You want to siege a city

>You want to siege a city.
>They fly away.
>Your mages are not strong enough to pull them down.
>Tech is 17th century

What are you doing?

Shoot them with harpoons.

>wait until they fly over a forest
>set the whole damn forest on fire
>city chokes to death on smoke

Alternatively, just fortify the best landing places with access to water and other resources, then poison the rest. They have to come down eventually.

I suppose you would infiltrate them with spies, find out whatever is keeping it afloat and bring it down via sabotage or assassination, or at least create enough mayhem to leave it vulnerable to another approach, probably involving those mages you mentioned, or airships if the setting is cool enough.

we have mages, right?
let loose some molten rock mortars

you could also emulate their floating magicks to create flying war machines.
I think it would be dumb if flying tech doesn't exist on a world with flying cities even if they're just hot balloons

I land first before the fugitives and strongarm the local Baron to pretend everything is normal while I set up the trap.

Have ornithopters fly over the city and unleash a payload of alchemically treated cold iron dust to interfere with their spellcasting.

It won't stop the spell, but it will lower the city, make it harder for it to move quickly, and exhaust their spellcasters.

In the meantime, we redirect the airship fleet from a different theater to continue the siege in the sky.

Cloudkill.

I think the idea s suppoesd to be that the tech to fly like that was unexpected, and currently possessed only by the enemy city.

how fast are they flying?
can my mages mark the city for tracking or no?
send scouts to track the city and keep track of who's leaving and entering the city

might be up to pure espionage to even attempt a second attack

>wait until they fly over a forest
>set the whole damn forest on fire
>city chokes to death on smoke

>implying they wouldn't have mages able to blow the smoke away.


>best landing places with access to water and other resources

>implying the mages wouldn't just conjure all the food and water they need

Do you even cast, bro?

Blow it the fuck up.

Time to mount siege weapons to magical airships, I guess.

Infiltrate
Spend months fitting in
Get into a guard position
Memorize where and how the nobles go
Orchestrate a purposely poor assasination
foil it
Get promoted or become a hero
seduce a nobles daughter
Become a noble
Chill out

Tell my old party/kingdom to suck a dick
Kill my contact/handler

EZPZ

Launch big rocks at one side of the city's underside of the city and flip it the fuck over.

Using political strong arming to keep it from landing anywhere where it can get adequate food and water to support its population and securing or burning the countryside anywhere it can flee to. After all it is still a city, it still needs food and water to support its population.

Even a self-sustaining flying city needs trade vessels to sustain its economy. Hijack one, use it to sneak a small undercover team in. That team then sets up a coordinated incendiary attack at key congestion points in the city (medieval cities were cramped as fuck, so fire spread like bad news in them). Unable to get bucket brigades in quickly enough, they'll be forced to conscript the mages who operate and power the "engines" as emergency firefighters, at which point the strike team takes advantage of the now heavily distracted and divided crew to ambush the flight deck and drop that motherfucker like an c-list actor with political opinions.

So, in review, the strike force (read: the party) through careful planning and consideration, have now in short order successfully managed to turn a happy, prosperous flying city into one that is A) falling out of the sky, B) on fire, and C) full of pissed off guards trying to murder them. While all of them are still on it. Naturally, not a single one of us thought as far ahead as how to get off.

Harass a dragon into proximity of the city then use harpoons to tether the dragon to the city

So what is the value of this city? If it moves it has no strategic importance. If you are waging a war against a nation who owns that city capture their other cities and burn their countryside to force their hand, if the city if fully autonomous and can just leave why are you fighting?

I dunno man, that sort of strategy somewhat breaks down when you consider that the city now that it is flying is an extremely effective means of projecting force. There is a significant population of mages within, clearly, so what you basically have is a gigantic siege engine/battleship. You need to deal with it before whoever controls it considers directing it towards your borders, or gets their shit together and returns to the battlefield loaded to bear.

Infiltration is probably the best bet, to be honest. Send assassins in and kill enough mages to force them to lower it back to the ground.

how do they get food?

>Your mages
Well knowing my side has numerous mages helps.

1. Have mages Polymorph a bunch if conscripts into giant ridable birds.
2. Fly towards flying city
3. Throw dispel magic at it until it starts to not fly

Alternatively open a tear to a different plane somewhere above the city and let shit fall down onto it. Close the tear if they fly away, chase and repeat.

Mages, what else?

Shoot cannons at them?

Propose trading pacts for them to become a great trading hub which goes from region to region instead of remaining fixed. Build roads towards hilltops where people can acess the city, demanding the usual tolls and taxes associated with any market in my domains. The city maintains its autonomy and profits from trade as if it was an emporium colony. The pact also stipulates that the city won't try to move goods and people by itself, bypassing my tolls and taxes.

Meanwhile, there is a great covert game of my infiltrators learning how to duplicate the magitech while their agents try to prevent it.

>If it moves it has no strategic importance.
>a capital city that can't be besieged has no strategic importance
>a mobile floating fortress that can transport your entire army above any enemy's defenses has no strategic importance
>a floating forward operations command base has no strategic importance
Fuck you're stupid.

Hire a ragtag group of adventurers, what else?

>a capital city that can't be besieged has no strategic importance
Capital cities by definition is where the leadership of a country is, when it is flying away information can only be transferred through magical means which is extremely limiting. Beyond that supplying such a city on the move is impossible outside of magic.
>a mobile floating fortress that can transport your entire army above any enemy's defenses has no strategic importance
And then what everyone jumps down to their deaths? If you have a setting where magic is powerful enough to move entire cities why not just give every soldier a magic jetpack or make several magic flying ships so you can have more mobile armies.
>a floating forward operations command base has no strategic importance
This has the same flaws as the floating capital, also a command base has no need to be a city.

If your city is already using magic to feed itself, communicate with the outside, and fucking fly, why aren't you using all this magical potential to just kill your enemy? It is like trying to escape a medieval army by using modern technology to make a carrier task force to house your population instead of using the technology used in making said carrier task force to obliterate any medieval army that threatens you.

However keeping this retarded scenario where you are for some retarded reason attacking an enemy that is so absolutely superior to you. Wait until the city lands, sneak some assassins and/or mages in and either assassinate whoever keeps it up, sabotage whatever keeps it up, or forcibly crash it with your own mages. Although I would probably use those assassins and mages to kill my own king for starting an unwinnable war.

You mostly don't care, if they fly away they can't controll the land where they once were.

Just build a new city where they left the hole, or give the land to surrounding cities you already controll

You are undoubtedly just being stupid with that post. Just about anybody should be able to come up with a reason for why a floating city is possible without widespread adaptation of flight capability. maybe the city is filled with mages who just want to be left alone and they haven't bothered to use the city for military purposes like others would, maybe nobody understands how to recreate what makes it fly. maybe you shouldn't apply modern ideas like jet packs or modern military doctrine to fantasy settings. just think for a second about how important seaming a flying city might seem to a general who's greatest technological and strategic advantage is having longer sticks then his opponent.

Order the men to masturbate so the people in the city avert their eyes, making them fly blind. Then hope they crash.
Then cum on the crashed city.

...

Get stronger mages.

Inform the dragons of their riches.

Magic this powerful would require many unwilling blood sacrifices and alliances with foul demons. Spread word of this unholy city and form a crusade of all nations to stop this atrocity at any cost!

>Your mages are not strong enough to pull them down.
Well are your mages strong enough to revert gravity on it or make it fly further up then?
At 7-8 km height the air is too thin to breathe.

We settle down in the lands they left. As far as we're concerned, we won. Shame we have to build another city, but restoring theirs would've been roughl the same.

steal some elder dragons treasure.

tell him "HAHA I HID IT ON MY FLYING CITY YOU WILL NEVER GET IT"

>haha mages can do anything1! the thread