How Long Should the Minion War Last...

[HWalsh]

This thread was spawned when I read this post from another thread...

Howdy. So I am curious what year rifts takes place in the Gregorian Calendar. I always thought it took place 300-309 years after 2098. But then I saw in some timelines that Rifts takes place in the 2380s. So in other words did the Post Apocalyptic Calendar start during the 200 years dark age or is there a zero year after which the P.A. Calendar started?

MiO states that 101 PA is 2387 AD in our calendar. The Coming of the Rifts happened on Dec 22nd, 2098 AD. I don't know what the current PA year is, so you'll have to find it and then do the maths to get the Cesarean calendar year.

AFAIK there isn't anything mentioning when the PA calendar started being used. My own personal take on it is that the CS created the calendar in order to better control history (and therefore their subjects) and it just gained widespread use in North America from there. IIRC, places like the NGR and Japan still use the AD calendar, so it's not that crazy of an idea.

The CS actually created the PA calendar sometime in the mid-50s PA or so, and then retroactively applied it to the rise of civilization after the Dark Age (so, when Chi-Town/NG/FQ rose as stable powers). Im not sure of the actual year, but it gets mentioned somewhere - i read and re-read sections of the books, and i KNOW i saw that somewhere recently.

As to what year it is now...

If you’re starting at the “RMB” start date - its 103-ish PA. They dont say for sure.

Coalition War Campaign runs this forwards to 105 PA as the release of the new CS Army and start of official hostilities between FQ and the CS and Tolkeen and the CS, though actual troop movements dont start until sometime later.

The actual “war Campaign” runs through 108/early 109 PA, though the FQ front ends before that, IIRC the last 12-18 months of the campaign were just the Siege on Tolkeen (possibly largely because the troops on the FQ front could now be moved to the Tolkeen front, after the original forces comitted got blitzed during the Sorcerors Revenge).

Aftermath sets the date at 109 PA

The Minion War is sometime in 110 PA, and advancing (as more Minion War books come out, possibly, though i dont anticipate the Minion War being a years-long thing, despte Kevin’s inability to realize that it shouldn’t even be a speedbump to the CS).

So you’d have to extrapolate actual dates from the Gregorian dates provided buy MiO or Triax 1.

So let's talk the Minion War.

Personally?

I don't think the CS is equipped to handle this as well as most people seem to think.

I think most people just think, "Well the CS just rolls its massive army out and wham bam thank you ma'am."

I think it's more than that.

First, the CS covers a very large area, and the bulk of its troops have to be there to defend it. Realistically that limits the CS forces.

I think the CS operates more on a basis of "jousting encounters" or short skirmishes rather than full on invasion. Even at Tolkeen it was small size encounters for the most part.

So we need to start looking at how the CS fares in small sized encounters. Removing their (ridiculous) population imbalance.

(Honestly, if I were Kevin, I'd reduce the CS military by 90% to bring things in a realistic direction, but that's just me...)

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

This thread was spawned when I read this post from another thread...

The Minion War is sometime in 110 PA, and advancing (as more Minion War books come out, possibly, though i dont anticipate the Minion War being a years-long thing, despte Kevin’s inability to realize that it shouldn’t even be a speedbump to the CS).

So let's talk the Minion War.

Personally?

I don't think the CS is equipped to handle this as well as most people seem to think.

Theyre over-equipped, really. We’ll get to that in a minute.

I think most people just think, "Well the CS just rolls its massive army out and wham bam thank you ma'am."

I think it's more than that.

First, the CS covers a very large area, and the bulk of its troops have to be there to defend it.

Actually, by and large, they dont. Go read the SB1, CS War Campaign, and other info about the CS. In addition to the “CS Army” that every State contributes units to (this is their massive standing army), Each state also has to keep two entire Army Corps (24,000 troops each) armed and equipped at their own expense for local defense; these troops are never part of the standing army. Basically, every state has a 48,000 strong National Guard. Complete with Robot, PA, Troop Transports, and (for Chi-Town, Missouri, and Iron Heart, at least) Skelebot attachments. Lone Star uses Dog Boys instead. We can assume that CS El Dorado probably hasn’t had time to meet their requirements by the time the Minion War starts, as it has just now become a State. But sparing an Army Corp or two out of the over 3 million standing troops to defend the El Dorado, is not really that big of a deal. And honestly, there’s not a lot there yet to protect. Its like... 3 cities.

On TOP of that, Every major CS population center has a LARGE number of ISS personnel - who, let us not forget, are armed with perfectly servicable “Old Style” Armor and weapons - and trained better than the average grunt. They are also extensively equipped with old-style SAMAS and SkyCycles.

Realistically that limits the CS forces.

See above

I think the CS operates more on a basis of "jousting encounters" or short skirmishes rather than full on invasion. Even at Tolkeen it was small size encounters for the most part.

Not.. really? There was plenty of both. During their pushes/advancement, the CS steamrolled n with lots of troops; the small skirmishes started while the CS consolidated its gains. So it was a bit of both.
Also, there’s a big difference between invasion (where you have to hold territory) and just going out and being “hey, look, Demos. Kill them all”.

So we need to start looking at how the CS fares in small sized encounters. Removing their (ridiculous) population imbalance.

You cant arbitrarily just throw out a fact you dont like. They HAVE a standing army of well over 3 million. According to Megaverse in Flames, after the mass-recruitment, itll be up near 10 Million under arms under the CS banner + Other friendly forces (including forces from the Cyber Knights, Tolkeen, etc, that the CS is “ignoring” as long as they are helping) like Ishpeming and allied mercenaries.

(Honestly, if I were Kevin, I'd reduce the CS military by 90% to bring things in a realistic direction, but that's just me...)

Well, he’s roughly TRIPPLING the size of the CS military, so.. good luck with that.

And honestly, its not about the size of the CS army at all. The Minion War fails on a few points. Well start with the North American thrust, since that is what most people are focusing on.

What i want you to do, before you make any long-form replies, is go read Dimension Books 10 and 11, thoroughly. Pay -careful- attention to the statistics of most of the Demons and Deevils.

They. Are. Worthless.

Theyre simply NOT dangerous to a high-tech force. Not remotely. Even in the tens of thousands. The vast majority of them are strictly melee-range. They have pitiful MDC (less than the average CS trooper). They aren’t immune to MDC weapons. Theyre on foot.

Even WITH the blood-tech/weird demon-tech weaponry shown in Megaverse in Flames... less than 10% of Demon and Deevil forces have those weapons.

Its a giant turkey shoot. A single platoon of CS troopers can hose down 3-4 times their number in lesser/normal Demons/Deevils. (The big guys like Demon Locusts, etc, not so much, obviously, but the vast majority of demons aren’t that tough). They wont even get into range. If they CS platoon is mounted (has an APC, jet packs, even just jeeps), they demons will NEVER get into range.

Even the big demons aren’t that dangerous to a full-up CS Field Army. AN LRM barrage from their launch vehicles or Firestorm command center will put paid to Greater Demons with no problem. The demons dont particularly have a good defense against missiles. SOME of their REALLY important bases (the actual hell pits) have a few missile batteries manned by mortal minions to defend them... but forces in the field? Again, less than 10% have ranged weapons of any kind, much less missiles.

Or send in a tank platoon. Bal-rog getting you down? Nothing a Linebacker cant handle. Without ever getting near the thing.

Megaverse in Flames also presents this “and the SKY IS FULL OF DEMONS MAN and super dangerous” ... the stats just dont represent that. The flying demons arent that tough (tougher than a lot of the ones that dont, but still not nearly as tough as even a Smiling Jack), dont have ranged weapons.. and fly DOG SLOW.

CS Air forces could literally just loiter arond out of the range of demons and shoot them out of the sky at will. There’s nothing the demons can do about it, they cant even run away, since the SAMs and Rocket Cycles are all WAY faster than they are. They can just get shot and die.

Kevin obviously had an idea in mind of what he wanted the Minion War to be.. but it doesn’t match the story or the stats.

90% of the Demon and Deevil forces are weak trash. The ones that are tough are no match at all for a high tech force (a tank platoon or a platoon of Skullsmashers will obliterate Greater Demons in job lots without ever being in danger).

Ironically, the “slave” “Sub Demons” - the Gargoyles - are the only real threatening Demons. Theyre actually tough as hell.

And thats just the North American theater.

The entire Minion War on Earth as it is presented is a total non-starter from Day 1.

Splynncryth will NEVER let the Demons or Deevils have Earth. And he has literal billions of Powerlords and Overlords (and tens of Millions of Kittani).

The Eurpoean Theater as it is mentioned in MiF is a joke. The Gargoyle Empire is stated that it will NOT be accepting any terms from Dyval or Hades, and the Demon Overlord sent there with a paltry 40k troops? Yeah, the Gargoyles will crush them in an afternoon. They dont present a credible threat to the NGR in any way. (And that can segway into another topic... the Gargoyle Empire was NEVER a credible threat to the NGR. Primarily for the same reason - they dont have enough high technology to counter the tech of the NGR).

But back to the NA theater...

Yeah, even if the CS didn’t add a single soldier to their cause (no mass recruitment, no no-questions-asked hiring of skilled mercs, no bringing Ishpeming into the field, no “ignoring” Lazlo’s forces in the field, telling the FQ to sit this one out, etc)...

Still wouldn’t matter.

The Demons have no effective counter to high technology, as presented. Theyre just sitting ducks. Even IF they close to melee (somehow..).. its not like the CS troops are helpless. Vibro-blades hurt demons just fine. Most of the demons dont inflict a lot more than Vibro blade anyway, even in melee... and they have less MDC than CS troops.

Start matching them up against Juicers, Borgs, and Death Knights? Splat. Especially with that WH40K-inspired “so we hear you liked space marines in your space marines so we put a space marine in your space marine” super-heavy armor suit they made for Borgs.

The CS fighting against Tolkeen was them fighting a comparable force. A force that understood technology and used it - or technowizard equivalents - to put up an even fight to the CS, or even an unbalanced one (as they were using Guns AND Magic - a mage with Impervious To Energy up can kill a lot of dudes before someone with a missile launcher or grenades can take him out).

The Demons just dont have that capability.

[Shark_Force]

in addition to the problems colonel tetsuya has pointed out, i would add that palladium has a serious problem with grasping the meaningfulness of large numbers.

i mean, i think at some point they mention the population of one of the demonic dimensions as being a few million. and this sort of thing shows up repeatedly. they don't seem to be able to grasp what happens when you have a couple hundred dudes with laser rifles shooting at an individual creature with 3,000 MDC. it's basically like "well, 3,000 is a lot of MDC, that's practically invincible" and then you have 3/4 of those 200 people hitting with 4d6 laser rifles for 600d6 damage *per action* and that 3,000 MDC creature has been vapourized before anyone can even fire a third shot.

they'll announce something like the demons (or dyvals?) have half a million troops (because that's a big number of demons, right?) and fail to acknowledge that they've handed the CS a standing expeditionary force of 3 million soldiers (again, that's just their offensive army; that 3 million soldiers plus auxiliaries was what they had to throw at tolkeen and free quebec, at the end of the war, on top of the defensive armies they presumably still had, plus the ISS). plus probable wounded veterans, many of whom may not be ideal soldiers but you could probably shove them into a jeep, hand them a rifle, and their injuries would become a lot less relevant.

not to mention that i'm pretty sure they've gone over the total population of both dimensions, and then some, long before this point... remember, they are supposed to be invading the three galaxies. the number of demons that would need to get involved in the three galaxies to even register as a blip on anyone's radar would probably be a larger number than we have a name for. like "we're going to need scientific notation to write this number down in a way that anyone can even begin to contextualize it, because we don't have names for numbers that large".
likewise, they just don't seem to grasp just how big the difference is between, say... 2d4x10+10 flying speed, and 400 miles per hour flying speed. the CS could literally fly in, kill a bunch of demons, spend a couple hours flying away, camp for the night, do their morning exercise, have breakfast, take a shower, get back in their suits, and still not have to worry that even the fastest of those demons could ever hope to reach them (not to mention the fact that having that much variation in speed means that the fastest ones will only be outrunning their numbers advantage, if they even had one in the first place... which they generally don't).

or the fact that the CS military had 3.2 millions old-style SAMAS suits, which presumably means an even *larger* number of old-style body armour and man-portable weapons, and a bunch of old-style vehicles too.

or the fact that the CS is canonically the main food source for all of north america, and is also shipping food out to europe to feed them as well (seriously, the CS cannot recruit more soldiers than they can feed, because someone decided that the CS is already feeding every person they could possibly hope to recruit and a whole bunch of people that they aren't going to be recruiting).

the minion war could be a plausible threat, but the numbers we've been shown make it pretty laughable. like, the 40,000 strong army sent to force the gargoyle empire to join them... is that a joke? no seriously, it only makes sense if we're supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of such a tiny number of demons forcing the gargoyle empire, which has withstood total war against one of the most technologically advanced, stable, powerful, military-focused nations on the entire planet for decades.

now, yes, you could totally ignore all the official stuff, and make a bunch of changes so that the minion war would actually be meaningful in any way.

also, considering significant numbers of the soldiers on both sides can only be permanently killed in their homes, the idea that either demonic army would think sending soldiers to any other place in the megaverse would be meaningful is really weird. it's like they decided to randomly send unfathomably large numbers off to mildly annoy their hated foes in a place where neither side ultimately particularly cares about in the slightest. they really should be invading each other; when they attack, they would have a huge advantage on the offense in that they're causing permanent death while their enemies are only causing slight inconvenience.

palladium does some stuff really well. large-scale warfare is not one of those things.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

This topic was already discussed pretty heavily (some time ago) here:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=150235&hilit=+Kydian

For ease of reading, ill repost my original post on the topic from that thread to here.

It sums up the problems with the entire concept of the Minion war, particularly population numbers of Demons and the like.

It's not presented this way though. It's presented as "Splynncryth could easily conquer the entire planet, but that would draw other powers into a giant war and would not be profitable, so he doesn't bother, and helps to enforce the "no one gets to have all of earth" unofficial policy to keep this from happening so it doesn't spoil the pot".

At no point is it ever intimated that Splynncryth is afraid of.. well, anything. The Splugorth pretty much consider themselves top dogs in the Multiverse with the Old Ones out of the picture, and apart from a few single unique entities (Like the dweller beneath), nothing has ever been presented to counter this in canon.

One thing people need to remember is this isn't D&D
Hades and Dyval are not infinite planes brimming with infinite numbers of infernals.
Each of them is basically working with the population of a single world....which to be honest makes the whole Minion War a bit....questionable. Though it does explain why they are so heavily recruiting additional troops.
But every singe member of both sides is out numbered, significantly, by Splyncryths troops. And if by some miracle they manage to take HIM out, one of the other Splugorth would move in on the now open territory with a fresh, likely larger force.

Pretty much everything Eli says. For shiggles, i went through the Hades book just now and totalled up the populations of each region and city, as given.

The grand total of the "endless armies of Hades"?

52.5 million. If they strip every single demon out. Now, even though it never says this, lets assume there's a lot more demons out there than are presented because the book usually focuses on cities and only a few times gives populations for an entire region.

Lets say its 10x as many. 525 million. Hell, 100x as many. 5.25 Billion.

Right on. If you strip every Demon out of Hades, you can field 5.25 Billion Demons.

Splynncryth, who is apparently a young, poor upstart of a Splugorth at only controlling three planets (I really think Kevin's intention was for this to seem super-impressive, and when the Splugorth were later expanded to being interstellar empire owning bad-asses, we probably should have ret-conned Splynnie being one of those Splugorth in the Three Galaxies with a few hundred or a thousand planets or so in his regime, but.. whatever, well stick with canon). Three planets, two of which are primarily Kydian, and third that is Kydian/Kittani. Kydians breed in litters starting from a young age and mature insanely quickly. (Faster than Demons sent back to Hades can return to 'life', actually). Their planets were noted for having TRILLIONS of citzens, that they couldn't feed until the Splugorth rescued them. They were then encouraged to KEEP UP THE BREEDING, because expendable troops are great. And while the Kittani certainly aren't THAT plentiful, its fair to say that "billions" is probably a good number to go with since they have super-high tech medicine and an advanced society.

Easily half of the Kydian population and perhaps 25% or more of the Kittani are warriors, maybe more. (That's how the Atlantis population breaks down, at least - and on Atlantis, EVERY Kydian noted in the population is a warrior)...

So Splynncryth alone could put Hades and Dyval in their places at a whim. Even trading dozens of men per demon, he can keep up the attrition for l onger than they can and send them packing back to their holes... not that he's going to have to - Splynncryth's (and any Splugorth's) forces are both highly magical AND highly tech oriented - entire battalions of demons can be obliterated by a single Kittani pressing a button to launch volley after volley of long-range missiles into their formation for which they have practically zero defense and which the Splugorth can provide in essentially unlimited ammounts.

In addition, even on the ground, all Minion are armed with powerful high-tech, long-range weapons; demons will be cut down in job lots just trying to close the distance on Splugorthian forces, and then theyre going to find that by and large, except for the Greater Demons that Powerlords, Overlords, Altara, and Kittani are more than a match, even in hand-to-hand, for the lesser demons. Armed with bio-wizardry weapons, supernatural strength (Powerlords, Overlords), extreme skill and high tech weaponry (Kittani and Altara) most lesser demons are going to be in for a rough day coming up against a Minion of the Splugorth. Serpent Power armor vs most of the lesser demons? Thats a lot of dead demons.

Accounting for high-tech advantages (like long range bombardment, ability to engage, even in army-on-army fights, for a few minutes before the demons can close the distance for their few ranged weapons/get into melee) and the fact that are also a highly MAGICAL force with Overlords, High Lords, and Tatooed Men (even a greater demon might himself having issues wtih a Maxi-Man or two, what with their renewable 75MDC/level shields, supernatural strength and magic weapons) - the Demons aren't going to have a good day.

So not only does Splynncryth (a Splugorth with a "paltry" three worlds + Atlantis) have the Demons of Hades handily outnumbered even when using extremely wild assumptions on the true demon population, he doesn't even have to worry about paying a high attrition rate - he can probably expect to lose 2 men for every demon, but he can more than afford to without even putting a dent in his available forces. And if things get really hairy, the Splugorth, while selfish and often competing with each other, are not happy with Hades and Dyval at the moment and will probably be happy (for a price) send in their forces as well. Its shown in Dimensional Outbreak that the Splugorth empires in the Galaxies are simply not having this upstart Demon invasion and put the demons down hard at every single opportunity.

And thats just the “Splynncryth will never let them have Earth” angle.

I could (and may, if im feeling up to it) break it down per demon/deevil type and how generally outclassed they are by high-tech opponents.

Eliakon also, in that thread, points out that ... despite being the Invaders, the Demons/Deevils are the ones that have to defend territory - the Hell Pits - so they are pinned down to objectives they MUST defend.

Its a turkey shoot.

Given that there aren’t actually that many Deevils and Demons in the Multiverse, and that they are engaged all over the place, not just Rifts Earth, they cant bring to bear millions of demons in the NA front. Or, maybe they can.. but thatll be IT. THey can spare 3-4 million. Maybe 5 at the outside (keep in mind they have to commit troops to their campaigns on other continents too).

5 million mostly melee-ranged, weak-butt demons against a highly trained professional army of 3+ million, another million or so also highly trained mercenaries, IMCN, and Lazlo/other free countries forces (and a few hundred thousand from FQ).. and 3-4 million “cannon fodder” ‘Burb mass conscripts...

Nope. Demons dont stand a chance. Oh, and those places they MUST defend to keep the War Effort going? If they die there... they die for good.

As presented, Kevin’s intent/the story he wants to tell just does not jive with the established setting, statistics for the units involved, nothin.

It -worked- in Dimensional Outbreak, because both sides had been corrupting entire planets of mortals to use as troops, etc, to supplement their limited true-demonic forces, and they are supported by the Demon Planet Kormal (and his two offspring), who can create demonic-hybrid ships, power armor, and fighter craft by the thousands.

They had a way to make the demonic/deevil threat plausible. They just recruited millions of mortals (and they dont care if any of those live)... and their plans in the Three Galaxies were in motion for centuries.

The MW in Palladium is unchanged, and Armageddon Unlimited has that as a strictly low-key affair, with not a lot of demons or deevils actually on-planet; just a few powerful ones controlling super-villains and establishing cults. So that worked.

But the Rifts Earth arm of the Minion War is just implausible on its face.

Demons basically get boned in the face of massed high technology.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

Hokay... i actually agree with Shark's conclusions here, but he did get some details a bit wrong, and i feel the need to correct them just to make sure we're all the same page.

in addition to the problems colonel tetsuya has pointed out, i would add that palladium has a serious problem with grasping the meaningfulness of large numbers.

i mean, i think at some point they mention the population of one of the demonic dimensions as being a few million.

Higher than that - but not a lot. I did the totals the first time this came up. Population by the books is ~60 million demons in Hades. Less than that for Deevils in Dyval.

and this sort of thing shows up repeatedly. they don't seem to be able to grasp what happens when you have a couple hundred dudes with laser rifles shooting at an individual creature with 3,000 MDC. it's basically like "well, 3,000 is a lot of MDC, that's practically invincible" and then you have 3/4 of those 200 people hitting with 4d6 laser rifles for 600d6 damage *per action* and that 3,000 MDC creature has been vapourized before anyone can even fire a third shot.

Exactly this. Or even just... OK, thats a big-ass Magot with 4000 MDC. Great. A platoon of CS Linebackers can literally just drive in circles around it and shoot it to death with impunity. Its got 5 heavy-hitting guns each with its own dedicated gunner, a dedicated driver, a coms guy who can man the (Medium Range AND Mini) missiles, and a "decent" rear-firing laser turret also with its own gunner. It can drive around at 150mph, stop on a dime, and skirt sideways and back up, since its a hover tank.

blat.

they'll announce something like the demons (or dyvals?) have half a million troops (because that's a big number of demons, right?) and fail to acknowledge that they've handed the CS a standing expeditionary force of 3 million soldiers (again, that's just their offensive army; that 3 million soldiers plus auxiliaries was what they had to throw at tolkeen and free quebec, at the end of the war, on top of the defensive armies they presumably still had, plus the ISS). plus probable wounded veterans, many of whom may not be ideal soldiers but you could probably shove them into a jeep, hand them a rifle, and their injuries would become a lot less relevant.

Not to mention that under the new programs, ALL of those walking wounded retirees could become Cyborgs if they wanted to. Theres even an option for die-hards to be continually put into new Cyborg bodies if theirs is trashed but their vital bits are recovered (from HoH).

not to mention that i'm pretty sure they've gone over the total population of both dimensions, and then some, long before this point... remember, they are supposed to be invading the three galaxies. the number of demons that would need to get involved in the three galaxies to even register as a blip on anyone's radar would probably be a larger number than we have a name for. like "we're going to need scientific notation to write this number down in a way that anyone can even begin to contextualize it, because we don't have names for numbers that large".

Here's your first inacuracy... but if you haven't read all the Three Galaxies books, its understandable..

One of the books (Fleets of the Three Galaxies, maybe? Not 100% sure; ive been going back and forth through several of the TG books lately, so i may have this mixed up. If i need to i can go dig for it later. Might also have been Dimensional Outbreak) actually gives a pretty detailed description of why they DONT need incalculable numbers to be dangerous in the Three Galaxies.

The gist is that most "non-major" worlds (I.E. the big worlds like the "Earths" of the Human portion of the COnsortium, Motherhome, etc) that are not hugely built up, dont tend to have bajillions of people. Since there is a lot of space, they tend to spread out instead, so while there are trillions of sentient's in the TG, a lot of the "bread and butter" worlds have populations more like 30-100 million people. These planets by and large have only small local defense forces (a few destroyers, maybe a cruises, and a lot of planet-based fighters), and help, even if called for immediately, is days or weeks away. These planets also dont keep huge standing armies - no more than 5% of their population AT MOST, and as the population gets larger, the percentage goes down (since the worlds of the TGE, UWW, and CCW are not at war with anyone, they pretty much only keep up enough forces to stand off pirates and other menaces).

When the Demon Fleet sweeps in with a half a dozen Demon Stars, a few Bone Maw Carriers, and a few dozen Demon Fury Frigates, they blow the planetary defenses out, and start landing troops. Unlike Rifts Earth, the Demons (and Deevils) in the Three Galaxies are flush with millions of demonic cultists/converts/conscripts.

They blow out any local defenses and set up the altars.

Convert/serve or die. Either way you're useful to the Demons or Deevils. You either add to their fodder army, or you power their ships/weapons. Works for them.

By the time help gets there (even if it is close, only a few days away), the planet is decimated or worse, and the Demon Fleet pulls up stakes and moves on.

And smaller "colony" sized planets (like about 2/3 of the planets settled in the Thundercloud)? Screwed. A lot off them dont even have worthwhile space defenses, and less than 10,000 defenders. THose planets will be lifeless husks by the time help arrives.

Even the three big powers only have a tiny portion of their populations under arms. The TGE and CCW fleets both number roughly 100,000 ships, but the vast majority of those are Frigates, Destroyers, and Light Cruisers. And they have to be spread out to cover thousands of inhabited planets. The CCW fleet, for instance, is comprised almost entirely of lighter combatants - there are only a few thousand Protector-class BBs, less than 100 Packmasters, and only ~12 of the Emancipation-class Dreadnaught. Similarly, the TGE fleet has only about 10,000 of the Executioner-class BBs, and only 21 Doombringer Dreadnaughts (2 having been destroyed fighting the one captured by the rebels at New Hope). The UWW fleet is SUBSTANTIALLY smaller, but their planetary defenses are quite a bit stronger (every planet that can support one has at least one of those massive space-nexus-point/lagrange-point powered super-stations, which can open rifts and summon Fleets from across the galaxy nearly instantly, and have massive weapons and scores of defense satellites) And they lost about 1/4 of their fleet to the Deevils at the start of the Outbreak. But the Demons dont like fighting magic-using enemies so they are by and large leaving the UWW for later.

Do the demons have any way of (and by demons here im generalizing either side) actually successfully attacking heavily-defended core worlds? Nope. Not right now at least. But they aren't trying to win this particular war in a day, as it were. Halthag's plan has always been a long game - gobbling up smaller planets while the Demon Planets pump out more and more ships, converting more mortals, picking away at the periphery until they CAN afford to pin down the CCW or TGE fleet(s) against a target that they MUST defend, and then wipe them out. It might take centuries (its noted in Fleets that the first time there was a Demon Star invasion - hundreds of years before the Outbreak - There were only 200 Demon Stars and it took several centuries for the nations of the Three Galaxies to hunt them down and put them out of comission)

Honestly, i wandered around on this one, so ill to a tildeer here:

Dimensional Outbreak (and Armageddon Unlimited, which has the Demons/Deevils very much in the background, with maybe a few hundred of each on the planet at most) is the only part of the Minion War series that works as it is presented. They have been planning it for centuries, have the support of an IMMENSELY powerful Demon Planet (Kormal, and, possibly, THREE of them if the two "offspring" eat enough planets to become full-sized), and have millions of mortal converts/conscripts/cultists to use as fodder.

Its the best of the lot, by a mile. Halthag's plan could actually work.

likewise, they just don't seem to grasp just how big the difference is between, say... 2d4x10+10 flying speed, and 400 miles per hour flying speed. the CS could literally fly in, kill a bunch of demons, spend a couple hours flying away, camp for the night, do their morning exercise, have breakfast, take a shower, get back in their suits, and still not have to worry that even the fastest of those demons could ever hope to reach them (not to mention the fact that having that much variation in speed means that the fastest ones will only be outrunning their numbers advantage, if they even had one in the first place... which they generally don't).

Oh god, so much this. This is what i meant when i was deriding Kevin's (im paraphrasing and exagerating here, a bit) "The skies are a huge battle with Juicers on flying wings zooming around fighting demons and SAMs and jets getting mixed up with hoards of demon flyers" bit in Heroes of Humanity.

Like.. wut? Those demons are slowpokes, have next to no MDC, and no worthwhile ranged weapons, at least, not against the SAMs (one of the flying Demons does have a sonic screech that hits out to 2000ft... but all those SAMs? Railguns. To 4000ft.) The SAM's could literally fly in loiter-circles and just make firing passes at the Demons until they got tired or ran out of ammo and had to go resupply. The Demons could quite literally never close with them.

Giant. Turkey. Shoot.

or the fact that the CS military had 3.2 millions old-style SAMAS suits, which presumably means an even *larger* number of old-style body armour and man-portable weapons, and a bunch of old-style vehicles too.

or the fact that the CS is canonically the main food source for all of north america, and is also shipping food out to europe to feed them as well (seriously, the CS cannot recruit more soldiers than they can feed, because someone decided that the CS is already feeding every person they could possibly hope to recruit and a whole bunch of people that they aren't going to be recruiting).

Your second major ... mistake? The CS i not main food source for anyone other than the CS. I went through this in a thread some time back (maybe afterEaster dinner ill try to track down a link to that thread). Thoroughly debunked.

Free Quebec is the one sending food to Germany, actually, not the CS, and all of the other nation-states in NA have plenty of farmland to feed themselves.

the minion war could be a plausible threat, but the numbers we've been shown make it pretty laughable. like, the 40,000 strong army sent to force the gargoyle empire to join them... is that a joke? no seriously, it only makes sense if we're supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of such a tiny number of demons forcing the gargoyle empire, which has withstood total war against one of the most technologically advanced, stable, powerful, military-focused nations on the entire planet for decades.

Yeah.. that one made me laugh. Like.. Emperor Zerstran (Sp?) has said no-way, no-how are his people going back to being sub-demon nobodies under Hades or Dyval. They like their freedom and their Empire very much, thank you. And 40,000 demons (who are by and large LAUGHABLY weaker than even a Gurgoyle) against the Gargoyle Empire?

Thatll be an extremely *brief* fight. Oh, and these Gargoyles..? They use tech. Extremely. Brief.

now, yes, you could totally ignore all the official stuff, and make a bunch of changes so that the minion war would actually be meaningful in any way.

also, considering significant numbers of the soldiers on both sides can only be permanently killed in their homes, the idea that either demonic army would think sending soldiers to any other place in the megaverse would be meaningful is really weird.

This is covered, actually. I THINK it is in MiFlames, but there is a thing about the fact that if they seize control of a planet long enough, they can essentially make it into another Hell Dimension. They want to capture Rifts Earth precisely BECAUSE they can turn it into another Hell Dimension - this one with unfettered access to the Megaverse.

Similar with the Three Galaxies, they see it as a way to make dozens/hundreds/thousands of Hell Worlds and capture Phase World, adding ANOTHER Megaverse-spanning Hell-world to their collection.

it's like they decided to randomly send unfathomably large numbers off to mildly annoy their hated foes in a place where neither side ultimately particularly cares about in the slightest. they really should be invading each other; when they attack, they would have a huge advantage on the offense in that they're causing permanent death while their enemies are only causing slight inconvenience.

Well, that WAS the plan, actually. The Demons WERE planning on straight-up invading Dyval, but someone screwed up and released the Worms of Taut early, tipping their hand.

palladium does some stuff really well. large-scale warfare is not one of those things.

Ahh, yeah. Understatement of the year.

And not just large-scale warfare... large scale anything. Population numbers in most of their settings make little to no sense (Three Galaxies is better than most, with a decent reason of why the people are so spread out, but its still absurdly low at only ~20-22 Trillion carbon-based sentient's in all three Galaxies, IMO.), army sizes make no sense...

Hell, entire portions of the setting dont even make sense. (one of my favorite weirdnesses - the Colorado Baronies are actually only a few hundred miles from Chi-town. Karl Prosek could literally bomb them off the map with missiles launched from Chi-town at a whim. But somehow, they exist.)

[Shark_Force]

according to... hmmm... i think it was one of the northern gun books... maybe the black market book? it's in a section talking about why the CS is an economic superpower or something like that. canonically, the CS actually is feeding most of north america.

it doesn't make any sense. in fact, it makes a lot of the opposite of sense. particularly since that explicitly included places like lazlo. but officially, that is actually a thing that is happening. why the CS would sell food to their enemies, and why their enemies would in any way rely on food supplied by someone that would like to kill them, is beyond me, but that is actually a thing that the books tell us is happening.

didn't know all that stuff about the three galaxies though. i'm glad somebody thought that out at least to some extent. i mean, i'm at a loss for why none of the other powers have thought of using magic on at least a limited scale to connect their empires, given that some random chump shifter can open a communication rift to anywhere in a minute or so, and a planetary budget should be large enough that they could afford to hire someone to open rifts for them, but... i'm prepared to chalk that up to "they didn't have any need to do so before the invasions started" (although they really should have wanted it, i mean, it is a ludicrously huge advantage to be able to put your entire fleet where you need it in an instant) and assume that they'll probably be looking at their options more closely in the future, once they start to figure out a response to the invasion.

[kaid]

This thread was spawned when I read this post from another thread...

Howdy. So I am curious what year rifts takes place in the Gregorian Calendar. I always thought it took place 300-309 years after 2098. But then I saw in some timelines that Rifts takes place in the 2380s. So in other words did the Post Apocalyptic Calendar start during the 200 years dark age or is there a zero year after which the P.A. Calendar started?

MiO states that 101 PA is 2387 AD in our calendar. The Coming of the Rifts happened on Dec 22nd, 2098 AD. I don't know what the current PA year is, so you'll have to find it and then do the maths to get the Cesarean calendar year.

AFAIK there isn't anything mentioning when the PA calendar started being used. My own personal take on it is that the CS created the calendar in order to better control history (and therefore their subjects) and it just gained widespread use in North America from there. IIRC, places like the NGR and Japan still use the AD calendar, so it's not that crazy of an idea.

The CS actually created the PA calendar sometime in the mid-50s PA or so, and then retroactively applied it to the rise of civilization after the Dark Age (so, when Chi-Town/NG/FQ rose as stable powers). Im not sure of the actual year, but it gets mentioned somewhere - i read and re-read sections of the books, and i KNOW i saw that somewhere recently.

As to what year it is now...

If you’re starting at the “RMB” start date - its 103-ish PA. They dont say for sure.

Coalition War Campaign runs this forwards to 105 PA as the release of the new CS Army and start of official hostilities between FQ and the CS and Tolkeen and the CS, though actual troop movements dont start until sometime later.

The actual “war Campaign” runs through 108/early 109 PA, though the FQ front ends before that, IIRC the last 12-18 months of the campaign were just the Siege on Tolkeen (possibly largely because the troops on the FQ front could now be moved to the Tolkeen front, after the original forces comitted got blitzed during the Sorcerors Revenge).

Aftermath sets the date at 109 PA

The Minion War is sometime in 110 PA, and advancing (as more Minion War books come out, possibly, though i dont anticipate the Minion War being a years-long thing, despte Kevin’s inability to realize that it shouldn’t even be a speedbump to the CS).

So you’d have to extrapolate actual dates from the Gregorian dates provided buy MiO or Triax 1.

So let's talk the Minion War.

Personally?

I don't think the CS is equipped to handle this as well as most people seem to think.

I think most people just think, "Well the CS just rolls its massive army out and wham bam thank you ma'am."

I think it's more than that.

First, the CS covers a very large area, and the bulk of its troops have to be there to defend it. Realistically that limits the CS forces.

I think the CS operates more on a basis of "jousting encounters" or short skirmishes rather than full on invasion. Even at Tolkeen it was small size encounters for the most part.

So we need to start looking at how the CS fares in small sized encounters. Removing their (ridiculous) population imbalance.

(Honestly, if I were Kevin, I'd reduce the CS military by 90% to bring things in a realistic direction, but that's just me...)

Given parts of the minion war has been going on since the dark ages post apocalypse its hard to say when you have an event that happens temporally as well as dimensionally.

The biggest issue is going to be if the minion war starts spreading out to the oceans/other continents. The CS and NA forces being proactive and aggressive can help suppress hell pits especially if they are willing to use nukes for ones they can't effectively assault. If you can keep hell pit creation in check in NA the foot hold the demons/devils will have is limited. The big issue is going to be the ones being built in cuba or africa, asia, australia or worse yet the oceans. The big way to lose the minion war is uncontrolled hell pits you don't know about that just keep vomiting out demons/devils unchecked.

So while I think if the NA forces do actually hold together they can keep that continent pretty well handled for the time being but could still potentially get swarmed and overrun by threats coming from outside their sphere of ability to act.

This is really where archie could make or break the minion war. He is the one force we know about on the planet that still has access to the satellite network. So he is the only being that can with a high degree of accuracy say where hell pits are being built. If archie came out of the shadows he could help direct assault forces at hell pits under construction to wipe them out before they can become established.


The other possible way to fend off the minion assault would be a combined forces siege of hell/hades. The hell pits are two way doors so one option is instead of blow them up assault into them. It would be hard and the casualties would be insane but every demon/devil you kill is perma dead. Push the assault into the hells themselves and then go weapons free with the major city killer nukes. Destroy their staging areas and any cities you can find use the biggest/nastiest weapons you can use with wild abandon. There are many hell pits but their origins where they are launching from seems a lot more limited. So if you can't wack all the hell pit moles on the earth side sending a major all out assault to take them out the hell side of the pit may be the more viable way to end the conflict. Demons/devils are not really known for their courage and pissed off humans whipping weapons of mass destruction and killing them by the millions may be enough to convince them that this is way more trouble than it is worth.

[kaid]

One thing that others have mentioned that is weird about the assault on rifts earth is demons/dyvaals biggest advantage is infiltration/corruption of local forces. If they are coming into the open guns blazing the forces of at least north america/europe are way more than capable of fending them off.

If the dyvaals were doing the 3 galaxies attack plan of using local forces to fight the war for you that would make a lot of sense but as others have mentioned the whole hell pit coming in as open combatants really limits them. Instead of being a mobile powerful attack force they are now tied to giant targets that is more dangerous for them to defend. Demons/devils are not known for their moral courage how long their attack forces will stay together defending hell pits once they realize they perma die if they die defending them has got to put some big hitches into their defense force. How willing would somewhat cowardly beings be to throw away immortality to defend some point. I am guessing as soon as a leader dies large factions of their army start spalling off rapidly.

[dreicunan]

It will end as soon as Kevin finishes writing: "The Darkness Beneath: High Adventures in Low Places (that are totally not the Underdark)."

[Shark_Force]

the CS has a fleet of flying transports that can get them honestly pretty much anywhere in the world if they care to bother, with the exception of places already occupied by powerful hostile forces. they can get next to pretty much any hell pit they feel like getting next to. as i recall, triax also has high speed flying transports. a number of other armies will as well.

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

the CS has a fleet of flying transports that can get them honestly pretty much anywhere in the world if they care to bother, with the exception of places already occupied by powerful hostile forces. they can get next to pretty much any hell pit they feel like getting next to. as i recall, triax also has high speed flying transports. a number of other armies will as well.

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

Right. it's stated that the Hell Pits will have some modern defences (manned by moral minions), but not enough that they could conceivably shoot down endless volleys of LRMs. Theyll run out of counter-missiles LONG before the CS runs out of LRMs to bombard them with.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

according to... hmmm... i think it was one of the northern gun books... maybe the black market book? it's in a section talking about why the CS is an economic superpower or something like that. canonically, the CS actually is feeding most of north america.

No, they aren't. Trust me, i went and found the thread where it was brought up, and i debunked it entirely. The only thing that is ever said about it is that the 1) the CS exports a lot of food to human communities that are near their borders as a "goodwill" kind of thing (its actually implied that this is basically just for PR, these places CAN make it on their own but the CS handing out food for free is great PR) and 2) CS Missouri is the "breadbasket" of the CS, which a LOT of people took to mean that somehow the CS was "North America's breadbasket".

At the time, i scoured every book that might have had anything to say about it, and there was no mention of the CS feeding most of North America, and PLENTY of actual text about most places feeding themselves just fine. FQ feeds itself just fine and exports food to the NGR (to help build their stockpiles for the All-Out War they were building up for Pre-Triax 2 - the NGR doesn't rely on food imports, this was strictly a "stocking up for a big war" thing; this is in the FQ WB); Lazlo is completely self sufficient (because "Lazlo" is not only the city but everything for about 100+ miles in most directions that dont butt directly up against another powers' territory - it protects any town that wants to consider itself "part of Lazlo") as is The Relic (this is in WB: Canada); Arzno gets most of its food from the neighboring Clarkdale Confederacy, which is a giant ranching/farm community, the Colorado Baronies are all more than self sufficient (they are all basically giant farms and cattle ranches) that produce way more food than they need and export a lot "back east" - particularly beef. NG buys a lot of it and resells it. (This is in New West). Arzno and Lazlo, in particular, also have access (if needed) to off-world food sources. Merc Town is surrounded by farms (and was, in fact, "founded" when the mercs that the previous "lord" hired to protect his farmland took over because he wouldnt pay them) and self-sufficient. Tolkeen was obviously self sufficient before it was snuffed out (and also had access to off-world sources of food), and the Federation of Magic doesn't have a massive non-farming population it has to support; unlike Tolkeen, its largely small towns and villages that are largely subsistence farming/hunting, making each town relatively self-sufficient, and they have magic to supplement their needs. The few cities in the Federation are actually quite small and could easily be supported by the local communities, and Dunscon and Stormspire in particular have easy accesss to off-world food sources. Ishpeming and Manistique are food *exporters* (In Heroes of Humanity i believe it is mentioned that due to "not enough stockpiles" to feed the 2+ million instant recruits, the CS is actually buying rations from NG and Manistique); they have one of the most safe, ley-line free, and fertile areas in all of NA - the Upper Peninsula of MI; and ready access to commercial fishing as well.

That covers pretty much all of "civilized" North America. The few smaller towns that i didnt mention (New Lazlo, Alexandria, and a few others) might have to buy-in their food, but they have ready access to neighbors with plenty of food to sell.

it doesn't make any sense. in fact, it makes a lot of the opposite of sense. particularly since that explicitly included places like lazlo. but officially, that is actually a thing that is happening. why the CS would sell food to their enemies, and why their enemies would in any way rely on food supplied by someone that would like to kill them, is beyond me, but that is actually a thing that the books tell us is happening.

didn't know all that stuff about the three galaxies though. i'm glad somebody thought that out at least to some extent. i mean, i'm at a loss for why none of the other powers have thought of using magic on at least a limited scale to connect their empires, given that some random chump shifter can open a communication rift to anywhere in a minute or so, and a planetary budget should be large enough that they could afford to hire someone to open rifts for them, but... i'm prepared to chalk that up to "they didn't have any need to do so before the invasions started" (although they really should have wanted it, i mean, it is a ludicrously huge advantage to be able to put your entire fleet where you need it in an instant) and assume that they'll probably be looking at their options more closely in the future, once they start to figure out a response to the invasion.

Yeah, Dimensional Outbreak was by far the best written of the bunch and the most plausible.

As to why the "Big Empires" dont use Magic...

Well, there are only 3 Big Empires.

One most certainly DOES use Magic. (That being the UWW - United Worlds of Warlock). They are the smallest of the three by far, and only really have substantial holdings in one Galaxy (the Anvil). But they make great use of their magic, which has allowed them to defend their territory with a much smaller fleet than the other powers, and defend even their smaller planets quite well with emplaced defenses. (Big giant space stations with effectively unlimited PPE and giant magic laser guns and the ability to open Rifts big enough to fit ships through them to ANY of the other Space stations on the network are pretty awesome).

The second, and arguably biggest by population and volume, is the Transgalactic Empire (TGE); they dont use Magic because Splugorth. Literally that reason. The Kreeghor were a former (possibly even created out of whole cloth by) Splugorth slave race. They distrust magic intensely. So non-magic-use by the TGE is sort of government policy. The only magic that gets used is by the Witches who have a pact with the Dweller Beneath (the NEW SI that they are effectively enslved to, though 99.999% of them dont know that)... and it is stated that the Witches can communicate with each other across vast distances.

The third, being the Consortium of Civilized Worlds... just hasn't seen the need. 95%+ of its worlds are tech-using, low-to-no-magic-use societies. Remember that while PPE is quite rich in the Three Galaxies (comparble to Rifts Earth's universe), that doesn't mean every planet has Ley Lines. Im sure many do, but "many" out of "40-100,000 settled worlds" doesn't have to mean much. So opening large portals and stuff without Nexi can be rather tough (or even impossible). They do have member worlds that use magic or are based on magic, but its very few, and magic isnt illegal, but it just isn't practiced enough that the average citizens gives a crap. And when your only real potential enemy (the TGE) doesn't have magic space-warping ships... you dont really need to worry about it. Remember, the UWW has a super-strict "we are a defensive pact ONLY" thing going on. They DO NOT fight wars of aggression (their own laws dont let them) and even (if only temporarily) expell member worlds which do go on the offensive against others. The only exception was the war that literally founded the UWW, when they went on to destroy the neighboring Splugorth kingdom and liberated its worlds. So, the CCW doesn't really have to worry about magic on a galactic scale. No one ever has, really. Now, if it were ever detailed you may find that at like, super-high levels of government, maybe they do employ magic to get information passed around quickly or something.

But i think the main reason is "we really haven't had the need". And, honestly, even against the Demon Fleets... there still really isn't the need in most cases. The Demon Fleets themselves still use traditional FTL travel. They dont teleport from planet to planet (the fleets themselves; individual and small groups of demons certainly can and do, im sure). Its not really that different from fighting a regular enemy like the TGE in those terms.

The primary difference comes in that, against the TGE or other beligerent, you're dealing with rational actors. And by that i mean.. the TGE isn't going to just come in an slag planets, or start setting up altars and bathing planets in blood for converts. They're going to invade to CONQUER. They need the civilian populations mostly alive, they need the infrastructure mostly intact. So, in those cases, if the TGE invades a CCW system, yeah, the local defense forces will get slagged (or, most likely, will withdraw to the outter system to keep an eye on the TGE while screaming for backup) and the ground invasion will start... and CCW help is a week or four away.. but the TGE will still be there when help does arrive, and they can then duke it out over the system, etc.

Demon Fleet dont care about any of that nonsense. They dont care about infrastructure or capturing planets. I mean, if they can, great. But a planet that they strip of life to power their Soul Barges and ships is just as useful as one with civilians still alive producing war material or whatever.

So thats where the big difference between the Minion War and other interstellar wars comes in.

[Mack]

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

The CS won't use their nukes. (Heroes of Humanity, p64-65)

[Shark_Force]

Yeah, Dimensional Outbreak was by far the best written of the bunch and the most plausible.

As to why the "Big Empires" dont use Magic...

Well, there are only 3 Big Empires.

One most certainly DOES use Magic. (That being the UWW - United Worlds of Warlock). They are the smallest of the three by far, and only really have substantial holdings in one Galaxy (the Anvil). But they make great use of their magic, which has allowed them to defend their territory with a much smaller fleet than the other powers, and defend even their smaller planets quite well with emplaced defenses. (Big giant space stations with effectively unlimited PPE and giant magic laser guns and the ability to open Rifts big enough to fit ships through them to ANY of the other Space stations on the network are pretty awesome).

The second, and arguably biggest by population and volume, is the Transgalactic Empire (TGE); they dont use Magic because Splugorth. Literally that reason. The Kreeghor were a former (possibly even created out of whole cloth by) Splugorth slave race. They distrust magic intensely. So non-magic-use by the TGE is sort of government policy. The only magic that gets used is by the Witches who have a pact with the Dweller Beneath (the NEW SI that they are effectively enslved to, though 99.999% of them dont know that)... and it is stated that the Witches can communicate with each other across vast distances.

The third, being the Consortium of Civilized Worlds... just hasn't seen the need. 95%+ of its worlds are tech-using, low-to-no-magic-use societies. Remember that while PPE is quite rich in the Three Galaxies (comparble to Rifts Earth's universe), that doesn't mean every planet has Ley Lines. Im sure many do, but "many" out of "40-100,000 settled worlds" doesn't have to mean much. So opening large portals and stuff without Nexi can be rather tough (or even impossible). They do have member worlds that use magic or are based on magic, but its very few, and magic isnt illegal, but it just isn't practiced enough that the average citizens gives a crap. And when your only real potential enemy (the TGE) doesn't have magic space-warping ships... you dont really need to worry about it. Remember, the UWW has a super-strict "we are a defensive pact ONLY" thing going on. They DO NOT fight wars of aggression (their own laws dont let them) and even (if only temporarily) expell member worlds which do go on the offensive against others. The only exception was the war that literally founded the UWW, when they went on to destroy the neighboring Splugorth kingdom and liberated its worlds. So, the CCW doesn't really have to worry about magic on a galactic scale. No one ever has, really. Now, if it were ever detailed you may find that at like, super-high levels of government, maybe they do employ magic to get information passed around quickly or something.

But i think the main reason is "we really haven't had the need". And, honestly, even against the Demon Fleets... there still really isn't the need in most cases. The Demon Fleets themselves still use traditional FTL travel. They dont teleport from planet to planet (the fleets themselves; individual and small groups of demons certainly can and do, im sure). Its not really that different from fighting a regular enemy like the TGE in those terms.

The primary difference comes in that, against the TGE or other beligerent, you're dealing with rational actors. And by that i mean.. the TGE isn't going to just come in an slag planets, or start setting up altars and bathing planets in blood for converts. They're going to invade to CONQUER. They need the civilian populations mostly alive, they need the infrastructure mostly intact. So, in those cases, if the TGE invades a CCW system, yeah, the local defense forces will get slagged (or, most likely, will withdraw to the outter system to keep an eye on the TGE while screaming for backup) and the ground invasion will start... and CCW help is a week or four away.. but the TGE will still be there when help does arrive, and they can then duke it out over the system, etc.

Demon Fleet dont care about any of that nonsense. They dont care about infrastructure or capturing planets. I mean, if they can, great. But a planet that they strip of life to power their Soul Barges and ships is just as useful as one with civilians still alive producing war material or whatever.

So thats where the big difference between the Minion War and other interstellar wars comes in.

allow me to rephrase: any random schmuck of a shifter can open a communication rift (not necessarily with perfect success rate, but still, they can). they then have a special ability, if you read the last few paragraphs of their 4th ability, "dimensional travel", you will note that it gives them a special ability with two spells (both of which are part of their starting knowledge, the relevant one of which is "re-open gateway") to do some special things, including changing the size of a portal. alternately, provided they're content to just land on the right planet, they can take a bit less time (but a lot more PPE) and open a portal to a world of their choice using the dimensional portal spell. in either case, they can alter the size of the rift, and while admittedly a level 1 shifter is going to have a hard time getting anything large through, it's guaranteed enough to send a fairly large number of troops through, and for a moderately experienced shifter even some decently-large vehicles (i'd have to get my hands on a phase world book to get a proper idea of how large capital ships are, although i suspect too large... still, they could get a large number of smaller ships through and use them to delay the demon fleet).

now, while shifters are not exactly common, even if it's only one in every million people, that would mean that there are likely to be over several thousand of them on a major CCW planet (presuming major population centers are at least as populated as modern earth, although tbh i'd expect more given they probably have space habitats, nearby terraformed planets within the solar system, etc). the moment it actually becomes *necessary* to get response times down as low as possible, it shouldn't be *that* hard to hire a few. potentially even hundreds of them, and get that response time down from weeks to hours.

now i can certainly understand that by default, the CCW wouldn't have a staff of hundreds of high level shifters on hand to transport major portions of their fleets at a moment's notice on each of their major worlds. as i said, if they simply haven't had the need to do so before, then they wouldn't have it, and that's perfectly reasonable. but i am saying that once they figure out that they do have a need, they should have the resources to get it done in pretty short order (and i would rather suspect that they would have at least a few shifters on retainer simply for the occasional emergency, just not enough to transport a fleet). the TGE, given they are apparently distrustful of magic, might take longer, but still, i'd expect them to eventually suck it up and hire some shifters too (once they figure out that their options are to have all of their smaller colonies conquered and turned against them and eventually have to deal with an unmanageable demonic army, or use magic, i expect they will eventually use magic).

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

The CS won't use their nukes. (Heroes of Humanity, p64-65)

last i heard, they were merely very reluctant to do so, and even more particularly within or near their territory. not sure what changed there. that said, i would expect any reluctance would be greatly diminished if they found out there was an open portal to hell through which they could launch those missiles and let hell deal with the side effects, given that the target would then not only be not in their territory, but not even on earth... i'm fairly certain they'd be more than willing to let hell go from being a non-irradiated wasteland to an irradiated wasteland, especially if it comes with causing massive permanent damage to hell's population. granted, that does rely on them figuring out how the portals work, but conveniently they do have scientists that study dimensional portals... (and if the books say they still wouldn't do that, then it's even more silly; i can understand that they wouldn't want to nuke earth, but nuking hell is a whole different kettle of fish).

still, in the canon universe, they should pretty much never need to. they outnumber the demonic forces. they outgun the demonic forces. they can outmaneuver the demonic forces. they shouldn't ever need to get to the "weapon of last resort" state.

[kaid]

the CS has a fleet of flying transports that can get them honestly pretty much anywhere in the world if they care to bother, with the exception of places already occupied by powerful hostile forces. they can get next to pretty much any hell pit they feel like getting next to. as i recall, triax also has high speed flying transports. a number of other armies will as well.

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

Well the issues in a lot of areas are potential issues with hostiles and dimesional/rift issues. But yes the CS and triax could send at least some transports almost anywhere if they really wanted to but without sat access they would have no way to know where to send the forces until it was too late outside their spheres of influence.

This is why archie stepping out of the shadows could be a huge deal for the minion war as he could give the info to the powers that be so they can actually send forces in a precise way.

[kaid]

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

The CS won't use their nukes. (Heroes of Humanity, p64-65)

This is why potentially assaulting through a hell pit may be a viable tactic. They are worried on rifts earth what the blow back of popping nukes off in all but extinction level threats but if you sent a big enough attack force through one of the hell pits into hades/dyvall you could then potentially use the nukes with wild abandon as anything in that hell spawned dimesion needs to die anyway and even any slaves would welcome a fast painless death compared to the torment they are suffering.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

The CS won't use their nukes. (Heroes of Humanity, p64-65)

This is why potentially assaulting through a hell pit may be a viable tactic. They are worried on rifts earth what the blow back of popping nukes off in all but extinction level threats but if you sent a big enough attack force through one of the hell pits into hades/dyvall you could then potentially use the nukes with wild abandon as anything in that hell spawned dimesion needs to die anyway and even any slaves would welcome a fast painless death compared to the torment they are suffering.

If they will even work there.

Remember that sometimes technology just doesn't work in different dimensions. If Hades is the wrong energy type.... you press the launch button and nothing happens. And you pull the trigger on your zapgun and nothing happens.

I'd have to look and see if tech works in Hades and Dyval. I dont remember.

[The Beast]

Rifts Earth and Hades use the same power matrix thingy, so that wouldn't be a reason why the CS's nukes wouldn't work there.

[Mack]

Another consideration is even if the nuke is detonated on the Hades side, it's still near a Dimensional Portal that's actively connected to an Earth nexus point. The CS is concerned with that massive PPE release affecting the nexus, and any other connected nexus points.

[eliakon]

The answer is "It should be over already"
Seriously.
The UWW, let alone any individual Splugorth say nothing of the combined race have the forces needed to go kick down the doors to hell and remind both sides why demons stay in hell.
When the odds are "your outnumbered a few billion to one" having some greater demons on your side doesn't really mean all that much.

I'm not kidding. Remember that 'some Splugorth' invaded and took over the home dimension of the Pantheon of India.
Yeah, the home of one of the top tier deities in the Megaverse, a big bad so powerful he helps keep the Old Ones bound...
...they just rolled up and kicked them out. Capturing several lesser gods and nearly killing some of the major ones.
After the shenanigans in Dimensional Outbreak Hades and Dyvall should be getting a visit from a few billion Kyndians who would like to have a word with their lords.
Especially when the Spulgorth find out that both of them have stolen Bio-Wizardry and are openly using it, and that they are making rune weapons!
Since canonically they are supposed to wipe out anyone that even gets a whiff of these secrets let alone openly sets up shops selling the services!

[dreicunan]

The answer is "It should be over already"
Seriously.
The UWW, let alone any individual Splugorth say nothing of the combined race have the forces needed to go kick down the doors to hell and remind both sides why demons stay in hell.
When the odds are "your outnumbered a few billion to one" having some greater demons on your side doesn't really mean all that much.

I'm not kidding. Remember that 'some Splugorth' invaded and took over the home dimension of the Pantheon of India.
Yeah, the home of one of the top tier deities in the Megaverse, a big bad so powerful he helps keep the Old Ones bound...
...they just rolled up and kicked them out. Capturing several lesser gods and nearly killing some of the major ones.
After the shenanigans in Dimensional Outbreak Hades and Dyvall should be getting a visit from a few billion Kyndians who would like to have a word with their lords.
Especially when the Spulgorth find out that both of them have stolen Bio-Wizardry and are openly using it, and that they are making rune weapons!
Since canonically they are supposed to wipe out anyone that even gets a whiff of these secrets let alone openly sets up shops selling the services!

After reading this, it occured to me that the minion war as presented would be much more credible if rival Splurgoth had already taken over both Hades and Dyval and then tried to take each other on.

[Shark_Force]

the CS has a fleet of flying transports that can get them honestly pretty much anywhere in the world if they care to bother, with the exception of places already occupied by powerful hostile forces. they can get next to pretty much any hell pit they feel like getting next to. as i recall, triax also has high speed flying transports. a number of other armies will as well.

i'm not expecting there to be much of a list of places the CS couldn't assault, if they care enough to try and know the location. that said, their access to nukes does provide another reason why a relatively immobile enemy with limited technology that is tied down to a specific location representing a legitimate threat feels weird.

Well the issues in a lot of areas are potential issues with hostiles and dimesional/rift issues. But yes the CS and triax could send at least some transports almost anywhere if they really wanted to but without sat access they would have no way to know where to send the forces until it was too late outside their spheres of influence.

This is why archie stepping out of the shadows could be a huge deal for the minion war as he could give the info to the powers that be so they can actually send forces in a precise way.

he probably wouldn't need to reveal himself. we already know that groups of psychics can get warnings about major threats to the world. all he needs to do is circulate rumours that a group of psychics near <hell pit location> have had visions that match a hell pit. in short order, someone else will investigate (probably lazlo), and then pass the information on to the CS (who in spite of their official stance do seem to pay attention to this kind of information from lazlo) or the NGR.

Another consideration is even if the nuke is detonated on the Hades side, it's still near a Dimensional Portal that's actively connected to an Earth nexus point. The CS is concerned with that massive PPE release affecting the nexus, and any other connected nexus points.

so strap them to a long range missile (i mean, honestly, i assumed they already *were* attached to a long range missile, because thousands of miles away is already closer than you might like to be standing relative to a nuclear explosion, but if they aren't i'm sure the CS has some unfathomably large amount of long range missiles they could attach nuclear warheads to) and nuke things further in.

before long, you shouldn't need to invade any hell pits at all; the demons should be the ones wanting them closed.

[Curbludgeon]

With the populations posted, the demonic/dyvalian forces are in no way equipped to handle wars of attrition during a siege on a fixed location. I find it useful to consider infernal forces less of an established power bloc than a particularly virulent infection, which can quickly corrupt a locale, leaving it spoiled for other purposes. Two ways in which to make the Minion War somewhat more of a viable threat on Rifts Earth are to leverage supernatural abilities in the construction of Hell Pits and to emphasize use of the Permanency ritual.

The digging of Hell Pits would really only be left to slaves without supernatural strength in places where infernal control was already absolute. In the course of an invasion the direct action of SN forces would wildly expedite matters, whether through brawn or the earth warlock powers of black Jinn, Gargoyle Mages, and mercenary warlocks. I'll crunch the numbers eventually, but Little Mud Mounds and the Dig spell can both move a lot of dirt, and are low enough P.P.E. cost to be operated non-stop. Similarly, elemental magic would speed up the construction of Blood Pillars, which goes double for any available Stone Masters. The main time sink seems to be an ambiguous matter of just how ornately decorated a given Blood Pillar is, because the bottleneck isn't one of P.P.E..

The Blood Source spell allows any Soulmancer to turn the sacrifice of a human-sized person into 72+(victim's P.P.E.x2) P.P.E.. A fun coincidence is that works out to requiring 13 average people to be sacrificed to meet the construction cost. The migration of the souls required back and forth from crystals is expensive but still easily doable, even before one considers how much P.P.E. is available from most demons, or obviating the use of soul crystals via a Soul Catcher. The ritual to create a Hell Pit isn't much more involved, requiring 8000 P.P.E. and enough blood to surround the Pit's central altar. The already constructed Blood Pillars can provide half of the P.P.E. if they've been installed at a ley line or nexus for 2 days.

Similarly, the Permanency ritual allows for all sorts of hijinks. It explicitly allows for multiple spells to be made permanent simultaneously. It's debatable if Blood Source can be used on the sacrifices' bodies before completing the Permanency ritual. This incentivizes an assembly line where the recycling of one ritual's sacrifices is used to fuel the next recipient's ritual. I'd like to go through Invocation magic and see just what an empowered person would look like and cost, as expressed in murders. If one were to allow WB35 Soulmancers access to DB12's Demon magic (considering how the definitions of what constitutes demon/soul/blood magic are left intentionally ambiguous yet expressly commingled) the spell Wings of the Demon Locust can eliminate concerns about disparate mobility.

[Nekira Sudacne]

I think for this discussion to take place seriously, we have to not only Analyze the demons or dyvals ability in a stand up fight, but their ability to, well, be sneaky like Demons do! This may apply to Deevils more than Hades Demons, but there are demons who have lots of very nice powers fight Gurilla style. Many can turn invisible naturally, many have natural abilities to hide in shadows and wait for prey, some can even take human form or possess humans (if only through the psychic power to do so).

So if you want to ask long the Minion War Lasts, it's not just a matter of how well the CS can muster a million man army to fight them. it's how well they can stop a lot of lesser but very sneaky demons from burning crops, sabotaging mines, and generally ruining supply lines. a combination of magic and tactics and lets not also forget equipment. Demons DO like magic, and greater demons especially can hoard them, and as this is a major war there's no reason to assume Demons won't be using magical weapons who can cast spells or have abilities that give them access to magic or powers they don't ordinarly possess. Not to mention that in the books both sides are using a great deal of TW armor and weapons to give them more of an edge in a stand up fight with technological powers.

[Shark_Force]

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

[HWalsh]

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

Looks like Palladium needs to give the demons some new toys they've not unveiled yet. Something to even the odds.

I know what I'll be giving them.

Some long range "surprise" anti-tech counter measures. Some ways to quickly move to counter the speed advantage. Some way to turn their enemy's weapons back on them.

[Shark_Force]

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

Looks like Palladium needs to give the demons some new toys they've not unveiled yet. Something to even the odds.

I know what I'll be giving them.

Some long range "surprise" anti-tech counter measures. Some ways to quickly move to counter the speed advantage. Some way to turn their enemy's weapons back on them.

sure, but the fact remains that while you can *make* the demons a threat, they are not much of a threat as presented.

[kaid]

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

Looks like Palladium needs to give the demons some new toys they've not unveiled yet. Something to even the odds.

I know what I'll be giving them.

Some long range "surprise" anti-tech counter measures. Some ways to quickly move to counter the speed advantage. Some way to turn their enemy's weapons back on them.

sure, but the fact remains that while you can *make* the demons a threat, they are not much of a threat as presented.

It is one of the odd things that their minions tend to be their bigger threats than the actual demons. Devils are not powerhouses but they have better natural powers for infiltration and corruption. But for some reason both sides are coming at rifts earth gun blazing which seems like a losing proposition.


Like the warlord that was charging into the hivelands because he wants to take control of the xiticix. But given the size of his host and the immense amount of xitix that have a large amount of very long ranged TW rifles I can't see that attempt as ending anything in abject defeat with the stragglers dimensional teleporting out as best they can. I am not even sure they would make any actual dent in the xitix numbers.

[kaid]

One thing though that should be noted is while north america and probably europe and the warlords area is probably going to be hard for demonic footholds to get setup a lot of the world has very few people or at least few people who can talk/coordinate with each other. The big danger overall is foot holds getting setup in the more out of way locations that can just crank away for a long period of time corrupting/dominating local forces.

Also in the sovietski book it sounded like the minion war vs triax was going worse for triax than I think was expected as it sounded like the demons were having luck dominating some of the gargoyle tribes that got fragmented by the big triax push to cut the gargoyle empire in half. The gargoyles in euorpe are a legit threat. They breed fast and are at least willing to use tech weapons. The brodkil would be a danger for the same reason if the demons/devils can seduce the angel of death.

[Nekira Sudacne]

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

If it doesn't matter if demons can be sneaky if they arn't being sneaky, then it equally doesn't matter if humans have nukes if they're not using nukes. If your going to change one side's overall stratagy I can change the other sides stratagy.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

If you can say "But the CS could easially use better tactics", then I can say "Well, the Demons can also use better tactics". So that kind of balances out. Both sides in canon are fighting with their dunce caps on. So it's kind of not correct to say one side will obviously win because they can fight smarter than they're written as, because both sides can fight smarter than they're written as.

[Shark_Force]

the CS dunce cap is not using their nukes... which is fine because all of the other stuff they have is more than sufficient to defeat the invasion (it won't also destroy large numbers of demons permanently, unless they push through the hell portals and take the fight there, but as far as just stopping the invasion, they've got this). and they have further abilities that they are using which will likely enable them to do quite well even if the other side starts trying to use sneakiness.

in contrast, the demons are pretty screwed. they don't have enough force to brute force anything. they're going to have a hell of a time dealing with the coalition states' dog packs and the psi-stalkers scattered all across rifts earth.

basically, the humans could use better tactics to win harder. the demons could use better tactics to lose less badly.

and yes, i'm sure the books *say* that the demon war is going to go badly for triax. just like it says the war is going to go badly for the coalition states for some unfathomable reason. i can't imagine why anyone with access to the relevant information would think that, but it doesn't surprise me at all that the books would say something that silly; obviously, the invasion of rifts earth is supposed to be a big deal, a major threat, etc.

that doesn't mean the actual numbers in question will bear that out. i would expect it to be more like the way the apocalypse demons turned out; a big fuss was made, and ultimately it warrants a paragraph or two in a few books elsewhere that amount to "yeah, the apocalypse demons got stomped, turns out they were only a threat when you assume a group of 6 people are the only ones trying to stop them"). but who knows, maybe this time it'll be a big enough deal that the NGR will actually need to contribute TWO airstrikes.

[dreicunan]

that doesn't mean the actual numbers in question will bear that out. i would expect it to be more like the way the apocalypse demons turned out; a big fuss was made, and ultimately it warrants a paragraph or two in a few books elsewhere that amount to "yeah, the apocalypse demons got stomped, turns out they were only a threat when you assume a group of 6 people are the only ones trying to stop them"). but who knows, maybe this time it'll be a big enough deal that the NGR will actually need to contribute TWO airstrikes.

This made me laugh. It also made me laugh again when I thought about rating threats in Rifts on the basis of how many air strikes the NGR contributes to defeating it.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

I think for this discussion to take place seriously, we have to not only Analyze the demons or dyvals ability in a stand up fight, but their ability to, well, be sneaky like Demons do! This may apply to Deevils more than Hades Demons, but there are demons who have lots of very nice powers fight Gurilla style. Many can turn invisible naturally,

If by "many" you mean... two. Two EXTREMELY weak Demons. For Deevils... one. Also extremely weak.

I'm only counting the "lesser" types or minions/Host, because the Greater types are not in large supply (though more of them are capable of turning invisible in SOME way, mostly through spells).

To be fair to Deevils, though, Deevils and Devilkin can both shape-change into human forms, which is pretty great. Until they get anywhere near a Psychic Sensitive, Dog Boy, or Psi-stalker, in which case they will be pretty much immediately screwed. Dog Boys and Psi-stalkers in particular will spot them on sight. Giant PPE and ISP pools with no way to hide them and "I AM A SUPERNATURAL CREATURE" broadcasting on every conceivable level.

many have natural abilities to hide in shadows and wait for prey,

Unless i just plain-old missed it... nope. NONE of them have an ability to hide in shadows, other than potentially via spell magic, and none of the lesser types have this ability.

some can even take human form or possess humans (if only through the psychic power to do so).

Only a very few of the Greater types can use the psychic power, and the only one with an innate ability can only posses bodies that no longer have a mind.

So if you want to ask long the Minion War Lasts, it's not just a matter of how well the CS can muster a million man army to fight them. it's how well they can stop a lot of lesser but very sneaky demons from burning crops, sabotaging mines, and generally ruining supply lines.

All of those quite easily since patrolling the farmland and protecting civilian infrastructure is the job of the ISS, which makes HEAVY use of Dog Boys. And Skelebots, who can automatically see right through lesser invisibility as they see in all spectrums of light.

a combination of magic and tactics and lets not also forget equipment. Demons DO like magic, and greater demons especially can hoard them, and as this is a major war there's no reason to assume Demons won't be using magical weapons who can cast spells or have abilities that give them access to magic or powers they don't ordinarly possess.

You're correct. You're also forgetting that the books quite explicitly lay out what kind of items you can expect to find.

Not to mention that in the books both sides are using a great deal of TW armor and weapons to give them more of an edge in a stand up fight with technological powers.

Im not sure how you translate "great deal" out of "less than 10%".

One thing though that should be noted is while north america and probably europe and the warlords area is probably going to be hard for demonic footholds to get setup a lot of the world has very few people or at least few people who can talk/coordinate with each other. The big danger overall is foot holds getting setup in the more out of way locations that can just crank away for a long period of time corrupting/dominating local forces.

Except we're told where ALL of the Hell Pits are going to be. None of them are in those far-away locations except for the one in Cuba, which was already totally dominated by Deevils anyway.

Also in the sovietski book it sounded like the minion war vs triax was going worse for triax than I think was expected

Not sure where you got this. I got nothing like that from reading it. If you've got a page number for a source on that, im willing to be wrong here. I just didnt get that from reading it.

as it sounded like the demons were having luck dominating some of the gargoyle tribes that got fragmented by the big triax push to cut the gargoyle empire in half. The gargoyles in euorpe are a legit threat.

No they aren't. Much like the Minion War, this is an area that was just NOT thought through by Kevin, even as far back as WB5. The Gargoyles are dog-slow in the air, cant sneak up on the NGR at all, ever, and even the tech weapons they do use are vastly outranged by almost everything Triax has. The only things that dont outrange them are infantry rifles.

Even just flying the old X-10A, the NGR can literally just fly in circles and kill Gargoyles for years without ever exposing themselves to return fire. WIth the new Luftwaffe? Gargoyles are nothing more than flying targets. Jets launched from the very northern tip of the NGR can reach a Gargoyle invasion force in SIX MINUTES. By the time any large force of Gargoyles gets moving, theyve already been spotted on Radar and the entire Luftwaffe can be attacking them before they get near the NGRs airspace. Those new jets do almost Mach 4.

The Gargoyle "threat" never made sense as an actual "they could invade the NGR and destroy it" - not ever, not once. It DID make sense as an enemy that the NGR just could never wipe out - because going in and digging them out of the mountains would have cost millions of lives. But simple LRM emplacements and border outposts to warn of any impending on-foot invasion make the NGR pretty much completely untouchable by the Gargoyles.

They breed fast and are at least willing to use tech weapons.

They breed in QUANTITY, but not particularly fast. Their young dont mature much faster than humans. But they do breed in large clutches. So, your point stands, just for the wrong reason =P

As for using tech weapons.. only about 25% of the Gurgoyles use them. Gargoyles are pointed out as still disdaining it and tend to not use them, though some do, and they love TW weapons.

The brodkil would be a danger for the same reason if the demons/devils can seduce the angel of death.

The Brodkil are only dangerous because the books say they are. Angel doesn't have enough production to give them all modern weapons, though they do better than the Gargoyles. Against any tech army with a reasonable combined-arms force, Brodkil are fodder. Theyll never live to close the range.

Ironically.. if they WERENT all gung-ho about cybernetics.. theyd be a LOT more dangerous, since the entire race can turn invisible at will.

the ability of the demons to be sneaky is irrelevant if the demon's aren't being sneaky. it is also irrelevant if humanity has the resources to launch a full scale counter-invasion of their foothold and nuke them until they can tell where the demons are by the fact that they glow in the dark. it is also also irrelevant if the humans have an army of powerful psychics that can instantly and reliably detect demons in the first place.

If it doesn't matter if demons can be sneaky if they arn't being sneaky, then it equally doesn't matter if humans have nukes if they're not using nukes. If your going to change one side's overall stratagy I can change the other sides stratagy.

We're not changing the other sides' strategy though. The CS ISN'T fighting stupid. The only thing theyre not doing is using Nukes.

and i'm still gonna put my money on the humans in the official version at least. if a small percentage of the demons are using TW devices or whatever, that isn't going to help them an awful lot, not least because in all likelihood a few million SAMAS with railguns and mini-missiles probably still have the range advantage, and still probably have the mobility advantage, and the CS has a few million SAMAS and also a few million people capable of operating them. and, as noted, a gigantic army of loyal dog boys that can deal with most forms of demonic sneakiness with relative ease.

now, this is not to say that i could not imagine a scenario where rifts earth would struggle with the invasions. i'm just saying that the scenario in the books is not one of them.

If you can say "But the CS could easially use better tactics", then I can say "Well, the Demons can also use better tactics". So that kind of balances out. Both sides in canon are fighting with their dunce caps on. So it's kind of not correct to say one side will obviously win because they can fight smarter than they're written as, because both sides can fight smarter than they're written as.

Actually, we're not saying "But the CS could use better tactics". They're already using good tactics. We're just saying they COULD use Nukes. They dont need to.

We're SHOWN and TOLD how the Demons and Deevils are going to act, and shown and told how the CS and other powers are reacting and the tactics they will use.

The only thing that doesn't jive is Kevin.

He tells us the CS is fighting smart, and then goes on to say "and there are big aerial battles and blah blah"... when his own earlier statements dont support that, and neither do the statistics of anything involved.

All of Rifts can really be summed up by:

Kevin wanted D&D/Palladium Fantasy with Ray-guns and Boomers. But Kevin has no idea how to write around the fact that high technology makes that extremely hard to do without a lot of McGuffin and Setting support that he just did not give it.

The Minion War is a perfect example.

In Kevin's mind, from 30 years of running Fantasy games, he KNOWS that Demons are supposed to be BAD ASS menaces.

Except they aren't. Not against guys that can kill them from dozens of miles away with a single button press.

The entire concept of the Rifts-Earth part of the Minion War is flawed from minute one (and lets not even get Splynncryth involved in the argument) because of this. They would have to have tens to hundreds of millions of demons and deevils (each) to make up for their hillarious weakness against technology to make it even a remotely credible threat.

[kaid]

The gargoyles are a threat in that the NGR has areas they want to/have to control and the gargoyles are big enough and tough enough that if they actually swarm a town or area it would be hard to fully stop them from reaching their target and ripping it to hell. That they actually can return fire often at decent ranges makes them pretty dangerous.

The NGR still managed to break their area of control in two once they started figuring out where to look for hatcheries and how to assault them. That is really the gargoyle secret weapon is that they breed stupidly fast and even the very young quickly become seriously dangerous MDC opponents in short periods of time. If you can find and strike their hatcheries it becomes a lot more possible to end that threat.

This is also one danger of hell pits though get hatcheries setup on the hades side near the portal you could fairly quickly get swamped and have a very hard time penetrating through to get access to the hatcheries to shut the flow down.

[Shark_Force]

again, the demons aren't equipped to deal with a technological force effectively. putting a hell pit in the way is not going to change much, and in fact the demons are probably less well-equipped than the gargoyles to deal with a technological force.

again, i'm quite certain it was *intended* to be something the NGR couldn't easily deal with. but the information we're given doesn't bear that conclusion out.

[Mack]

I haven't read the MiF books (just HoH)... how much does the CS actually know about the demon threat? Do they know (as we readers do) that 'killed' demons reincarnate back at their home, or that killing them at a hell pit prevents this reincarnation? In short: how good is the CS's intel?

[Shark_Force]

I haven't read the MiF books (just HoH)... how much does the CS actually know about the demon threat? Do they know (as we readers do) that 'killed' demons reincarnate back at their home, or that killing them at a hell pit prevents this reincarnation? In short: how good is the CS's intel?

the knowledge that demons are reborn in their home dimension should be moderately common knowledge. lazlo has tons of scholars and they aren't the least bit shy about sharing information. whether or not they've specifically pointed this fact out to anyone in this exact crisis is less certain, but the CS has millions of people who are incentivized to have demon and monster lore, and something that is common across all true demons like that shouldn't be rare information to them. i wouldn't expect to point at a random CS soldier and have them know it, but i'd expect that if you asked a few dozen CS troopers, one or more would know about it.

knowledge that dying in a hell pit makes their death final is probably much more limited; to my knowledge, this is the first time we've really seen hell pits. i'm not certain anyone other than perhaps the demons would know, and maybe not even all of them (i imagine it's much easier to persuade them to go to war when they think they can't be killed, and the higher-ups probably don't trust them much in the first place) although i expect they would come to know relatively quickly once fighting reaches the hell pits. i would not expect the CS to know this until after the war at the earliest.

knowledge that demons can be killed permanently in their home dimension is probably much more widespread, however, since that is a common demon power. and the hell pits are portals, so it is reasonably possible for someone to come up with the idea that they should push the demons back through the portals and then send a bunch of explosives through to permanently kill a bunch, and wind up getting lucky and killing a bunch of demons along the way that are in the hell pits when they die.

and then someone will start up a business selling demon bones to people from the palladium fantasy setting and cause prices to plummet because of a massive over-supply of them it will probably spark a magical golden age where permanent magic effects are common, and thousands of years in the future people will look at the wonders their ancient ancestors were able to achieve and think they've lost their techniques for cheap easy permanent magic, when really what they've lost is a cheap supply of demon bones

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

I haven't read the MiF books (just HoH)... how much does the CS actually know about the demon threat? Do they know (as we readers do) that 'killed' demons reincarnate back at their home, or that killing them at a hell pit prevents this reincarnation? In short: how good is the CS's intel?

IIRC, they know everything Lazlo knows. While they dont publicize it (ever) they DO listen to and heed most things Lazlo has to say about magical threats.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

The gargoyles are a threat in that the NGR has areas they want to/have to control and the gargoyles are big enough and tough enough that if they actually swarm a town or area it would be hard to fully stop them from reaching their target and ripping it to hell.

Only near the border. Remember that the NGR's Army is as big as the CS Army (or bigger), and has a LOT less territory to cover that is all contiguous. If it is anything that is more than an hour's flight time from the border, no amount of Gargoyles will ever make it. They fly stupidly slow compared to the Luftwaffe, which is armed with MRMs and LRMs. Theyll shoot Gargoyles out of the sky by the dozen without ever exposing themselves to return fire.

That they actually can return fire often at decent ranges makes them pretty dangerous.

Except they dont. Go back and read WB5. The tech weapons are primarily used by the Gurgoyles. The Gargoyles feel it is beneath them, by and large. SOME of them do use tech weapons, but its WAY less than the Gurgoyles, though they do apparently love TW wepons. And most of their guns are in the ~2000ft range. Every flying PA or Robot that the NGR has, has weapons that hit out to 4000-2 miles. The new Luftwaffe jets have extremely long range lasers in addition to their missiles.

The NGR still managed to break their area of control in two once they started figuring out where to look for hatcheries and how to assault them. That is really the gargoyle secret weapon is that they breed stupidly fast and even the very young quickly become seriously dangerous MDC opponents in short periods of time. If you can find and strike their hatcheries it becomes a lot more possible to end that threat.

This is also one danger of hell pits though get hatcheries setup on the hades side near the portal you could fairly quickly get swamped and have a very hard time penetrating through to get access to the hatcheries to shut the flow down.

Ill have to go back and read, but Gargoyles and Gurgoyles still take 10+ years to mature. They do hatch in clutches, which is what has kept them as a "credible threat"... but hatcheries near a Hell Pit aren't going to speed up Hades-loyal Gargoyles coming through (and remember, those guys DONT use tech, not even the Gurgoyles). Not that it matters, since Zerstran has said no-way, no-how are they EVER going back to being Hades' minions (or signing on with Dyvaal). The Demons sent to set up a Hell Pit in Europe are going to have to fight not only the NGR, but the full might of the Gargoyle Empire and probably the Brodkil as well, as they have no desire to be minions to anyone - they even broke away from their alliance with the Gargoyles because the gargoyles treated them like minions/second class.

The Demons trying to set up hell pits in Europe are pooched, six ways from sunday.

[HWalsh]

Are people taking the demon plagues into account? They could devastate millions of beings and some spread like widfire.

[Sohisohi]

"How Long Should the Minion War Last..."
Until it resets the population sizes globally, Africa specifically.

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

"How Long Should the Minion War Last..."
Until it resets the population sizes globally, Africa specifically.

Ironically, its the monster kingdom in Africa that is the worst offender.

[shadrak]

I’m actually surprised that the Minion War didnt run more like Wormwood/Mercenaries with possession, witches, and mortal converts being the bulk of demon/deevil forces. Rather than fight for a “Hell Pit”, why not seek to convert small population centers by subverting leadership.

Something more insidious than just a stand up fight...more of a “can I trust my neighbor down the street isn’t in league with the demons?” Or “why are all the goblins in the mountains able to cast spells and take a shot from my Wilks laser pistol without dying?”

[CastorJack]

The Minion War is a tricky thing to play out from a Army v. Army perspective.

Clearly Kevin intended for the scale of the forces and demons involved to be small enough for set piece battles for the players to be involved. A fight in which the players can make a difference. Add in a few uneasy alliances and you can mix and match groups of almost any alignment and character background.

Want CS Troopers with a Dnorr Ley Line Walker, sure we can do that.

But actually fitting this whole mess into Cannon is tricky.

What bothers me is not so much tech users puppy stomping the tiny demon armies, but the fact that many items and weapons from other Minion War books did not make it into MiF. Specifically things like the Soul Eater Demon Transport in Hades DB10. That thing could teleport troops right into enemy field bases, artillery positions, or battle lines. They may not have many of these things (laughably so) but they can transport as many as 1000 demons in a teleporting strike.

Teleportation, Turn to Mist, Metamorphosis Insect or Animal, and the like are not uncommon and could be extremely effective at either closing distance or striking when and where it is least convenient. Though yes, I understand that these powers are mostly restricted to Greater Demons, though many Deevils possess these abilities. Invisibility works by the same process so long as Fire Magic is used to mask thermal readings. While most demons would not understand this, there are certain forces and leaders among the Demons and Deevils that do and could instruct their troops accordingly.

Fighting straight up would be suicide yes, but guerilla tactics, ambushes, and infiltration would be devastating if actually used. But I agree that as presented The Demon Forces are to Small to do more than kill a few isolated units or annoy the enemy.

[Shark_Force]

even guerilla fighting is going to run into some serious problems for the demons.

the CS has hundreds of thousands of psychic sensitives that can instantly detect any supernatural being that comes into a fairly large radius. in fact, they have so many of them that they don't even care to bother splitting them up as much as possible to make sure they have full coverage, because they probably have full coverage even when they group them together into dog packs.

now, there absolutely are tricks to get around that and make guerilla fighting effective. but a lot of those tricks, demons are not particularly good at. few if any are great at teleporting a group of demons in close enough to engage an enemy before they get a long period of warning that demons are in the are. few have the kind of spell knowledge that would let them conceal their auras (by which i mean, none have it by default, but some specific individual demon could theoretically possess that spell knowledge). they're not good at moving so fast that you can't keep track of them well enough, they don't have a lot of magic that is great at disrupting a group or that render groups of enemies ineffective, they don't have a lot of magic that lets them shape the battlefield in their advantage. they generally don't have skills that are good for laying traps or ambushes either.

i could absolutely imagine a group of magical/supernatural beings that would be quite difficult for the CS to deal with, especially in mass quantities. just not the ones that are officially supposed to be giving them a hard time.

[DhAkael]

Seriously; you're going to go by the 'canon' numbers?
Which are absurdly small... like pathetically idiotically 'hack-writer' small.
It is (repeat after me) "The purview of the GM" to make the MEGAVERSAL conflict as large or as small as required & wanted.
Don't feel like altering things? Fine, the Minion war (which, by CANON, has been raging since before the material planes formed) will be wrapped up in a week by the Coalition. "Yay Nazi Americans; you save-ed us!"

Actually want to make things to the scope as given in the flavour text (not the number, the actual story)? Then do your job as a GM and say "Nearly endless hell-spawned fiends.", and have your players DO THEIR JOB, to close the gates to Hades & Dyval through ingenuity and planning as opposed to Doom(tm)'esque tactics of 'Loot & shoot'.

[Shark_Force]

Seriously; you're going to go by the 'canon' numbers?
Which are absurdly small... like pathetically idiotically 'hack-writer' small.
It is (repeat after me) "The purview of the GM" to make the MEGAVERSAL conflict as large or as small as required & wanted.
Don't feel like altering things? Fine, the Minion war (which, by CANON, has been raging since before the material planes formed) will be wrapped up in a week by the Coalition. "Yay Nazi Americans; you save-ed us!"

Actually want to make things to the scope as given in the flavour text (not the number, the actual story)? Then do your job as a GM and say "Nearly endless hell-spawned fiends.", and have your players DO THEIR JOB, to close the gates to Hades & Dyval through ingenuity and planning as opposed to Doom(tm)'esque tactics of 'Loot & shoot'.

i don't believe anyone has so much as implied that you can't change things so that the minion war is a serious threat. that doesn't change the fact that in order to make it a threat, we need to change it. a lot.

[eliakon]

Seriously; you're going to go by the 'canon' numbers?
Which are absurdly small... like pathetically idiotically 'hack-writer' small.
It is (repeat after me) "The purview of the GM" to make the MEGAVERSAL conflict as large or as small as required & wanted.
Don't feel like altering things? Fine, the Minion war (which, by CANON, has been raging since before the material planes formed) will be wrapped up in a week by the Coalition. "Yay Nazi Americans; you save-ed us!"

Um no.
This is not D&D. This is not the Blood War.
The minion war has not been "Raging since before the material planes formed"
Your speaking out of your homebrew there.
1) there are no "material planes"
2) the Minion War, by Canon, started in the Land of the Damned. After the Chaos War. Meaning that at best it is 100,000 years old probably much less since the Garrison would have dealt with it before it fell.
3) No one is saying the CS is going to stop the war. It just looks like the White Knights have set it up so that the CS will get to save North America.

Actually want to make things to the scope as given in the flavour text (not the number, the actual story)? Then do your job as a GM and say "Nearly endless hell-spawned fiends.", and have your players DO THEIR JOB, to close the gates to Hades & Dyval through ingenuity and planning as opposed to Doom(tm)'esque tactics of 'Loot & shoot'.

Sure. We can throw out literally everything published on the Minion War; gods demons; dimensions; History; Cosmology and related topics to date.
This includes (but is not limited to) Conversion Book 2; Dimension Book 2, 7, 10, 11 12; The Entire Palladium Fantasy game line; The entire Tolkeen war game line; WB 23, 24, 35; and Dragons and Gods
We will only have to throw out huge chunks of the rules on magic, OCCs, some core game stats. And only huge swaths of WB 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 18, 19, 20, 36; Book of Magic; Mercenaries; DB 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14 and a few others.
We can then write, from scratch, an entirely new cosmology, megaversal history, creating, from scratch, an entirely new universe where we have created an entirely new netherworld that uses entirely different rules and is regulated totally differently by an entirely different range of gods, intelligences and other "powers that be".
Simple
I can't imagine why everyone isn't leaping up and down at the simplicity of the task and might instead be looking at how best to adjust the canon material?

[DhAkael]

Y'know... I wasn't going to engage.
Dealing with grognard trolls seems like a waste of time... but today?
[censored] it.
Engaging.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do expect some GM's to toss out the rather large garbage fire that is the numbers given in canon Minion Wars materials.
They make no sense for a megaversal setting.
A halfway decent merc company could hammer the miniscule numbers of inferal or daemon given for each hell-lord. Unless of course the pits are opened, in which case *shrug* CS to the rescue (as per norm with PBooks).

As for fan-fic? Isn't that what any RPG really is anyways?

So do NOT try and get esoteric & all scholarly with me mate. Rules lawyers and people who quote pages are treated like badly formed dice in vegas; removed from the table.

Warning: Trolling. Mack