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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1633406" data-attributes="member: 3146">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.</blockquote>

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