• she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



JcDent
@JcDent

In games and other media, you'll never see

  1. The last ultimate battle fought by the dregs on both sides: it's largely ignored that war consumes one resource that's functionaly irreplaceable on a short timescale - manpower. It has a hard cap [demographical] and soft cap [political willingness to mobilize more].

Look at the armies present at Waterloo and the way there were raised. Then consider how by the time Berlin fell, everyone was feeling the manpower crunch, though Germans more than the others.

It's far cry from epic sci-fi, fantasy and video games necessitating the last battle be fought by the most powerful troops everyone can muster. Video games have the hardest time avoiding it since getting ridiculously powerful (or just ridiculously powerful guns) is part of the premise and most RPG systems make early enemies non-entities while you're but halfway up the ladder.

  1. The difference between elite and regular troops being that elites die standing: I feel like pre-WWI era gunpowder combat granted the least individual survivability via individual skill: your melee provess isn't important 99% of the time, your ability to make the best use of cover is irrelevant in a firing line.

However, your ability to stand and fight while your friends are getting shot and gored by cannonballs wards you from one of the major killers of pre-WWI battlefields: the rout.

Cavalry loves nothing more than seeing infantry turn around and run. Chopping down fleeing men is their favorite pastime. Conversely, a musket with a bayonet is a short pike, and an infantry square - woefully vulnerable to any fire - is a nightmare for horse.

However, your survival depends on the whole unit staying in the fight. This doesn't give you more armor or HP to withstand getting shot while you close in, but, uuuh, at least you die fighting.


Of course, when dealing with post WWI fights, the media ignores that elite units aren't more killy because they're all expert rifleman immune to bullets, but I'm getting tired of writing this...


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