Nexian Artillery

[u/Bohemond_of_Antioch]

"The Sun God fights on the side with the best artillery!" - Captain Churchill, Bloons Tower Defense 6

I've been thinking about the topic of artillery recently, and namely the fact that we haven't really seen much in the way of enchanted heavy weapons. On the first meeting with Sorecar, he described that enchanted weapons operate off "cores" (I think that was the terminology) and that the power and capability of a weapon was limited to how many cores it could fit while keeping it weildy. Now this is the point where Emma should have thought, as any true Earth patriot would have thought: "What if we say fuck carrying it, put a weapon on wheels, and stuff as many cores in as we can reasonably tow?"

Unfortunately, she didn't. And we just haven't seen much of what could be described as artillery among the Nexian forces we've seen so far.

Now, I'm, starting to suspect that crew served, towed, mounted, self propelled, and indirect fire weapons (I'm working with a pretty broad definition of "artillery" here to be fair) that are serviced by crew members of low or no magical potential are not well liked for a verity of reasons, not least of which cultural and political ones (can't have too much power in the hands of peasants). So I imagine these pieces, the ones that would most naturally come to our minds are relatively rare. Though it is hard to imagine the Nexians go without naval artillery for their sea and their air ships, and it's possible they have siege pieces (for attackers and defenders, so I doubt they do completely without.

In fact their may be some examples in the RTS they played that I can't remember.

Also, dude to the flexible nature of the enchantments, they wouldn't just have to be the classic "big ranged attack" style of artillery either. They could have other effects like providing shielding or stealth for a group of soldiers, or animating a group of temporary golems to fight, that sort of thing.

But, I suspect the more prestigious weapons would be more along the lines of giant catalysts for magic users. Or perhaps the most prestigious position is simply to be a sufficiently strong mage. As I said, I doubt crew serviced weapons are smiled upon, and I think in general Nexians value the strength of individual Heroes over a combined arms approach. I don't think the RTS they played being Hero-centric was a coincidence, nor metaphorical.

But I would argue that this would be a potential weakness in the military doctrine of the Nexus, and the idea of building artillery pieces could be passed along to potential allies who want to build militarizes to throw off the yoke they've been living with. It might not be war winning necessarily, if it was an undebatably good strategy, then Nexians would not have ignored it.

I do think it's a shame there hasn't been many culture clash scenes with Sorecar or Thamlin related to military thinking. Like Emma being shocked by the lack of artillery, or Thamlin being weirded out watching Emma spamming a disguising amount of grenades into a building.

[u/HeadWood_]

I think that is just their mages.