That thread about elves with firearms got me thinking, how would humans deal with an enemy that can see at night just as good as during the day and don't need to sleep?
Elves could force battles to happen at nigh when humans not only can't see but are also tired and sluggish.
Why is this almost never pointed in fantasy games and novels?
>doesn't need sleep
I'm pretty sure that they would require some sort of rest getting porked by orcs all day.
Just because they don't require sleep doesn't mean they don't require rest.
>Why is this almost never pointed in fantasy games and novels?
Probably because very few of them have humans directly go against elves in warfare.
Probably because most authors arn't specialist in warfare/warfighting and no one really stops to think about how a fantasy race would use it's intrinsic abilities and how they affect them doing things we normally associate with ourselves.
I mean, look at most topics here. People talk about fantasy warfare as if it were bog standard medievel times in real life but who takes into account you can have war giants who are throwing boulders or some flying creature that can drop stuff on people.
Advance quickly against infrastructure essential to the Elves. Fighting a war of attrition is meaningless and war against the Elves should be predicated upon the existence of clear and achievable goals.
If such goals do not exist war should not be waged and is basically without meaning. This applies to all war but Elves would seem to be particularly well adapted to resistance and guerilla style war efforts.
About the sleeping thing, I imagine you could have a split in your forces so some of them sleep during the day and are wide awake at night. Still not ideal but it's not like sleeping at night is an unavoidable biological imperative. There are also more "extreme" forms of sleep where instead of however many straight hours of sleep you take short power naps all throughout the day. I think the most you can stretch it is sleeping eight hours a day in intermittent 15 minute naps
Not BATTLEs, guerrilla warfare. Go in, kill a few elves, steal their stuff, and be a distraction to a rogue sneaking past through the back and stabbing a bunch of elfs. Have half of the army sleep at day, to be alert. Dorf mercenaries.
Existence of magic alone would make fantasy battles much different than they were in history.
>mage calls fog = ranged weapons and artillery are now useless
>mage calls rain = say goodbye to your cavalry charge and early firearms
>mage calls earthquake = your walls are now worthless
I imagine the Elves would be far better than humans at that kind of war as it emphasizes individual skill and valor, traits which Elves are routinely depicted as being peerless in.
>having a mage advanced enough to influence the weather conditions
One properly placed assassin ruins this entire scheme.
>guerilla warfare
>vs elves
Dude...
>Not BATTLEs, guerrilla warfare. Go in, kill a few elves, steal their stuff
This usually works better when you're sneakier than the people you're trying to sneak up on. Chevauchée isn't quite so effective when you have to climb trees to get to the raiding part.
Thank you for pointing out the obvious more bluntly lol.
Calling some fog is not advanced magic. It's super low lv in almost every system.
And if assassinations were so easy the likes of Alexander or Napoleon would never survive their first campaign.
>both armies have a large corps of mages trained their entire lives just to be able to cast counterspell and dispel as much as possible
Don't they need to trance?
But then humans would get fucked vs races better at magic.
Since dispel and counterspell are relatively high-level spells that only counter one spells each use, I imagine both armies wouldn't bother to counter all the low-level spells, and it'd be a battle of feints and deception to try to trick the enemy to exhaust all their spell countermeasures before you let loose with the big guns, or to make a powerful spell seem too weak to be worth dispelling before it hits.
Usually elves are vastly outnumbered
Just few hours and they can do that any time they want.
Dispel and Counterspell are high level spells, so simply overwhelming them with sufficient low level spells will either force them to let some spells through or exhaust them. And the human fantasy trope is that humans will always be able to bring more mages, however weaker individually, than races that are better at magic.
This is another part that magic changes. (Greater) Invisibility spells, and a skilled assassin. Or an adjusted Magic Aura and Prestidigitation, to sneak toxins past Detect Poison and neutralize the taste.
>advanced mage
>gets offed by a meek assassin
These are mutually exclusive, user
Human history shows that better trained and equipped forces can slaughter much more numerous enemy.
Just have Elves fight like humans. If there's a large Elf kingdom, then they fight like a large human kingdom with standards battle tactics. If they're a small group of people living in bumfuck-nowhere then have they fight like the American revolutionaries with guerrilla tactics.
See the Shannara Chronicles, the books.
Humans were second class citizens because magic, woodcraft, and the long memories of the elves lend themselves to maintenance of culture and technological skill gave them an advantage while humans slid slowly into a more feudalistic society - one which the elves took advantage of.
If the assassin is a mage as well, then you might as well as say that "the side that has the better spellcaster wins".
And honestly, that's true.
Magic also brings Purify Food and Drink and Detect Magic, which can be cast indiscriminately and don't require spell slots if cast as a ritual. Or See Invisibility, which is much cheaper than Greater Invisibility. Everything you mentioned has easy counters with magic.
It depends what the terrainbis like ans where this takes place on the turf of.
Even if they fight exactly like humans why won't they use the obvious advantage and force the battles to happen at night?
Imagine getting attacked by elven archers at night.
>the number one killer in warfare is disease
>elfs have -2 con
interesting how people think elfs would be good at war when they are hard countered by it.
There was another good point in that thread.
With elves your entire population can fight while with humans your elderly and most women can't. Humans are good warriors only at their physical peak that is just 20-30 years.
This 8 hours of rest is very new an unnatural. It's not our natural sleep cycle. Before electricity, everybody had 2 sleeps, usually separated by 1 hour. You slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Fucking phone
Elves are immune to diseases though.
You can still sleep multiple times a day. It's just that Edison hated the concept of sleep as wasteful, despite the fact that he slept all the time during the day.
Depends on the setting.
Most elves probably just roll over and take it ass opposed to fighting, unless it's a crazy end of the world scenario, and even then they want to stand behind "Lesser races".
Even if they win a war, they lose, because they simply can't replace the loses. Diplomacy and mercenaries are how they get by.
bacterial infections =/= disease
no they arent
In the past the number one killer was disease because of poor medical practices and open wounds. That's really not so much an issue when magic exists and Elves are (at least stereotypically in fantasy) very good at healing.
Also they're twenty feet tall and made of fire.
Yeah, but Elves are arrogant and will soon leave out of political strife.
Remove disease is a 3rd level spell.
Druids and rangers have it too.
>bacterial infections =/= disease
This has to be bait.
>The term disease broadly refers to any condition that impairs the normal functioning of the body. For this reason, diseases are associated with dysfunctioning of the body's normal homeostatic processes.[5]
>Commonly, the term is used to refer specifically to infectious diseases, which are clinically evident diseases that result from the presence of pathogenic microbial agents, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, multicellular organisms, and aberrant proteins known as prions.
>bacteria
Holy shit user.
Also, those epidemics plaguing medieval armies were a result of terrible hygiene. Elves know how to into hygiene.
Throw a full pack of dogs infected with rabies. Rabies have no cure once the first symptoms appear.
Because "muh HFY"
Honestly, in the vast majority of fantasy settings where humans are inferior to every single thing that lives in the planet and are merely the "jack of all trades" races, they should be long extinct.
First you'd have to decide what sort of magic we're dealing with and what limitations it has or otherwise people will do what your doing and assume wizards can cause earthquaks can casually call on orbs of annihilation on a whim.
...
Elves wouldn't exterminate humanity.
They would turn them into 2nd class citizens and use them for labor.
>has no cure
Has no known cure based on modern scientific knowledge. Thankfully, modem scientific knowledge doesn't include magic.
>elves' bullshit magic cure the dogs of rabies
>elves speak/empathy with animals, and now doges are fiercely loyal to elves
>now you have elves allied with a shitton of strong doges
Not a good move, user. Not a good move at all.
Send in the werewolves infected with rabies.
I'm pretty sure an army can take out a pack of rabid dogs, user.
Swarm tactics.
The elves are not an army.
True that, but I can think of several other races that would very likely kill every human they could.
The real killer in night-fighting, particularly in a forest or jungle is sound. The sound of metal against metal in particular is jarring even to an untrained listener, so you're left with a choice: head inna woods knowing you're at a tactical disadvantage, or try and play a game the elves are better at by nature.
Or you could just not go inna woods at all.
Why wouldn't an organized, well-established civilization field an army, user?
Calling fog isn't advanced, but creating a wall of fog big enough to alter the course of any battle larger than a skirnish takes a lot of power.
How do elves get any iron? Do elves mine?
Because they are hippies.
Extract iron out of the blood of living beings. Mining is for dwarves.
Stop posting these threads on Veeky Forums you fucking mong.
Even hippies would field an army if they lived next door to orcs and niggers, user.
This all depends on what sort of elves you're talking about.
Tolkien elves are (mostly) just straight up better than humans.
D&D elves are kinda worse than humans, and I can't see a human army in that having problems with an elf one.
You're saying that as if it was a insignificant requirement. If the average member of the elf army is level fucking five it's better to just surrender immediately and avoid the imminent destruction of your species
>takes a 5th level character to cast it once a day
So you're saying it basically doesn't exist in setting?
[citation needed]
Pretty sure they shit in the woods and don't have running water.
Sweden begs to differ.
>D&D elves are kinda worse than humans, and I can't see a human army in that having problems with an elf one.
If you're doing a strict stat vs stat comparison, elves are worse than humans in a straight-up battle where two armies form battle-lines in broad daylight. Anything else and elves are generally better at warfare due to being better at stealth, better at shooting, better at operating without sleep, better at operating at night... Not to mention that average elf is higher level than average human. The only real advantage humans have is numbers and the fact that elves are incapable of replacing losses at a rate comparable to humans.
burn down their forests
Overhunt animals, make drums from the skin and pound them to demoralize
ask the dwarves if they would assist in slaughtering some elves
I swear you guys let your autism get the best of you more often than not these days
I LIKE this. It would be a mind game- like chess. Maybe ascribed openings, feints and counterfeits taught at the arcane academies.
Stop. I just fapped.
>So you're saying it basically doesn't exist in setting?
>all settings are the same
Be that as it may, but I'm still unconvinced that a pack of dogs is enough to defeat the entirety of elven nation, user.
NO!
Elves are the best at everything. They are literally undefeatable.
Checkmate dwarf fag.
>making skin drums
>accusing others of having a dissociative mental condition
pick one faggot
Not all elves are wood elves.
Again, if we're assuming the elves are universally level 5 or higher there's no point in even discussing it because you're giving them a monstrous advantage. Even having enough level 5+ healers to make disease practically non-existent would be absurd
>how would humans deal with an enemy that can see at night just as good as during the day and don't need to sleep?
While I dunno about the "need to sleep" thing just look up how one side having standard issue night vision influenced the Falkland War and Gulf War when the other didn't to see just how big of an advantage it is.
inb4 analogous Sweden is the elven society in my setting
Not pack of dogs user.
Now that I think about it, why would elves and humans be at war? Elves pretty much have no valuable exports except maybe elf slaves. Being a non-agrarian hunter gatherer society they don't offer a lot of loot to pillage.
>burn down their forests
How exactly do you do that when elves are shooting at you?
They like meatballs and affordable furniture?
Do High Elves mine, pick and shovel?
Why wouldn't they?
Well, their servants do.
Who are their servants?
You lob burning stuff in a catapult, out ranging arrows. If they want to stop you, they've got to leave the cover of their precious, now burning, forest.
People start huge wildfires by accident. It's not something that requires a lot of effort or precision. Are we also assuming every square inch of the forest is packed with armed, ever-alert elves?
Humans, orcs, and other disposable rabble.
Reminder that Orcs are supposed to be nocturnal.
Just pointing out that it's equivalent to saying "Defeating humans is easy, just burn down their cities".
Cities being burned down was not that rare.
Poison the river.
A fair point, but that depends on what level averages are around. If the lieutenants of the elven army are level 5, it would be easy enough to prevent disease from spreading.
Purify Food and Water are level 0 spells, and surely handy in avoiding contamination in first place.
But let's be honest here, if a -1 to the Fortitude saving throw meant that no one could survive a common disease, elves would never make it through their 110 years long childhood.
How did they get any servants without any iron in the first place?
Cities don't take decades to rebuild.