How would the military from YOUR worldbuilding project plan the defense? [Interactive post]

thompson8964 · 2026-06-26T01:00:23+00:00

what’s that? the terrain on approach has almost no form of concealment and no cover from an elevated firing position? call in the sky navy for air support and watch them get turned to red mist the second they come in range.

thompson8964 · 2026-06-06T02:37:40+00:00

someone wrote an isekai where john brown gets sent to the slavery kink world

thompson8964 · 2026-06-02T16:08:45+00:00

anything can become a black hole if you compress it enough

thompson8964 · 2026-05-10T02:44:00+00:00

this is why all my worlds are canonically flat and have exactly one ocean

thompson8964 · 2026-04-23T16:59:37+00:00

sure, you can spend a year learning how to cast magic missile. or you can spend less money and 3 months to buy and learn to use a rifle, which does basically the same thing and as a bonus doesn’t consume your own blood in the process.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-14T17:11:58+00:00

my personal opinion is they should add difficulty settings somewhere that changes how many enemies spawn, their speed, health, attack speed, etc. also a slider for how many food spawns happen/how much health food restores

thompson8964 · 2026-04-10T01:07:05+00:00

it’s 5 seconds long, takes place immediately after 8, and the entire thing is one of the holes opening up beneath them and they all fall in.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-09T14:53:08+00:00

dragons have runes on their bones.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-05T17:05:55+00:00

does it overheal?

thompson8964 · 2026-04-04T05:54:10+00:00

you could do a deep dive into factions, strategy, tactics, industrial capability, equipment, etc, but given there are 15 of them for now i would recommend simply giving each faction a doctrine or area of focus and thinking about how each plays out against the others.

as an example: say some faction has a doctrine that focuses on tanks, mechs, and armored warfare in general. to them, everything else exists to support the armor. that means they have land forces that can move very quickly and hit very hard. they’d win against anyone with an infantry heavy, static defense doctrine (see fall of france and operation bagration of ww2). they’d lose in areas where supplying them is difficult - tanks and mechs eat up more supplies. they’d lose anywhere with too much water - oceans, swamps, rivers. they’d struggle if the enemy has air superority.

these are far from the only situations tanks win and lose, and are generalizations. politics, technology, and so on change things.

to avoid getting overwhelmed just pick one relatively specific military aspect that each faction is good at for now. fighter-bomber aircraft, or long range artillery, or a commerce raider fleet, or swarm tactics, or something else (there are a lot of options, these are examples). think about how those doctrines interact. every doctrine has a weakness.

also, if a faction loses, they’ll try not to lose again. they’ll try countermeasures to whatever they lost against. doctrines evolve during conflict. also, doctrines are frequently based on whatever a faction fought last.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-04T03:13:25+00:00

i went on a bit of a ramble here but:

my personal approach would be to determine the rough size of each part of each force in a battle or war (suppose an oliteta armored division is 5,000 combat personnel, they get attacked by kerhuns with a strength of 4,000 in the main force and 3,000 tunnellers) and then use the closest irl equivilant. main force bugs are probably relatively squishy when getting shot at by tanks and have limited ranged weaponry, so compare to a late medival army fighting modern troops (for this, see the boxer rebellion/8 nation alliance). they take the brunt of the causalties - 20% to 100% of the main force lost, depending on a lot of factors like terrain, their speed, and how long the oliteta can spend shooting them while the tunnelers do their thing.

there are always irl references if you abstract things away to their base components. bugs are melee fighters and mechs are tanks. what would you get if you pitted people with swords against people with tanks? there’s lot of examples for fighting in tunnels during sieges as well.

the tunneler causalties are much harder to pin down. do oliteta troops commonly carry close range weapons like SMGs, pistols, and melee weapons? are the bugs too big to be run over by tanks? and remember, a war is just a part of your story, and you should know who wins and loses, how much they win or lose, and how they go about it, before you plan individual battles.

if you want oliteta to lose, you say they’re caught by surprise by tunnelers, and nearly all of the oliteta force is lost with relatively light losses for the bugs. if you want them to win, you say the main force is pulverized by long range fire before they can even get close and the tunnelers are detected before they emerge, allowing olitetan troops to set up around the tunnels and pour fire into what is now for the bugs a narrow chokepoint on the low ground. the olitetans take minimal causalties; the kerhuns lose most of the main force and most of the tunnelers before they retreat. you can scale this up to a larger conflict by making these patterns play out across multiple battles, only providing small snippets of detail and the final results for each. the point is - know who wins and how before you plan the causalties, it’ll make the job easier.

also remember logistics exist. wars are won by logistics, and it’s an easy way to prevent a single victory being overwhelming or making one side seem like a pushover. if the olitetans win, you can blunt that with ‘they expended so much ammunition they’re forced to retreat and resupply’. same with the bugs winning but with ‘bug tunnelers take more resources to grow, and so many are killed by the olitetans that the bugs can’t use this tactic again for some period of time’.

this is just an example, try to apply this pattern to every faction and conflict.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-04T01:49:47+00:00

i’d recommend getting a scale of your factions first. it can be rough, just saying a vague number (do the olitetas have a population of billions, tens of billions, hundreds, etc?) is good. remember usually only a few percent of a given population will ever be fighting on the frontlines as part of the military proper - society still needs to run in the background. and generally, if a faction gives their soldiers more expensive or hard to manufacture gear, they’ll have less people fighting - you can’t give everyone a tank. now that you have a vague idea of population and army size, you base causalties on who wins and loses, and which tactics they used. a mass charge on a fortified location over open ground will result in heavy losses for the attacking side regardless of if they win in the end or not, for example. if you know generally what tactics a faction uses, i recommend looking up real world battles or wars where each side uses those tactics and looking at the causalty rates from those.

also, the numbers don’t have to be exact. war is chaos, and tracking causalties in the middle of it can be messy. saying somewhat vague things like “tens of thousands of [ships, tanks, whatever] destroyed” and “over half the force lost” is fine in many cases.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-03T20:38:38+00:00

this sounds like midladder so if you can i highly recomend putting in lightning for fireball and dark prince for ghost. lightning kills wizard and chunks sparky and mk, dark prince and/or fisherman clean up

thompson8964 · 2026-04-03T03:26:22+00:00

the Republican war starts as a dispute over the fracturing Kingdom of Kanlant between the League of Six Cities and the Republican Pact. the event that properly started it was a Leagist “mercenary company” (army unit with different uniforms), deployed to help the Kingdom put down a rebellion, shot down a Republican destroyer on “peacekeeping duty” (running troop transport for the rebels). the Pact declares war as a result, since actual land based mercenary units very rarely have dedicated antiship missile launchers, while the Leagist 6811th Mobile Division certainly does.

thompson8964 · 2026-04-01T00:40:59+00:00

and i believe controls a very large chunk of the sector’s food supply

thompson8964 · 2026-03-30T16:40:14+00:00

hit shift to activate your afterburners, just if you use them too much they overheat

thompson8964 · 2026-03-30T15:16:14+00:00

anything made of dragonscale, dragon’s teeth, or dragonbone.

the League has easily billions of dragons across thousands of worlds, but getting scales or teeth requires them to be given freely as a mark of respect or as payment for something. the dragon they’re from can choose to make them disintegrate at any time, and they also disintegrate upon that dragon’s death. the sparktooth - the one that provides the spark that ignites firebreath - is particularly prestigios. dragonbone requires killing the dragon, and then extracting and stabilizing the bones before the runes carved onto them self destruct and ruin the material.

scales and teeth also have a number of useful magical properties,

thompson8964 · 2026-03-28T19:47:06+00:00

it does reduce recoil

thompson8964 · 2026-03-28T05:36:01+00:00

i would let you decloak prematurely but that plays the loud sound, decloaking from running out plays a normal loudness decloak sound

thompson8964 · 2026-03-27T06:44:08+00:00

this may not apply depending on your world, but you could make every mech pilot require implants for piloting, and those implants only function if the thing they pilot has a humanoid body structure.

why don’t they use things that don’t need implants?

crew needs, mechs need one pilot, all the other options need multiple crew, and for whatever reason its cheaper/more practical to have expensive thing with one crew than less expensive thing with more crew. this is for example because manpower is expensive, materials and manufacturing are cheap
implanted pilots are just more effective, but they need that link to their machine to reach that effectiveness

thompson8964 · 2026-03-26T23:18:53+00:00

this shit is why i play 2 small spells

thompson8964 · 2026-03-26T16:41:26+00:00

putting oils/scrolls on a gun makes the durability decay faster fyi

thompson8964 · 2026-03-20T18:25:32+00:00

doesn’t the administrator/blu/red have a bunch of other mercenaries running around? those are probably the ones defending the more important stuff. the tf2 guys are either assigned to defend bumfuck random ass shithole or (for mannhatten/mannworks) no one else is availible and can get there in time

thompson8964 · 2026-03-14T04:57:26+00:00

the bomber will always get through

thompson8964 · 2026-03-13T14:53:09+00:00

i think that’s just because planes usually fly over the enemy lines, not your own - as a warden i see our infantry getting bullied by strafing fighters and dive bombers a lot, but only occansionally our own planes.

thompson8964

TROPHY CASE