How to fix the unsullied?

Or wait at least until the men are grown. Then cut off the balls.

Give them proper training and armament fit for the times. Unsullied fight in the nude with only a shield, helmet, spear and shortsword which in comparison to knights are useless. Discipline or a lack of fear don't matter when the opponent can cut through their formation without any real harm to themselves.

Dothraki are also useless due to being nude guys on unarmoured horses without any real discipline or tactics.

>Don't have to deal with PTSD
Yeah, no. I'll have you know, PTSD is not an elaborate ruse for crafty veterans to get tax refunds. It's a disability that affects humans. You can only hope that your soldiers will be too afraid to show that they are disabled.
>No desertion, no mutiny
You know, at some point, you're actually gonna have to send your soldiers to fight something. They're gonna have to interact with a normal human being, eventually. Assuming they know how to talk, and they must, then it's pretty safe to assume that whatever you do, they will always have a chance to get influenced.

Cutting off an adult mans testicles has a high chance of death from bleeding out.

But soldiers die from stupid shit like disease all the time on campaign.

Upfront cost is an issue if you have a huge turnover.

When soldier x dies, you have to wait 20 years to replace him

Actually, Dothraki tend to get by on numbers, horseback archery & more. Facing them in an open plain is considered suicidal & despite their lack of discipline & siege tactics, they've definitely got skill on horseback.

The Unsullied get by on discipline & collaboration. They don't have the muscle of others but they're loyal to a fault.

They're fine.
Just stop fucking watching HBO and read a motherfucking book you goddamn illiterate.

I think that was their real strength, yes.
That and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of professional full-time infantry in Westeros and Essos in general.

You can get everything you mentioned, including muscles, by using regular soldiers. Using foreign soldiers for a bodyguard worked very well.

>charging entrenched spearmen with light cavalry

Since this seeems to be an ASOIAF thread, I would like to remind you that this woman right here literally did nothing wrong, ever, and if people listened to her, things would go better for them.

It was him saying, in a roundabout way, he liked to ask and play with questions Tolkien didn't really bother with. Gurm has nothing but respect for the books, and anyone who thinks "What was Aragorn's tax policy" was Gurm taking a pot shot at the Hobbit Father needs to lighten up.

Remember the point of the Unsullied was you buy more. The people who produce them sell them at a mark-up and have yearly "classes" they graduate out to paying customers. They're not a standing army, they're an auxillary force you buy. The only reason Daenerys had so many was because she stole literally all of them.

1. Give them westerosi equipment
2. Make them drop the spears
3. Give them 2-3 javelins that they can throw at the enemy

Unsullied are wasted when used as fodder like normal soldiers. They should be given the role of shock troops with heavy armor or as bodyguards.

>Remember the point of the Unsullied was you buy more. The people who produce them sell them at a mark-up.

How can anybody possibly afford them?

Except she's a crafty sheming seductress and never plays out her cards in the open
That and Stannis has a fart stuck crossways

Why not just pikes and gambesons?

IIRC massively rich slave traders ran that entire region's economy. Most wars were fought between trade princes who purchases Unsullied and merged them with mercenary companies like Daarios. Mereen and the other cities were filled with wealthy weirdos with lots of enemies. You of all people should understand this kind of thing, Satan.

So having the military equivalent of Hungry Man meals lying around was a pretty sensible business idea.

Sully them?

This. If you're going to wait that much time you better use them as elite troops and not as fodder like peasants.

>Daenerys steals an army of human robots, who always follow orders
>An army that doesn't feel pain, doesn't retreat, doesn't disobey, doesn't rape and pillage
>Proceeds to instill the idea that they're people into their minds
>Which makes them simply a bunch of well-trained eunuchs
Why does Daenerys keep fucking up?

Because the books clearly make her out as an incompetent who only gets by because of her looks and bloodline. She's not really supposed to be heroic; we have Jon Snow for that.

But HBO and the show-only fans can't clue in on this for some reason.

Let them dick around.

>You can get everything you mentioned, including muscles, by using regular soldiers. Using foreign soldiers for a bodyguard worked very well.
Not within Westeros. For every Barrastian Selmy, you have tons of backstabbers.

Mercenary companies have had a reputation for unreliability in Westeros too. Gold Company is an extreme exception.

That's the thing about Dany. She's heavily flawed but D&D can't seem to see that. So many mistakes she made which she regrets & only survives thanks to her existing assets.

Weren't Dany's personal bodyguards throughout the series all motivated by a lot more than just the money she gave them? Daario wanted to nail her. Barristan and that Dothroki guy had genuine loyalty to her predecessors and by extension her. Jorah was a mix of both.

You're fucking retarded.

The books make it clear she's a sheltered teen. Which frankly goes to show just how fucking amazing she is. Because she should have been dead a long time ago. But she's too smart to die.

Of course, we don't get that on the show because show Daenerys is a badass.

Daenerys is supposed to be a confused girl with a dream and motherfucking dragons.

by having the kind of money toy raise and keep an army in the first place.
People hiring mercenaries aren't poor. Fantasy Trumps and Billy Gatesses are buying these guys

>But she's too smart to die.
No it's because there's like a dozen different people with a vested interest in seeing her live.

With a hot knife?

Underrated post

Fantasy Trump's Unsullied would have to wear much shinier outfits.

The reason why Unsullied have to endure unnecessarily cruel "training" is well, because they are meant to be sold.
Think of it. You have a region where the concept of a permanent professional army that actually fights is alien to all states. You got a region were wars are entirely fought by soldiers that you buy one way or another, and are won by whoever throws the most money. At this point, do you even care about what "the most efficient way" is? The Italian Condottieris fought with mostly outdated weapons and openly faked the outcome of some battles, and no one cared as long as it stayed in Italy. Italy was conveniently playing with its own set of rule despite the rest of the entire world. The same happens in Slaver's Bay, but in a kinda same-but-different way. Let me get this straight, you don't actually need to waste thousands of perfectly fine baby slaves and puppies to get your elite soldier force. The Unsullied training system really doesn't make sense if they were to fight against anything else than other Unsullieds, Dothrakis, or common mercenaries. These guy only know 3 weapons and nothing else, and if I remember well, they don't even have ranged weaponry. But it's fine. Because "trained for birth" is nothing but a marketing gimmick for the cities who make their money exclusively out of selling Unsullied to cities who will always rely on Unsullied and will never actually confront their Unsullieds with anything out of the ordinary that the Unsullied-traders have artificially created.

>charging entrenched spearmen with light cavalry
The point is to hit the enternched spearmen's supply wagons with arrows from horse back till they are no longer entrenched and you can hit them with arrows, not charge a spearwall with horse archers like you're the ai from mount and blade.

I dunno, Gurm plays up the Dothraki as pretty idiotic when it came to fighting. We get the impression they spend 95% of their time fighting each other or pitifully under-defended farming villages. There's a reason they never really made it outside the Dothraki Sea.

Hire from Norvos.

But the dothraki actually charge entrenched spearmen and I doubt anyone leaves their baggage outside a fortified camp.

The majority of characters encounter far more disloyal allies.

They never made it out because they distrust any water horses don't drink.

I mean like they never left that immediate area. Did they ever even try going after Braavos or Myr or whatever?

That only explains why they don't go further north.

In one of the first chapters, it's said that Pentos pays off dothraki so they won't attack and raid it. Presumably, every other city does it as well.

You and I both know the Dothroki absolutely would attack those cities if they could stop fighting each other for longer than half a day.

hey rich empire, give me more money for my army and I wont attack you honest

Give them the D

Yeah, they are horse nomads but they don't seem to use bows. Lack armor and siege too. They would get massacred by Westerosi knights and men at arms.

>but they don't seem to use bows

Came here to post this

It's generally consider cheaper to feed them than hire mercenaries. The cities just give them food & they leave.

>but they don't seem to use bows

They do, very effectively. At their wedding ceremony, Khal Drogo received a large warbow meant for use on horseback.

>Well you don't have to deal with PTSD
You don't have to deal with it in professional or citizen-soldier army either. You just kick affected soldiers out of the army and let them ruin (and probably end) their own lives in record terms and replace them with new recruits. Pre-modern society is a bitch...

People I think are forgetting the entire point of the Unsullied: absolute loyalty.

They're pre-packaged battle droids incapable of doing anything other than following orders of whoever owns them. An Unsullied commander isn't going to pull a Red Wedding.

You buy them to reinforce your troops and not have to worry about them deserting or betraying you if you suck. Dany's use of them in such large numbers as unprecedented and only happened because she killed their owners and enslaved them herself. Even if she didn't see it that way.

Don't castrate them. Castrated soldiers would in reality be useless.

All of them? All by yourself?

...

Don't forget it was Qohor that broke the first great khal's khalasar. After that they have stuck to only raiding and in fighting.

Most Westerosi use spears.
Or pikes, or other polearms, in the books at least.

i've read the books you're full of shit
danny is grums 14 year old dream princess
(i think he describes her like stunningly attractive or something in his original pitch, which is kinda messed up when talking about a 14 year old) but user its da middel ages and people fucked young cause they died at 25 years old eks dee lindybeige told me no they didn't ,we're maturing faster than ever thanks to being the most well fed generation of humans ever, a 14 year old in medieval times wouldn't look as mature as a 14 year old today

grum tries his best to make her look like an innocent well meaning fairy (and fails horribly mind you) the plottwist is that she's supposed to drop her naivete and become more strict/pragmatic. That's what the whole shitshow in merreen was all about
>book dany is smart
no she just gets macguffins handed to her by the plot.
>show dany is badass
hahahahahahahahahahaha

Dany never is really a part of their raids, so as far as I remember there isn't any reason we would really know how they actually fight. It's heavily implied that they make a lot of use of bows though. They probably don't use siege weapons since the larger cities simply pay them off, but that doesn't really mean they have no concept of it or are unwilling to use them

IIRC in one of the Westeros chapters someone brought up the idea of a Dothraki invasion and he said it'd be a mixed bag. A massive horde of them probably couldn't take a walled keep like Casterly Rock or Winterfell or even King's Landing. But they'd decimate the countrysides and villages spread throughout the continent and basically force everyone to stay behind walls starving until the Dothraki all got bored or died.

To be fair, I think she did give them the option to leave if they wanted to, but they all stayed because they just loved her sooooo much and fighting was all they ever knew anyway.

That was said, but I think it kind of assumes they can't just take siege engineers prisoner and force them to do shit. At this point it's probably more like winter would just fuck them up

I think it was more of the latter than the former. Not saying it's hard to believe a few felt grateful she freed them, but I think overall they're just so brainwashed most couldn't really see any other future besides fighting for her.

The book does say some started developing personalities and giving themselves knew names based on things they liked but most remained combat robots.

All things considered their only other options were basically going to another city and being slaves again or just going full bandit

I think they're ultimate undoing would be the fact Dothraki suck at teamwork. Eventually someone will stake umbrage to getting bossed around and go do his own thing.

I know Drogo had a lot of clout but that was mostly because of the mysticism around his unborn child. Considering how quickly that all fell apart I feel even if he did invade Westeros someone at some point would break off from his leadership. Then it would just turn into a bunch of warlords who ultimately freeze death, but not before guaranteeing Westeros's worst winter ever.

You sound like my younger sister when I insulted her for reading twilight.

>But HBO and the show-only fans can't clue in on this for some reason.

The show was written with idiots in mind and thus leaves out the characterization bits that actually make sense of all the issues that the show has.

One character says that on the open field their horse archery and would fuck some shit up, but as soon as it came to a siege they'd utterly fall apart.
In the same breath they note that Robert, battle-hungry idiot that he is, would actually probably meet them in the open field where'd they do the most damage rather then do the smart thing and wait them out until they fell apart.

Do you think the Greyjoys would've tried teaming up with them?

Pyke is probably the safest place in Westeros from the Dothraki. Even safer than the North as a whole.

>Greyjoys
>Teaming up with anyone

They wouldn't have any reason to really "team up". They'd probably just use the opportunity to raid more

Are you one of those guys that thinks Victarion is actually smart because he can't read between the lines or into different narrative viewpoints or something?

Dany's whole thing is that she has the POTENTIAL to one day be a decent ruler (she's smart enough and willing to learn), but literally every ruler figure she's ever met either has zero interest in teaching her anything at all and is much more interested in manipulating her combined with the unfortunate temperament and judgement problems of a teenager. She's Jon without even the distant male role model of a good ruler his father was, so she's all potential and absolutely zero refinement or practical learning. She's a terrible ruler because she has no idea how to be one and literally doesn't even have EXAMPLES of what a good ruler looks like.
It doesn't help that out of all of her advisors exactly ONE has her best interests at heart, and that one spends a LOT of time running as fast as he can from taking any greater responsibility then he already has and only really takes up any authority or direct assertiveness at all when Dany appears for all intents and purposes to be fucking dead.

Her character phrase in-universe could be summed up with "wasted potential"; in-universe she has the seeds of something impressive and even great, but because of her circumstances and gender she's basically completely screwed until she can get her hands on an advisor who knows both how to tell her no and how to actually rule who DOESN'T want to rule in her place.

>Unsullied legendary reputation is due to their intense mental conditioning, making them stone-age battle droids
>When Dany "freed" them, she started to erode this conditioning; the Unsullied no longer believe they are truly property, and are developing personalities
>Unsullied ultimately lose their fighting spirit, and many begin to have mental breakdowns as their pre-constructed world of slavery and death crumbles as they face the sobering fact there is more to life than murder
>For the first time in literally ever, the Unsullied have mutinies and desertions

It would have been cruel to keep them enslaved, but it is crueler still to let the Unsullied realized what they are (and what they are not) as they unsuccessfully try to assimilate to the outside world. In the series, it is mentioned multiple times that Unsullied that live with civilians literally go soft, often getting fat and out of shape. They are very susceptible to basic human desires.

No. Balon Greyjoy is ambitious but a complete idiot politically.
It's even worse when you read about the kind of man his father was and just how terribly Balon measures up.

Eh, Moat Cailin means that the North is safe, but you're totally correct about Pyke being completely safe. Dragonstone too.

Dorne would also probably do pretty well. Natural bottleneck, plus deserts.

Sauce?

It's yet another in-universe example of Dany doing the right thing and it having unfortunate consequences because she's never really been exposed to the reality of ruling; that there is no "happy ending" and everything you do has something that comes after it and so you have to deal with that part too.

I could see the Ironborn getting chummy with one of the inevitable splinter Khalasars. If only because it gives both sides some much needed manpower to raid their bigger neighbors.

Jorah had her best interests at heart, too, he just also had his interest in exploring her anatomy at heart.

Was his dad a better raider or something?

That looks like the comic "Nextwave". I remember liking it at the time. No idea how well it aged

I'm pretty sure Balon was the one who brought raiding back

Yeah IIRC Grandpa Greyjoy put aside a lot of that Iron Price garbage because he saw the writing on the wall and knew the current power players wouldn't tolerate it.

Balon brought it back because he had a massive boner for his culture's history of Viking LARP and it seems most of his people did as well.

I love the Ironborn. They're all a bunch of backwards idiots who deliberately reject basic civilized behavior because killing and stealing for all your stuff is cooler.

>only interesting thing that happens in the books is the Night Watch fighting zombies, and Daenerys leading the Mongol Hordes
like goddamn can we just have books about the not!mongols instead

Jorah doesn't know fuck-all about ruling, and ultimately his agenda was selfish; he wanted her for himself and warned her against trusting ANYBODY because that way she relied on him and only him.
Yes, but that's actually besides the point.
Quellon Greyjoy was a reformer who was trying to modernize the Iron Islands and bring them more in line with the rest of the Kingdoms. He did away with a lot of the customs that pissed off the mainland and did a lot to modernize them (he actually was the first guy to bring Maesters to the Islands) and was a war hero during the War of Ninepenny Kings. A lot of the older lords hated him, but since he was ALSO legitimately a fantastic fighter and general with a brutal temper once you pissed him off so they went along with it. And it actually worked. The Iron Islands were more prosperous and powerful then they'd been in centuries.

Then Balon comes along and after (it his highly implied) poisoning his father he blown away decades of progress in under a year and dragged his culture back down to the point of uselessness and long-term ineffectuality.

Quellon Greyjoy was a guy who was born to what amounts to a race of stupid fantasy orcs who saw potential in his people and was determined to drag his people kicking and screaming into modern day and actually make something of themselves.
Balon decided that productiveness and long-term planning wasn't cool and why not just be useless fantasy orcs again?

Yeah, it is. I really like how Martin has written this narrative from Dany's POV describing how she's trying to do right by everyone, and failing 99% of the time. Because a ruler doesn't do the right thing because their morals tell them to, they do the right thing because it will do best for their people, and their country.

I think in the next book we're going to see a minor civil war among the Unsullied, and it will cripple Dany.

...

They're basically traditional fantasy orcs as people: rather actually make anything significant of themselves, they REALLY like killing people and taking their shit even though they're hard working and industrious and could be quite formidable if they put any effort into it.

I think the comparison to orcs is deliberate, because Euron Greyjoy as of Winds of Winter is now literally an insane wizard king who wants to kill the world for lols and wears spiky black armor and even fucking uses uses a red eye as his personal heraldry.

Hand them, as well as the position of power and dragons, over to Tyrian.

Directly south there's really only city states that just buy them off or have defences they couldn't breach without dragons, and valyria aka scary magick DOOM.

Going west means either a long ass trip around the worlds largest river or somehow convincing your khalasar to go across it. A river that has whole sections contaminated with a scary magick DOOM disease.

And further east there is like one place worth robbing which is behind 20 other places full of
even scarier ancient magick DOOM than anywhere west of them that nobody with any sense would go near.

They really should have just killed most of the leaders and drowned god religious figures after the Greyjoy rebellion. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble