As far as the "how did we get there?" question, I'm only analyzing attacking a Dragaeran Empire, not the Dragaeran *planet*. I.e. I thought we were discussing a hypothetical high-tech Easterner civilization, and how it would fare against "Elder Sorcery," as Majikjon put it. My thought was that the Easterner civilization has a lot of advantages that are not immediately obvious. You ask what the purported military objectives are. I'm not sure. What are Sethra the Younger's purported military objectives? It appears to involve a lot of killing people and breaking stuff: probably establishing military credibility in the face of aggression by the other side, or else because you want something like the Pepperfields. Destroying the Empire itself is probably outside the scope of our objectives, but it hasn't really been well-defined what we're doing. "Several zillion hugely unwarranted assumptions," eh? Some of those assumptions were warranted by the context of the discussion; others may be genuine oversights, which I would be pleased to have you point out. I noted several advantages on the Easterner side which have nothing to do with storing energy in high-density packages. (Radio, for instance, doesn't require powerful batteries. You saw how useful communication systems were in /Sethra Lavode/.) Furthermore, all we actually know is that spell sticks were abandoned because somebody figured out how to make them all go off at once; whether that is because they were high-density energy packages or because they were delayed spells is unknown. The approaches I outlined were in fact designed to test whether Dragaerans *can* make tanks go "boom" from two miles away by igniting their ammunition. If Dragaerans are in fact capable of catalyzing arbitrary high-energy packages from long distances, the war is lost anyway, because they can just melt your flesh by igniting your *bodily* energy. (BTW, the human body produces more heat than the sun, cubic inch for cubic inch. Of course there's an awful lot of sun.) So basically, we don't know what would happen if Dragaerans went up against high-altitude bombers, and I'd be an idiot not to try it assuming that I've developed those bombers already for use against the USSR-equivalent of the period. (Again, we come back to not knowing exactly the circumstances of the contact.) In response to your #2: I have other high-tech advantages which are reliant on high-density energy storage, but behind the front lines (in my manufacturing base, for instance). If Dragaerans can make them go *kaboom* at an arbitrary distance, yes, my situation becomes a lot uglier. In that case there's not much point in analyzing tactics, because strategically I've lost before the war even begins. I have no way to defend my homeland, period. In response to #3: When discussing Sethra's tactics, I was thinking more particularly of /Sethra Lavode/, where the stakes were a lot higher than in /Dragon/. We still didn't see her destroying armies with sorcery. In fact, her tactics were still very much as in /Dragon/, in spite of the fact that the enemy had no access to sorcery at all. And I suppose I should leave discussion at that. ~Max Wilson -- Be pretty if you are, Be witty if you can, But be cheerful if it kills you.