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[Gervassen]

Seems legit i withdraw that last argument but i still caution for the VERY BEST camouflage we can put together around this campsite. An a set rally point if things go bad which we'll tell our troops.

A fixed emergency rally point to be used only in an occasion of a rout is a brilliant idea.  We wouldn't want our men riding cluelessly all the way back to the Duke in ones and twos, when we've gone through all this trouble to lead enemies away.

[3man75]

Okay so far we have

A: put together camoflauge on campsite
B: rally point in case we get routed for an organised retreat.
C: troop deployments an tactics like gerv said (cant fumd quote right now).
 D: (your ideas here)
 E: Fight like a desperate man with nothing to lose!

[evilcherry]

Presumably the main point is whether they have light Cav or not. In any case, any army disciplined enough can withstand light cavalry unless they are horse archers (which is another story though).

Have some intel check on their force composition before deciding on how to harass. If they have no light cavalry, we can just run riot. If they have some, our best bet is to disrupt its attention. Even they have intel on the Duke's forces, chances are they still need to do some serious maneuvering to prevent being anvil-and-hammered.

[3man75]

Checking on force composition should be done first then and wait for the results. It is as evil described it.

[Tomcost]

I have an idea: what about if we find a really easy to deafeat foraging patrol? Wouldn't it be nice if our men pretended to be bandits? You know, make them look disorganized, so that the enemy thinks that there is no mayor threat.

[Gervassen]

Hmm. I'd rather that they over-react toward us, tbh. Under-reaction is so humdrum! Besides our duke is digging a hidden trench, you know, and it's best to give the enemy lots of exaggerated threats elsewhere. He'll have his own cavalry screen, but the more we distract, the fewer probes that they have to catch.

On another thought, the west is where all the major foraging is happening. When you think about it, the horde already marched up to the capital through the south and tore the land up, the east is various Duchies that still have leadership and coherent resistance, the north has been regained by the King. That leaves the weakness leaderless remains of this Duchy that lie west. Most of that foraging traffic is trundling down the roads leading west.

[Tomcost]

And, what about beggining by pretending to be bandits, and when they get over confident we truly strike?

It would be lke this:
-Small party arrives without possessions at the horde.
-Leader decides to send stronger party to forage.
-Stronger party doesn't even come back.
-???
-Paranoia
-Profit!

[Gervassen]

We only have a few days to make an impact, and that plan is full of waiting for them to grow worried and react. I'd prefer knocking loudly on their western door, sucker-punching them when they answer, informing them that we are composed of gingerbread, and riding west with columns of smoke giving them unmistakable evidence where we were half a day ago when we hit the last forage convoy. Run them a merry chase.

Btw, we need not wait for foragers to leave the raider camp. There are already dozens of foraging groups out there, sent days ago, that we can catch while they're trying to return with food.

[Tomcost]

Well, if there are such time limitations, then I like more your idea.

EDIT: typos, grammar, because I wrote this in a hurry.

[Gervassen]

Yeah, we are only two or three days ahead of the Duke, if I read correctly. We need to grab their attentions fast.

[3man75]

And, what about beggining by pretending to be bandits, and when they get over confident we truly strike?

It would be lke this:
-Small party arrives without possessions at the horde.
-Leader decides to send stronger party to forage.
-Stronger party doesn't even come back.
-???
-Paranoia
-Profit!

The thing is their going to keep sending even more bigger partires like one sqaud in front 3 in the back to find us. {if they get serious that is we don't know what their leaders temper is like} Plus why would we be bandits? they'd just stab whoever is not part of their homeland for food. BTW do you guys think the Sea raiders will turn to cannibalism?

[Culise]

Gerv? You are scary, but you have a good grasp of the battlefield. Your coldly pragmatic attitude has questionable appropriateness in times of peace, but you may be the best at times of war.

These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back! There's no choices left and I'm ready for war.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Obligatory Second Spoiler for Unrelated (click to show/hide)

Laws of war exist so long as both side benefit, otherwise there is no means of realistic enforcement in the middle of a war. It's unreasonable to think that Germany would not have gone around a meat grinder like the Maginot line for the low cost of invading a small neutral country. With Britain already in the war, it wasn't even like WWI in which invading Belgium led to Britain joining France. Britain was already in. The Maginot line was indeed short-sightedly... short.

Spoiler: Still Unrelated (click to show/hide)

To be fair, it wasn't short-sighted.  It was politically impossible to extend the Maginot line as far as the Channel coast, for the very simple reason that doing so would have been tantamount to admitting that Belgium could not be defended, causing them to (at best) declare complete neutrality and (at worst) flip over to actively supporting the Germans thanks to the lessons learned in World War 1 about respect for neutrality.  That was something the French and the British could not countenance.  For the French, having taken such dreadful losses and having had their northern lands devastated in the last war, the next war had to be fought off French land, no matter what; the guiding rule for the British since the late 18th and early 19th centuries has always been to avoid any single hostile power being in control of the Flemish lands, whether it was France or Germany; and for both powers, pushing the front into Belgium greatly shortened the front lines and avoided the fall of the Belgian industry into German hands.  Besides that, the Belgian forts on the German border were some of the best there were, exceeding even some of the Maginot fortifications except for the major unanticipated weakness that they had not been designed to withstand aerial attack - forts like Eben-Emael, supposedly impregnable and dominating the approaches into Belgium, would have delayed the Germans tremendously had they held as they had in Maastricht, and the fall of Eben-Emael to a simple glider attack by less than 80 commandos with shaped charges was a deathblow that threw the entire Allied defense plan in Belgium into disarray and convinced the Allies that this was the main point of attack (and that Sedan was the diversion). 

The reason France fell is because of a lack of immediate French and British reaction to the German invasion, and over-reliance on captured plans that indicated that the Germans really did intend a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan (which were, to be fair, not only logical, but also completely genuine).  This put the cream of the French army, the entirety of their reserves, and the BEF all on the wrong side of Belgium when the Germans came pouring through, and Gamelin, expecting the German hammer to fall on the excellent tank ground of Belgium (especially after the Belgian front collapsed), put all of his mobile forces too far north to react to the actual German plan.  If the French had reacted faster, if they had proper C3I (especially as far as comms are concerned; they completely underestimated the role of radios in modern warfare) and air assets, and if they hadn't committed all their reserves to counter the Belgian offensive, even ignoring the ignored opportunity of the "Sitskrieg", they could have still wiped out the Germans in the early days of the Ardennes offensive when the main offensive was jammed up in one of the largest traffic jams in history and effectively unable to fight.

Sorry, but the "Maginot was a boondoggle" has always been a huge pet peeve of mine, perpetuated from Patton on.  The line did exactly what it was supposed to do - serve as a manpower multiplier for a country suffering from a hollow generation with just over half the total population of its expected opponent, and force the Germans to fight through the Low Countries instead of France.  The fact that the Allies botched even that doesn't change the fact that those goals succeeded.  Now, whether it was cost-effective is another story; the main section of the Maginot that everyone thinks of when they hear the name was ridiculously expensive in spite of being in favourable terrain, which is why the Luxemburg-Dover extension that was built when the Belgians really did declare neutrality briefly from 1934-1938 (or was that 1936?) was so sparse by comparison.

[GreatWyrmGold]

((I think that we can all agree that the Maginot line was a reasonable gamble that lost because the Germans made a different gamble through a weak point in the line using tactics that the defenders had not anticipated.))

[Maldevious]

I think we can all agree that this is not the place to discuss the Maginot Line, interesting as it may be.

[3man75]

Okay i think were ready to sucker punch and {stone cold} stunner these sea raiders with our fool proof plans.

TV HOST:
Will Count stone survive leading these raids? will he be able to survive the final showdown between the remnants of the kingdoms armies and the Sea raider alliance?
Tune in next time to LORDSHIP a suggestion game!