Malfurion cut off those supply lines, and the Night Elves came out of those same forests in the end of that cinematic as well.
From the mission table perspective the Horde also left no occupational forces in Astranaar and left the Night Elves to reclaim it and hold it defensively for the missions:
Thenysil commands the remaining Sentinels in Ashenvale. Infiltrate Astranaar and take her down before they muster their strength.
The Horde commander responsible for the fall of Silverwind Refuge marches against Astranaar. Show him the Alliance will not give up Ashenvale so easily.
You may have missed the numbers but thanks to Sylvannaâs abdication and no Horde significant casualties on either side⊠the Second Siege of Orgrimmar ended with the Horde having a numerically superior army with the reunion of Saurfangâs dissidentâs and Sylvannas loyalists.
Thatâs been balanced by the fact that theyâre facing the Forsaken forces that werenât present there either.
The Kultiran Navy that went on the hunt for Sylvannas wound up broken at the bottom of the sea at Nazjatar. The sailors that were killed arenât so easily replaced.
The Forsaken were there. Their forces were up on the ramparts. Theyâre the ones that let Anduin and Thrall carry Saurfang into the city.
Jaina talks about the KulâTiran Navy going after Sylvanas after NâZothâs defeat, after the Nazjatar trap, which they magically have recovered from.
I think thereâs plenty of loose threads that Blizzard could pull to explain away either faction suddenly having more troops.
From a storytelling perspective, though, I would be really annoyed if Blizz expects a resumption of the old status quo of an uneasy-truce-with-maybe-some-skirmishes without at least also resuming the status quo of night elf civilian populations living relatively safely in their homes in Ashenvale.
Seriously, this truce plot is annoying and vague enough already without saying âoh, and you ceded your cultural homeland in the unwritten fine print, tooâ.
You canât prove that. Outside of the warfronts we werenât told the state of anything else. Which is why weâre here arguing about whether or not the Horde or Alliance has Ashenvale.
Well people keep saying that the Horde lost the war even though they only told us that the Horde lost the 2 warfronts which were zones that never belonged to the Horde to begin with.
Thereâs still the potential that the Horde got Ashenvale so they mightâve actually gained land in this war, not to mention that they gained another tactical advantage by completely burning down an alliance city/zone and almost wiping out one of the Allianceâs most influential races.
The Cinematic was Terror of Darkshore the events taking place there were occurring in Darkshore. Let alone your own argument betrays you, as had the Night Elves controlled the land route from Ogrimar they would have merely blockaded the path instead of having to resort to ambushing caravans.
The mission descriptions donât dispute my chain of events. Stage 1 Sentinels rally and push back into Astranaar while the bulk of the Horde army is in Darkshore. Stage 2 the local Horde commander rallies his forces to try and deal with the problem himself. Stage 3 Alliance sends their special agents to back up the Sentienals and repel the local commanderâs assault. Stage 4 the situation is passed on to the Horde special forces after the commander is defeated, they then route the Night Elves by assassinating their command structure.
Quite the opposite. Since the Night Elves then controlled the land routes the Horde player had to arrive to the warfront proper itself by boat.
And the Alliance perspective of the mission table missions that go into Astranaar is that the Night Elves are defending, and those defenses are a success.
Which is not what anyone was talking about. They were talking about what would have happened in the war if that battle had gone forward.
If the Horde hadnât decided not to fight after the duel, the vastly outnumbered Alliance would likely have been slaughtered. And while, yes, the Alliance would still have armies that werenât present at that battle, with the core of itâs army and most of itâs leadership wiped out, thereâs no way the Alliance remnant would have been able to fight the rest of the Horde alone.