They said that about canons. Didn’t change the need for fortications, just how they were made.
And, in fact, the opening cinematic showed fortifications being important. (And yes, you can argue that Blizzard didn’t know what they were doing, then why even argue the point at all. Everything you argue about is based on what Blizzard has presented).
Heck, whether you are charging people in fox holes, or trying to fly in with helicopters against defender’s fire, the attack always has the worst of it.
These fortifications are made to fight people on foot with ladders and regular catapults (i.e. medival combat), they aren’t designed around stopping airships or WMDs. Look at what happened in Dresden with the bombings and the city wall making that more of a death trap for the people inside.
Let’s look at the cinematic more though. The horde don’t even really use the fortifications in the cinematic other than a couple of archers on the roof, then they fight the alliance in an open field. This is of course after Sylvanas blows up a siege weapon and kills a ton of troops with a death fog. The fortifications were pretty much not used.
Then what happens right after the cinematic of the horde fighting outside their fortifications? They walk out and spray the plague (very short ranged weapons) without effort then Jaina blows up the wall. We’ve seen time and time again fortifications being useless, if they had a point Teldrassil wouldn’t have burned down in an instant and the horde would have had to naval blockade it or built some kind of bridge like Alexander did at Tyre, an essentially Island nation would have been very hard to seige, but seige warfare in wow doesn’t matter.
[Stuff regarding why Blizzard’s cinematic didn’t make sense. Though note, making sorties from fortifactions doesn’t mean the fortifactions don’t have value.]
If even the situation Blizzard is showing you doesn’t make sense, why are trying to draw conclusions from it? You can argue it shouldn’t be hard to take (though, in the end, the defender always has some advantage, as I pointed out in the part of the post you didn’t copy). But then one can also argue that defenders shouldn’t have holed up there in the first place. If the premise i wrong, you can’t draw conclusions form it.
The bottom line is that the writers believe fortifications are useful, so that is how the worlds works. You can argue that the story didn’t make sense at all, but it doesn’t support claim about how the story is suppose to be taken.
The writers don’t always believe fortifications are useful, that is the point. That is why in the cinematic the horde is fighting in front of the walls instead of from behind them. That is why Teldrassil is instantly destroyed along with the people inside it, same with Theramore, they end up becoming more of an advantage for the attacker than the defender.
In regular siege warfare fortifications are very useful, in wow you can have the same amount of people on both sides, fortifications in the way doesn’t dictate the size of the armies in wow, that’s why you can’t compare wow to any kind of warfare in the real world because the writers don’t really know much about real world things like that, they just know that they would have armor (that is pretty much useless in wow as well as also demonstrated in the cinematic), swords and castle walls.
The cinematic has a sortie, common enough tactic in medieval warfare, from a defensible position. And one thing Jaina specifically did, was destroy the fortifications so they couldn’t be used defensively. What is more, the reason the Horde had been pushed back to the city defenses was they they were pushed back.
The Horde was clearly using the fortifications defensively and hung back on them. They were using troops to plug wholes in the wall and, when they felt and advantage had swung to them, the sortied out. All common enough tactics when defending using fortifications.
They were not fighting from a defensible position in the cinematic, they were fighting in front of their defenses, they didn’t have trenches or barricades they were just in the open field. Then when the siege engine got up to the wall sylvanas just blew it up by herself, making the siege engines pointless and then that was enough to make the horde charge into the middle of the attacking army (not a sortie because they weren’t in a defensible position beforehand) and beat them (as their plate armor was useless) until anduin did his holy nova.
Sortie is common when you beat back the attackers enough with the help of your fortified position to face them in open combat, this is not that. The cinematic is an extremely bad demonstration of siege warfare and purely “rule of cool” garbage that ruins the point of any numerical or tactical advantages.
Edit: Also watching the horde troops in front of the wall without barricades I realized arrows don’t do damage to the body in wow as we see Saurfang get hit with a bunch and then he just charges it off and is fine.
While I hate to disagree, Void elves. Only reason Void elves are the most OP thing Alliance side is that thankfully Velen and his race and their spaceship stayed neutral on pacifist grounds during BFA citing the war as pointless (and I have to agree seeing the outcome).
They were defending holes in the wall. They did this with the advantage of covering fire from the wall. They had rubble around them for cover (which, in fact, the cinematic shows people have to charge over and around).
If the writers were telling us that the fortifications didn’t matter, then they wouldn’t have the Alliance using siege engines and having them systematically try and reduce the walls. Now would they have made a point of Jaina taking them out.
Perhaps, but if the story is being written without regard to real tacits and strategy, then why is one trying to draw conclusions from them (like who has the military edge) in the first place?
Fortifications absolutely do not matter in wow, that’s why it’s so easy to destroy Theramore or Teldrassil. Also that hole seemed to have vanished in the scenario, that’s why Jaina had to make a new one with ease because fortifications are very easy to destroy.
If the alliance was actually concerned about the fortifications (first of all they would use airships because walls wouldn’t matter then, but they had to not use them for the sake of visual effect), they would just destroy the walls with magic wow catapults that can launch things miles, like we saw in WoT.
Instead we saw them driving up siege towers that don’t even have ladders in them for troops to get on to the ramparts with that only have like 4 troops inside, it was basically just a fancy cannon they were driving up to the wall so sylvanas could explode it, instead of using it to bombard the horde (it had a cannon and a trebuchet on it), but no real way to assault the ramparts and really no troops in it. Where are the ladders for siege warfare? You don’t drive your cannons/trebuchets to the front, you keep them back.
All I can say is that I am baffled by your take. The siege towers were clearly use to counter the fortifications. They had not other reason to even be there.
They were being used to reduce the fortifications. That alone says they were significant. Jaina does two things to turn the tide, one of which is to take down the walls. Quibbles about how many troops they had (more troops can always come later) or ladders (there weren’t enough shots to know that they didn’t, or couldn’t exist) not withstanding.
I guess we are going to have to just disagree, but the cinematic screams at me that fortifications were being portrayed as significant. What is more, except of nukes (which render the whole battle pointless) it has been harder to attack than defend in pretty much every era of human history. Even in periods where we have technology that exceeds what can be done in WOW.
Sylvanas goes inside the siege tower, we can see there is no ladders there when she blows it up and there are only 2 guards on the top of the tower and two dwarves by the engine part in the bottom. It does not have ladders for assaults on the ramparts.
The siege towers were more a cannon and trebuchet combination machine, without an actual top bridge to drop down onto the ramparts, you also see the back shot of it is filled with gears and things for the trebuchet part when it’s approaching the city, after Saurfang gets shot with arrows that don’t do damage to humanoid bodies.
So what happens in the cinematic is they roll their cannon/trebuchet to the front and have no troops to attempt to assault the ramparts. But that is also another interesting thing, the “siege towers” (or rather mobile cannons without the abiltiy to attack the ramparts) are mobile fortifications that get destroyed in an instant because they don’t matter in that cinematic other than for the visual of it.
Then in wow we see it’s easier to attack than defend at Theramore and Teldrassil as they end up doing far more damage to the defenders than attackers. But also the ability to portal far exceeds any technology we have now. You could also use the space ship to just shoot objects without explosives onto cities and the kinetic energy from orbit would be enough to level a city, but we are ignoring space and airships for cosmetic purposes in this attack.
So is running away after throwing another tantrum. Nathanos also could have avoided a Val’kyr’s death by bringing the Night Elf bodies to her instead of bringing the Val’kyr out into the field instead. Sylvanas and Nathanos are a lot less practical than you are trying to give them credit for.