 Alright, gonna have to tread extra careful to make sure this one doesn't get demonetized, which means no bad language words. Hopefully the pressure doesn't build up too much. Most authors are bad at writing battles and even worse at writing wars. There, I said it. The most common fantasy war goes something like this. Dark Lord wants to take over the world because he thirsts for power. He fights all the nations of the world at once so they can pull their strength rather than trying to make any alliances or take them down one at a time. Then he has his army zerg rush foes with no regard for tactics allowing the heroes to lay a clever trap and temporarily turn the tide. But then things will turn against them, somehow, until the hero kills the Dark Lord and his old army disintegrates since there's no other generals, lieutenants, or politicians to take command. The most common science fiction war is pretty similar, only instead of killing the Dark Lord the heroes will have to capture a single important location, and maybe one of them will invent some new technology that the villains can't reverse engineer which saves the day. It should go without saying that most real wars don't work out that way. They tend to be much bigger and less dependent on individual people or even individual battles. Realistically, they're determined by things like resources, training of the army, equipment, preparation, and geography. Now, realistic doesn't always mean good. Watching someone sit in a trench for six hours before poking their head up and immediately being killed by a sniper might be a realistic portrayal of how someone would meet their end during the Battle of Verdun that wouldn't make it entertaining to watch. At the same time, when two armies just charge at each other and things turn into a bunch of one-on-one duels until somebody somehow wins, that's so far outside the realm of what we're willing to believe that it's boring. If you make something with a lot of moving parts and clever plans, then that's more attention-grabbing, more tense, and harder for the audience to predict. So let's learn how to do that. Let's start with battles then move on to wars because they're different beasts. But first, campfire. Hi Oscar, how's it going? Are you here to talk about campfire software and what a good deal it is for writers? Really? So you're telling me that the new campfire blaze is in open beta for the month of October? That it includes award processor, character sheets, timelines, locations, maps, relationships, character arcs, encyclopedia, magic, languages, items, and a research module? That you can build your own subscription and only pay for the features you need for as little as 50 cents? Or if you'd rather you can purchase them with a one-time fee and own them forever? The only thing more amazing than that is if you could collaborate in real time with other writers and there was a 30-day money-back guarantee. Wait, it has that too? Amazing! Should the people watching check out campfire blaze today? I agree. The best time is yesterday, the second best time is today. Click the link in the description to learn more. A battle is a relatively short engagement between two or more armed groups that ends when one of them is unable or unwilling to fight anymore. And that's key here. Battles are not about killing everyone on the other side, they're about rendering the other side unwilling to continue. If there was a fight between two groups of emotionalist machines, then maybe they would fight to the last with no hesitation, humans are different. We panic and run if we feel it's the best way to avoid being killed. In pre-modern times, armies would clash while in formation and chip away at each other until the men on one side panicked and ran. But which side wins isn't determined by who killed more, it's based on which side achieved their objectives. Are they trying to capture a strategic location? Push the enemy out of a region? Convince an ally to join their side? That's the important part and it has little to do with how many soldiers you kill. If you can display enough force to convince the enemy to surrender before the fighting starts, then that's still a win. There are exceptions to this. Sometimes when people thought they would be killed if they surrendered they would fight to the last, and some people are zealous enough to keep going when there's no hope of survival, but those are both rare. You mostly see that level of zeal from religious extremists or radical nationalists. A lot of writers forget about this and keep the fighting going until one side is completely wiped out. In Star Wars the spaceships fire lasers at each other until there aren't any more ships firing back at them or until the enemy base is completely captured. No one ever seems to cut their losses and surrender or run away. That goes for every major battle I've ever seen on film, even the good ones, like those in Lord of the Rings. And granted, a lot of the time this is justified by the heroes fighting orcs or shadow spawn or something that'll kill them if they give up. So it makes sense, however it takes away a dimension of the fighting, morale. Commanders have to know how to make their soldiers want to fight and give them hope that they'll survive, otherwise self-preservation kicks in and discipline dies. When discipline dies it's every man for himself and then you're dead. If you write some sort of battle, try and set things up in a way where maintaining morale is important for both sides. That gives opportunities for big inspiring speeches, big displays of power, and clever traps laid by both sides. Make one side tired or low on supplies to make things more tense. You were already putting in a cheesy speech, now you can justify it. Obviously one way to make people scared enough to run or surrender is to kill a shitload of their friends, so it's not like fighting plays no part in this. Fear is key. That's why tribal warriors used to paint themselves blue and run into battle naked. That's why Romans crucified rebellious subjects along roadsides. That's why terrorists fly planes into buildings. It's about making your enemy afraid. When they're afraid they don't think straight and they play right into your hands. When the actual fighting starts the manner of the battle is dependent on stuff like terrain and the technology used. Roman legions versus Germanic barbarians in a forest looks completely different from Mongol horse archers versus Chinese levies on a flat plane, which looks different from the Red Army capturing Berlin. If I tried to explain how every type of warfare worked I'd never finish. A few rules stand out and can be applied to just about any situation though. For starters, if the battle results in two sides breaking into large numbers of one on one duels then they have failed at being armies. At that point they're just a couple of mobs. The point of organizing and having things like chain of command is so that you can work together and protect each other. Sure, a bunch of master swordsmen hacking away at each other can look cool but if they ran up against a shield wall they would get massacred. Formations are key. There are many different types for different situations and different equipment. The point is that there's discipline involved. Discipline charges require teamwork to function properly, that's why breaking up enemy forces into smaller, easier to beat chunks has always been so important. Wrecking formations with things like terrain, archers, or booby traps often decides the winner. And this is one more way in which morale matters. If discipline fails then the army disintegrates. That holds true for old school spear armies and ones with modern hardware. In fact it's more important nowadays considering how much more ranged weapons have and how much bigger battlefields have gotten as a result. The main difference is that soldiers are no longer bunched up together, they're spread out and supported by things like artillery and armored vehicles, simply charging in on foot results in World War 1 and that kinda sucked for everyone involved. Next up, defense is always at an advantage, making it the most important thing to get right. Take the high ground and you'll be in a better position, whether you're using swords or laser guns. Put a wall between you and the other guys and they'll have to climb it while you throw rocks down at them. Defense isn't always an option but when it is, you should probably take it. Beyond defense, the most important part is mobility. If you can move faster than your opponents, you control the flow of what happens and you can hit them from multiple angles. Before modern times, and even during modern times to an extent, the people best at this were horse archers from the Eurasian steppe like the Huns, Mongols, Seljuk Turks, Cumans, etc. They rode horses with more stamina than most and could shoot a bird out of the sky while at a full gallop. So they would usually just ride around their opponents and riddle them with arrows until they broke, then close to melee to clean up. And since their level of horsemanship can't be learned except by a lifetime of experience, it was almost impossible to counter them. The only example of foot soldiers and heavy cavalry defeating horse archers in open battle I found is the battle of Dorilium during the first crusade. And even then, a lot of things had to go right for that to happen. Horses attacked a French army while it was moving and the crusaders quickly realized that if they tried to fight back normally, they'd be outmaneuvered and filled with arrows. So the knights formed a defensive circle with their shields and blocked incoming missiles for about 7 hours. Something like that required a hell of a lot of discipline. And even then, the knights were pushed back into a river before reinforcements arrived to flank the Seljuks. Horse archers are unbeatable on their own terms, but that applies to most armies of all sorts. The trick is not to fight them on their own terms, and that requires both accurate information on their capabilities and some imagination. But that ties into the last, arguably most important rule. Information is key to every encounter. It's extremely rare for anyone to have all the important information on a confrontation, limitations in communication, terrain obstructing the collection of information, and deliberate obfuscation by the enemy all prevent commanders from knowing everything they need. Even playing chess where you could only see half your opponent's pieces and once in a while your own pieces would do something you didn't tell them to, and so you had to rework your plan. Wheel of Time handled this sort of thing extremely well. Most of the time the characters we're following have no idea what's happening outside of their little slice of the fighting. All they can do is what they're ordered to. Things like trees, hills, and even buildings prevent them from seeing everything, and it's nice to read about battles that don't take place on flat empty planes. Warfighting, scouts, and locals should be gathering all the information possible so that the commanders know about possible ambush points, defenses, and choke points. During the fighting, whoever is in charge should be sending messages back and forth to the front line so everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing and plans can be adjusted. Insert that G.I. Joe quote here. For the sake of simplicity, I'm classifying sieges as a type of battle. Basically, they happen when one side holds a major defensive point such as a castle or city and the other side is unable to force their way in so they just surround them. Sieges involve a lot of waiting around for the other side to starve and trying to slowly wear down their defenses. Most of what I said about battles still applies here, there's just more emphasis on attrition. They are cool though. They have a whole host of new weapons to use like siege towers and catapults. So if you want to have a battle that lasts a long time and has plenty of push and pull while one side tries to end things as quickly as possible and the other tries to draw it out, consider making a siege instead. If you want more specific advice for this sort of thing, then one good idea to try is to search for real life battles similar to the one you're writing and use that as a template to get started. Writing a battle in a modern industrial city with modern weaponry? Look at the Battle of Stalingrad. Want to know how to break through a shield wall on higher ground? Check out the Battle of Hastings. Are your heroes trying to withstand cavalry charges with only infantry? The Battle of Tours holds your answers. If you're trying to show how a technologically inferior force can win using superior knowledge of the area, then read about the Battle of Tireswang. Note that you shouldn't copy it exactly though, since those of us who recognize it will notice. A war is, when you boil it down, a means of negotiating between states or other entities. All sides want something that the others have, whether that's resources, influence or religious endorsement, and taking it from them requires violence. It's not a simple matter of people hating each other, although that plays a part in it. Wars are generally seen as a series of battles, and just like battles they aren't about killing everyone on the other side, they're about making them give up. About making whoever is in charge feel that continuing to fight is not worth the cost. Whatever the type of government or level of technology, this holds true, and the way where you get the other side to capitulate is your strategy. When the rubber hits the road, strategy is far more important than tactics. There are tons of real-world examples of commanders who almost always won against their opponents in individual battles, yet wound up losing the overall war because they couldn't break the enemy's will to fight. Hannibal Barka, Robert E. Lee, Charles XII of Sweden, and Isaroku Yamamoto are all pretty good examples of this. For a fantasy example, look at Robb Stark during the War of Five Kings. He never lost a battle, but he had no real plan to win the war. He took no important targets that would force the enemy to surrender, and mostly just sat around waiting to beat off their attacks before he betrayed one of his most important allies and got assassinated. Plenty of military theorists will crucify me for saying this, and plenty of others will leap to my defense, but history doesn't lie. You need to be able to properly assess the strength of all sides and leverage your advantages against their weaknesses, otherwise you'll be ground down to dust. Feel free to argue that down below though. Generally speaking, wars in the past were settled with one or two big set-piece battles. There are exceptions, of course, the Second Punic War being a good example, but most old-school kingdoms and empires could only afford to field one army of any significant size. Once that was gone, it was to the negotiating table. Even if they had enough people for a new army, how could they feed it, equip it, get it where it needed to be? How could they train it to reach any level of effectiveness? Modern nation states can sustain far more damage than ancient empires and certainly more than old feudal regimes. You ever wonder how Alexander the Great could conquer 44% of the world's population with only around 32,000 men? However large their empire might have been, they needed the bulk of their people to make food and perform the other tasks that kept the economy moving. Nowadays, with the advantages of technology and efficient administration, we can take a bigger percentage of our populations out of work to go fight without making everything fall apart. And even more importantly, we can transport them and the materials for fighting to where the fighting is. Just look around wherever you are right now. How much of the stuff there was manufactured within 100 miles of you? Odds are, most of it was made in one or two locations before being loaded onto trucks, trains and ships to go all over the world. Without that sort of technology, we're limited to moving around stuff with wagons, at best. And even then, this sort of transport needs supporting technologies to work properly. Stuff like roads, railways and oil. During wartime, securing or destroying these resources is often paramount. You ever wonder why the Battle of Stalingrad was so important? Whichever side controlled the city controlled the Caucasian oil fields. The Axis forces needed oil to run their trucks and tanks, but they didn't have much in their home territory so they had to try and capture them. When they couldn't, their war effort effectively ended right then and there. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the American Navy had such great supply lines that they had entire ships that were just used to make ice cream for their soldiers. They had plenty of food so they were able to make more, just as a treat. After that, to the Japanese forces who were almost exclusively relegated to eating rice balls and whatever they could scrounge up for themselves. Before modern times, with all this wonderful stuff like trucks and refrigeration, moving armies were limited to whatever they could take from the land, peacefully or by force. When you write a war, take some time to think about things like this and how each side can take advantage by destroying or taking these things from the other side. If they have factories that make all their weapons, try to bomb them to rubble. If they advance into your territory, try to destroy all the roads so they're slogging through mud. If they're about to besiege one of your fortresses, take all the food from the surrounding area and burn whatever is left so they can't have it. If they have a choke point where all their transportation goes through, try to damage or capture it. That sort of thing is effective whatever the circumstances. That said, in more modern times, winning a war isn't about destroying enemy armies so much as destroying their ability to fight. In other words, it's about destroying their support base. While modern armies are much more efficient and better run than older ones, that efficiency is built on a complex system of supply and communication logistics. When that's disrupted, the whole thing slows down. One of the best real world examples of this is also one of the first used, General Sherman's March to Sea during the American Civil War. First he and his forces penetrated deep into territory held by the rebel confederate government, then captured the city of Atlanta, which was not only a railroad hub but an industrial center too. The army destroyed all the military infrastructure, making the city useless to the rebels, then they moved on to continue their destruction in the countryside. Railroads, factories, cotton mills, horses, surplus agriculture, and more were all taken or destroyed in a path of destruction 300 miles long and 30 miles wide. Civilians were left alone unless they resisted. The campaign was not about killing people, it was about destroying the economic base of confederate armies and instilling terror in its supporters. The government surrendered five months later. Each shit, Dixie Boys. But all of this has yet to really touch on the reasons wars start, and that's arguably the most important bit. Like I said, it occurs when one or more sides want something badly enough to kill for it. The most basic thing is resources or power. However, ideology can and often is important too. While ideology has always played a part in wars, in the past they tended to be less of a focus than, I want your stuff, give it to me. Back in the day, your average person wasn't very politically active, nor did they think they should have the right to be. Most of the time, one guy was in charge, and that was that. When power struggles broke out, it was usually about who would be in charge, not how. And depending on time period and location, the average person didn't participate in the fighting, that was left up to the ruling classes. They were the only ones who had the time and money to spend all day learning how to fight. It was only when average people became more educated and things like guns allowed them to fight on par with everyone else that wars became more about ideals. The flip side of this is that when civil wars break out, they can be along ideological lines as well as ethnic or religious ones, which results in a fractured landscape with a hundred actors all vying for supremacy, and while they can form alliances, the distrust runs deep. Look at the Russian Civil War. The common thinking is that it was the communist reds facing off against the czarist whites, but that's almost completely false. The reds were a more or less united faction, but the whites were divided into czarists, supporters of a military dictatorship, democratic socialists, liberals, and proto-fascist ultra-nationalists. That's not even counting the anarchist black army, the green peasant militias, the foreign armies supporting the whites, or the groups fighting for full independence. A big part of the reason the Bolsheviks emerged victorious is that they were united and working together while their enemies were all busy killing each other. Other factors were in place too, of course, like how they took control of most Russian industrial centers before the fighting began in earnest, but that's the biggest reason. Then look at this chart showing some of the factions fighting in the Syrian Civil War a few years ago, while keeping in mind that many of these factions are themselves coalitions of people who don't necessarily like each other. It's a mess. That's the most important thing about ideology. It always has different interpretations, and sometimes those are severe enough to lead to conflict. If you come up with a conflict motivated by it, there won't be two sides, there will be twenty. Long story short, if you want to write your heroes doing something really intelligent, don't think tactically, think strategically. Are there any faults in the enemy forces they can exploit? Are there different ethnicities or religious groups they could turn against one another? Where are the resources the enemy needs to keep fighting? Can the heroes destroy or capture them? What kind of weaknesses do enemy armies have in terms of equipment, training, experience, or leadership that they can exploit? If they can't beat the enemy outright, can they drag the fighting out until they get tired of it and cut their losses? All these questions and more can be used to shape events into something more complex and entertaining than the good guys simply fighting better than the bad guys. Hell, some of them can even bring up interesting philosophical or moral conundrums. I know a lot of this might seem complex to those unfamiliar with it, just keep in mind that this is surface level at best. There's a reason that becoming a military officer takes years of education. You don't need to create an entire logistical system, tactical doctrine, chain of command, and ethnography of belligerent nations to understand the basics of how wars work. Since you're creating everything from scratch, you're in total control. All you need is to determine the causes and outcome, then fill in the why and how to match with those. People that know their stuff will appreciate the detail, and people who don't will be more absorbed in the conflict, even if they don't understand exactly why. It's the same way that your average person enjoys the mysteries in elementary more than in Sherlock. Elementary portrays a detective who uses intelligence and reasoning to solve crimes, while Sherlock portrays a wizard who just knows who did it and how. They both reach the bottom of things, but one does it in a more satisfying way. Battles and wars work in the same manner. Intelligent victories are far more entertaining than the heroes winning by simple virtue of being heroes. It takes a little more work, but hey, you wanted to stand out. Buy Campfire. As always, thanks to all of my patrons, including the $10 Up patrons, Oppo Savilainen, Ashley Watson, B Quinn, Brother Santotis, Christopher Quinten, Mbis, Emily Miller, Evan Stagall, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Madison Lewis Bennett, Mike, NB Star, Sad Mardigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Vacuous Silas, Vaivictus, and all the other names on here, you know. You guys are great. I'd also like to thank the people who made the footage for this one, because, well, without them, would have been a pain, would have been a major pain. And all of you guys for watching, you guys are great. If you haven't already subscribed to this channel, then do that. Please, I appreciate it. It helps a lot. And also like the video, share it around, you know, all that sort of stuff. Anyways, see you next time. Bye.