What would an Elven military look like?

>their goals would not make sense, their plans would be useless to try and divine, their strategy nonsensical and their people unable to give anything resembling real intel when captured.
So, the U.S.? Sounds good to me.

i'd need more info on the specific type of elf your talking about first. there is too many and too much diversity between the various types to give an ll encompassing answer.

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A gay pride parade.

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overlord 2s take on it is hippies with swords.

>Freedom focused almost beyond rationality
>Super woodsman and also sort of worldly but isolationistic
>Manifest destiny and arrogance

Yeah it checks out

Given their enviornment and skills, elves strike me as the perect guerilla forces. Impossibly skilled and absolutely independant on operation, they work to lure more organized forces into traps and other situations where their advantages are minimized, generally cutting them down one by one. Heck, elves are long-lived, so they can simply wait for a short-lived race like goblins to die of old age.

the beanie is too much lol

ospreypublishing.com/elf-warfare

>The main antagonist of the game is on this picture

Of all the pics that are available, you had to post something that had nothing to do with yout topic?

Depends on what type of Elf. For me I imagine it a bit like this.

Wood Elves: pretty much what this user described and backed with druidic magic and exotic animals

High or Civilised Elves: I imagine highly disciplined forces backed up with High Magic focussing on shock and awe and combined arms whereever they can. Think Air Cavalry (pegusus, griffons, maybe friendly dragons) combined with heavy hitting evocation magic used to brake and overwhelm enemies. Then a swift attack by Mithral armoured swordsmen & cavalry supported by highly accurate archers & stat boosting magic. Illusion magic is used to cover and stealth these forces until they are ready to attack, whilst using other magic to be extremely mobile.

Drow: Shock raids on weak points, diversionary tactics to draw defenders away from soft targets, assassinating leaders, offeicers, mages and official to remove leadership whilst poisoning food stores and water supplies. Only striking in force when they confidently know they can overwhelm and annihilate their enemies.

Each of the above described tactics focus on the preservation of Elven lives whilst minimalizing cost to their own. Also given their long lives and reluctance to shed their own blood never expect an Elven force to fight on anything less than their own terms and even if they have to (say in the case of invasion) do so with great preparation and an exit plan should things go wrong.

You do not understand the 'Chaotic' side of the alignment spectrum.

fantasy america
>powerful navy/force projection
>powerful military pound for pound
>arrogant, meddle in foreign affairs
>overwhelming arcane firepower

Some ideas:
>Guerilla warfare conducted by small, independently-operated cells, following loose directives from their superiors

>Traditional warfare based around hit-and-run tactics, coordinated among large regiments of warriors spread across great distances, kept in contact by magical means

>Army contains specialists who can converse with the spirits of trees, animals, mountains and the weather, and ask them to intervene on their behalf
>Enemy finds themselves bogged down in heavy rain, their supplies overrun by rodents, their scouts vanishing in the forest

Elvish

In my setting (16th century technology) the one major elven nation are all members of a fanatical death cult and thus use a variation on the Carolean drill allowing them to win even with relatively small numbers.
The other major elven nation has very advanced metallurgy and thus have developed armor capable of deflecting bullets and use massed cavalry charges in conjunction with their powerful sorcerers to quickly rout the enemy.
They sometimes have problems with pikes though.

Heres something from a setting im in.
The High Elven military is a volunteer force based out of their home continent in the east. Having survived the cataclysm the ravaged the nations of the past age. With their technology and society still standing they picked up where they left off. Using all manner of magic to enhance their fighting capabilites and with the power of the Gods supporting their nation in all fields enables them to field a large army and navy that is well equiped, trained, and motivated to take on their enemies and spread the faith across the world.

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Shiny

Whenever I can, I kinda make them as a pike and shot style fighting force, only with bows instead of muskets

+1

Because of the huge mobilizations required on all sides, WWII was effectively fought by civilians.

The Russians spent the previous quarter century adapting to state socialism. The Germans had spent nearl a decade under National Socialism, and anyway, they were *Germans*.

The Americans were busy getting drunk and jumping tanks over lines of Jeeps while Canada held their beer.

>If elves were, as the AD&D rules suggested, mostly Chaotic Good, then you would have a very weird situation where there would be only volunteer army, run by volunteer generals who try to herd cats, where it basically devolves into a horrifying case of magical guerrilla warfare.
Well, my subjective and probably wrong interpretation of the law-chaos axis is that chaos emphasizes individual liberty whereas law emphasizes morality and tradition. In other words, chaos is the liberty to do wrong, while law is the duty to do right. As such a stereotypical chaotic society would be some kind of bizarro-America where everyone is a Lamia that keeps screaming that other Lamia shouldn't step on their tails, while a stereotypical lawful society would be one where every shoesalesman is a shoesalesman like his father before him, his father before him, his father before him et cetera ad infinitum.

To be fair, that's not an unsound principle and is even used in chess to a certain extent. Chess is won by predicting the moves of your opponents, so if you know that your opponent is better at predicting your moves than you are you beat him by making irrational moves, throwing his entire plan off balance.

Like a regular military, but with pointier ears.

>whereas law emphasizes morality and tradition.

Law is tradition, but not morality. Morality is good. Ethics might be law.

Depends on the setting

In mine, they make up for being natural pacifists with an extremely low population by the fact that the elves can focus so completely on their chosen calling that on the offchance they do choose the path of war, they become living WMDs.

The largest elven army ever mustered was 11 individuals strong, 5 soldiers, 4 archers, a druid, and a wizard. They managed to conquer most of a continent. They were stopped by the combined might of two kingdoms which hated each other but saw the necessity of working together because the last three countries which found themselves in the path of the elven army were literally wiped off the map.

And this was all due to overharvesting of wood from the edge of the great forest for lumber.

Probably a shitload of wizards who spam AOE spells so that any army that faces them don't even touch them because they're assholes with 0 honor

To an occupying army, yeah. The US is impossible to occupy by design. Everything's too decentralized and nothing would remain of the infrastructure an army needs before said army arrived.
There's nothing irrational about our projection though. Our retarded amount of resources has just allowed us to make it overwhelmingly more powerful than any other force on the planet.

>France
>Looks impressive
>Shit in practical and outside of harassing and annoying
>Leaders vastly over-estimate their competency
>Foreigners provide all military duties when in combat

Not as much yelling.

They seem to be doing fine in Mali, and they seem to actually do shit.

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Not to mention the American economical hegemony over the world is very much related to their force projection, and spending a ton of money on it is an indirect boon to their economical position.

>>Foreigners provide all military duties when in combat

>They seem to be doing fine in Mali, and they seem to actually do shit.

foreignlegion.info/2013/01/16/french-foreign-legion-in-mali/

>dickheads in chainmail with long knives

>If elves were, as the AD&D rules suggested, mostly Chaotic Good, then you would have a very weird situation where there would be only volunteer army, run by volunteer generals who try to herd cats, where it basically devolves into a horrifying case of magical guerrilla warfare. their goals would not make sense, their plans would be useless to try and divine, their strategy nonsensical and their people unable to give anything resembling real intel when captured.

This is how Tairandal Elves fight wars in Eberron. They form wandering warbands that can see at night, only need to rest in a trance for 4 hours a day, and live for centuries.

So they don't conduct "war" as humans know it. First off, they use their long lifespan to train so that they're capable one on one warriors to begin with. Then- rather than just overpower their foes- they engage in long term assassination/sapping/asymmetric/terrorist conflict until their enemies lose the will to fight after a couple of decades.

And their religion compels them to remain in constant conflict as its the only thing keeping the spirits of their ancestors alive. They make no distinction between civilians and combatants and if there's nobody around actively attacking them, then they launch unprovoked attacks on their neighbors until someone decides to declare war on them.

And when they do lose, they just retreat to their island refuge which is protected by the god-like power of undying souls, they wait a couple decades, and they attack again.

You do know that the FFL is far from the only French unit deployed in Mali, and that an estimated 25% of the FFL are actually Frenchmen, right? Then again, Americans never needed facts to hate the French. Just look at the 2003 mess that startes this shit.