Books are mid, but the setting can be useful for a unique challenge.
You have 3 months of preparation time to equip a single division's worth of people in order to invade Alagaesia during the later portions of the reign of Galbatorix, circa Book 1 of the series.
Area of settlement of the Empire, Surda, the Dwarves of the Boer Mountains, the Elves of Du Welden Varden, and the scattered Urgal and desert tribes equates to roughly twice the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Significant supernatural entities come in the form of:
>Galbatorix: King of the Empire, he is a centuries old sorcerer that has extensive knowledge of the terrain of his kingdom and a great deal of wards and power sources.
>Shuriken: The dragon of Galbatorix, it is sufficient in scale to be equated to a significantly large hill. Personality places them as a barely contained berserker.
>Spirits: Ordinarily harmless, if summoned into a vessel they become a creature known as a Shade. Destruction of the heart is the only way to kill a Shade, they will just respawn otherwise.
>"Burrowing Worms": Strange creatures found on Vroengarg. Carnivorous, they jump onto targets and split into multiple copies of themselves. Galbatorix has taken some of these for torture purposes. You have a secondary objective of exterminating these creatures entirely as they cannot be permitted to live.
>Ra'zac: Natural predators of humans. Superhuman capabilities and are undetectable by magical means. Dras Leona plays host to a religion that worships them.
>Urgals: Big orcs. Currently enslaved at scale by an Empire aligned Shade.
>Elves: All elves are centuries old wizards that are inimately familiar and protective of their forest.
>Dwarves: The entire south mountain range is filled with their tunnels, to the point they aren't fully certain of the full extent that exist.
The tech level is loosely medieval, but there does exist magic of major concern:
>"13 Words of Death": Spells that target major arteries, the strings that hold your heart together, the brain stem, and so on. Wards can protect from them easily, but unwarded targets can be taken down by the hundreds.
>Mind Reading: Standard skill of wizards, breaking into a mind allows for every scrap of information of someone's entire life to be extracted. This is relevant because...
>True Name: Gaining sufficient knowledge of a person provides you this. Wizards gain total control of the body of someone's true name and can force them into binding oaths against their will. Only out is to change your fundamental self. Galbatorix is researching the True Name of Magic itself and is close to completion.
>"Be Not": Someone turns every part of their body into energy, effectively becoming a nuke.
>Wards: Wizards are able to provide energy shields against projectiles. This can be applied to others, level of charge is typically equal to Wizard's stamina. Gems can be charged for additional energy. Dragons have an organ that is a self-charging gem (Glabatorix has hundreds of these). Specialized wards have previously resisted a "Be Not" on Vroengarg.
>Scrying: You can look in on anyone and know where they are if you have seen them and been there before. Missing one of these has holes of info.
>Sight Borrowing: A wizard can borrow animal's lines of sight to look through them, from birds to ants.
So, how do you outfit your division and what is your strategy, anons? Equipment must remain conventional to our world, you will not be resupplied after being sent, and you can have at most 3 ships.
Just magdump with enough MGs until the fatigue of their protective wards kill them. A 5.56 round has some 15x the energy as a longbow arrow.
So I reckon all the non-major magicians would die from their own wards rather quickly. Galbatorix and Murtough are frankly not worth planning around as they are written with a power scale entirely separate from the average combatants.
Catch is, how many Wizards can you magdump before you run out of ammo? Every bullet fired is one that is not going to be resupplied without difficulty. This is especially a concern when the Elves are a target to be conquered and they're a species of wizards.
>Just magdump with enough MGs until the fatigue of their protective wards kill them. A 5.56 round has some 15x the energy as a longbow arrow.
Magic doesn't appear to be weighted directly on energy, I think it's weighted more towards momentum? The protagonist actually exploits this by firing tiny rocks at high speed to hunt at one point when he's still shitty at magic and couldn't throw a bigger rock.
I suppose that means he could fire a grain of sand fast enough to blow someone up but they never think of that, they go straight to fricking with atoms and turning people into nukes.
Unless they have wards all of your mg guys just drop dead a few seconds later. Also, OP forgot another important aspect of how magic works - spellcasters can drain energy from living things around them, including, you guessed it, unwarded enemies.
>spellcasters can drain energy from living things around them, including, you guessed it, unwarded enemies
This isn't common knowledge, luckily. You won't have to worry about this.
no fricking clue about this book
pretty sure you need way more than a division to invade and control an area this large with supernaturals and dragons.
Probably need a good navy, airforce, and armed forces.
initial air strike on surda cities, destroying castles to kill nobility and general, hope to kill galbatorix and shuriken with fighters
Amphibious assault through the south on Surda cities and all islands. Use islands as ports for my navy and as resupply lanes, also control sea trade.
Artillery to shoot down city walls, armor + infantry to capture the cities. Proclaim annexation of the empire, roll through the flatlands north and capture everything there. Leave mountains and deserts alone, station men and armor at key points
have control of the sea trade and the prime fertile land, demand fealty from neighbours if they dont want to starve to death. Start using superior food and population to retrain a massive militia. Prepare invasion of spine. Use navy to attack on both sides, capture spine.
Now fully control all sea trade and large food production. Nothing else is worth it. Im not losing men to the desert or knife ears in the forest.
Make alliance with dwarves over shared hatred of knife ears
demand fealty from the elves
start napalming the trees inch by inch from fortified positions if they refuse. lets see how well your magic missile deal with rifle fire behind earthen fortifications
The Division is your initial forces. You are able to recruit additional forces as auxiliaries from the general populace as part of your strategy, though may want some form of screening process.
Conquest.
>Conquest
Conquest can have many definitions what are my specific objectives? If I back a native faction in a civil war is that conquest?
>Books are mid
The books were dogshit, the author was published through his parent's company, lied about the age he wrote it at, and had the gall to compare himself to Tolkien.
>the gall to compare himself to Tolkien
Lmao
Tell me more anon, I'm curious
That one's not much of a story, he just at one point said something moronic along the lines of "I like to think that my writing is between (someone I don't remember) and Tolkien when it's at it's best"
Eragon is just him flitting from famous setting to setting going "hey I can steal that" and copy pasting shit into his book wholesale while denying it had any influence. the first half of the entire series' plot is just a gayer more poorly paced Star Wars, and the second half meanders incoherently and falls off a cliff. His magic is just the magic system from Earthsea, half his names are Tolkien, and everything else is from sword of truth or wheel of time.
His most original idea was his vegan atheist vulcan super-elves, and that was the gayest shit I'd ever read in my life. Eragon spends half a book meditating on his own butthole in a hippie commune and writing poetry before literally cooming so hard seeing that elf b***h who hates him he accidentally fricks up his dumb magic photography class and shits out porn of her.
First book and eragorn's cousin escape were fun to read despite him shamelessly copying other stories
Don't forget that only the first 4-5 chapters were written by him. You could tell by reading them. I read better fanfiction than that crap. The prose drastically changes close to the end of the first half of the first book, becomes more polished, although the plot is still awful and filled with cheap cliches. Everything past it was ghost written, i'm sure of it
Eh, the kid was 16. I'm not going to pretend the books were good but it's understandable at the age he wrote them
I liked them when I was a kid, disliked them when I reread them as an adult
He was NOT SIXTEEN that's a FRICKING MYTH. He "started writing them at 16" but his final draft was YEARS LATER.
Frick I can't believe I'm actually having to deal with these lies like two decades later Jesus Christ.
What exactly do you mean by invade? Just "cause as many casualties as possible" or topple the government?
Here are some limitations on magic that I think are important.
>1. magic must be spoken
Well, not technically true, because there are non-speaking magical sounds that can do various things, but unless you're fighting elves that's not a problem. The point is that magic is slower than bullets.
>2. human magicians are rare, and primarily conserved for countering other human magicians
I can't remember which siege it was when Rorden's mage friend turned an enemy magician inside out, but it was mentioned several times that he conserved his strength specifically to protect their coventional elements from enemy spellcasters.
>3. magic works within LoS
Not necessarily your LoS, with scrying and sight borrowing or such, but without a true name a magician has to be able to physically see or otherwise since his target in order to define it as the subject for their spell.
With all this in mind, I am going to suggest an armored division. Magicians are their only form of AT and you out range them considerably. There's no need to stock AP rounds because nobody's armor is thick enough to contest you and KE doesn't seem to translate to magic 1:1, just maximize the amount of frag and concussion the enemy has to deal with at all times. Let the combat aviation brigade deal with Galbatorix and Shuriken. Fuel permitting, something like
>land NW of Feinster, assault the port city and Belatona
>if Galbatorix shows up, great, better to fight him somewhere on the planes between the two cities than in a city itself
>either way, next move is upriver to Dras-Leona and Helgrind so you can use the river to ferry your logistics
>besides, we need to do spook ops in Helgrind anyway
>then it's a dash across the planes for Uru'baen proper, which will force a confrontation with Galbatorix if he hasn't made a showing yet
>Not necessarily your LoS, with scrying and sight borrowing or such
Magic is distance based. It's stated multiple times the farther something is the more energy it takes to cast magic on it.
Yes, but AFAIK never see them target a point on a coordinate grid or something like that. They speak it as a language, with a subject and an object, and without a true name to work with they've got to actually perceive the thing they want the spell to act on.
I'm STILL fricking mad that the MC didn't tap the elf.
Wasn't the author too Mormon to write an impure relationship or some shit
>Mormon
Considering some of the shit in the books, he's more of an edgy atheist
I'm probably thinking of Brando sando
Given that they will both live for functionally as long as they feel like it I like to headcanon that arya fricks off from alagaysia eventually as well.
The knife ears are pricks as usual, arming the dorfs is a good call. The younger dragons could be pinned, stunned, or otherwise knocked down by air defense to be shelled the big fricker would need more effort but we could always do the "punch holes in wings until it's grounded" technique
>equip a single division's worth of people
HAMMER TIME.
Kill all the fricking elfs, total knife ear annihilation, extreme prejudice towards dandrophiles.
You would have to just avoid Galbatorix entirely since the ultimate conclusion at the end of the books is that he can't be killed traditionally. He has an almost infinite supply of energy for his wards in his capital, you can't kill him. Everything else is a pushover though, basic b***h wizards can barely stop arrows in flight for extended periods. The only real problem is if they start summoning demons, which rival elves in magical ability.
I import Anasurimbör Kellhus or another Dûnyain from the GOAT fantasy series and just let him brainwash all the other factions until he inevitably raped whoever is in charge to assert dominance, then pop out of the shadows and laugh.