How much of an advantage do the Alliance really have?

Lore Story Forum
129

But they don’t. You even get to go back to Tirisfal to partake in the god-awful quest regarding Calia. There’s no-one there, except for the shambling dead.

It would make 0 sense for an enemy to be driven from the shoreline, with all assets built upon that land destroyed, built upon an inhospitable land in which nothing will ever grow again, where the dead roam en masse.

And even then, Silvermoon is just a ride from the north. How are they going to hold that land without any reinforcements, with a dependent supply line, with an enemy who’s height of power is practically next door in terms of marching men?

That’s not a solid answer from me, chief.

Yeah. That’s still normal on assaults. I cannot underline how extremely lethal it is to attack a place. You need those sorts of odds to even begin the attack. That is the cost of doing business in ye olden warfare. It’s still true to our modern day as well, though to a lesser extent, simply because of how technology has rapidly progressed.

Alleria is about as high as it gets on the food chain. If a Grand Marshal knows something, she knows something. They seem quite knowledgeable on the other on-goings, besides.

There’s also the added fact that Nathanos can “make” them “dependent” on civilians, so as to get them to arm themselves and fight. I sincerely doubt that’s necessity.

Anduin talks about the Alliance, in all its entirety. Of course Tyrande isn’t going to be there if she just defiantly split off from the Alliance’s army. Of course Turalyon, Muradin and others weren’t going to be there. That’s what an army does. It’s not a death ball.

Elegy also refers directly to the manpower invested into Ashenvale and Darkshore. Manpower deliberately split as a feint.

Your views on “Alliance superiority” are misguided and border on propagandized jibbering.

130

Any advantage-- stated, perceived, or otherwise-- is completely ephemeral with the writing style of World of Warcraft.

Fun to postulate on but at this point it just feels tiring to go, “[faction] would be better at [topic] because of [thing]” to have the writers pull something from thin air to justify that thing not mattering, or better yet, just ignoring that it even exists.

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131

‘https://www.wowhead.com/mission=1927/lordamere-lake’
Horde follower quest: “The Bloodfang Pack controls Fenris Isle. Create a distraction along the Misty Shore to lure them out of position, allowing Horde refugees to escape Tirisfal across the water.”

'https://www.wowhead.com/mission=1912/silverpine-reinforcements"
Alliance follower quest: “Horde reinforcements from the Sepulcher in Silverpine Forest are marching toward Tirisfal under High Executor Hadrec. Halt their advance.”

As you can obviously see, the Alliance controls Tirisfal in lore.

‘https://youtu.be/N9ONyL3pIWY?t=1729’

Also, In blizzcon was stated that after the victory in Lordaeron, the Alliance has control over the Eastern Kingdoms, “very close to the full Aliance” and the remaining members of the Horde are in Arathi making their last stand (we know they lose there too).

If Tyrande, Muradin, Turalyon and Danath armies are not in Orgrimmar, then obviously the entire Alliance army wasnt in the siege… Many were controling E.K. You cannot even prove that the entire Army was in that last fight.

Meanwhile, the entire Horde was in that last battle. Is stated in the chapter description and Nathanos states they have no more troops and need the civilians.

And again: In Lore the Alliance has always won every major battle against the Horde. Every battle during the Second War. Every battle during the War of Draenor. Every major battle during the Fourth War. That is canon.

The topic is about “How much of an advantage do the Alliance really have?”. And the answer is: The Alliance has ever won and was stated by Metzen to be Azeroth standing super power in Wod, just 2 years before BFA.

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132

Fenris Isle is in Silverpine and near Graymane wall. The Sepulcher is closer to Lordaeron than Fenris Isle. The Bloodfang Pack never stopped fighting for Gilneas, even after the hostage situation that sounded their retreat. In short: they secured a Fort. The Sepulcher is a military installment and Fenris Isle does effectively nothing, aside from cement a foothold in an area that they’re already warring over. That does not mean = won.

And nothing has really changed there? Eastern Kingdoms has always been predominantly Alliance, save for Lordaeron and Silvermoon.

Arathi Highlands is not a “Last Stand”. It’s where the two territories encroached. I’m sorry, but he’s offering a sales pitch, not reading a map. Arathi was little more than Highlands with one point of entry for a single vessel, that was the connecting point between Ironforge and Lordaeron. The real point of contest would be Lordaeron, because that’s the actual connection between Quel’thalas and the outside territories.

That is what we call a ‘mobile army’, the actual meat of an army. They matter the most, because they are the ones who are mustered for a siege, who provide relief when a local position is under attack, are reinforcements in a place where they cannot locally recruit, and so forth. Much of what you see in the Barrens, or Redridge, are just that; garrison forces. They oversee the region they are tasked with holding. They do not mobilize and go elsewhere. They cannot do that, because that’d be compromising the army’s hold over the location.

Something that should go without saying; there is no battle where every gun and every man is set to fight against the entirety of another army.

Take logistics from Nathanos Blightcaller with a grain of salt. His agenda was in with Sylvanas’ death cult thing. Any decision he made was very likely not out necessity, but to have more resources piled upon something, to ensure more death.

Debatable “win” conditions, at plenty of junctures.

???

And why I’m arguing with you, because Metzen, god bless his soul, made that claim, and then went on to contradict himself in the next few words he said after that. Because if victory comes at the cost of “everything”, it is not victory. It is suicide. And it an exhausting argument to have.

Thus does Warcraft “have” a story of conflict. If there was one superior side, they would’ve wiped the other off the face of the earth already. There is no holdie-backsies.

133

No it isn’t? Fenris Isle is directly south of the Undercity in Lordamere Lake.

Fenris Isle is closer to the Undercity than the Sepulcher, at least by water.

There’s not much salt needed to be taken here. It would be hard to trick the Sylvanas loyalist player into thinking Orgrimmar’s forces hadn’t been depleted when they could see for themselves as they were going around the city trying to rally the militia and take down anti-Sylvanas posters.

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134

I think at the end of the 4th war, the Horde actually have a large advantage in military power. As, going into the final battle, Sylvana’s forces are described as being superior to Anduin and Saurfang’s forces combined. And afterwards, Saurfang and Sylvanas’s forces rejoin, without suffering any casualties.

So unless the Horde suffered WAY more losses fighting N’Zoth than the Alliance did, the Horde should still have the advantage in military power.

And considering the Horde is now united as a council of equals, while the Night Elves have all but separated from the Alliance, I wouldn’t say they have the advantage in political unity either.

In economics, the faction with Goblins will always have the advantage.

I’m not sure how to measure cultural advantage.

135

On a soldier to soldier basis, the Horde has the advantage in terms of their troops. Tauren are incredibly strong and much larger than what we see in game, armour a bunch of them up and send them in a charge and there wouldn’t be a human shield wall in existence that can hold out. Pound for pound almost every Horde race is physically more powerful and dangerous than an Alliance one, and the Alliance races that are physically more powerful than humans are fewer in number than their Horde counterparts in general (with exceptions, of course).

Technologically and logistically the Alliance wins out, of course, though if the Zandalari Empire gets whipped back into shape along with the Nightborne, and if that Iron Horde tech is better integrated, that gap could very well close pretty quickly.

On paper, the Alliance would win purely because of one single member race. Not the humans, but the dwarves, who are objectively the only true superpower on Azeroth right now. The united Three Hammers are essentially powerful enough to solo the Horde if they were used to their full potential, in every respect they outstrip all the other races in terms of capability in some way.

Of course, they’re ignored for the sake of the plot, much like the Vindicaar and the various Wild God allies of the night elves who probably wouldn’t be too pleased during the War of Thorns. Per the current plot, the inference is that the Horde is currently in a better place than the Alliance, since apparently Sylvanas’ forces were ‘the only force possibly capable of defeating N’zoth’, meaning they were superior to the joint rebel and Alliance troops. Couple that with getting rid of the person who was actively trying to sabotage things and draw the war out, and the Horde is (if we ignore the same things the writer’s are) now the stronger of the two.

In fact, giving the Three Hammers their due basically nullifies the need to go to Kul Tiras to an extent. “Oh no, we need their fleet!” “Anduin… we have an airforce of mini-Thors that fought dragons in the Second War.”

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Something I want to point out is, you can absolutely hold Fenris Isle without having a grasp over Lordaeron. The Forsaken didn’t have hold over it until the Cataclysm. In-between, Lordaeron refugees took the Keep and liberated it from the Gnolls, who had allied with the Scourge and took the Keep before them. It is a good location, as it is surrounded by water and it is a fortified Keep, but it is by no means a product of taking Lordaeron.

The salt to take is; the situation is most likely not that dire, and that Nathanos Blightcaller, as well as Sylvanas Windrunner, are death cultists, trying to web in as many casualties as physically possible. If the objective is to obtain corpses, why not fill the local civilian populace with dread, arm them with spears and say “This is it! It’s all or nothing, each and every one of you is defending this hold!”.

The local peons aren’t going to know logistics. They’re going to hear what they’re told and say “well, let’s do it.”, or, they’ll revolt and die.

And they sure as a lack of rain in the south, would absolutely lie to the loyalist, because the loyalist is a pawn, in a game where the end objective is the death of all living things.

137

Sylvanas forces are described (by Nathanos) as being depleted in the war and in need to recruit civilians to fight the last battle. The entire loyalist and rebel horde armies are described (in the chapter description) as being completely recalled to fight that battle.

Meanwhile there is no evidence (still waiting for one) that the entire Alliance army was in Orgrimmar. You see no Blackmoon Army, no Stromgarde Army, no Silver Hand Army, no Dwarven Army, nor a Kultiran Army in Orgrimmar.

The Old Horde had tens thousands of troops (the New Horde only thousands) and had ogres. They lost all the battles in the Second War and the War of Draenor (against Ner’zhul horde). All the battles.

The New Horde lost in Lordaeron. They lost in Arathi. They Lost in every major battle of the Fourth War too. In lore the Horde has always lost a major battle against the Alliance forces. This is a fact.

If the Horde had truly a military advantage they could have won at least one battle.

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138

It is nowhere neat Greymane Wall.

Your own point betrays you, as it is exactly that Sylvanas and Nathanos are death cultists that would have lead them to grinding away the Horde’s soldiers to the point that their ranks were depleted.

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139

Sure but…Anduin said the same thing about HIS army fairly early on in the expansion.

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Setting aside that apparently the old Horde crushed Stormwind, swept across Dun Morogh and Lordaeron, almost taking the capital, without winning a single battle, your point is oddly based upon a narrative in which the Alliance were the sole protagonists and so were always fated to win in the end.

It’s like you posted “Sauron had vast armies, including Ringwraiths and trolls, yet lost all the battles of the War of the Ring. What a chump.”

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141

It was Genn who said it, actually. But unlike what the Sylvanas loyalist players saw, we never actually saw said farmers called upon. Just those Night Elves growing pumpkins in Stormwind instead.

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Stormwind, a single kingdom, hold the entire Horde for 4 years until Garona betrayed King LLane. Said Horde had the help of Deathwing/Old Gods, preventing the other kingdoms help.

Alliance didn’t exist until the conquest of Dun Morogh, and even the entire Horde never took Ironforge or Gnomeregan.

And you should read the novel: the Horde never “swept across Lordaeron”. They tried and failed in Hillsbrad, suffering heavy losses. Doomhammer retreated to Hinterlands were he lost half of the horde, and had heavy losses again trying to destroy Silvermoon.

When the remainings of the Horde tried to take an unprotected Lordaeron, King Thoras Trollbane sent an army to Alterac Mountains, blocking the passes and traped Orgrim’s reinforces. And when Doomhammer had almost destroyed the gates of Capital City, the Alliance army arrived and crushed his rear.

As i said, the Horde lost every battle.

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143

Not achieving total victory is not the same thing as loosing.

The Alliance succeeded (whether it was from a Mary Sue moment by one of their heroes or not, it was a success) in destroying the economic and political center of the Forsaken and driving them out as refugees. That is, by any reasonable standard, a win.

They might also have had the goal of occupying it, and even if I find that debatable (were they going to live in the undercity with it toxins?), I will repeat not achieving every goal is not the same thing as loosing.

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144

But the means in which you achieve this victory matter in the long run of a war.

A pyrrhic victory is as bad as a defeat. In an endeavor like ye olden warfare (and, again, to a lesser extent in modern warfare), if it costed you too much to obtain, it has wounded you in the long run. In this, they did manage to turn a defeat to victory, but at such an immense casualty rate that conscription had to began.

That is very bad. Especially at the beginning of a conflict.

There is a reason why many sieges weren’t waged in battle, but rather by starving out the populace. They were extraordinarily lethal.

You can win plenty of battles, but lose the war if the battle costed you nearly everything in manpower and resource. In this, the armistice was met in fairly neutral terms. The Alliance isn’t in a position of strength to make demands, the Horde has no interest in resuming the war and just about all assets on call were exhausted between the two.

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145

My point doesn’t betray me. Because be that as it may, that Sylvanas and Nathanos want as much death as possible, that includes the enemy as well. Grinding their own forces down until they couldn’t defeat the opposition would be counter-intuitive to the whole plot of attempting to kill everything.

In the good words of Bane, long may His sweet mask reign; “Theatricality and deception. Powerful agents to the uninitiated.”

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ignoring the BS godlike lore characters on the alliance side(because the horde doesnt have any now)
a united horde would crush the alliance.

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147

Sylvanas and nathanos lost you know.

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148

The alliance needed the horde military to fracture so they could join up with them just to have a chance to fight the other portion of the horde. The alliance is usually on the verge of losing until the horde fractures, it happened in SoO, it happened in 8.2.5 and it happened in WC2.

The alliance may have the numbers, but they are usually written as insanely incompetent and weak. They didn’t even know the forsaken would use the plague at undercity, and they weren’t able to scout a gigantic army in the barrens until they basically lost ashenvale.

In terms of who should be stronger realistically, it’s the alliance, in wow it’s the horde because the alliance is too stupid to even be able to tie their own shoes, and their powerful characters never make an impact in these fights.