Whoops. Sorry about the delay re: strategychat. I'm on a train at the moment and will probably fall asleep shortly, so I'll pick the rest of this up tomorrow morning. For now, it will suffice to say that when the war started, Thalmarkin was low on gold, recruits, and lacking sound infrastructure. So it was decided pretty much immediately after Enzo took over that we'd systematically deprive Melhed of food, gold, and stability everywhere we could. Having more nobles but crappier RCs than your enemy works fine for a looting war. The longer the war went on, the stronger Thal got. If you continually loot someone and they don't devise a strategy to stop it or repair the damage quickly, the stress compounds and the gap between the two realms keeps growing. It's a tough hole to dig out from.
We used Qual and Lastfell—and their militia garrisons—as third and forth armies, respectively. Having equal mobile CS early on meant that 4K militia behind walls in either of those regions freed up 4K extra mobile CS to... You guessed it: loot. It also meant we could spare an extra 4K CS to join the 3-4K CS in the monster hunting army when Melhed started raiding in the north.
In general, I tried to ensure that there was always an active rotation of refitters and folks at the front. I loathe the battle-refit-battle-refit cycle that everyone falls into. It's hard not to, but if you can avoid it, you put your enemy under constant pressure. Mistakes get amplified. More opportunities can be exploited.
Thank the devil you showed up before this thread got locked.
I'm crashing hard too, so I'll keep my response brief. Your constant pressure strategy worked wonders, and the uniform banners were definitely an interesting trick.
To be honest, the Melhed that talked a lot about war was not actually so good at war itself. The few people at the top who were banging the war drums dropped off their activity right after the war-dec. Our combined armies had a really rough time trying to repulse the constant attacks. Thal's greater number of nobles definitely helped with this. When we started out the war, we had the Blood Wolves and the Inner Guard (a defense/rogue-killing) army. The Inner Guard was basically me and a bunch of quasi-active courtiers and priests. It got disbanded soon enough and a new army called Dragonstrike was founded.
Maya was made marshal of Dragonstrike, and we sailed off and plundered the Thal north in an attempt to reciprocate the looting stratagem. It worked a little bit and gave us a nice thing to cheer about at home, but we were too spread out. At least we did some good damage to Sandefur. The Thal counterattack on Sandefur was pretty badass with Marc de Coivos and Maya holding off superior numbers. That was one of my favorite battles in my time in BM. Had an Alamo feel to it, amplified by Jaeger Guile's magic attack on Maya (and Marc too I think). This attack on Sandefur was known in Melite royal circles as 'Maya's honeymoon' since it was her first act as Queen, following her marriage to Yeux. He turned to focus on priest stuff after that.
At this point we started going through generals like crazy; government ministers and marshals were losing spirit. Levon Arrakis served for a bit then quit and paused. For some reason the idea to fold Dragonstrike into the Blood Wolves won out in the realm, and we basically only had one army then, which is probably why in the late game we failed horribly in facing the constant Thal attacks.
One thing I learned from this war was that despite Maya's best intentions to save Melhed, a lot of Melites didn't give her any respect for what was perceived as her selfish power-grab. To her, it was a selfless sacrifice - she wanted to see the war through, where no one else seemed to want to have that responsibility. She expected that if she lost, she'd be exiled and lose everything. Now, after the peace and rebellion, she sees every day of her reign as a blessing.
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