They have darkvision, elves dont

 

[Dark Jezter]

This thread is too good to let die. It reminds me of some of SHARK's old threads dealing with fantasy battles.

Anyways, do the goblins in the army have worg mounts? Since worgs can track by scent, they could prove useful in tracking the elves.

 

[Whitey]

Mythago's got a great idea with the dam - but let's take that a step further.

Build the dam upriver, if it's possible, of that pesky elven keep. Do this by clear-cutting everything about 100 yards from the riverbank, which is about as far as a bowman can shoot, yours or theirs. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, having a lot of orcs besieging the fort, as long as there are enough, to make sure no one's ambling in and out. The orcs might not like all the work details - kick them until they do, and make sure every orcy labor gang, at least 50 workers strong, is guarded, preferably by a squad on a raft, in the river. Now you've got a lot of lumber, to build your dam. Try to work at night, and rely on darkvision, and again do the construction out of range, of the elven fort. A dam about 20ft high is OK, 30ft is better. You'll have some wood left over - use that to make arrows, handles for greataxes, cooking fires, whatever. The cleaner the banks, the better. You might also want to send some left-over logs downstream, every now and then, just to see if they hit and get stuck. If there's a part of the river you're not travelling through, post some logs, vertically, just below the water's surface, and clip the tops off, at an angle. Any elfy boat that hits one will capsize or get a hole in the hull, or at least come to an abrupt stop. Got your dam ready? Good.

Blow the dam. Swim, little elves, swim. Since you don't have dynamite, just yank some timber out of the bottom, done by some ogres with chains, or a big battering ram thingy.

You probably won't wash away the fort, but you'll ruin all the stores inside, along with any planted crops in the vicinity. A tree that's just partway underwater for a couple days will die, probably just as fast as you can burn them out. The banks will have eroded, making the river flow faster, and be all silty and rank. Areas that are too high to flood, you might try tunneling into, killing the trees you uproot, and forcing them to waste time, locating the burrows. Your pointy-eared opponents will have to deal with impassable tracks, massive outbreaks of cholera and/or dysentery, and soggy silk underpants. But really, this is just to buy you more time, so you can go all Mordor on 'em.

Wherever there's a bend in the river, something that's hard to see and navigate around, put up a watchtower. As big a tower as you can raise, with the legs wrapped in cured animal hide so they don't burn, and staffed with all the orcs you can fit. You might want several floors to your tower, for observation, lobbing arrows, storing supplies, whatever. Keep your towers in contact, with horns and signal flags, using as complicated a code as your orcs can dope out. They should check at least once every half-hour, day or night. Remember, you're not in a hurry, and every bit of attrition is on your side.
Now, you're ready for the final phase. It will take months, or maybe years, but you can connect your towers with suspension bridges, or causeways. This way, even if one tower gets taken, you can isolate it, until you're ready to counter-attack, or you can leave it besieged and keep working. You'll have divided the forest into parcels, which you can methodically wipe out, replace them with orc hovels, a pigsty, a forge, and all the comforts of home. Truly ambitious despots might want to build a permanent castle.

Elves in the forest? Not any more. No more forest. No more elves.

 

[Goobermunch]

If you're upstream from the buggers and they keep hitting your boats with flaming arrows, turn it around on them. Load some boats with barrels of pitch (harvested from the handy local trees). Send them downstream into the elven forest and invite them to blow 'em up. If you've got problems with chains, vines, and the like, use the same tactics, but make sure there's a lit lantern near those barrels. When the boat suddenly stops: KABOOM! Even if it doesn't get ignited, it'll just jam up the river for your next boat.

Make some small catapults. You've got the resources where you are.

Make sawdust, lots of it. Mix it with pitch and launch big gooey burning balls of sticky awfulness into the forest. You burn some trees, you burn some elves, you make a nuisance of yourself.

Others have said this, but corrupt the river. Build a dam. Dig a pit on the other side. Kill everything you can get your hands on. If you have to, find a nearby human village and kill them all. Pile the corpses up and let 'em rot for a few days. While they're cooking, build another dam on the other side of the pit. Gradually let the water from the river filter through your new festering pit of putresence. By regulating the flow through the dams, you should be able to turn the river into a biohazard the like of which your world has never seen.

If you're not going to be able to do that, start cutting down trees and sending them down river. After a few days, start cutting them in half and hollowing them out (include some airholes). Send platoons of orcs down river in primative submarines. Set them up on the other side of the enemy fortress and begin a two front war.

Take the long view and start building a fence around the outside of the forrest using trees you've cut down. Dam the river. Wait a few years. Then burn the thing down while it's dry!

--G

 

[Sejs]

Dam the river upstream and you deny the elves the use of the river.

Dam the river downstream and you divert the water into the surrounding region, flooding it. Then start feeding it diseased corpses.

Nothing quite like turning that happy little elven forest into a festering plague swamp, now is there? Suck on that, Mr Racial Con Penalty.