Hokay...
i actually agree with Shark's conclusions here, but he did get some details a bit wrong, and i feel the need to correct them just to make sure we're all the same page.
Shark_Force wrote:in addition to the problems colonel tetsuya has pointed out, i would add that palladium has a serious problem with grasping the meaningfulness of large numbers.
i mean, i think at some point they mention the population of one of the demonic dimensions as being a few million.
Higher than that - but not a lot. I did the totals the first time this came up. Population by the books is ~60 million demons in Hades. Less than that for Deevils in Dyval.
and this sort of thing shows up repeatedly. they don't seem to be able to grasp what happens when you have a couple hundred dudes with laser rifles shooting at an individual creature with 3,000 MDC. it's basically like "well, 3,000 is a lot of MDC, that's practically invincible" and then you have 3/4 of those 200 people hitting with 4d6 laser rifles for 600d6 damage *per action* and that 3,000 MDC creature has been vapourized before anyone can even fire a third shot.
Exactly this. Or even just... OK, thats a big-ass Magot with 4000 MDC. Great. A platoon of CS Linebackers can literally just drive in circles around it and shoot it to death with impunity. Its got 5 heavy-hitting guns each with its own dedicated gunner, a dedicated driver, a coms guy who can man the (Medium Range AND Mini) missiles, and a "decent" rear-firing laser turret also with its own gunner. It can drive around at 150mph, stop on a dime, and skirt sideways and back up, since its a hover tank.
blat.
they'll announce something like the demons (or dyvals?) have half a million troops (because that's a big number of demons, right?) and fail to acknowledge that they've handed the CS a standing expeditionary force of 3 million soldiers (again, that's just their offensive army; that 3 million soldiers plus auxiliaries was what they had to throw at tolkeen and free quebec, at the end of the war, on top of the defensive armies they presumably still had, plus the ISS). plus probable wounded veterans, many of whom may not be ideal soldiers but you could probably shove them into a jeep, hand them a rifle, and their injuries would become a lot less relevant.
Not to mention that under the new programs, ALL of those walking wounded retirees could become Cyborgs if they wanted to. Theres even an option for die-hards to be continually put into new Cyborg bodies if theirs is trashed but their vital bits are recovered (from HoH).
not to mention that i'm pretty sure they've gone over the total population of both dimensions, and then some, long before this point... remember, they are supposed to be invading the three galaxies. the number of demons that would need to get involved in the three galaxies to even register as a blip on anyone's radar would probably be a larger number than we have a name for. like "we're going to need scientific notation to write this number down in a way that anyone can even begin to contextualize it, because we don't have names for numbers that large".
Here's your first inacuracy... but if you haven't read all the Three Galaxies books, its understandable..
One of the books (Fleets of the Three Galaxies, maybe? Not 100% sure; ive been going back and forth through several of the TG books lately, so i may have this mixed up. If i need to i can go dig for it later. Might also have been Dimensional Outbreak) actually gives a pretty detailed description of why they DONT need incalculable numbers to be dangerous in the Three Galaxies.
The gist is that most "non-major" worlds (I.E. the big worlds like the "Earths" of the Human portion of the COnsortium, Motherhome, etc) that are not hugely built up, dont tend to have bajillions of people. Since there is a lot of space, they tend to spread out instead, so while there are trillions of sentient's in the TG, a lot of the "bread and butter" worlds have populations more like 30-100 million people. These planets by and large have only small local defense forces (a few destroyers, maybe a cruises, and a lot of planet-based fighters), and help, even if called for immediately, is days or weeks away. These planets also dont keep huge standing armies - no more than 5% of their population AT MOST, and as the population gets larger, the percentage goes down (since the worlds of the TGE, UWW, and CCW are not at war with anyone, they pretty much only keep up enough forces to stand off pirates and other menaces).
When the Demon Fleet sweeps in with a half a dozen Demon Stars, a few Bone Maw Carriers, and a few dozen Demon Fury Frigates, they blow the planetary defenses out, and start landing troops. Unlike Rifts Earth, the Demons (and Deevils) in the Three Galaxies are flush with millions of demonic cultists/converts/conscripts.
They blow out any local defenses and set up the altars.
Convert/serve or die. Either way you're useful to the Demons or Deevils. You either add to their fodder army, or you power their ships/weapons. Works for them.
By the time help gets there (even if it is close, only a few days away), the planet is decimated or worse, and the Demon Fleet pulls up stakes and moves on.
And smaller "colony" sized planets (like about 2/3 of the planets settled in the Thundercloud)? Screwed. A lot off them dont even have worthwhile space defenses, and less than 10,000 defenders. THose planets will be lifeless husks by the time help arrives.
Even the three big powers only have a tiny portion of their populations under arms. The TGE and CCW fleets both number roughly 100,000 ships, but the vast majority of those are Frigates, Destroyers, and Light Cruisers. And they have to be spread out to cover thousands of inhabited planets. The CCW fleet, for instance, is comprised almost entirely of lighter combatants - there are only a few thousand Protector-class BBs, less than 100 Packmasters, and only ~12 of the Emancipation-class Dreadnaught. Similarly, the TGE fleet has only about 10,000 of the Executioner-class BBs, and only 21 Doombringer Dreadnaughts (2 having been destroyed fighting the one captured by the rebels at New Hope). The UWW fleet is SUBSTANTIALLY smaller, but their planetary defenses are quite a bit stronger (every planet that can support one has at least one of those massive space-nexus-point/lagrange-point powered super-stations, which can open rifts and summon Fleets from across the galaxy nearly instantly, and have massive weapons and scores of defense satellites) And they lost about 1/4 of their fleet to the Deevils at the start of the Outbreak. But the Demons dont like fighting magic-using enemies so they are by and large leaving the UWW for later.
Do the demons have any way of (and by demons here im generalizing either side) actually successfully attacking heavily-defended core worlds? Nope. Not right now at least. But they aren't trying to win this particular war in a day, as it were. Halthag's plan has always been a long game - gobbling up smaller planets while the Demon Planets pump out more and more ships, converting more mortals, picking away at the periphery until they CAN afford to pin down the CCW or TGE fleet(s) against a target that they MUST defend, and then wipe them out. It might take centuries (its noted in Fleets that the first time there was a Demon Star invasion - hundreds of years before the Outbreak - There were only 200 Demon Stars and it took several centuries for the nations of the Three Galaxies to hunt them down and put them out of comission)
Honestly, i wandered around on this one, so ill to a tildeer here:
Dimensional Outbreak (and Armageddon Unlimited, which has the Demons/Deevils very much in the background, with maybe a few hundred of each on the planet at most) is the only part of the Minion War series that works as it is presented. They have been planning it for centuries, have the support of an IMMENSELY powerful Demon Planet (Kormal, and, possibly, THREE of them if the two "offspring" eat enough planets to become full-sized), and have millions of mortal converts/conscripts/cultists to use as fodder.
Its the best of the lot, by a mile. Halthag's plan could actually
work.
likewise, they just don't seem to grasp just how big the difference is between, say... 2d4x10+10 flying speed, and 400 miles per hour flying speed. the CS could literally fly in, kill a bunch of demons, spend a couple hours flying away, camp for the night, do their morning exercise, have breakfast, take a shower, get back in their suits, and still not have to worry that even the fastest of those demons could ever hope to reach them (not to mention the fact that having that much variation in speed means that the fastest ones will only be outrunning their numbers advantage, if they even had one in the first place... which they generally don't).
Oh god, so much this. This is what i meant when i was deriding Kevin's (im paraphrasing and exagerating here, a bit) "The skies are a huge battle with Juicers on flying wings zooming around fighting demons and SAMs and jets getting mixed up with hoards of demon flyers" bit in Heroes of Humanity.
Like.. wut? Those demons are slowpokes, have next to no MDC, and no worthwhile ranged weapons, at least, not against the SAMs (one of the flying Demons does have a sonic screech that hits out to 2000ft... but all those SAMs? Railguns. To 4000ft.) The SAM's could literally fly in loiter-circles and just make firing passes at the Demons until they got tired or ran out of ammo and had to go resupply. The Demons could quite literally never close with them.
Giant. Turkey. Shoot.
or the fact that the CS military had 3.2 millions old-style SAMAS suits, which presumably means an even *larger* number of old-style body armour and man-portable weapons, and a bunch of old-style vehicles too.
or the fact that the CS is canonically the main food source for all of north america, and is also shipping food out to europe to feed them as well (seriously, the CS cannot recruit more soldiers than they can feed, because someone decided that the CS is already feeding every person they could possibly hope to recruit and a whole bunch of people that they aren't going to be recruiting).
Your second major ... mistake? The CS i not main food source for anyone other than the CS. I went through this in a thread some time back (maybe afterEaster dinner ill try to track down a link to that thread). Thoroughly debunked.
Free Quebec is the one sending food to Germany, actually, not the CS, and all of the other nation-states in NA have plenty of farmland to feed themselves.
the minion war could be a plausible threat, but the numbers we've been shown make it pretty laughable. like, the 40,000 strong army sent to force the gargoyle empire to join them... is that a joke? no seriously, it only makes sense if we're supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of such a tiny number of demons forcing the gargoyle empire, which has withstood total war against one of the most technologically advanced, stable, powerful, military-focused nations on the entire planet for decades.
Yeah.. that one made me laugh. Like.. Emperor Zerstran (Sp?) has said no-way, no-how are his people going back to being sub-demon nobodies under Hades or Dyval. They like their freedom and their Empire very much, thank you. And 40,000 demons (who are by and large LAUGHABLY weaker than even a Gurgoyle) against the Gargoyle Empire?
Thatll be an extremely *brief* fight. Oh, and these Gargoyles..? They use tech. Extremely. Brief.
now, yes, you could totally ignore all the official stuff, and make a bunch of changes so that the minion war would actually be meaningful in any way.
also, considering significant numbers of the soldiers on both sides can only be permanently killed in their homes, the idea that either demonic army would think sending soldiers to any other place in the megaverse would be meaningful is really weird.
This is covered, actually. I THINK it is in MiFlames, but there is a thing about the fact that if they seize control of a planet long enough, they can essentially make it into another Hell Dimension. They want to capture Rifts Earth precisely BECAUSE they can turn it into another Hell Dimension - this one with unfettered access to the Megaverse.
Similar with the Three Galaxies, they see it as a way to make dozens/hundreds/thousands of Hell Worlds and capture Phase World, adding ANOTHER Megaverse-spanning Hell-world to their collection.
it's like they decided to randomly send unfathomably large numbers off to mildly annoy their hated foes in a place where neither side ultimately particularly cares about in the slightest. they really should be invading each other; when they attack, they would have a huge advantage on the offense in that they're causing permanent death while their enemies are only causing slight inconvenience.
Well, that WAS the plan, actually. The Demons WERE planning on straight-up invading Dyval, but someone screwed up and released the Worms of Taut early, tipping their hand.
palladium does some stuff really well. large-scale warfare is not one of those things.
Ahh, yeah. Understatement of the year.
And not just large-scale warfare... large scale anything. Population numbers in most of their settings make little to no sense (Three Galaxies is better than most, with a decent reason of why the people are so spread out, but its still absurdly low at only ~20-22 Trillion carbon-based sentient's in all three Galaxies, IMO.), army sizes make no sense...
Hell, entire portions of the setting dont even make sense. (one of my favorite weirdnesses - the Colorado Baronies are actually only a few hundred miles from Chi-town. Karl Prosek could literally bomb them off the map with missiles launched from Chi-town at a whim. But somehow, they exist.)
Im loving the Foes list; it's the only thing keeping me from tearing out my eyes from the dumb.