Hellfire: From Bad to Worse
It’s the year 2950 and we’re going to need a bigger army.
And that bigger army is going to need some bigger tanks.
The city of Damascus has been taken, after some vicious fighting, by our neighbor to the southeast, the Tillian Republic. We know they mean to take the city of Dion on the sea, which would open their markets to the rest of the planet and cost us the transport income that we earn from controlling the two best rivers in the north. To prevent that, we can recruit a sizable army of our own. The early years of peace left me with a quarter of a million spacebucks that I’ve been husbanding for just such an event. Our local boys can spin up three mechanized battalions and one company of heavy tanks, the latter of which should match those of the Tillians. To their credit, the remaining Imperial forces in-country have not yet run back home – over time individual companies will fade away, but we’ve got the first-gen jets and artillery on our side, plus a forgotten asset. We forgot to pay that mercenary company to do nothing last year, and they did it anyway. This year we’ll pay them to help with the liberation of Damascus.
But first, we need to roll for invasions in the year 2950, and we get a whopping five of them. Two turn out to be the Weallians, who are still licking their wounds after finding the young kingdom a tougher bunch than they thought. The Tillian number comes up, and we decide they must be reinforcing their gains from last year. The forces we roll for them go right into the Damascene cauldron, which also still holds the militia forces. They aren’t great, but that’s four companies of soldiers we need to account for. Hence the big mobilization.
Late in the year, the Popular Front, a near-peer nation to the southwest, makes a play for the city of Pella. One of the mini-games Jim includes in the campaign is the option to resolve city-taking operations with a simple die roll. You can set tax rates in your cities to generate more revenue, but this makes it much more likely for cities to immediately surrender to the invading barbarians. Even with just a 10% chance thanks to my very reasonable tithes, the city elders go full Toledo and open the gates on my merchant city. So now we’ve got two cities to liberate this year and that’s going to be a real problem.
The good news is that the third invasion would be the Weallians if we hadn’t pantsed them two years ago. They are still plotting their little plots and likely to hit us hard next year, but that’s a problem for later.
The problem for this year is a pair of forces from the Gray Horde, nomadic people with obsolete weapons, but boy howdy are there a lot of them. If they want to raid our cities, we are going to be too distracted to do much to stop them. To our surprise, they are willing to work for booze. Okay, so from a campaign perspective the costs for one company are the same as for any other, but Jim describes these guys as totally-not-Mongols, so booze it is. They’re going to show up late in the year, the same as the Popular Front, so we can resolve the Damascus front first. Then any survivors who aren’t busy rebuilding the river city can accompany the Gray Horde on a slow journey to the west.
Our boys will have a couple of months to recover and the Popular Front very little time to reinforce their newly taken city. They Gray Horde alone outnumbers them by 3:2, and with our combined arms we should be able to retake the city. Regardless of the outcome, this event will still cost us the income from Pella for the year, and the same goes for income from Damascus.
That rainy day fund is drying up faster than expected. Let’s hope the fights go well, and the storms stop blowing.