[Any] Fantasy Military Tactics/Strategy

[SirKazum]

Today, I saw a reference in another thread about dragons doing "strafe runs" and it got me to thinking about how stuff like dragons and wizards might work in a war, and it reminded me of something that irks me a lot about fantasy literature and RPGs. Namely, the lack of real thought behind the effects of magic and fantastic creatures on warfare, and the tactics and strategies that would arise from them.

In most cases, when battles are depicted in a fantasy medium, they function almost exactly like "normal" medieval (or whatever appropriate time period/culture) battles from history, except for some fantastic stuff going on that (usually) has no effect in the overall battle at all. Those wizards and dragons and giants and heroes and whatnot usually just fight each other, not really interfering much with the mass-combat. (In fact, the old-school Chainmail system actually had very separate rules for "normal" and "fantastic" combat, and it seems to encourage keeping the two mostly separate.)

But think about it - why would any sane warlord actually do things that way? Why not get your wizard to Fireball the Hades out of the enemy pikemen, and give your horsemen free reign? Why not get your high-level cleric to spam Mass CLW on your troops during melee? And why waste a huge amount of time, resources and human (or elf, dwarf etc.) lives on a grueling siege, when you could just 'port a high-level strike team into the castle and get the job done in like 15 minutes?

What I'm saying is - the military resources available to the different forces often shape the tactics used, to the point that warfare becomes practically unrecognizable from what it was before the resources were introduced. Case in point - the rise of castles as highly efficient defensive structures led to the creation of siege warfare. Gunpowder made castles obsolete, and led to trench warfare. Today, aerial support and guerilla tactics both changed warfare in different directions, both of which highly different from what we had 60-70 years ago. Each of those kinds of warfare is a completely different endeavor, that works in different ways and uses different tactics.

So, I ask you - what would war really look like in a fantasy world? I mean, magic and fantastic creatures would surely make warfare into something utterly different - so, how? Right off the top of my head, I imagine that "scry-and-die" tactics would play a huge role. Armies and nations would have to start "thinking four-dimensionally" (to quote Dr. Emmett Brown), in this case, taking teleportation and planar travel into account, not to mention the whole scrying and other divinations part. Healing magic and ressurrection would probably change a lot too - in fact, the latter might even make assassination a mostly worthless tactic. (I.E. if you're important enough to be assassinated, you probably have allies that would gladly spring the cash for a Rez or even True Rez.) And so on.

I prefer to avoid comparisons to modern technology and modern warfare, both because I think that's just lazy, and because technology is NOT the same as magic - for example, technology can't do teleportation (yet), and it's tough to get easy, reliable and accessible long-distance communication with magic, at least in D&D.

[Morty]

The reason battles in fantasy tend to be portrayed traidtionally rather than "magic pwnzorz all" is that well, at least some people tend to prefer the traditional warfare in stories set in quasi-medieval settings, and thus many authors keep the impact of magic on warfare lower that it should logically be. Also, tricks like "fireball the hell out of enemy troops" or "teleport high-level strike team into the castle" work in D&D, but not in a system with lower magic level.
That said, you seem to be underestimating the extent people take magic into account in fantasy warfare. In D&D books, there are chapters that look precisely like your post - describing how magic can turn war inside-out.

[BRC]

For such an engagement, I think we first have to categorize things.

What Fantastic elements do effectively the same thing as mundane things ,only better.

For example, a band of ogres are, for tactical purposes, the same as normal infantry. They may be much better at it, but they still serve the same purpose.

Other things, like flyers and wizards, add entierly new tactical dimensions. There is no analogue in medieval combat for flying troops. or for summoners.

[Spiryt]

So, I ask you - what would war really look like in a fantasy world?

That's not easy to answer.

First someone should know how fighting really looked like in actual history.

And no one can be really sure about everything, especially as many years have passed.

Then one should acknowledge that even with considerable knowledge, there are always thousands of different possibilites in reality.

And then there comes a fact that it's fantasy world, which complicates things even further.

[The Flyin' Lion]

You are also underestimating what D&D itself has printed. In one of the books (Complete Warrior? The one based around Martial classes), they point out that a 2nd level Wizard or Sorcerer can be given a Scroll of Fireball and a Wand of Magic Missle, acting as a machine gun and a rocket launcher. They point out how certain monsters will invalidate fortresses, how Giant Eagles can render impossibly accurate troop dispositions, how a single Ice Giant can hammer through companies of soldiers.
In my campaign, the DM is throwing a Demonic army at our city next session, and I am trying to figure out the best tactics to ignore 'conventional' warfare, and there are thousands of ways to do it (Folding Boat+Fly comes to mind...)

[Lapak]

I think the point that we have a limited ability to predict what would happen is a good one. No matter how good an assessment we think we have, we can easily be wrong - the generals of Europe had a good idea of what the equipment available to them in WWII could do, in part based on their experiences of WWI, but the actual way that events played out did not always - or often - meet with their best guesses. That was in a situation where the laws of physics and the raw performance capability of the equipment was pretty well known. Adding in elements that flat-out deny our ability to apply the rules of the world as we know them makes it pretty much impossible to be certain how it would play out.

And it's not unreasonable in many cases (D&D is not one of these cases, but fantasy in general) that things would cancel each other out. If my sorcerers can block anything yours can throw, and vice versa, then it all becomes a wash. This is presumed to be the case in the Vlad Taltos novels, for example - sorcery became so widespread that every tactic on a war-sized scale had a counter, and almost every soldier was capable of at least a little bit of counter-spelling, so war had moved through a magic-blasty phase and right on back to swords and arrows.

Now, in D&D in particular (and most especially 3.x) magical offense DOES generally outweigh defense on a warfare scale, but taking magic to its logical conclusion alters ten thousand other things in the campaign besides war. If you approach things on that tack, the setting becomes unrecognizable in a hurry.

[Swordguy]

Assuming we're discussing D&D, whomever has more/better arcane spellcasters wins. That's where this discussion ends up, and it's boring. Which is why we see warfare portrayed the way it is - it's at least interesting to read about.

It's not so much as "it's not been thought through" (it has - google the "Tippyverse") as "it's been thought through - at least somewhat - and found to make dull stories".

[Morty]

Assuming we're discussing D&D, whomever has more/better arcane spellcasters wins. That's where this discussion ends up, and it's boring. Which is why we see warfare portrayed the way it is - it's at least interesting to read about.

It's not so much as "it's not been thought through" (it has - google the "Tippyverse") as "it's been thought through - at least somewhat - and found to make dull stories".

This, pretty much. Once more, someone else manages to convey my point better.

[SirKazum]

For example, a band of ogres are, for tactical purposes, the same as normal infantry. They may be much better at it, but they still serve the same purpose.

See, right there, I'd see a new tactical possibility. While ogres essentially work the same way as footmen, just the raw concentration of power and durability might be enough to change tactics at least somewhat. To me, comparing ogres to footmen is the same as comparing battletanks to rifles. The ogres would be great for breaking up enemy lines (thus giving them a role closer to cavalry), while lasting much more against archer fire, and would even double as siege engines in a pinch. But yeah, I see what you mean - some things are just improved versions of already available troops/resources, while others simply have no parallel.

Anyway, I'm not really talking about specific ways to use fantasy stuff in battles per se; I'm talking about what would magic/fantastic warfare look like, in a basic concept. I certainly don't see sieges and the whole pikemen line / knight charge / archer hail of arrows thing working in fantasy; so, what essential tactics would take their place? Divination recon + teleporting sabotage + "nuking" (by dragons, heavy-duty area spells, and other such resources, attacking from the air or long magical range) + heavy footmen (this means ogres, giants, buffed-up-the-wazoo melee characters, etc.) + magically defending the conquered area (Wall of Iron etc.) while healing the shock troops + insertion of a mass of "cannon-fodder" defensive troops (including reanimated enemies) with plenty of ranged and anti-magic defensive capabilities + rinse and repeat? Also, if this has already been explored, how did it play out, and which resources do you feel could still be used more extensively? After all, war is generally all about pulling all the stops and using everything you can to gain an edge.

[AstralFire]

You have to set the level, ruleset, and supplements, essentially. Otherwise you end up with Tippyverse, and as has been noted, that's boring as hell.

[JonestheSpy]

Assuming we're discussing D&D, whomever has more/better arcane spellcasters wins.

Yeah, first off we have to seperate "fantasy" from DnD - most fantasy novels and such don't have the uber-plentiful magic available that DnD does, nor is it that flashy - endless wands of firebals and such. Look at the master of fantasy battles, Mr. JRRT - magic was about will, morale, weather - large scale impacts like that, not treating wizards as artillery - though it's also worth noting that in the Silmarillion the presence of a single Dragon won the batlle for Morgoth many times.

Now even in a DnD world, the idea that "whoever has the better spellcasters wins" is just simpleminded. Didn't we just see that theory blown out of the water in the Varsuvius vs Xykon battle? Or for a real world analogy, look at Vietnam - the American had far far more firepower and advanced technology, but the Viet Cong were better strategists and knew the battlefield better than the U.S. army possibly could.

[lvl 1 sharnian]

Today, I saw a reference in another thread about dragons doing "strafe runs" and it got me to thinking about how stuff like dragons and wizards might work in a war, and it reminded me of something that irks me a lot about fantasy literature and RPGs. Namely, the lack of real thought behind the effects of magic and fantastic creatures on warfare, and the tactics and strategies that would arise from them.

In most cases, when battles are depicted in a fantasy medium, they function almost exactly like "normal" medieval (or whatever appropriate time period/culture) battles from history, except for some fantastic stuff going on that (usually) has no effect in the overall battle at all. Those wizards and dragons and giants and heroes and whatnot usually just fight each other, not really interfering much with the mass-combat. (In fact, the old-school Chainmail system actually had very separate rules for "normal" and "fantastic" combat, and it seems to encourage keeping the two mostly separate.)

But think about it - why would any sane warlord actually do things that way? Why not get your wizard to Fireball the Hades out of the enemy pikemen, and give your horsemen free reign? Why not get your high-level cleric to spam Mass CLW on your troops during melee? And why waste a huge amount of time, resources and human (or elf, dwarf etc.) lives on a grueling siege, when you could just 'port a high-level strike team into the castle and get the job done in like 15 minutes?

What I'm saying is - the military resources available to the different forces often shape the tactics used, to the point that warfare becomes practically unrecognizable from what it was before the resources were introduced. Case in point - the rise of castles as highly efficient defensive structures led to the creation of siege warfare. Gunpowder made castles obsolete, and led to trench warfare. Today, aerial support and guerilla tactics both changed warfare in different directions, both of which highly different from what we had 60-70 years ago. Each of those kinds of warfare is a completely different endeavor, that works in different ways and uses different tactics.

So, I ask you - what would war really look like in a fantasy world? I mean, magic and fantastic creatures would surely make warfare into something utterly different - so, how? Right off the top of my head, I imagine that "scry-and-die" tactics would play a huge role. Armies and nations would have to start "thinking four-dimensionally" (to quote Dr. Emmett Brown), in this case, taking teleportation and planar travel into account, not to mention the whole scrying and other divinations part. Healing magic and ressurrection would probably change a lot too - in fact, the latter might even make assassination a mostly worthless tactic. (I.E. if you're important enough to be assassinated, you probably have allies that would gladly spring the cash for a Rez or even True Rez.) And so on.

I prefer to avoid comparisons to modern technology and modern warfare, both because I think that's just lazy, and because technology is NOT the same as magic - for example, technology can't do teleportation (yet), and it's tough to get easy, reliable and accessible long-distance communication with magic, at least in D&D.

I believe that if Kings are at the point where armies are fieldable, a few magicians wouldn't difficult to hire for either side. Arguably, the reason that casters and PCs go after eachother is that it's more tactical to go around crippling the support than damaging the cannon fodder because as long as you are engaging their casters, they can use spells on your troops.

Besides, spells don't interact like they should in the real world. For example, Fireball creates a pressureless 20ft spread of fire, so a shield wall should be able to shrug it off. On the other hand, if magic is so predominant as to have ressurection then assassins will probably carry trap the soul, while the targets, assuming they are important enough, should be able to toss enough money to ward against scry-and-die.

[Saph]

Kazum, you should take a look at the 3.5 book Heroes of Battle. It has a sub-chapter on basically exactly what you're talking about.

In particular it makes a distinction between:

Medieval Warfare: Massed troops. Large blocks of infantry. Armies tend to stay together because that's the only way to communicate. Officers are highly visible because they want to be recognised. Armies are extremely obvious and can be spotted miles away.

Modern Warfare: Cover and concealment are king. Armies have good communications and so can spread out over a wide area into many small groups. A modern battlefield, to an untrained observer, looks completely deserted, because everyone's staying out of sight.

It explains how you can get both kinds in D&D.

- Saph

[AstralFire]

Now even in a DnD world, the idea that "whoever has the better spellcasters wins" is just simpleminded. Didn't we just see that theory blown out of the water in the Varsuvius vs Xykon battle?

While the Vaarsuvius versus Xykon battle is excellent storytelling, it is terrible modeling of D&D, in particular because Vaarsuvius fails almost every basic rule of how a Wizard should be built to be optimal. Allow me to express that I in no way consider this to be a fault of OotS.

[Joran]

Anyway, I'm not really talking about specific ways to use fantasy stuff in battles per se; I'm talking about what would magic/fantastic warfare look like, in a basic concept. I certainly don't see sieges and the whole pikemen line / knight charge / archer hail of arrows thing working in fantasy; so, what essential tactics would take their place? Divination recon + teleporting sabotage + "nuking" (by dragons, heavy-duty area spells, and other such resources, attacking from the air or long magical range) + heavy footmen (this means ogres, giants, buffed-up-the-wazoo melee characters, etc.) + magically defending the conquered area (Wall of Iron etc.) while healing the shock troops + insertion of a mass of "cannon-fodder" defensive troops (including reanimated enemies) with plenty of ranged and anti-magic defensive capabilities + rinse and repeat? Also, if this has already been explored, how did it play out, and which resources do you feel could still be used more extensively? After all, war is generally all about pulling all the stops and using everything you can to gain an edge.

It's really too large of a question to ask with not enough information. First you must define the society which this army is drawing from. The shape of an army is defined by the society. My military history teacher always stated that the two questions that you must ask are: "Who fights and why?" "Who pays, how much, and why?"

You must answer essential questions such as how the soldiers are trained, are they professional, standing troops, mercenaries, or farmhands plucked from the fields? How large of an army can the nation support; can magic be used to increase crop yields, improve logistics, cure the sick? How rare is magic, how powerful, and how difficult to cast? It really depends on a lot of variables.

[SirKazum]

First off, yeah I understand that casters would basically dominate war (even if it's not ALL about them), and battles might actually not be as engaging as ones fought with swords and arrows. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Heck, I mean this more as a thought exercise than as something to use in an actual game or in fiction. And, as to being boring - I'm not even sure about that, as long as you're viewing the story from the involved casters' vantage point.

In any event, people talk a lot about "Tippyverse" (which I understand as being a 3.5 D&D world where arcane casters have free reign to twink-out as much as possible, though I don't know exactly where the term comes from). So, just so we have a basis to work on - how would warfare work on the Tippyverse? I mean, what exactly do Tippy wizards do in this situation? Let's assume we have two large nations with ample resources and a large pool of NPCs of all classes and levels, distributed as per DMG guidelines, fighting against each other. Don't tell me "whichever nation acts first wins" - I don't care who wins, I wanna know what tactics they're going to use, both offensive and defensive.

And it's not unreasonable in many cases (D&D is not one of these cases, but fantasy in general) that things would cancel each other out. If my sorcerers can block anything yours can throw, and vice versa, then it all becomes a wash. This is presumed to be the case in the Vlad Taltos novels, for example - sorcery became so widespread that every tactic on a war-sized scale had a counter, and almost every soldier was capable of at least a little bit of counter-spelling, so war had moved through a magic-blasty phase and right on back to swords and arrows.

See, that's the approach I was talking about in my OP, and with all due respect to that author, that sounds like a lazy cop-out to me. I just don't see it happening that way. Even if magical offense and defense are balanced to each other, doesn't mean people are going to just toss both of them off and go "ah what the hell, let's go back to swords and arrows". There's no way the exchange wouldn't change the face of the battlefield. In fact, if any base soldier is capable of a bit of counter-spelling, that's all the more reason to not waste able hands with silly things such as swords and invest your manpower in using enough raw spellcasting power to overcome the enemy's defenses.

[tyckspoon]

Now even in a DnD world, the idea that "whoever has the better spellcasters wins" is just simpleminded. Didn't we just see that theory blown out of the water in the Varsuvius vs Xykon battle?

Braving a risk of reopening some rather overdone discussions- no, we didn't. The better spellcaster still won. What we saw was that 'better spellcaster' is not determined solely by how many spells you can throw.

On topic: as mentioned upthread, how fantasy warfare looks different is going to depend a lot on just what your particular fantasy world is. Are fantastic creatures tamable and/or willing to help your side? If so, what advantages do they bring (having a D&D dragon on your side is a very different thing than having a corps of people riding big eagles- the tactics for dealing with the eagles are fairly mundane, the tactics for the dragon require pretty big changes.) What does magic do? Are your wizards going to be doing mostly intelligence gathering and psych-ops, or are they best sent to the battlefield as fire support? It's quite possible to have a world where the actual battles are all carried out in 'traditional' style, but the people with the best magical backup have the ability to pick the time and place, demoralize the enemy and maybe disrupt their communications; they get a massive advantage and change the face of warfare without anything fantastic actually happening where the swords hit the meat.

[SirKazum]

Well, I wanted to keep this generic to allow for wide and abstract discussion, but it seems some constraints are in order. So, let's say we're talking about 3.5 Core D&D (which has quite enough to talk about, and has a very deep knowledge base), with monsters working in the most "default" manner possible, character class/level distribution following the NPC guidelines in the DMG, and the same goes for magic items. In other words, 3.5 D&D, kept as basic as possible. Yes, it's a lot more magic-heavy than most fantasy, which works great for my purposes - I don't care for subtle changes, I wanna see a world completely upturned by magic If this means changes in how society and everyday life work, that's just gravy, though that might be too much for a single thread. And oh yeah, assume a more-or-less-medieval-European-though-not-really society, the kind that's pretty much default in D&D.

[Eldariel]

Modern warfare really works quite well with D&D, as the books point out, and is actually quite close to a basic level of application of Magic and fantastic creatures into the system. Dragons acting as ground combat planes/bombers (or flying Wizards, sure), Wizard-type effects acting as variety of artillery/missile launchers with ability to use a varying kinds of battlefield altering- or enemy killing payloads while providing mobility and warriors acting as the actual force to control an area with.

All manners of casters also act as counters to the opposing casters, much like WWII era artillery targeted opposing artillery to shut down their support at some points (though it was found more efficient to target the grouping areas, of course, especially on the east front).


The problem with this is that melee soldiers are mostly useless in modern warfare and it would translate into D&D warfare too. Getting in range as a melee character means giving up your cover and concealment making you an easy target for all the area effect spells and attacks flying around. Now, tanks are perfectly usable, but they need to be actual tanks.

The frontliners who step in there and go wreak havoc on the opposition need to have sufficient defenses to not fall to the non-concentrated attacks around the battlefield and to be able to take the focused fire from hiding defenders. That means you need energy resistance and decent saves/spell resistance along with a large number of HP and damage reduction+prolly fast healing/regeneration meaning only high level melee types and some bigger creatures (such as Giants or The Tarrasque) and buffed spellcasters have any business acting as melee units in combat (and buffed spellcasters better have high enough CL to survive whatever dispelling the opposition can throw at them).

Most of the standard soldiers are best off with Crossbows prone behind some tree in holes in the ground, hoping your caster support keeps the Walls from blocking your shots and just firing away at any visible targets, because else they'll just fry in crops as a variety of breath weapons, evocations, confusions, cloudkills and such wreck hundreds of troops in seconds. Same applies to low level spellcasters without the spellcasting prowess to defend themselves; it's also worth noting that they'll run out of gas without some Wands very soon and be reduced to mooks.


But yeah, it's doable, it just flies in the face of the fantasy archetype of "swordsman" or in general, any frontliners be they mounted cavalry, pikemen or in general, anyone without a reach weapon. Those can exist, but Level 1/2 Soldiers have no business in those roles as they'll be dead before they get to swing once.

Also, magic obviously removes the communication difficulties faced by medieval army - indeed, Sendings, Telepathic Bonds and similar spells make for a command chain much more efficient and sophisticated than what we are using today as messages can't be intercepted and are relayed instantaneously from a mind to another with no disruption.

[Fishy]

I'm wondering about scry-and-die.

Deception has always been a staple of warfare, right back to Sun Tzu, and guerrilla tactics is the traditional answer to a military that just plain outguns you (read, Wizards).

How does that work against a Wizard 5/Mindbender 1 with Mindsight, who just plain knows where you are? Or Scrying, Clairvoyance, Detect Thoughts, Sense Hostile Intent, or any of a thousand 'ha, there you are' effects?

How do you set up choke points and ambushes against an enemy that can teleport?

[Pharaoh's Fist]

In DnD, your basic troops are best off as Warlocks and entangling exhaustion Dragonfire Adepts. This allows people with poor stats to still be threatening, as the Warlock and DFA classes are about as SAD as you get.

A third level warlock can shoot you for 2d6 damage, hits your touch AC, and can do so at 250 feet without penalty. He also gets an invocation that can be spent on Entropic Warding so that you suffer a 20% miss chance on your ranged attacks against him. Stick him in a chain shirt, have him take cover on the ground, and you're archers have to contend with a range penalty, +18 AC + dex mod, and a 20% miss chance.

Anyone who gets too close is entangling exhausted by Dragonfire Adepts and shot to death while trying to advance. Not fun.

Higher tier troops should be casters and operate as special forces units.

Artificers would have scrolls of things like Fireball and use them as fire support.

How does that work against a Wizard 5/Mindbender 1 with Mindsight, who just plain knows where you are? Or Scrying, Clairvoyance, Detect Thoughts, Sense Hostile Intent, or any of a thousand 'ha, there you are' effects?

Undead takes care of Mindsight. Mindblank takes care of the diviniation effects.

I don't think you can be undead and be Mindblanked, but I'm sure there's some spell for it. Like Nondetection, maybe? I forget what that does, but it sounds like the right kind of spell.

How do you set up choke points and ambushes against an enemy that can teleport?

It's very hard to stop the DnD equivalent of paratroops, but you can ward areas against teleportation. Other than that, diviniation to know where they will be and send units to intercept.

[AstralFire]

How do you set up choke points and ambushes against an enemy that can teleport?

If you want to make it possible within a setting - areas with valuable resources that run interference with dimensional effects. Also, almost certainly, key headquarters are warded specifically to avoid them. This is one of the things that is easier (if not easy) to overcome.

[Eldariel]

I'm wondering about scry-and-die.

Deception has always been a staple of warfare, right back to Sun Tzu, and guerrilla tactics is the traditional answer to a military that just plain outguns you (read, Wizards).

How does that work against a Wizard 5/Mindbender 1 with Mindsight, who just plain knows where you are? Or Scrying, Clairvoyance, Detect Thoughts, Sense Hostile Intent, or any of a thousand 'ha, there you are' effects?

How do you set up choke points and ambushes against an enemy that can teleport?

The whole opposing force hardly has the capability to teleport; just small, strong strike squad, much like paratroopers. Key areas can be warded by Anticipate Teleport (which doesn't stop Teleportation, but allows you to know it's coming and prepare a death trap for the new arrivals in a span of ~30 seconds) and the higher-ups you don't want targeted of course want the best non-detection/mind blank type effects at your disposal. Generally said effects are strong enough to negate scrying to a degree.

Scrying also doesn't let you know more than what you see; you don't know the location of the place you're scrying and thus cannot use it to e.g. make sure the general is still in the place he was in the morning. Also, thanks to Teleportation and Illusions, misleading takes a whole new aspect and a brand bunch of toys; indeed, I think that aspect of warfare is most altered by magic compared to modern day warfare. Information is available without any risk, but that information is incomplete and can be mislead with spells and just setting the environment for the spell. And on the other hand, the ability to completely shift landscapes, create phantom armies and such definitely makes believing what you see less given (though on the other hand, they're counteracted by other types of magic but if the said magic doesn't happen to be available where these spells are deployed...).


Also note that many spells have rather short ranges; 100' or 120' is nothing in a war which renders things like Mindsight, Blindsight, True Seeing and such far less of issues and less relevant as you need to be very close to something to use such abilities to detect possible ruse and such.

[endoperez]

In the Temeraire series of books, dragons are handled almost like naval vessels. Most dragons don't breath fire, but are instead used to carry bombs, relay messages, defend against enemy dragons, support ground/naval troops, etc. Dragons wear harnesses with metal rings and leather straps, crew wear special belts that let them secure themselves on the harness, besides bombers and lookouts each dragon has a gunner crew, etc. Really nice take, much better than the usual "single knight on a dragon".

[Lapak]

See, that's the approach I was talking about in my OP, and with all due respect to that author, that sounds like a lazy cop-out to me. I just don't see it happening that way. Even if magical offense and defense are balanced to each other, doesn't mean people are going to just toss both of them off and go "ah what the hell, let's go back to swords and arrows". There's no way the exchange wouldn't change the face of the battlefield. In fact, if any base soldier is capable of a bit of counter-spelling, that's all the more reason to not waste able hands with silly things such as swords and invest your manpower in using enough raw spellcasting power to overcome the enemy's defenses.

In the setting in question, the power curve went something like this (as laid out in Dragon, one of the books in the series):

- When sorcery first started being used, its users were inexperienced. The focus was mostly on scrying and illusions, and this was effective until counter-scrying charms were developed and soldiers were taught how to penetrate illusions easily.

- Sorcery got more powerful, and was invested in items. You could give every soldier an enchanted item that fired off one-shot sorcerous blasts. This pushed the setting into a Renaissance-style combat model, with such items taking the place of primitive artillery and firearms. The large-scale sorcery was still mostly scrying, illusion, and counters.

- Someone figured out how to unravel enchantments and enchanted items, causing them to detonate in the process. Armies stopped using them (obviously) and threw their resources into training combat sorcerers to throw around BIG effects. This is the period you'd be interested in; a sorcerer corps could roast an infantry division, teleport behind enemy lines to assassinate a general, destroy all of an army's supplies and so on. The problem with making this interesting is that it is utterly arbitrary. As other people have said, it's impossible to talk about unless you've set precise rules on what can and cannot be done - if we assume no upper limits or prohibitive costs on magic, then it just becomes a matter of who can throw more power at a problem and wipe the opposing nation off the map in one spell. (Which is how this era in the Taltos setting ended; accidental annihilation.)

- Sorcery became so commonplace that everyone puts up wards against everything. Teleport blocks, scrying protections, shields against blasts in combat, counterspells to prevent terrain alteration. In general, in that setting, it's easier to counter magic than to use it. It's not an unreasonable assumption, incidentally, if you see magic as breaking the rules of the universe - it SHOULD be easier to reinforce the universe against something teleporting than it is to teleport. Since the enemy can counter more cheaply than you can enchant, you can get more for your money by countering and sink the rest into mundane troops. Dumping more money into magical offense is a losing game, because it's just plain easier to counter than to create magical effects.

But that's in a particular setting with particular rules. If you want to take a look at this in fiction, there are a couple of places you can go. Several have been mentioned already; another option is Turtledove's Into the Darkness series, which is pretty much explicitly WWII in a world where magic is used as technology. A lot of settings do treat magic as a replacement for tech at one level or another, because that's the best approximation we can imagine for it.

[deuxhero]

Some of my random thoughts brought this up.

In my hypothetical world magic HAS made regular soldiers useless now that you can teach a man to sling level 2 spells in under 3 years. A single grease spell could take out an entire group of mundane troops, while Fireball would destory the sails of most ships.

I also had the idea for a empire with an epic, immortal wizard for a ruler. The primary offensive "tactic" of the empire was to scry/die rulers and generals, then crush the leaderless country. The emperor would also use crazy magical tricks to warfare unneeded. One idea I had was that she would (further, given how common it is in D&D) flood the world with gold and silver (via epic magic) to break the economy of the rest of the world (except for the empire, which uses Steel Mithril and Adamantine slugs for currency.) to walk over half the world while they were in economic ruins.

[Lapak]

I also had the idea for a empire with an epic, immortal wizard for a ruler. The primary offensive "tactic" of the empire was to scry/die rulers and generals, then crush the leaderless country. The emperor would also use crazy magical tricks to warfare unneeded. One idea I had was that she would (further, given how common it is in D&D) flood the world with gold and silver (via epic magic) to break the economy of the rest of the world (except for the empire, which uses Steel Mithril and Adamantine slugs for currency.) to walk over half the world while they were in economic ruins.

The problem I have with this kind of thing is that it only makes sense on first glance. On second glance, you'd realize that any world in which magic was common enough to make this possible would not have produced a currency based on a substance that magic can replicate. The primary reason gold was valuable was because it was relatively rare; a world in which metals can be created out of nothing would have stuck with a barter system or found a base currency that can't be produced magically. Or possibly overshot hard currency altogether and gone straight to a modern credit-based banking system, though I'm not sure how easy that leap would be.

[Eldariel]

Or possibly overshot hard currency altogether and gone straight to a modern credit-based banking system, though I'm not sure how easy that leap would be.

With magic, it should be relatively simple.

[Zen Master]

Generally, I feel the more common magic is, the less interesting it becomes.

I truly see no reason wizards should be common enough to become any significant part of armies - nor do I see how or why they should be particularly powerful. A fireball doesn't do anything that a hail of arrows doesn't do better.

These discussion of how combat would be ever so enormously different in a fantasy universe always assume unlimited ressourses. For what it's worth, I actually see cleric pulling more weight on the battlefield than wizards.

[jmbrown]

The important thing to remember is that very few fantasy settings have high level characters running around which is what we're used to because we all play high level characters.

Protagonist level characters are rare. They make up maybe 1% of the world's population. The wizard that can teleport troops, reverse gravity, and stop time is likely the warlord's closest confidant. Everyone else is a peon.

In DnD terms, the average soldier is a level 1-4 warrior. Higher ranking guys go up to level 10 but that's the upper limit. When building an army, few countries can afford +5 enchantments for everyone. Few people can afford the component cost for higher level spells. Few people can afford to convince powerful creatures like dragons to fight for them.

Within the limits of the generic high fantasy trope, war is pretty conventional. If one side has access to nigh infinite resources then just like in real life that side is likely to win.

edit:

These discussion of how combat would be ever so enormously different in a fantasy universe always assume unlimited ressourses. For what it's worth, I actually see cleric pulling more weight on the battlefield than wizards.

Thank you. Most DM's ignore minor material components and assume the wizard happens to have them on hand. In a real battle I don't think the wizard would hold up fumbling around for bat guano and which spider he should eat.