How effective would an elf or a dwarf army with 100 years of combat experience actually be...

There are diminishing returns for training.

Take some random peasants which have never killed anything bigger than a chicken, give them some armor, swords and bows and send them into battle and they are liable to just shit their pants and run away
Take the same peasants, arm them, have them practice once a week with sword and bow for a few months then send them into battle and they hold up a little better.
Give those peasants a couple of months to of solid training with weekends off and you get a decent infantry force that can hold it's own.
Give those peasants a year of training and you got a solid unit that can hold the line better.
Take the kids of those peasants and raise them from age 5 to be soldiers with weekends off and you got some soldiers which can do some things that can master several tricky skills like using composite bows and fighting on horseback. They can be better fighters than trained peasants and can do some niche stuff, but they also cost 12 times as much to train and can still die on campaign from disease or a wound.
Take the same group of kids,drill them mercilessly and kick out those that are not exceptional and you get a group of psychologically damaged fighters.

>War changes a lot in a hundred years

Depends on it. The ancient Greeks fought for a long time in a phalanx.

Eventually you’d basically stop getting better at fighting but you’d continue getting better at tactics and strategy.
In fact in real life this is a common thing; various professional special forces units train pretty much daily, but it’s not actually to improve their marksmanship skills in combat or in the field simply because their skills are already on par with the best on planet Earth. Rather, they train to keep these skills “fresh” and to physically stay in shape.
The real benefits would leaders with centuries of tactical experience and strategic insight who are able to maximize their effectiveness in both combat and force placement along with drilled troops that have fought next to each other for entire human lifetimes.

Mind you, real life is not D&D and if they had inferior numbers or bad positioning there’s only so much you can do with that. At best an excellent grasp of combat tactics and a perfectly drilled unit when tremendously outnumbered can at best die with some impressive dignity.

>Mind you, real life is not D&D and if they had inferior numbers or bad positioning there’s only so much you can do with that.
Something D&D never really talks about; combat skill and tactics isn’t so much about personal strength so much as it is maximizing any existing advantages you already have at the start. Therefore if you start a fight with too many disadvantages then really you’re maximizing nothing at all.

It certainly happened in both World Wars, with various leaders preparing for the last war rather than the one coming up, even though many were in various military positions

The biggest benefit would be the ability to pass plenty of Warfare knowledge onto new recruits and levied forces

The only thing they bring to the table that humans can't is "experience", but how much is said experience worth? Of course it's common knowledge that experienced troops will fare better than less experienced ones, but where does that end?

Knowledge in the martial arts can be drilled, though putting it into practice against an enemy that actually wants to kill you helps. Still, how many battles before you reach the point where experience gives you diminishing returns? Is a veteran of 5 battles really significantly better than a veteran of 10? A veteran of 10 significantly better than one of 20? One of 20 significantly better than one of 50?

As for morale, I remember hearing something that true, sheer panic can only be felt for 15 minutes or so because after a while you just run out of hormones, and that CBT often plays into triggering that fear for as long as possible so what triggers that fear becomes less and less scary over time, until eventually it becomes something trivially unpleasant. Once again, how many battles are needed to reach that effect?

I honestly doubt a human who's been fighting for 20 years would be inferior to an elf who's been fighting for 200 years. If anything, I can see this becoming a detriment higher up the chain of command, with highly conservative and set in their ways generals fighting like it's a war that happened 200 years ago. We saw this in WW2: the French army was led by the victors of the last war, the German army was effectively "purged" with high positions being held by ambitious (relative) newcomers. Guess how that ended.

Adapting costs money. De Gaulle had proposed reforms in tank doctrine that were very much in line with those of Güderian, but he was mostly ignored unlike his German counterpart. I imagine the reasons were something among the lines of:
>The Germans aren't ACTUALLY going to try anything again
>It's too expensive
>If we start suddenly upgrading our army, we'll draw attention from the international community
>We can spend that money on more important things, like trying to win the next elections

>We saw this in WW2: the French army was led by the victors of the last war, the German army was effectively "purged" with high positions being held by ambitious (relative) newcomers. Guess how that ended.
That is a huge reductionism as to the failures of French command in the second world war. If anything, their problems mostly stemmed from attempting to adapt to new realities, like the ability to exploit breakthroughs that were far more narrow than could be done back in the day, or the difficulty of bringing up reserves to the frontline in the face of enemy air power.

What the French did; a long, tough line with almost no reserves trying to repel a breakthrough at every point instead of allowing and then counterattacking it, would be considered madness in WW1 trench style fighting. This is a good work on the subject.

spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977623/1/Parker_MA_F2013.pdf

Nah, the main reason De Gaulle was ignored was that there was a view that without artillery support, no arm of battle could do much; and that sort of fluid, rapid charging, deep maneuvering sort of armored warfare, where you necessarily go outside of the range of your guns, was considered suicidal without the development of self-propelled artillery that was still a few years off.

Elves may be useful, but dwarves are short.
Being short means that they'll always suck at war

There are so many aspects to war besides fighting. These would be disciplined soldiers, adept at things such as scouting and foraging. It would be safe to assume that they know their territory and local populations extremely well and have decades of dealings with them.

Imagine a lifetime of experience that a human is capable of, now assume that same lifetime was dedicated to warfare and military structure. Miscommunications would not be a thing, rookie mistakes like getting lost or stuck in poor terrain wouldn't be possible.

The only real way to defeat an army like this would be to use unorthodox tactics and new technologies and hope that a century of practice will make their leadership poor adapting to a new style of warfare.

Incredibly. Long lived races being on par with short lived ones is one of the biggest crocks of horseshit ever fed to fantasy readers.

Humans are at their physical peak for a short period of time and it’s experience that makes up the difference. If a race could maintain their physical peak for decades while gaining the experience of a late-career fighter they would be superior in just about every way.

Hell, just purely based on luck an amazing human commander has a lengthy career and makes a huge difference and an amazing athlete has a 15 year long career with ups and downs. Imagine an athletes that was physically 20 and mentally 35 with he ability and genes of one of the superstars in a sport, and that they won’t age out of the game for a century. That’s a version of reality where every high school graduate for humans was already at retirement age in terms of experience, it blows human ability out of the water.

And what’s worse is that dwarves are universally presents as being heartier than humans meaning less prone to disease, disability, and injury. Any setting with fluff like this better have God’s shitting on dwarves or the dwarves as one of the most powerful groups in the world.

They should be better at war, magic, and engineering but writers will nerf them so human can stand a chance. Humans are like anime MC that lack the skill and experience but some how beat the better because of "heart" or some other plot bullshit.

>There are so many aspects to war besides fighting. These would be disciplined soldiers, adept at things such as scouting and foraging
Reminds me of this image I inexplicably have in my /int/ shitposting folder. No idea why I saved it, but I guess it's relevant for once.

Reminds of the episode in the Sharpe Series when Sharpe has to quickly train a bunch of redcoat rookies. They are drilled and forced to be super discipline in marching and cleanliness but can barely shoot 2 rounds a minute.

They are not a cohesive unit, they haven't faced actual conflict or threat of conflict up to that point and Sharpe has to make soldiers out of them. Rather than work with 'pretty tin soldier toys'.

He has cannons shoot near their position but not directly at them. Putting them into "danger", he drills them to hold the line and that they will die if they don't hold the line. He also drills them to shoot 3 rounds a minute which is what the French army is capable of doing as a baseline standard. With these rookies he makes formidable soldiers out of them capable of fighting against French Veterans. Which if he hadn't done would have been a guaranteed death of not only these men, but of Sharpe and his regiment of Irregulars.

>Being short means that they'll always suck at war

Not really, Dwarves typically are renowned for their strength and stamina. Being short with silly strength comes with its own pros and cons. From a pure combat perspective let's look at the pros:

>able to easily use weapons that typically require high strength, eg high poundage war bows/crossbows
>able to wear heavy armor with little concern
>small profile means harder to hit both up close and from range
>'normal' sized shields cover a much larger area of the body
>hard to defend against attacks coming from the low angles which Dwarves would use
>high strength/stamina means the ability to fight for longer

>need less resources to build dwarf things due to proportions, such as armor, forts, weapons, etc.
>live longer because the body does not deteriorate as fast
>probably will lose against flying units though

This. True, they may have less natural reach, but they could still use polearms, and while it's true that downward blows are probably stronger, attacks from below are harder to defend against.

>need less resources to build dwarf things due to proportions, such as armor, forts, weapons, etc.

I'd love to see less Tolkien dwarf architecture where everything is pointlessly and impossibly enormous, rather than making things fit dwarfs. Imagine a fortress that is designed exclusively around dwarf stature, goblins and other dwarfs would be able to navigate it, but Orcs, Humans, Elves etc would be stopped.

I like how everyone goes about experience which is nice on paper but you forget PTSD is a thing. One of the best British divisions in WW2 fought through France, North Africa, Italy, then D-Day, only to be disbanded in late 1944 as the men had enough and the unit collapsed. You can only watch your comrades and enemies die so many times until you're spent and have nothing to fight for or no more things left to prove, you're done.

I think you'd have a formidable army because of non-combat experience.
>Hey, it looks like your boots wearing out, let me show you this trick I learned back in the Wurtbad campaign.
>Time to pillage! I'm grabbing socks first. A pound of gold is great, but fuck me if I'm getting trench foot again.
>You gotta really scrape the bark deep if you want to add it too the soup.
>You think you're hungry now, back during the Malediction we had to send nightly raids out to grab up dead goblins for the stew pot. And we were the lucky ones!

You're not married to a man, Steve, you're just living in sin.

You're right. It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Boys shouldn't be fooling around with other boys, they should be taking responsibility for girls(male).

Heh, might have all the elves and dwarfs going "Fuck off, I aint fighting, warfare is for idiots". Explains why they keep to themselves in deep woods and mountains....

True, but modern wars in the real world are fought between men, not men vs rodents or men vs tree-things or men vs spiders. War could potentially be a lot more easy on the mind if you know you're fighting vermin or pests that are a blight. Plus we have no idea whether dwarfs and elf kind are more or less susceptible to morale issues. I would imagine that dwarfs, with their reputation for stubbornness, would be less susceptible.

This. I imagine most further gains will be in anticipating enemy movements and tactics

Leaders and generals prepared for what they knew and what they could predict, unfortunately nobody could predict what WWI would become. Some things can only be learned from experience, or serendipidity.

Old generals though that moving lots of people as fast as possible was a good idea, unfortunately the new means of locomotion made those advantages so less significant.

Old generals trusted on horse charges and mass charges to overwhelm positions at critical times, unfortunately they severely underestimated the effects of machine guns.

Old generals saw their men dying in droves against artillery in fields, so they build fortifications as any sane man would do. Unfortunately, nobody could predict years of stalemate over hundreds of Km, the use of poison gas on such massive scales, and the effect of battles months-long on the morale of the soldiers.

Old generals though that conquering a country was a matter of defeating the enemy troops, driving in, staying there for peace-keeping and signing some documents granting the anexation of key zones and whatnot. Unfortunately, nobody predicted such parity of forces, such ease of transportation and other factors that made conquering so darn difficult.

Old commanders always fight the last war they were in, because that's what they know. They see the mistakes of the past, the means of victory attested in history and visible by hindsight, and try to apply those lessons to the current war. As any sane man would. Unfortunately war has this tendency to change the rules without telling anybody, so everybody starts blind and reliant on how good they are at exploiting their initial luck.

Being shorter than average in battle is still better than be too tall.
The taller you are, the most unbalanced you are while standing so it's easier to make you stumble and fall to the ground
Also of you're too tall you're at disvantage against a shorter enemy that manages to get close because you won't be able to protect your legs or nards effectively.
I remember that one of the most effective tactics against a taller enemy consists in basically diving at his feet and stab him in the dick

Manlets, when will they learn?

youre right
but this.

experience counts for a whole hell of a lot

Two words: strength, reach.

Unless the dwarves have the great equalizer, those 2 things are their eternal handicap.

>Unless the dwarves have the great equalizer
P I K E
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K I K E S
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Yes your reach is greater, that's why i mentioned "if the shorter one gets close"
Staying at reach, the shorter fighter is doomed to lose, but if manages to get close enough to negate reach the taller enemy's strenght is weakened too because he doesn't have room to swing properly. Doesn't mean he will lose automatically but the odds will be at least evened out, if not in favour of the shorter guy

That's a big if you got there. Difficult to back it up without reach or really good armor, you see...

All ifs are big ifs in a fight. Sure you clearly have an advantage, but usually the first one to die is not the shorter but the one who makes the first mistake

We have a very large body of data from human-human fights, in which heigh differences are not all that significatively. Of course mistakes would outweight height in those cases.

I know right? At least elves are cute.

I want to FUCK her in front of her army!

>towers would be much more spacially efficient so you could have like +300% more archers

how come nobody's though about doing something like this with dwarves before?

You realize dwarves are often depicted as quite a bit stronger than humans, right? Lower center of gravity, higher stamina, and superior strength would make dwarves a nightmare on a medieval battlefield considering most fights between heavily armored opponents/knights/etc. devolved into a grappling matches. I weep for the poor wretch unlucky enough to find himself trying to grapple a dwarf encased in a suit of armor.

>Old generals saw their men dying in droves against artillery in fields, so they build fortifications as any sane man would do. Unfortunately, nobody could predict years of stalemate over hundreds of Km, the use of poison gas on such massive scales, and the effect of battles months-long on the morale of the soldiers.

Trench warfare might work to the advantage of an ageless army who can afford to bunker down forever.

So, in my setting, the Dwarves, Humans and Elves are in a highly stable coalition mainly because, due to events external to the region, everything else wants to kill them. Humans make up the bulk of their armies, dwarves and elves offer specialized support, which are designed to be HIGHLY maneuverable and independant based off of my interpretations of historical warfare.

My armies run a modified phalanx. Dwarves are strong and hardy, but totally unable to move efficiently en masse other than at a steady march. These form what I call the bulwark. This is a 3 man deep wall of dwarven steel and full plate armor with short spears. One dwarf takes the front of the shield wall, the next takes the top for arrow protection and the third stabs things that get too close.
Basic phalanx tactic.
This has a secondary line of elves on the inside. These guys are shock troops. They are fast and hit as hard as a human. They weave between the dwarven lines, fuck shit up and immediately fall back in, with barely a crack in the wall. Finally, there is a tertiary line of humans that, after the initial block and shock, take the brunt of the fighting. These are basic irregulars. Not as specialized as the elves, tough enough to take over from the dwarves. Mixing that with cavalry at the sides and you have a classic trident movement.

Thing about dwarves, elves and humans, is that they each completely fill a basic battlefield roll that would be historically part of the battle.

I run a ton of actual formations depending on the game, but this is the basics and has held up well in our games.

almost everybody in this thread has no idea whats going on

1) 100 years in terms of warfare is like whole new galaxies of strtegy and tactics, dwarves and elves are notoriously oldfashioned in such regards
> weaponskill may be high
> tactical and strategical adaptability will be low

there's another thing though.
> Combat Exhaustion

this is something most visibly observed in World War II, most famously IIRC with british troops who had seen almost continuous action for many years - and started performing much poorer than relatively rooky regiments.

the Reason is simply this:

the Human Psyche breaks down after a certain amount of time. It may vary in how long it takes, but it will happen. Once you've been in stressfull life or death situations often enough, sooner or later, you just cease working as effectively.

For both dwarves and elves I'd claim near-human psyche. While they might not take a small number of years but instead maybe a decade or two before breakdowns in combat effectiveness appear, it would happen.

After a Century most any fighter will have become Useless.

this is stupid and wrong.
always remember this:

In any given War, Generals and Officers will begin fighting that given War as if it was the last previous war they have experience and knowledge of.

Tactics and Strategy will then evolve from there for each now War coming around.

In many ways, every War is a new ruleset and a whole new game. Humans and everyone else, as well as elves and dwarves, start from scratch in each new War they start and adapt from there.

assuming extreme stubborness for dwarves or timelessly oldfashioned elves and comparatively larger flexibility for humans,

strategically and tactically humans will best dwarves and elves more often than not in an evolving strategic scenario

>For both dwarves and elves I'd claim near-human psyche.
And that's your mistake. Elves live retardedly long lives and are blessed with beauty, health, and great agility. There's no reason to believe they would be distressed by taking the lives of creatures they might view as barely above insects. Be it human or goblin or what have you. A creature that lives for at least ten times the length of a human's natural lifespan is going to have developed ways of coping with things that cause humans to go insane or develop PTSD, otherwise all elves would essentially become useless vegetables after 200 years of life.

A similar argument can be made for dwarves. They are much tougher and stronger than humans, stubborn as the stone itself. Dwarves are also immune to sickness and disease. In some settings they are even resistant to magic. They are not a fragile people by any means, unlike humans.

To assume both elves and dwarves would have as fragile minds as humans despite the fact that their bodies are vastly superior is a bit odd. They don't develop the same fears, worries, etc. as humans. I'd expect a dwarf to go insane over losing a family heirloom before he suffers PTSD from killing too many people. I'd expect an elf to die of depression from a lack of romance before he withers from the guilt of all the orcs he's slain. The races are wired differently. They are not humans.

>To assume both elves and dwarves would have as fragile minds as humans
> ( ... )
not what I did. I assumed decades instead of years before combat exhaustion erodes martial ability - I basically assumed Elves and Dwarves to be ten times as resilient to psychological terror, as humans are.

Now, speaking from RPG Rulesets, you and me can easily agree that Dwarves usually are not ten times as courageous or steadfast as humans.

My assessment was therefore:
> best case dwarves and elves take ten times as long before breakdowns in effectiveness
> compared to a century of warfare ( the question posed in OP ) this best case scenario still leads to ineffectiveness after a century.

I mean, clearly races at the edge of technology would just stop adapting whatsoever. Also, Fantasy worlds constantly update military within 100 years I mean the way Aragorn swung that pistol around oh my

They would die. You get combat experience by being in combat. Chances are you'll die before 100yrs.

Pretty Much this. Also Never forget that no matter how experienced you are everyone dies like a bitch if you get an arrow in the throat.

These were also mistakes made by generals who served in combat for what? A couple decades?

You are using "old" in the human sense. A commander who had led troops for what you and I understand as generations would obviously be aware of the fact that battle field environments change.

I'm pretty unimpressed with MOST of the arguments in this thread so far. Geez Veeky Forums have I been gone this long?

People using any sort of human reference are woefully narcissistic. Why would you compare a fictional fantasy creature to your own human history? Obviously creatures that can live 5-10 times our life span do not suffer from the same mistakes and psychological forces (should they feel them in a way that we do at all!).

>Obviously creatures that can live 5-10 times our life span do not suffer from the same mistakes and psychological forces
Why not? They're usually depicted as doing so

A century of peace.

But... France invented Self-Propelled Artillery trying to perfect the tank. The later FT-BS was a Renault FT converted to hold 75mm mortars. The Char B1 Bis literally had a field gun built into it for the express purpose of indirect fire.

>Long lived races being on par with short lived ones is one of the biggest crocks of horseshit ever fed to fantasy readers.
Does that actually happen a lot outside games(where you have to give reasons why everyone should NOT be an elf or a dwarf)? Elves and dwarves may not be portrayed as strictly superior to humans, but when there's a craftsdrwarf, it's ALWAYS a master on par with the best humans. When elven crafts are brought up, they're always of superior quality. And when soldiers come up, elves and dwarves seem to be always portrayed as elite warriors.

Realistically these armies would be unstoppable unless met with overwhelming enemy numbers or extreme bad luck.

People vastly underestimate how important psychology was to winning a battle. What we see in Lord of the Rings movies or Total War games is probably more violent than what an actual line battle would have looked like.

Victory would come to the side that failed to retreat most of the time, and most casualties would be taken on the retreat rather than in a sprawling melee.

Napoleon, Alexander and Julius Caesar were all fine general's, but their biggest strength was that they had armies that consisted of men who had fought together under the same flag for years if not decades. They didnt panic when things looked bad and that meant that superior but less experienced armies with poorer morale would break before them. Ceaser beating Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus is a fine example.

Now imagine that advantage can be multipled by a factor of 10 or more. In an experienced elven army even a footman has a first hand knowledge of miltiary history that would shame any human general or historian. 100s of years of fighting has taught the elf that all he needs to do is hold his ground and he will win, like he has hundreds of times before. How would you beat that army realistically?

>this is something most visibly observed in World War II, most famously IIRC with british troops who had seen almost continuous action for many years
And that's where your argument breaks down. The key word here is CONTINUOUS. It would be silly to assume that wars lasting years upon years or even decades are the norm in a normal pseudo-medieval fantasy setting, or that dwarves and elves wouldn't be aware of those risks if they are, and wouldn't take appropriate precautions.

This. Dwarves and elves straight-up have higher averages than humans do.
Humans get around it with numbers, greater willingness to use different tactics instead of sticking to "superior" ones that've been continuously used b/c they work. Also there are more of us, we breed like rabbits compared to them.

These two points combine though - if the army isn't fighting as a mostly-constant force every few years then it loses that solidness, but if it's in some kind of mad constant warfare then they'd reach that point of over-saturation of action much faster.

And you'd also wonder what's supporting this army so that it can gain combat experience for decades upon decades - in most famous historical cases these were conquering armies that were able to maintain momentum - other than maybe in a civil war I can't think of any forces that have reached the legendary levels of experience without being conquers, something you don't usually see in dwarves or elves,

That said though, the (probably noble) elites of a dwarven or elven army would probably be a horrific thing to face on the battlefield, having all those centuries of practising and training together even in peacetime, and actual experience as well

Wargames are a thing. Training may not be a substitute for experience, but it does keep your skills honed.

I think Lindybeige did a video where he said that research showed that new soldiers slowly become more and more effective over a very specific period of time (around 3 weeks?) before they begin to lose combat prowess to exhaustion (physical and mental). Experienced troops reach their limit a little slower, but it's not a lot different.

Well yes, but until the modern era trying to have a standing army with which to do wargames during peacetime would be ruinously expensive - hence my points about the elites, actually, as they could exist as a standing army in peacetime on their wealth.

The other point about knights is that Ye Olde tournaments had two major components to the entertainment - the joust (crowd pleaser, never the main feature) and the melee, a mock charge of massed knights, which would basically degenerate into a small wargame in that it'd last for ages and they'd rope off a good few square miles of land, and the knights loved it because they got to fight (and actually took hostages or occasionally killed rivals)

Yeah, because every fantasy setting has breakneck progress in military just like 19-21 centuries.

it would lead to conservatism— the 300 year old einstein or michael jordan would be vested more in the social aspect of keeping their own glory recognized and pushing down others rather than exercising more core skill

The phalanx continue to evolve, be it adjustments to armor, how many ranks are breast or deep were used, how long the spears/pikes were, etc.

The iterated all the time in whatever way you could give them an advantage over the other poli.

>it would lead to conservatism— the 300 year old einstein or michael jordan would be vested more in the social aspect of keeping their own glory recognized and pushing down others rather than exercising more core skill
>nonhuman creatures would act exactly like SOME humans [specifically the type that makes my otherwise BS argument somewhat legitimate] would

This. It's like with pro athletes or gamers. Training makes you ever so better but once you reach the human peak performance, you gain very little by training even more (it's still something though).
The problem with humans is, that age eventually catches up and reduces your performance faster than your training improves it.

Depending on culture it could actually start to diminish over time if you kept the same troops on the front for a hundred years.

Lots of time in combat zones, especially over the last hundred years, veteran troops start to become only really useful in defensive operations after a certain point. You become obsessed with just surviving the war and become far less likely to do things like charge a machine gun nest or die for your country. After all, performing heroic acts and being brave doesn't tend to help your life expectancy. As a result you have very experienced soldiers, but for the most part they're hesitant to take too many risks as they're well aware of the consequences of those actions.

I could see a dwarf who had survived a 100 years of combat going "like hell I'm charging that troll with this dinky little axe, let one of the Young blood earn his pay!"

As commanders or officers though, they would be invaluable. While your physical skill would certainly plateau at a certain point, tactical and strategic knowledge would continue to grow as you saw more battles and campaigns. They would have near uncanny ability to call the ebb and flow of battle as it happens and would have a very thorough understanding of longtime all/enemy mindsets, which is invaluable.