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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eltab" data-source="post: 7335904" data-attributes="member: 6803337">The classic Dark Lord strategy blunder is: attack in every direction at once.  In most cases, the Heroes of the various lands will fight your army to a tie.  Then you have to decide which front to reinforce.  Usually at this point you are informed that one attack truly suffered a catastrophic defeat and you are being counter-attacked by the successful defenders.  So now your reserves are busy too.The better plan: pick one enemy (conveniently, where the PCs are) to smash.  Hold a reserve just as big as the attacking force.  Use only economy-of-force units (more than frontier guards, big enough that the other Good Peoples will not want to attack them) on the other fronts.  Send ambassadors to everybody, explaining your overwhelming power and offering to accept requests of alliance.Let the PCs be the big heroes who break your ravening hordes (or go down trying).  If they only defend themselves to a tie, you can send the reserve in as a second wave against them.  If they do defeat the first force, they have to deal with the reserves also.This gives you as DM a chance to set up a Helm's Deep / Minas Tirith set-piece battle, and a follow-up open field engagement to decide the war.  If the heroes win both, send an ambassador with an offer of peace.But there also should be some 'secret mission' that only a small band of highly-trained and very-experienced individuals (such as the PCs) could hope to pull off, which will greatly weaken and embarrass The Evil One, so he has to spend his time and efforts and resources keeping his overwhelming coalition from falling apart (or turning on him), instead of attacking.Should you ever decide to go back to that world later, The Evil One (or his successor-lieutenant) still has his fortress-land and is surrounded by suspicious neighbors - just the set-up for another campaign!Putting this in LotR terms:Sauron attacks everybody from Gondor to the Lonely Mountain.  - The dwarves sent a call for help and retreated into their fortress, letting the men from Dale take shelter also; the besieging army was trapped in place (based in Dale) when more dwarves arrived, and destroyed in a three-way pincer attack.- Mirkwood spiders and monsters attacked the Mirkwood Elves.  The organized Elves attritted their disorganized foes down to nuisances, in time to send help to the dwarves and men inside Lonely Mountain.- Moria- and Dol Guldor- based orcs launched a scorched-earth campaign into Lorien.  Galadriel used the power of her Elven Ring and counter-attacked across the River Anduin, enlightening and cleansing Dol Goldur.  The monsters of Mirkwood could not help defend the fortress.  (And this also confused Sauron: is that the power of His Ring or of hers?)- The movie shows Aragorn's and Gandalf's defense of Minas Tirith.  In the book, Aragorn also uses psychological warfare by contacting Sauron through Saruman's palantir and lists off his rightful claims of kingship.  (So Sauron is led to think that HE has the Ring and is going crazy from its influence.)- Unbeknownst to Sauron, the REALLY important operation of the war is Frodo and Sam (bearing the One Ring) sneaking their way towards Mt. Doom.Sauron SHOULD HAVE picked one foe - Galadriel or Gondor - and sent an overwhelming hammer-blow against it, with an equal follow-up army.  Plus fortified his frontiers against infiltration (Gandalf speaks about this briefly to somebody in the book).  Capture Frodo and Sam, and present overwhelming force - the war is over, with victory (but not revenge, which has to await another day).edit: punctuation and spelling</blockquote>

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