Thank you for another great video! This made me think about warfare in my underwater world. The population centres of the merfolk are close to the surface of the ocean which means the continental shelf, the shores of islands and the top of the underwater mountains close to the surface are populated, leaving vast swaths of the ocean (the ocean floor) uninhabited. The merfolk are quite magically advanced, therefore, they have ships that tread the ocean depths and can quite easily reach faraway inhabited shores. I was wondering how warfare would in this kind of scenario. In the ocean, most of the time one wouldn't be obstructed by terrain unless one defends a shallow coral reef. This might indicate that if an attacking force is stronger than the defending one, the war would be swift and the attrition warfare would not exist. However, considering urban warfare, even if you can swim with your warships above the city, the defenders still have an advantage of hiding in the buildings below and should be able to take down a lot of enemy ships from below which would prolong the war. What are your thoughts on this kind of scenario?🤗
So, I'd treat underwater warfare like space warfare. Specifically, I'd look at the model of say Space Marines in jetpacks in Warhammer 40K. You can use cover, but it needs to be 3 dimensional cover or moving cover. So let's take your reef example. If the mermaids have a cave in the reef or an overhang they can defend, that will give them some cover. That being said, it won't be anywhere near the safety of say a castle. Yes, there's only one entrance, but it's an entrance you can't block up, so you have to mount a constant guard. I think your warfare would be very much a constant shifts situation and watching of the holes that exist in your fortifications. Does that make sense?
It's nice to hear about the history from the author, usually they're not interested in this kind of thing, everything is superficial. I'm used to hearing such things on a channel about history, and on those whose target audience is not stupid people. Because most of these channels tell about history in a very schematic, superficial way. You can also get people from prisons to go to war. They are doing that in the Russian Federation now. They release criminals and promise them amnesty for going to war. There is an opinion that they put them in the most dangerous areas so that most of them die. There are already precedents when criminals returning from the war again commit fatal crimes on the outside, thinking they are war heroes.
What do you think of the idea of medieval Republic like Venice and each Guild has their own personal Navy and army within their specific District of the city
