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

[Elder-Basilisk]

Do you use 3.5?

If so, get a legate to cast deeper darkness on a coin or rock and keep it inside a sealed jar for the journey. Put one on board each ship. If the elves ambush the ship, break or open the jar and you'll cloak the ship in shadows making it hard to find. The elves, however, won't be any harder to see.

If you use 3.0, just import the 3.5 darkness as "Cloak of Shadows" or some such name. (That's what is should have been called in 3.5 anyway).

I know you don't have much access to magic but it's a relatively low-level spell and has an incredible duration and consequently might be an option. And it would probably make a significant difference.

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

Burrowing and Armour

The 2 suggestion that I've seen posted that I think have the best opportunity are burrowing and armoured vehicles.

Effectively split your force in 2 half burrowing along for a long term strategy, half continuing to support your convoys. Ok three groups - the third being your siege forces.

So 500 strong in each - could be a problem but them's the breaks.

Team 1 - sieging - nice and easy stay dug in, don't do sorties, try and take out as many as possible with nasty tactics - catapulting dead animals into the fort, catapulting fire into the surrounding forests. Above all else try and keep yourself a ring of cleared forest around your position - Salting the Earth as suggested shouuld help there - but lots of salt required (how often does it rain around here?)

Team 2 - supplies and armour. Obviously the priority is keeping the supplies moving. That's got to take up a lot of your effort. But deforestation has to remain part of your strategy and the area around the river is where you need to do that. Here you need to go with the heavy armour approach - let the long ears come at you with bows - just keep a nice 5 cm thick piece of steel or wood between your orcs and everything else. May I suggest squads working along the river with little mobile walls. Your problem is keeping the river alive and working for you, but stopping the elves using the forest around it - and you don't want to salt the earth as you affect your own water supply. So don't get chop down trees - ring them. With the ground coated in dead trees they will lose a lot of the cover they grant the elves, and fresh trees won't be able to work there way in. Plus this kills the roots of the riverbank trees - but doesn't mess up their earth support which is keeping your river stable.

EDIT - additional thought - once the trees are dead start hacking off the limbs! Less cover and no platforms for the elves but keeps the structure of the forest and still stops fresh trees from encroaching.

Team 3 - burrowing alongside the river. Some will say that you risk the water coming into your tunnel, and to some extent you do. But otters maintain riverside burrows - and there is some evidence of these having been around for generations (particularly thinking of the giant otters here). I'm also not meaning right on the river bank - but about 20-30 meters in. The tunnels don't have to be big enough to have armies marching through them - only big enough to put down rails and have relay teams that pull a low cart containing supplies to a way-station and transfer it to the next cart. And the way stations are inhe cellars of the forts that you say you already have scattered along the river bank. This gives you a supply line that is difficult to attack - it's protected by the earth and all the nice tree corpses that you've left around which give it armour from any attacks from above. ANd as you have your forts in place already - you can divide team 3 up and start the tunnels from multiple places at once.

Logistics - you need 80,000 metres of tunnel, and of track - is that possible? You don't have to worry too much about cave-ins - you have a nice root structure above your head that will hold the earth in place (and contrary to popular belief the 'tap-root' is a myth. OK you need to go a bit deeper, and will have to deal with problem roots occasionally. You also need to work swiftly on getting the tress along the river bank ringed (I am presuming your trees suffer the normal effects of ringing and that the other trees can't remove their corpses. Would probably be worth organising a Berlin Wall style event with all your forces concentrating their effort on that in one day long blitz - any elves that are in the area for an ambush that day may get or give you a nasty surprise but the job will be done before they have a chance to mobilise.

Anyway hope these help

BTW what part of London are you in?

The Hoard

 

[StalkingBlue]

I've heard it said that the reason we have such horrible nasty dangerous devestating forest fires in America these days is because we're too good at stopping the little ones. Little natural forest fires sweep away the underbrush but merely scroch the bark off the old growth trees, which heal rapidly and persevere. But when the brush piles up, forest fires become too hot, and even the old ancient trees burn. Rain doesn't stop this fire, rivers don't stop this fire, a torrential onslaught of pumped water doesn't do a thing. Only thing that works are back fires to starve fuel out.

Aah. Fantastic! Fancy orcs actually planting things...

Of course this also means that chucking burning pitch into the forest from travelling riverboats will tend to make the forest around there harder to burn in the longer term... Although all those elf-sown assassin vines will still writhe and go up in flames nicely.
(Where isthat grinning devil smiley when I need it?)

 

[StalkingBlue]

While you're clearing vegitation for your road, salt the ever-loving bejebus out of the earth as its being turned and pounded flat. Salt your roads. LET the trees move in over them to conceal the path - your roads wont be marked by stone slabs, they'll be marked by the long strips of dead and fallen vegitation that run along them.

Nice. Can salt paths. Can salt the ground around our forts. If want to start deforesting, can throw salt at riverbanks from boats...

 

[StalkingBlue]

You might look up the tunneling strategies for the viet con. There should be plenty of stuff around on the internet.

Good point.

You might design the ships with protection for the rowers and lots of modular components for the decks so that the crew can easily adjust protection and dock the boats together for escape and reinforcements.

Yup, it's being done to the extent possible, which right now is limited due to limited building/requisitioning capacities. (Or possibly due to boats being hoarded for some other vile purpose, who can tell... )
There still are well-protected boats, but some newer ones used for trips up and down the river are woefully open to attack, with some improvised coverings that might provide partial concealment and with added shields, some degree of cover. I have to say attacks on boats have tapered off a bit over the months, looks as if we are gradually eroding the guerrilla effort along the riverbanks.

The Elf climbing bonus is nasty. You sure they couldn't find something like a thorny kudzu to grow up into the top branches and really punish 'em?

Plus, trapping tree tops is just a nasty idea. Can't you imagine how much it would frustrate the elves to know that a false move will cause their dear departed uncles head and hair to go up in flames?

Kudzu is not bad, for hampering access and spoiling firing angles. Tree traps are brilliant - both very nice to have for areas adjacent to our fortified points.

(DM's note re uncles: Not that orcs would know, or tend to care about those tiny details, but even elves can't tell whose spirit is in which tree, plus the area my setup is in has very ancient spirits, some must have lived and died more than a thousand years ago. So, nobody's actual uncle.)

 

[StalkingBlue]

Just learnt about kudzu growth rates. Well, blimey! Why did anyone ever start chopping and burning that forest when you can just sit there and choke it with weed!

 

[StalkingBlue]

Do you use 3.5?

Yup, but I'd still like to keep ignoring magic in this thread for now. Not all units have magic available, and anyway orcs are warriors first and foremost and want to be independent of spells where they can. Not to mention that far too many tasty and very orcish ideas are springing up in this thread without any magicking around.

I might start another thread involving magical solutions to orc problems in a little while, for now let's keep it mundane, ok? Cheers for some cool ideas.

 

[Sarellion]

I don´t think that Orcs would know about modern forest fires caused by preventing smaller forest fires. We didn´t know about it in the first time either or we would´t have done it. Why should a subterranean race know this?

 

[StalkingBlue]

I don´t think that Orcs would know about modern forest fires caused by preventing smaller forest fires. We didn´t know about it in the first time either or we would´t have done it. Why should a subterranean race know this?

Through observations over centuries and centuries of making slow inroads on the elven forest lands by burning.
Grunt orcs of course shouldn't be expected to understand the overall environmental impact of their actions, but I'd say it should become evident quickly to any veteran orcish forest fighter that forest-cum-undergrowth is a good place for laying a fire, while forest that's fairly clear of plant life underneath the canopy of ancient trees tends to be much more resilient, with lots of fuel needed to get a fire started and repeated attempts required to kill off the mightiest trees.
The brains at the top of the army, whether orcish or human, will surely be able to draw their own conclusions from that over time.

 

[StalkingBlue]

And now I need some cool, nasty, non-magical, easy-to-make traps for treetop places. Especially for waylaying snipers that may sneak in towards a fortified position or a river choke point.

Ideas?