>>6117331Caedo finds himself and a pair of guards wandering the perimeter. Pondering. There's a lot books written on the nature of warfare. Most officers of most grand armies are meant to have studied that kind of thing. It makes sure they're all playing by the same rules and have some common understanding. War is too grand a play to get wrong.
Commander Isenfrii keeps a library of articles on the nature of dispute resolution. Some of the bannerleaders have loaned books from there, studied, asked questions. There's book clubs. It helps while away the long evenings. But Commander Isenfrii takes a somewhat different approach to the question of combat than the authors of the books he likes to cite. They might call it glory or cunning. Commander Isenfrii calls them his catalogue of common mistakes. He doesn't read the the histories to find the brilliant gems that biographers marvel that Crassus or Aranski or the Seven Princes pulled, no, Isenfrii points to it again and again and again - that line on the page that separates the daring from the dead. " Would have worked but ", " A brilliant plan but ", " Which almost succeeded but " and other such phrases haunt him. He doesn't talk much about his career in the national service of Vanadia, or what he did for the Crown-turned-Republic. But he hammers it home: Brilliant tactics gets you in the books, but the trouble is the line between brilliant and a blunder is the ten thousand tiny, inscrutable things you've done for the last six months and *in the thick of it, you can't tell*. A sword or the snap of a flintlock or the accidental flight of a wind-tossed arrow will turn all your genius to one more glorious last stand that future historians will catalogue, analys and finally describe with the words " Might have worked but. . .". All the biographies of great generals is a testament to their enormous skill as much as it is a catalogue of all the mistakes their enemies made that allowed them to be great in the first place. It's all chaos, out there, Isenfrii intones again and again. Your enemy isn't the enemy. Your enemy is the natural perversity of the universe, and if you can outflank that, the battle is just a formality.
Amateurs may study strategy and professional logistics, but the soldier-scientist studies the only thing that matters: The certainty of chance.
>Small Unit Tactics Trick:!Blundering to Glory: Free Action, once/turn. Allied Banner gets 3 AP to spend immediately, ignoring all engagements *but* suffer a equipment or skill critical failure*
>You can define what they spend it on, as an order - roll Tactics as always to guide them>Equipment mishaps are dropped gear, lost tools, missing things. Skill mishaps are misses that hit an ally, dropped weapons, bungles of that nature.>>6118524It's not that the Blue Rats are *good*, Wicklighter realizes, the fourth time he has to pick up his own weapon after it slips out of his sweat-stained grasp . . .
