Warfare

Armies

There are no standing armies in the Tower Lands. Armies are assembled as gatherings of feudal retinues; each lord calls on their knights, who call on their friends among the peasantry and their slaves to accompany them, all with whatever wargear and provisions they can afford to bring from their homes. Each liege is responsible for paying their own retinue, usually from shares of whatever pay they receive from their own liege.

By longstanding tradition inherited from Old Kingdom law, every house in the realm is required to maintain, at minimum, a spear, helmet, and shield, and to provide one able conscript at their liege's request. While villagers still train with regular formation drills just in case, in practice, most lords will only conscript from among their serf farmers as a last resort, since that means fewer people to work the land and pay taxes. Most soldiers are drawn from the freefolk, with well-off town houses maintaining sometimes significant wargear and training their youth for service. These semi-professional fighters form the backbone of most Halish armies.

A single knight with their retinue is called a lance; this is the smallest level of organization in a Halish army. A lance is a logistical grouping, not a tactical one, used mainly when describing the overall strength of an army. The traditional lance is composed of a mounted knight in heavy armor; a second cavalier in medium or light armor, who might be lowborn or a highborn squire learning from a veteran; three or four foot soldiers with medium or light armor; two lightly armored archers; and at least two slave porters, one each for the knight and the second cavalier. In addition to their warhorse, the knight traditionally brings a riding horse and a pack horse, and the second cavalier brings another pack horse. Today, with the collapse of the Old Kingdom's military economy, most knights would be lucky to field such a retinue. More realistically, most modern lances include an armored knight with a warhorse and a pack horse, three or four lightly armored foot soldiers, an archer, and perhaps two slaves or other support personnel.

A group of lances under a single lord is called a company, with the lord taking the role of captain. This is the main tactical grouping of a Halish army. When arranging for battle, a captain usually won't deploy their lances as lances, but will instead break up each type of soldier--light cavalry, heavy cavalry, archers, and infantry--into one or more tactical groups called cohorts, each led by a sergeant. Traditional wisdom is that you need one sergeant for every cohort of ten warriors. The Tower Lands are hilly enough that cavalry battle is often impractical, so knights train for mounted and foot combat equally and may deploy in either role; when fighting as infantry, they'll often serve as sergeants of infantry cohorts.

Armies larger than a handful of companies--that is, a few hundred to a couple thousand fighters all told--are rare in the present age. Where a lord calls up their knights in force, leaving few to guard their lands, they might have an impractically large company; in that case, they'll often break up their force into several companies captained by their favored retainers. If such a group of companies is part of a larger army, rather than an army in its own right, it's called a battalion.

Quite often, an army won't be drawn up entirely by a single lord from their own vassals; lords going to war love to call on their friends to join in and bring their forces along. When this happens, if there isn't a clear hierarchy among the lords joining in, supreme command of the army usually falls to the one whose idea the campaign was. However, fights between lords over who's in charge are one of the most common ways Halish armies dissolve.

Logistics and Strategy

Every army lives and dies by its baggage train. Camp servants, porters, and quartermasters--most of whom are usually slaves--are a vital element of any force, and prime targets for attack.

When an army is on campaign, soldiers with scouting and wilderness experience will be deployed as vanguards, ranging ahead of the main force to harass the enemy, targeting their supplies, their stragglers, and their morale. This often involves burning villages and killing farmers who the enemy would rely on to supply them. One of the most important pieces of strategic wisdom every Halish lord learns is, "The best place for any army is on someone else's land." This way, when the enemy--or, indeed, your own soldiers--go around pillaging local villages for supplies, it'll be someone else's serfs they're doing it to.

When an enemy shows up on your doorstep with an army, they're traditionally supposed to come right to you, call you out of your citadel, call you a bitch, and challenge you to come out and fight them. If you refuse, they might park their army down at your doorstep and dig in for a siege, at which point you'd better hope you either have enough supplies to outlast them or have some way of getting more that they don't know about. Alternatively, or at the same time if they can spare the forces, they might go riding around your lands burning down your farms and killing your serfs, hoping to force you to come out and deal with them before they leave your fief a barren wreck that won't make you any money. Only if they're very confident and have the right siege equipment will they try to attack your walls; defense is always much easier than offense.

Skipping the "riding up to your doorstep and calling you a bitch" step and going straight to the "riding around murdering your serfs" step is considered a dick move, but it happens fairly often.

Tactics

The most important thing to understand about Halish warriors is that they are fucking stupid. The Halish don't go in much for things like "strategy" and "planning" and "force organization"; they find all that stuff super lame. Battles are, first and foremost, opportunities for knights to demonstrate their personal prowess, shed lots of blood, and win glory. Concerns like strategic objectives and state interests are distant second priorities, if they think about them at all.

Usually, when two Halish armies meet in the field, the battle will start out with infantry forming opposing shield walls and marching toward one another, with archers taking shots from the flanks and light cavalry, if present, doing ride-by harassment with javelins. Meanwhile, the heavy cavalry, if present, will gather in their cohorts and get ready to charge the enemy's infantry line. If both armies have heavy cavalry, the two will usually meet in the middle of the field, at which point things will dissolve into a bloody, chaotic melee with zero organization or tactics beyond every knight fighting to unhorse as many opponents as possible. This is most knights' favorite part of a battle.

Whichever side wins the melee will rally and continue to charge the enemy infantry, which will often rout at about this point. Whether they hold their ground or not, the cavalry will slam into their lines and cut down as many as possible, killing anyone who tries to break and flee. This is most knights' second-favorite part of a battle. Those who get away will be mopped up by the light cavalry and archers.

If the cavalry melee has left the winner weakened enough that the enemy's infantry can hold off their charge, they'll break off and circle back behind their infantry line to rest. Knights consider it super lame to have to do this. The infantry lines will then finally meet, at which point the shield walls will push against each other and try to break open gaps to cause a rout. Victory at this point is determined by the morale and mutual trust of each infantry force; whoever breaks first loses. Those who flee can be cleaned up by the winning infantry, archers, and light cavalry.

If the terrain doesn't permit cavalry battle, things will basically proceed with those steps skipped. However, most knights find fighting in infantry formations turbo-mega lame, so they'll often rush off ahead to meet the enemy's knights ahead of the line and fight things out in duels. This is when they get to bust out all the fancy martial arts they spend so much time practicing.

No knight with any semblance of honor will ever, ever accept being deployed anywhere but the very front of an army during battle. This insistence has lost countless battles that could have been won. Knights would much rather lose gloriously than win by being lame.

You might be asking, are Halish knights all suicidal? Sort of, but not as much as it might sound. Keep in mind that with their heavy armor, and the prevalent tradition of capturing enemy knights to ransom rather than just executing them, knights are relatively unlikely to actually die in battle (at least compared to common soldiers, and no one cares about them). Nevertheless, being fearless and accepting of death is a huge virtue in Halish warrior culture. A knight whose liege dies in battle is expected to die with them, by their own sword if necessary; failing to do so is a grave dishonor, worthy of becoming an outcast.

Of course, that's all well and good in theory, but in practice, many knights who lose their lieges do choose not to go through with the whole honor-suicide part. Those knights tend to gather up their surviving followers and join mercenary companies of others like them, who end up forming an unsavory but vital resource for lords needing to strengthen their forces. Or they become bandits.