War in the Future! - Anvil Discussion

Burning Empires General Questions
41

So “battalion” is not a fixed organization in the Iron Empires, but a catch-all term for a certain level of organization which can vary widely in composition and in size? (Much like a “regiment” in the British Army or a “brigade” in the modern US Army).

Regardless, I’d imagine a battalion is going to be at most a thousand personnel (which is a huge battalion by 21st century standards)… If that’s true, then looking at the force to population ratios of 1:1,000 to 4:1,000 cited in the RAND study referenced in this prior thread, an Anvil Lord’s contingent of one thousand troops can control at most a million people. We also know from Thor Olavsrud’s and Chris Moeller’s comments in this thread that a typical world has “a handful” of Anvil Lords, which translates into several battalions, i.e. several thousand troops, i.e. enough force to police several million people.

These starting points lead inexorably to one of three conclusions:

  1. The sociology and/or technology of the Iron Empires are so radically different from that of our era that populations require much less policing. We haven’t seen any evidence that the people are so remarkably tractable in either Faith Conquers, Sheva’s War, The Passage, or the Burning Empires game-book, so this one strikes me as somewhat implausible.

  2. The populations of Iron Empires planets are much smaller than that of 21st century Earth. Most worlds would have to have populations in the 1 to 10 million range to make direct control by 1-10 Anvil Lords work. This is plausible, given the vast dispersion of humanity – 10,000 worlds in the eight core empires alone – and the centuries of decline, which presumably included population decline. But it seems a bit restrictive to me.

  3. Most of the day-to-day police work is fobbed off on someone besides the Anvil Lords. Communes obviously have the Law Enforcement lifepath, Merchant Leagues have the Security lifepath, and – most relevant to a feudalized world – Slaves and Serfs have the Taskmaster lifepath, so clearly there is support for this in canon. I’ve proposed the Watchman lifepath as the equivalent for the Freeman setting: Just as feudal lords employ Taskmasters on their estates, and Merchant Leagues have Security in their company towns or factory dormitories, so do Freeman communities hire Watchmen to police themselves. The exact form presumably varies, but off the top of my head, I can imagine four alternatives:
    (3.1) The wealthier Freemen, the ones with those Artisan, Engineer, and Manufacturer lifepaths, hire local toughs and/or expendables as Watchmen to police their own employees, both to keep the workers in line and to keep the workers from being beat up so badly by muggers that they can’t come in to work. These “Upper Freemen” might hire such forces either as individuals or collectively, with several local bigshots chipping in together. Call this a “mini-Merchant League” approach.
    (3.2) A Freeman Guild runs its own town or neighborhood for its members, ruled by the Guildmasters, with the Guild either providing directly or through approved subcontractors such services as housing, power, and security. Guild security is likely to be mere Watchmen but might rise to the level of League Security if the Guilds are organized well enough or there’s a well-organized security contractor on the planet. This is another “mini-Merchant League” approach.
    (3.3) A neighborhood or village of modestly well-organized and well-off Freemen form a Neighborhood Watch, supplemented with tough guys hired from outside. Call this the “mini-Commune” approach.
    (3.4) If none of the above applies, and the area is ravaged by criminals, the odds are that eventually one particularly well-organized bunch of criminals is going to kick out the rest and take over, at which point they have a vested interest in preserving some kind of order: You rob a man once, you’ve paid yourself for a day; you get a man to pay protection, you’ve paid yourself for life. (The so-called “stationary bandit”). This means that the local “police” will actually be drawn from the Outcast & Criminal lifepaths: Mostly Hive Thugs, maybe backed up by some Bikers, led by Gunsels and under the overall direction of one or more high-level Criminals.

Obviously, I personally like the third alternative - subcontracting out policework to sub-Anvil forces.
First of all, it frees up our worldbuilding calculations: We don’t have to figure out how relatively small Anvil forces are policing large populations all by themselves, because they’re not doing it all by themselves.
Second, it frees up Anvil forces to be proper military forces, rather than police units with some military functions.
Third, it makes it much, much easier to conquer planets, in classic medieval fashion. Instead of having to uproot massive garrison forces (1,000 troops per million population) [EDIT: and then replace them with your own garrison troops transported expensively across space], you just have to defeat the small, high-quality force that’s personally loyal to the feudal lord (i.e. the Anvil). Then you tell the commoners, “We have a new address for you to send your taxes to” and otherwise leave their local ad hoc law enforcement alone. The local Watchman on the street keeps doing his job no matter who the Baron may be, and the new Baron doesn’t bother himself with who’s patrolling the neighborhoods at night as long as taxes come in on time.

Of course, in especially important areas, e.g. the spaceport, the planetary capital, a major mining or industrial center, etc., the local Anvil Lord will probably want to exercise control directly without allowing any local security force in the way. That’s where you’ll see Soldiers, Anvil Bikers, and Military Police actually patrolling the streets.
And even in areas where the Anvil Lord delegates local law-and-order to sub-Anvil forces, he’s not ceded ultimate authority by a long shot. Merchant League Security, Freeman guild/neighborhood Watchmen, estate Taskmasters, and even the local protection racket’s Hive Thugs are no match for a low-grade Anvil force of Soldiers with ballistic armor and assault rifles, backed by a few armored vehicles and artillery pieces (i.e., in game terms, the Anvil Lord only bought a 1D Affiliation), let alone grav-mobile Iron. If any local authority gets out of line, a few grav sleds swooping in to disgorge combat troops should make the point about who rules the Iron Empires in short order.

42

/applauds Lord Freeberg

Your third (and preferred) alternative makes a LOT of sense. I’ve often wondered how a small, tight-knit noble-driven military force could hope to police a populace that could outnumber them over 10,000-to-one.

Thank you sir.

43

Perhaps lords might sell charters and grant communities permission to police themselves. This is in the lord’s best interest, because the dreary and dull responsibility (and cost) of policing gets fobbed off on peasants, it provides a scapegoat to blame if the people become restless (“My people, I am shocked, SHOCKED to hear that some of the wardens you appointed have been running extortion schemes. I promise you they will be dealt with”), and creates a pool of nominally trained and armed troops that can be quickly and easily conscripted into a levy army. Savvy lords might even charge communities for the privilege of not relying on his arbitrary and often lethal judgment.

This could also provide some context for commune and Merchant League run planets… their lord is absent or not very involved, and has granted so many charters that he has no effective power any more.

44

Yay! I love this thread. Remember, in Sheva’s War there is the Landwehr (people’s army), which is very large indeed (planetwide), and not a true baronial Anvil Force, although the unimpressive Baron Sheva is their commander. Here’s a very brief document in my IE folders entitled “Landwehr”. I’m guessing I wrote it while working on Sheva’s War:

Landwehr
Military resources break down into two broad catagories: the Landwehr and the Nobility. Landwehr are planetary forces, trained and maintained by the worlds of the empires. They are forbidden by law from using grav-pressor technology, personal armor or energy weapons (some worlds have made a case for landwehr equipped with laser & pack weapons), and may not leave the worlds of their origin. Landwehr are organized into squads, platoons, companies, brigades (up to 5 companies), corps and armies.

This is specifically about the Karsan League, with its more egalitarian “we’re all in this together” tradition, but similar entities will be present anywhere there’s a large population. So the distinction between these “militias” and true Anvil forces are interstellar mobility, and firepower. The “planetary militias” or police forces, which can be very, very large, are feared by the aristocracy, who keep the real weapons out of their hands (so that they can suppress them where needed).

The prohibition against such forces moving from world to world is again, the barons protecting their prerogitive as the Emperor’s Anvil, as well as the lordly class as a group protecting itself against the multitudes. There is a tradition of these local forces looking to their Forged Lords for direction. When he and his family are killed off, it’s expected that they will put themselves into the hands of his successor.

-Chris

45

Even the Landwehr, as depicted in Sheva’s War, are a step above what’s required for basic public order: They seem roughly equivalent to the Iraqi Army, or to the Public Order Battalions of the Iraqi Interior Ministry: AK-47, flak jacket, helmet, and an unarmored truck to ride in.

All you need for day-to-day policing – the 1 enforcer per 1,000 population – is a handgun, a radio, a badge, and a bit of attitude. The more I think about it, the more I think “Hive Thug” is actually a common lifepath for Iron Empires law enforcement.

46

P.S.: Particularly horrible thought:

“…and therefore this Court finds the defendant guilty of aggravated assault, larceny, and witholding of the reverence due our sovereign Lord, His Grace Duke Elias. The Court therefore gives the defendant a choice: He may spend three years at hard labor in the lunar mines, or, he may spend six years as bonded Watchman…”

47

… bloody marvelous.

48

Sydney, Mike… :: sigh ::

You guys are pansies.

Six years of bonded watchman duty is a “horrible thought”?

I think you guys need to take your pussified, freedom-loving, I-support-equality-and-civil-rights, democratic, north american morals and put them on the shelf for a minute.

Why do I, as a Forged Lord, care how my communities are policed? They will produce X amount of product Y, or I will bombard the shit out of them from orbit until they shape the fuck up. What? Gangsters have instituted a bloodthirsty reign of terror over the populace? Well, is production down? No? Fine.

A civil war or a coup is cutting production down? Orbital bombardment until the politics resolves itself. You can see the instability in the Hamas government in Palestine when the US etc stop sending aid money (witholding the carrot) - this is the same principle, only it’s all stick and no carrot. The people will police themselves and maintain adequate levels of production or they will die. Oh, did I kill them all? Okay, I’ll just buy some more. It’s a good thing I have Anvil to clean up the bodies!

You’re absolutely right, Sydney - maintenance of social order would be contracted out, NOT done by Anvil. But only a few Forged Lords are going to be picky about the way their peasants live. Some Forged Lords will control numerous worlds - all with numerous communities on them - and he won’t have time to poke around in all of them, checkin out their dinner tables. So they just become abstract centers of production for him. As long as the oil flows, it’s source escapes our notice…

Yes! I will admit this represents the most callous and inhumane attitude you are likely to find in the IE, but you guys are also working off a lot of more modern assumptions, when the fundamental paradigm of Chris’s work is based off medieval principles (and not so unrealistically, IMHO), which are quite different.

I have some more to say about that in a second…

49

No Johnstone, the horrible thought is punishing criminals by making them policemen. It’s hilarious. (edit, I can see a forged lord dancing about his palace singing
“My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time —
To let the punishment fit the crime —
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!”)

I also tend to agree most lords won’t care how their fiefs are policed… in a previous post I suggested that lords might sell their subjects the dubious privilege of not relying on the lord’s personal brand of law and order, which could certainly be “Battery A, fire for effect.” Though that might be less common than you might think. Infrastructure is expensive, as are trained personnel.

50

Don’t get me wrong now - this thread is hot shit - but I’ve also noticed one glaring omission in amongst all this miltechpron talk:

Are you guys still playing Burning Empires?

Cause you need to set your OBJECTIVE before you start the Firefight!

Up till Sydney brings up the policing issue, you guys have flying tanks, Maginot lines, the high ground, stealth fighters and blitzkrieg going back and forth and nothing - NOTHING - about the objective! What is this stuff doing? You guys have it all shooting at each other and not much else - pony up some objectives, and then get down to which grav-sleds and fortresses will do the best job.

And this is an important point, because (as I mentioned above) you guys have objectives that you are taking for granted when you discuss warfare, not to mention conceptions about those who engage in warfare - which may be wrong.

In the Iron Empires, “nations” are not important, and there are no “nation-states,” no “state-nations,” no “territorial states,” and hence, any style of warfare predicated upon those types of states is meaningless. There is one fundamental unit of legitimate government, and that is The Prince - ie the Forged Lord.

The Forged Lord has a society of peers - a small group of other nobles - and he has Assets. That’s it. War waged by Forged Lords is about those Assets. And they include:

1.] Social Standing. This is the ephemeral Asset. Wars waged over interpersonal issues are about humiliating another Forged Lord or raising one’s own standing in the eyes of one’s peers or superiors (if any).

2.] Hammer Assets. This is the be-all and end-all of force in the Iron Empires. If you have Hammer assets, anybody who doesn’t is nothing. You crush them like bugs if they displease you.

3.] Anvil Assets - when you need things to be done on the planet, you use your Anvil. They do NOT destroy stuff - they secure it for later use. Orbital supremacy allows you to destroy anything you don’t need. Then you use your Anvil forces to capture production centers, technology, specified personnel, and maybe mop up any leftover hostile forces.

The reason the Forged Lord is so powerful is because he has both Hammer and Anvil. A Hammer Lord can only threaten destruction on a planet, while an Anvil Lord only has his ground forces for coercion - and they canNOT stand against Hammer.

4.] His own Bureacracy for managing all his other assets. He has to have skilled clerks to take care of his affairs!

5.] Production Assets. These are communities of peasants who make stuff for the Forged Lord. This includes everything - military technology, agriculture, machines, furniture people, or mineral ores. Whatever. If the people are highly skilled, that makes them expensive, and they get privileges, like a few rights and maybe some Anvil support during unstable times. If they are unskilled, though, they mean nothing. If they revolt, they can be replaced. If they cannot police themselves, they can be replaced.

There are basically 3 ways people in the Iron Empires obtain rights - they can be Born to Rule, they can learn valuable skills which allow them to bargain for rights in payment for services, or they can escape the notice of the powerful and gain de facto rights based on their use of force. Outside the IE (I mean culturally, not spacially), there exists democratic communes, and anarchic free communities, but they exist outside the feudal structure.

The sixth category of asset is really a subset of Production Assets, but I think it deserves special attention:

6.] Peasant reservoirs. These are miserable communities of hard-done-by peasants who would do anything for a chance at a better life - like obeying the Forged Lord! This asset is necessary when you wipe out communities of Production Assets - all those people need to be replaces, and the best candidates for that are people who think they are moving up in life. Immigrants always work harder and cheaper, right?

This brings me back to objectives:

Forged Lords do NOT fight over “territory,” nor do they need to fight over people (excepting the highly skilled). They are not warring nation-states. They do not require spacially contiguous holdings, either, although if they want to keep their holdings they need supply lines. They do NOT need to share a “culture” or language with their subjects, and they do not need to win their hearts and minds.

The Hohenzollerns built a geographically contiguous state (Prussia), in order to defend it better, and then molded it into a nation-state. This is the wrong model.

The Hapsburgs controlled a near-endless collection of states scattered all across Europe, all united merely by the ruler’s dynastic legitimacy. This is the right model.

I’m probably forgetting something here, but Anvil confrontations in the IE (what this thread is actually about) are going to be working within this framework. They won’t be trying to take and hold territory or states - just points of strategic interest.

51

[EDIT: Massive crossposting! Hold on, I’ll soon reply to Johnstone’s post about objectives.]

Mike’s got it.

Yes – for the people the convicted criminal turned bonded watchman is supposedly protecting.

Likewise, I don’t expect the local Anvil Lord to be particularly bothered that criminals have instituted a reign of terror over one of the towns in his domain and the local people are being abused. I do expect him to care if local criminals have instituted a reign of terror and are building up their own efficient, ruthless forces. You take time to care about what kind of people are policing your population not because you’re worried about them turning on the population, but because you’re worried about them turning on you.

From the feudal overlord’s point of view, a big part of the attraction of local law enforcement personnel based on lifepaths like Merchant League Security and Security Officer, Commune Law Enforcement, Outlaw & Outcast Hive Thug, and of course Freeman Watchman is that none of those lifepaths grants skills/traits like Tactics, Assault Weapons, Vehicular Weapons, or Anvil Trained. They’re very capable of keeping shopkeepers and serfs quiet, and knocking petty criminals’ heads together, and even making serious bandits think twice before raiding the place. But against even bare-bones Anvil forces, they’re toast.

In game terms, imagine a bunch of Merchant League Security and Security Officers versus Soldiers, Scouts, and Sergeants with ballistic armor, jack guns, a few heavy assault guns mounted on Anvil ground cars, and exponent three skills. The “local cops” start the Disposition checklist (pg. 471) with a six point disadvantage, because that bare-bones Anvil Force has Superior Training (+1s), Superior Communications (+1s), Superior Weaponry (+1s), and vehicles with Heavier Chassis (+1s) and Greater Mobility (+2s). Plus, unless the cops’ leader is an Anvil veteran himself, they don’t have anyone with Tactics or Command, which means they’re rolling for initial Disposition and for every single Firefight action at double Obstacle penalty.

Conversely, at the high end, it takes a minimum of nine years to train someone to wear Anvil armor (Soldier, 3 yrs; Scout, 3 yrs; Anvil Elite, 3 yrs; total, 9 years; or Court Coeptir, 4 yrs; Court Armiger, 5 yrs; total, 9 years; or Coeptir, 5 yrs; Armiger, 5 yrs; total, 10 years). It takes fifteen years to train a fully qualified Lord-Pilot (Coeptir, 5 yrs; Armiger, 5 yrs; Lord-Pilot Anvil/Hammer/Hussar, 5 yrs; total 15 years*). No society can support more than a tiny fraction of its population in economically unproductive endeavors for that long. Anvil Trained and Iron Trained soldiers are going to be small elites, capable of butchering less intensely trained troops without undue difficulty. (Now I want to do a Firefight between Lords-Pilot in Iron and vanilla troops with one Soldier lifepaths led by a Soldier+Sergeant to test that).

In a society with tremendously complex and tremendously effective military technology, such as Iron, there is a strong practical incentive to confine soldiering to a select few. And that exclusivity has political implications compared to, say, Iron Age Earth, where any solid citizen can afford decent weapons, armor, and militia training (hence the Greek hoptlites and the Republic-era Roman legion). Add in the fact that you really should start training to use Iron at age 9 (when the Coeptir lifepath begins), and practical considerations are just begging you to institute some kind of hereditary warrior aristocracy. Asking free citizens to volunteer at age 18 won’t cut it at all, not when they won’t be fully Iron trained for another 15 freakin’ years! You can always try slave-soldiers, warrior-monks, or life-term conscripts, of course, but the problem with giving your best weaponry to people without social privilege or political power is that they tend to use that weaponry to seize privilege and power, sooner or later: Look at the Mamelukes, the Janissaries, or the landless peasants who formed the bulk of the Roman Republic’s legions shortly before it ceased to be a republic.

So you don’t need irrational archaicism to explain the Iron Empires being feudal: You just need a healthy respect for how long you have to train people to use your society’s best weapons technology and for how early you have to start.

  • Fiddly obsessive note: Court Coeptir saves you a year but you pay it back because Court Lord-Pilot requires “Mark of Privilege,” so you have to spend a year changing between the Nobility and Court & Stewardship settings).
52

Little obsessive note of my own. One of the best military lifepaths, imho, is the Professional Officer lifepath in the Commune setting. It is actually so good I occasionally wonder if it was a mistake =P

Born Citizen, Student, Volunteer Soldier, Professional Officer gives you a 27 year old officer with Tactics, Command, Close Combat, Assault Weapons, and Squad Support Weapons.

Not to mention the Zealot trait.

53

Bottom-line objectives are pretty constant across different periods of history and types of society, and Johnstone’s list is a pretty good start. I’d boil it down to three:

  1. Controlling Population. This is the big one. Power is about being able to make other people do what you want, and you can’t sustain either Production or Institutions for long without a population base.

  2. Controlling Production. Natural resources, specialized skills, factories, mines, whatever. You can’t sustain any kind of military force, or most any kind of institution, without some kind of production base. Since productive assets tend to concentrate for efficiencies of scale, or to develop chokepoints due to trade patterns and mutual interdependence, or both at once, this tends to be considerably easier than controlling population.

  3. Controlling Institutions. The management of those production facilities; or the religious/traditional leaders of the population; or the bureaucracy that polices the population and taxes the production base; or the military itself. Since institutions almost by definition are hierarchical with a relatively small leadership circle you can coerce, destroy (“decapitate”), or replace, this is even easier than controlling production nodes.

Each of these classes of objectives implies a certain kind of tools. To walk back up the hierarchy:

  1. Institutions
    If you’re trying to control institutions, you need small, elite forces: Training and precision are at a premium, not raw firepower. Ideally you want your commando team to kick in the doors, kill or capture the current leadership, and install your own puppets in their place, with the commandos turning into bodyguards to make sure no one does unto you as you did unto them.
    If the target Institution is savvy and well-resourced, however, they’ll have security of their own, which means you’ll have to bring in some heavy firepower to blow down the doors before your commandoes can swarm in. Trevor Faith’s raid on the CHOT temple compound in Faith Conquers, spearheaded by a single handpicked squad of Iron backed by a short platoon of Anvil Elite and five grav sleds, is a near-perfect example of this second type of Institution takedown. (“Near-perfect” because he’s merely out to destroy his target, not to take it over himself).
    Maneuver comes into play if the Institution is decentralized, or if its leaders move about, or if (as in Faith Conquers) its security forces have multiple assets they need to protect and can be wrong-footed into covering the one you’re not going to attack.

  2. Production
    Production by definition involves making stuff, lots of stuff, so even a small production node – a factory town, a hydroelectric dam, a mining complex, an air-/sea-/spaceport – is probably larger than most institutional targets (temples, bureaucratic offices, banks). That means you need more boots on the ground just to control the whole place, because if you don’t control the whole place, someone can sabotage it out from under you, and then where’s your production gone? That implies a sizeable force of grunt infantry to secure your target.
    Making things much tougher, productive resources will often be producing and sustaining military forces to sustain themselves, either as their main line of business or as a sideline to keep their main line from being carried off by the nearest ambitious bandit. That means you’ll need heavy weapons, in sufficient quantity and quality to break the defenders.
    Maneuver starts coming into play when production systems are spread out over wide areas of territory: a factory town isn’t much use without control of the nearby hydroelectric dam that powers it, for example; a port isn’t much use without control of the approaches. That gives considerable leeway to the attacker, because he can now disrupt the target and render it useless to its current owner without having to occupy it: Seize the dam and shut down the power, or occupy the moon and interdict the space lanes, and force the enemy to come to you, or just wait him out in a seige.

  3. Population
    This is where the serious ugly starts. People can and do live all over the place. They live in crowded slums, high-rise apartments, mountaintop villages, and lonely cabins in the wilderness. So there are two extreme approaches to controlling population:

1.1) Boots on the ground.
March soldiers down every street. Have “presence patrols” in every village. Make sure every local sees a man in your uniform every day. Make sure local leaders, or just local snitches, know how to get in touch with your troops and can drop a dime on troublemakers without fear of retaliation, because your guys are there to stop retaliation. Raw numbers are required to make this work, big raw numbers, plus a degree of perceptiveness, even empathy, that allows your iron fist to have a velvet glove able to feel what the population is up to.
This is what the US has failed to do so far in Iraq, and in general it’s tremendously hard for foreign occupation forces: It’s hard to transport enough troops from your distant home base to wherever it is the population lives, and once they get there they don’t know the streets, the customs, or, usually, the language. Ultimately a “boots on the ground” approach is going to rely on cooperative locals to do your work for you (e.g. the Iraqi Army), so it’s best to figure out what Institution already controls the local police, take that over, and then let them put your insignia on the uniforms of the people they already have on all the streets.
There’s damn little maneuver involved in this approach, except to the extent you can shuffle forces around from place to place with clever patrolling techniques. Otherwise it’s a pure numbers game.

1.2) Heads on pikes
If anyone makes trouble, kill them. Kill their family. Kill their livestock. Kill their neighbors, on the principle that it’s the neighbors’ fault for not stopping them from making trouble. Leave mangled corpses and a big smoking crater as the sign of your displeasure, and people will get the hint. Probably.
The upside of this approach is it requires far, far fewer troops than “boots on the ground.” You just need enough force, in highly concentrated form, to sweep in and do horrific damage to one center of resistance at a time. Mobility, firepower, and savagery are at a premium, raw numbers are secondary. Maneuver is a big deal, but physical space is less important than psychological space: You prioritize crushing the centers of resistance that everyone knows about, so their connections to other communities stop transmitting messages of “Help us! Join us!” and start transmitting “I’m dead; if you don’t want to join me in hell, submit!”
The downside of this approach is that it’s a big fat bluff. If the population decides to get angry instead of intimidated, there are too many of them for your relatively small punitive force to keep under control, and if you have to kill all of them, well, hell, what did you conquer them for in the first place? Target practice? Dead peasants don’t do you any good unless their deaths scare other peasants into shutting up and paying taxes. If the other peasants start yelling and waving pitchforks instead, you’ve got a problem.

As a practical matter, any population control program is going to rely on a mix of presence and terror. 21st century police departments in liberal democracies tend to go heavy on the presence and light on the terror, but they still call out the helicopters and assault-rifle-wielding, body-armor-wearing SWAT teams when some bastard kills a cop, because they want to make sure nobody, but nobody, dares try that more than once. Iron Empires feudal overlords are presumably going to feel a lot more comfortable with terror, but they still need to leave most of their population alive: Interstellar travel is slow and expensive, so you can’t easily replace your planet’s population, even of unskilled laborers.

54

Mmm, good points indeed, especially this one:

And you’re still worried about them turning on you? You’re a careful man, Syd.

Still, I think your view is colored a bit much by the situation in Iraq (no surprise, I guess). We live in a world where education is more important than propaganda, freedom is equated with nationalism and self-determination, and technological skills are pretty diffuse. This isn’t quite the case in the Iron Empires, where you’re going to see a much higher degree of collaboration and cronyism than in Iraq. And that’s even after you cut out the situations where the population takes little notice of one Forged Lord replacing another - but you don’t get Anvil fights there, so nevermind.

Not saying it’s not similar, certainly, but not exact by any means.

…
Quick math note, though - 15 years represents an experienced Anvil Lord - it doesn’t take the whole 5 years to learn Iron Trained (which can also be bought with General skill points), it’s 5 years of being an actual Anvil Lord. It’s still 10+ years before you graduate to Lord status, though, and your point still stands.

55

Okay, so I’ve already posted the opinions of a Forged Lord who doesn’t care about the peasants. How bout you convince me otherwise?

Let’s say these people have Mike’s Maginot Line and whatever else - even Anvil troops. Why do I need them? and whats the best way to defeat them militarily without simply annihilating them?

56

The Maginot Line I came up with was mostly for the Karsan League. They know something nasty’s out there. They know it’s coming for them. They want protection. The Vaylen aren’t about to burn the planet clean… that would defeat the entire purpose of the invasion. The best way to take a fortress planet like this (or hotok) is by treachery… by infiltrating the planet’s military and usurping control of the deadly Anti-Hammer Planetary Defense Batteries. Second best is by storm… take the defenders by surprise, use Suppressive Fire against against the planetary defense centers, and try to flank them by finding blind spots in their fire networks. Once you’ve done that, you nuke the capital from orbit, decapitate the leadership, and move in peacefully. Of course, that probably won’t work, so you’ll be forced to withdraw and [b]take cover[b] in a position behind a handy meteor, or advance into the oceans of the planet to unload your cargo of naiven and bioengineered supersoldiers. After that, you want to avoid firefights like the plague, instead focusing on kidnapping people and winning their hearts and minds, or at least minds. When there’s a worm in the mind, the heart follows. Use your new human troops to wage a guerrilla war on the humans… don’t engage them, otherwise their PDBs will slaughter your hordes with direct fire. Eventually, the fortresses will run out of supplies and become demoralized, a factor directly linked to the fact that while they are waiting for targets to appear, you are infesting the minds of their wives and children. They’ll be in no condition to resist a duel of wits with you, and will surrender their forts or commit suicide. That’s how I would conduct an invasion against a planet with a Maginot Line or Hotok style defensive system.

And you ask if we’re still playing BE. REALLY! =)

57

I’m so happy. Great discussion. Johnstone’s (John’s?) post about setting objectives was brilliant, and right on the money. Sydney, I’d like to add another option to your list:

1.3 (Colonization): This is straight out of Machiavelli, who was living in a world with similar realities to the IE. He reminded his prince that the Greeks and Romans had colonized, as quickly as possible, the areas they invaded. They beheaded the local rulers and began shipping in Greek and Roman settlers. The best way to control a population is to have them police themselves, and colonists begin to give you that (plus deny any insurgents the ability to hide in a 100% friendly population).

Of course, in fights between neighboring Barons, whose people share the same cultural traditions, colonization isn’t necessary since the peasantry could care less which flavor of local tyrant is ruling over them. As John says, there’s no national identity at this point, just webs of patronage.

-Chris

58

My dread lord, no doubt, already knows the answer and merely tests his servants.

Sire, the deer in your parkland exist only for you to hunt and kill. And certainly you have the skill and the means to kill them all, every last one, if you desired to do so for your sport. Yet you do not.

Why does your grace so restrain yourself? Is it out of soft compassion for the deer, or a meek aversion to violence, or a quaint respect for the deers’ “rights”? Lahk’s Blood, no! It is simple prudence. If my lord slaughters every last deer today, what shall your grace hunt tomorrow?

As with the deer, so with the people, my dread lord. The death of one, or two, or a thousand is no great matter (for such creatures do not feel pain as we do, being born to suffer and having few pleasures in this life to regret losing). But one must leave enough alive to work, and to breed the next generation of workers.

My lord Moeller sagely corrects your humble servant’s oversight about colonization. Certainly this technique has its place. It is always wise to seed a newly conquered world with a few loyal retainers – say, by giving property whose owners are deceased as land grants to loyal members of one’s victorious Anvil, estates to the Lords-Pilot and small holdings to hardy Sergeants: Such awards give their recipients a vested interest in understanding, and in holding, my lord’s new territory.

But replacing entire populations is another matter altogether, your grace. The void between the stars is vast, and ships are expensive. Shall we devote half our fleet to shipping peasants between planets? (Mind that we clean out the holds afterwards!). Or shall we husband the peasantry we have, and save our ships for transporting my lord’s armed retainers?

59

Just a quick point about the Freeman setting: It doesn’t really exist independently of a government. In other words, Freemen are the workers in a Commune or the laborers in the corporations that make up a Merchant League, or the peasants in a noble fief or imperial court. It’s the same with Serfs and Slaves.

As for the Volunteer Soldier: Yes, it’s a deliberately fantastic lifepath. No child soldiers here. But how many Communes – bastions of democratic freedoms and egalitarianism – do you think exist in the Iron Empires?

60

On the Freeman setting, understood, it and Servitude & Serfdom represent the working underbelly of various forms of government, not an independent kind of society in themselves. But if you restrict yourself to the lifepaths in the book, it’s possible to get, say, a Noble Fief planet where all your native settings – Nobility, Anvil, Hammer, Freeman, Servitude & Serfdom – lack any kind of “public order” lifepath except for the S&S setting’s Taskmaster, which is pretty narrow (no “Security” skill, for instance). Hence my proposal of Military Police in the Anvil setting and of the Watchman in the Freeman setting to make sure there’s always some lifepath available with the appropriate skills.

As for Communes:

If Communes are so great, why aren’t there more of them? If a civilization is characterized by intense inter-state competition – like the wartorn Iron Empires – then weak forms of governance get weeded out, and the civilization will end up dominated by the most efficient kind of government it can support. Since the Iron Empires are dominated by feudalism, not by Communes, presumably the Communes have some fatal weakness that the feudal entities don’t.
Two (complementary) alternatives off the top of my head:

  1. Communes try to maintain militaries based off universal conscription or volunteer service, drawing on the entire population. They cannot develop a trained-from-childhood warrior class – the book even explicitly states that Communard (and Merchant League) Professional Volunteer Forces “may not use the Coeptir or Lord-Pilot lifepaths” (p. 53) – which means they lack access to the most powerful armaments available: Iron, Hussars, and Hammer starcraft. What’s more, if a Commune tried to develop such a warrior elite, the Commune wouldn’t last long: Democracies have enough trouble keep professional, career soldiers from staging coups (witness the fall of the Roman Republic), and soldiers trained from childhood would be of necessity so isolated from the rest of their society that their loyalty to it would fray in a few generations. [EDIT: In other words, a Commune will either be conquered by outsiders who have Iron Trained troops, or attempt to raise Iron Trained troops of its own who will eventually subvert it from within.]
  2. Democratic government has a host of prerequisite cultural traits: a tradition of compromise, respect for the rule of law, some modest sense of civic duty and common interest. Otherwise it degenerates into mob rule or dictatorship in short order. The people of the Iron Empires may simply lack the cultural traits required to sustain a functioning democracy over the long term and on a large scale.