Oltux72

The problem with that is that he stands out a lot. People with shiny chickens a not exactly common on Roshar.

You might speculate that he knows how to use Connection. In fact that may be the reason he is using an Aviar.

Map of Roshar Not many islands? In the field. In a town arson becomes an option.

But not necessarily together Ati might have considered himself to be in the CR (for reason of death). So the similarity may be to Vax or the subastral of Vax. For all we know it is a continent or country on Yolen.

Costal shipping is essential on coast with a lot of islands. How do you set the thickness of the wall, height, depth of a trench and so on? Soulcasting works so well because it involves a kind of telepathy anyway. Yes and what for? That is the tactical reasoning. You also wish to minimize your own losses and wear down the enemy's officers. If you can harrass cheaply, you do it. Shardbearers cannot hold territory. The same applies to Surgebinders. However, you need to consider that during a Desolation, you may not necessarily want to take a city, but destroy it. You march an army to gain an advantage in position. You will not gain surprise against an enemy who can fly or even see the future. Nor will you outmarch a flying or teleporting enemy. If you want to build up. Digging still sucks. That means that any cover you build will have to be built under fire or behind a shield wall. They required the Alethi forces to construct enormous camps with shelters. Yes, it still took years against an outnumbered enemy. Feasible because the troops were not needed elsewhere. Not a plausible assumption in a Desolation. So your troops are limited to chull cart speed and to tracks chull carts can cope with.

No problem. Spontaneous short reactions point out where hidden unquestioned assumptions are.

Now you are touching on the strategic. At such loss rates we are talking about naked survival and total war. You do not seek to attack the other side's armed forces. You wish to kill women and children. Hence the primary goal is to devastate rural areas. You attack cities only because you cannot afford to be trapped between two forces. Giving you the distance to the next storm shelter you can operate at without slow, portable shelters or Surgebinders. Amphibious operations. Can you built a fortification with a cohesion fabrial. How would you use abrasion, tension or gravitation. They need an advanced UI. No. Those Fused were probing and harrassing. That was no serious attempt to take the city. That still does not make them easy to find. To put it bluntly: insufficient data. Fascinating, but conclusions are totally different based on assumptions which are all plausible Exactly. A fortification makes it easier for the smaller force. Add to that, that sieges are harder on a city than on a castle, as you have more civilians to feed. Not an issue on Roshar. My second point was that movement is also less important on Roshar.

If they were used in the army as Surgebinders, they count. We do not know how versatile and common Fabrials were. So were they, apart from Soulcasters, used in combat? I do not know. I don't know that either. A Thunderclast would have squashed him. Odium's side is more variable. And less known to us. He is correct with respect to fortifications to be held by only mundanes against Surgebinders. However, it is not correct with respect to fortifications held by combined forces. That in turn means that fewer but large fortresses are superior to many small castles. Forms of Power are fascinating, however them still being rare compared to mundane Singers, I doubt that they would fundamentally alter the situation.

I was actually trying to talk about how to combine Surgebinders and mundane forces. Surgebinders are rare. A few thousand for a whole continent. You cannot delegate all fighting to them. Mundane forces against Surgebinders is suicide, so they will need to learn how to fight together. Also almost all Surgebinders were organized in two distinct camps. Unless you wish to assume a civil war, you would see the Radiants and mainly human forces against the Fused, Regals, Thunderclasts and mainly Singer forces. Well, no, as the Fused lack Blade and Plate. Yes. In fact they will dominate warfare.

They also have magical defenders against such forces. A troop of Stonewards can build a wall 20 meters thick and 20 meters high, shoud the need arise. The Fused can do it, too. Surgebinders can fly. But they are not bombers. There are no explosives on Roshar. They can drop rocks and burning stuff only. You can defend against that with the available means.

Hi, people were asking about the role of the orders in warfare. But that neglects the role of ordinary forces mixed with Surgebinders in conflict. I will try to shed some lights on this. My premises: Horses are too rare for common usage. Mundane transport is by ship, foot, oath gate or chull cart. Spanreeds were not yet discovered Stormwardens did not yet exist. Elsecallers and Willshapers can teleport. You do not have the number of users of Transportation or Gravitation to transport the bulk of troops or supplies Yet you still have no guns, no good artillery, yet you have Highstorms. The tech level was essentially somewhere between classical antiquity and medieval times. Even that masks some difference to those periods on Earth. First, Roshar has little to no soil. That means earth works require Radiant support. You cannot dig a trench. You cannot apply the Roman tactic of building a damm to overcome a fortress's wall. Second, there are Highstorms to deal with. This has stark consequences. siege engines become harder to operate. Your stuff has to withstand a hurricane. you need supply trains or Surgebinders to quarter your troops in the field. Taking a Highstorm without shelter is detrimental to health, morale and equipment. It is not an option you can use for ordinary operations. That means most of your troops will be as slow as a chull pulling a cart. You cannot maneuver freely. If your forces are too far away from the next shelter when you get reports of coming Highstorm, you are in a serious emergency. Third, you got magic added to the picture, but not uniformly. communication is optimal at the theatre level. You cannot interdict or intercept a teleporter. Messages from an HQ to an HQ will get through, will be fast and will be secure. You have early 20th century levels of air recon. You will not surprise an army that has Windrunners or Skybreakers on the lookout. The can patrol out to multiple days of marching time. You can always land a small elite unit at any place. To be outmarched by your enemy taking a choke point unopposed is out of the question. All in all the element of uncertainty and surprise is much reduced. Forcing such an army to give battle is hard to impossible. Delaying action by Radiants makes pursuits hard, especially if you destroy the storm shelters behind you. These armies will fight only if they see a valuable objective. Furthermore, small units have a problem. Without a Radiant you cannot call for help, nor do you have air defense. Splitting up your forces is problematic. Where does that leave us? Fewer to no heroic forced marches. You need to be in reach of a shelter and the Radiants will always be faster. The amies will march as a block. Giving up communications and air cover is too dangerous The main battles will be at fortifications. Your Radiants are good at building and destroying them. Use them. How do you operate? In two words, slowly and ugly. You hold fortifications in defense In the attack you try to take fortifications by storm And you spend much of your time slaughtering peasants. The enemy cannot be brought to battle in the field and assaulting a fortress is so expensive. Is there anything unexpected? Yes: The Marines rule. Transport on water is much better than a chull. Whoever rules the ocean will rule the lands near them. So is Roshar a planet of castles? No. A castle historically had a small garrison. This will not do. Radiants are practically air-mobile tanks. A small, mundane garrison won't do. On Roshar the fortified city with a large population always manning the walls well and Radiants at ready is the queen of war. I am vaguely reminded of the Hellenistic Period.

Right, but it is consistent. Ati may have assumed that he is dead. So we cannot just compare physical worlds. And we have to consider that Ati referred to a place that may be thousands of years in the past and changed since. I am afraid this line of reasoning is not very productive. The only solid thing we have is Khris in the Ars Arcanum. It is also quite short.

"I will protect those who cannot protect themselves" You are basically restating the second ideal. And it is supposed to be about not wanting to protect people, not concentrating your efforts.

They won't be on the battlefield, as in WW2. You are thinking of army on army clashing in open combat. That will be vanishingly rare. They lack that modern level of mobility and they have no firearms. They will target civilian populations, supply lines and force the enemy to take a Highstorm out in the open. They fight repeated battles in a total war on known terrain. War on Roshar will be fortresses, fortifications, breastworks, moats and trenches. On a planet which makes sieges extremely hard to conduct, fortifications are the gold standard. Make them die on your walls. Burn or take their grain. A desolation will be raids against civilians, counter raids, skirmishes, attacks on supply lines, hunting out magically disguised infiltrators. Major battles will either involve a fortress on one side or will be delaying actions against a pursuit while your forces are going back to a fortress. The other key factor are the magical forces of the other side. We haven't seen most Forms of Power. Raiders and especially counterraiders. Also air supply and scouts. Every Shard Bearer with Plate and Blade can fulfill the role of a cavalry charge. The older roles of scouts and raiders still need to be fulfilled. Dalinar's vision of the village attacked by the Midnight Mother's monsters were likely typical. Air defense and internal security. Sappers. Bring down the enemy's walls. Exactly. Also counter biowarfare. Spreading disease is an obvious tactic. Somebody has to be counter intelligence and interrogators. Unless the Skybreakers are doing the torturing. Deep raids and strategic scouting. Fortifications are the key to war on Roshar. Hence the Stonewards are the key to war. Build the battlements and then hold them.

How would that help? The fourth oath is a riddle only for the first time. The problem is meaning it, not knowing what to say.

It makes clear what they think. Their understanding is not necessarily entirely correct.

Well, the question makes more sense if we treated them as forces discovered in another universe or in another region. Do they break existing physics? Allomancy is remarkably nice in that regard. Steel and iron add energy to a system, but in exchange fuel vanishes. The same effect sort of applies to the other metals. In theory you couls swallow metals at a higher place, gain the energy from going down, burn off the metals (or use a metal to do so) and let the lighter you be transported back using less energy. Aside from that, which we also sort of have if we use nuclear reactions, we are good. Even bendalloy and cadmium are nice in avoiding a redshift meaning that you cannot use them to violate the second law of thermodynamics. The real physics breaking stuff is in feruchemy, iron and bronze foremost. If you have them you have a perpeutual motion machine or can break the second law of thermodynamics. Gold is also bad as it allows you to create matter.

No. That would not be Brandon Sanderson anymore. Well, Brandon tries to get away from good vs. evil. A story ending in the defeat of the protagonist would be cool, though. And I must say, Vasher is not a good guy. Let's face it, he is a murderer advocating censorship of scientific research. The Blackthorn is a tyrannical, racist aristocrat.

No, as it was impossible to predict which or how many metals Kelsier would test. She would have to be a Mistborn. How? If the Inquisition knew where to put such aplant, why not just arrest? Again, no way to predict which metals Kelsier would use.

You cannot pretend to be a Mistborn. The only thing Vin was not, was from the ministry. Why would they use a precious and rare Mistborn, if they could just strike and torture information out of people?

By that logic he has already broken his word. That nobody born in Kharbranth died during the battles of Thaylen Fields and Kholinar alone is statistically implausible. It seems to me tht the deal applies to the people residing in Kharbranth.

We still need to find out why he gets away with that and why he thinks that he can get away with it.

arrogance to whom exactly would she betray Kelsier? No Skaa allomancer can risk contact with the ministry she had an inquisitor chasing her. She needed protection and information. what would a rival group do with the information? If it were a heist, sure, but a revolution? If he is to fail, he'd rather fail early before much money is spent

IIRC he had been training her for weeks when he offered an exit and the money.

Why is that a problem? The Thrill is allomantic zinc essentially. Different systems can overlap.