I am now imagining a situation where an underground war of dwarven sappers has been going on for so long that a group of adventurers are able to conquer the city when they realise that nobody is actually defending the walls anymore.
all the counter mining. close combat. the tank size drills filled with a ten man squad rumbling under the battle field. praying their going the right direction and don't fall into undiscovered caverns or finding one that has no breathable air, creatures and elementals attacking the soldiers all the while your still on a time schedule because the surface units need you to break through. kind of reminds me of Gears of War 2.
When it comes to dwarven engineering specifically, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that yes, they can do it faster and better than humans can, but *they still have to do it*. Your wall is still forcing the enemy to expend time and resources that they otherwise wouldn't have to. It does affect the cost vs benefit equation of building walls, but there are almost certainly still going to be situations where the cost is still worth it.
Also walls aren't built just against invading armies, but also to keep away illegal immigrants and other undesirables. I can see high elves building walled off cities for themselves even if the walls were simple to reduce to dust with magic during wartime.
it also doesnt take into account counter mining operations as seen throughut history. undermining is not a hard counter, it simply opens up a new front
Not sure if this is sarcasm, but if you can't get in through a wall you also can't get out through that wall. Inevitably if you make it too difficult to enter you make it near impossible to escape should you need to bail in a hurry.
Perhaps he was confusing walls and doors. A common mistake, judging by the frequency of signs on doors which state they are to remain closed at all times on account of being accidentally placed where walls were intended to go.
To a conventional army, the walls are a barrier. They can be crossed, but only with great effort. To an airborne dragon, the walls are a boundary marker. They can be crossed as easily as any other piece of land, but doing so without permission draws attack. To sapping dwarves, the walls are a target. They are what the surface-dwellers hired you to bring down.
you forgot other reasons for walled towns: effective taxation of and enforcing tarriffs on foreigners, thus defending against some forms of economical warfare; information about who comes and who goes; security theatre and status symbol, ...
This is what I was going to mention. In a medieval world where commerce and trade occurs, walls are extremely important for collecting taxes. While divination magic does exist I cannot imagine the material cost and or training to “big brother” the people would be possible.
Walls aren't just defense, they're also attack: you have a height advantage over the other army. It's easier to see them and launch a ranged attack. Compared to being on the ground, walls are useful, even if they are imperfect. It can be just a well connected chain of watchtowers and archers/cannons, that also serves some protective functions. In a magical world, they can have their own magic. In my world, an example of a wall meant to keep people in, intead of out (a prison yard), uses both heat and shock magic to prevent people from climbing over the wall.
Even thinking with the possibly very "broken" DnD spells, a lot of the spells require usage on a spot or area that you can see. So at the very least, a chain of towers connected by walkways, coupled with fitting them all with carefully designed visual cover, would both give you a very good view over the area to be much more effective at aiming your spells while also protecting your side from a lot of the more direct spell threats. Especially since most magic users would definitely be utilising the lower level spells with much less range and much fewer options for not seeing where to cast.
@@houndofculann1793 Yeah get a few dozen wizard spires along the wall and 90% of your issues are solved. Just gotta cough up the money needed to keep the wizards on staff.
And depending on how they're constructed, a damm good force multiplier in general. Oftentimes, a densely built up city is the wall. During WW2, a dozon troops occuping a castle held off continuous assaults. And the Siege of Budapest took so long, and tied up so many troops, that Stalin's schedule got completely derailed
I'm very confident that any fantasy setting where the primary form of movement isn't flying - would still have walls. Just because Dragons or Harpies or mages with levitation exist - doesn't change the fact the walls are still needed. Now - if in our fantasy setting there are ONLY drqagons, or ONLY harpies or levitation is a spell that every human can do - yeah now the walls would likely be too much effort for too little gain. But assuming more standard fantasy setting, with majority of the sentient beings walking on foot - walls are needed.
Yep, it's forgetting that a locks main purpose is to keep honest men honest, next is to keep out the unskilled. Walls reduce the threat profile faced, with walls more focus can be put on AA
if you think about this it’s a great reason for dnd-style fantasy worlds to have so many underground passages that keep getting infested with monsters. they’re remnants from old trenches and sapper tunnels that never got filled in, or better yet, they’re bunkers meant to keep people safe from dragon attacks! maybe the local lord has been skimping on infrastructure maintenance and now all the dragon-bomb shelters have goblins.
I have to disagree with most historical sieges failing, and Helm's Deep is actually a pretty good analogy for this. Because it's most sieges you read about in casual/surface level history books that fail, while most of the ones you don't hear about succeed. Thing is, Helm's Deep was never the target of the war, the main battle everyone wanted to reinforce was at Minas Tirith. It's that urgency that forced Saruman to storm the walls pretty much immediately. And you see this sort of thing repeated a lot in history, but you only find out about this if you really dig down to the specific details of a campaign. As an example, there was a march by the Bohemian king to relieve the siege of Buda, and on the march there, he conquered several castles (IIRC about a dozen) as he went by, simply because he didn't want them to be a pain in his rear. These were small fortress castles meant to slow down an enemy, and they would have done a much better job is Hungary at the time wasn't so badly fractured that half of them surrendered without a fight. (Source for learning this: a biography of a noble who was directly involved) Another example is the Mongol invasion of Hungary, after the main battle at Mohi was over, the Mongols had to fight a huge number of siege battles (close to one hundred, estimated from the number of destroyed fortifications), most of which they won. Some Danubian fortresses held off until winter when the river froze and the Mongols could cross over and encircle them, and a few fortresses in high hills held off as well, but most of the flatlands castles were conquered and burned to the ground. (Source for learning this: a PhD thesis on defensive strategy of late Arpad kings) Even then, if there is a major siege and the besieged city surrenders after two months of fighting, do we count it as a successful siege? If we do then sieges are closer to 50/50 odds, if we do not... then yeah, most sieges that see you storming the walls fail - you have to be pressed for time or desperate to storm the walls instead of just waiting, so the odds aren't in your favor to begin with.
Main character of The Wheel of Time books, after reintroducing teleportation to the setting and helping found a military group of people who are living artillery pieces, has a moment where he's looking up at the most famous fortress in the world and thinking about how it stood for centuries, and he rendered it meaningless in months. In Final Fantasy XIV, the Severe and Reclusive theocracy of elves and such that is forever fighting dragons has massive spikes on their beautiful, equally massive gothic buildings and walls. As a friend noted, they aren't decoration: they're giant pigeon spikes, to keep dragons from perching atop them. If you want a really fun, if slightly irreverent, look into how sieges can go from someone else with a UK accent, Lazerpig's video on Black Agnes is absolute gold.
In regards to Saruman and Helms deep, Bret Deveraux at A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry(ACOUP) has a great series of post going over the battle of helm's deep, and Saruman makes mistakes because he is in haste to defeat Rohan, and critically isn't a good military commander. But likewise Theodan is also under time constraints, due to the bigger battle being prepared for in Gondor.
Furthermore he has a good set of posts on the Development of cities. And one of the things he brings up is that even within medieval cities there can be quite a lot of farming and livestock going on within the town, even with historical maps showing how cities included this. For the farmer, being within the walls is good sure maybe not as large as a field, but less of a worry of wolves or other monsters rampaging through his fields, as well as quicker access to markets. Since in a per-modern society food spoilage is a thing to be concerned about, thus being within the city allows one to sell say your carrots, potatoes, or cabbages at market without them spoiling as fast if it say takes you a days travel to get there. Maps of historical cities like Lyon, Exeter, Paris and more show it. This same series also points out that we typically imagine the castle or city on an empty grassland for some reason when natural envirornment plays a major role. Being built next to a river, hilltop, mountains, sea, etc. all impact the nature of the settlement and its design and its defensises, and it might not be the most important one. If a port town isn't blockaded then your attempts to siege and wait them out are kind of useless.
@@herkles5416 A great series. It also points out that the battle in the books goes quite differently to how it goes in the movie. For one, there's no civilians there, but rather 1,000 Rohan cavalry, a formidable force that can't be allowed to remain in place. This forces Saruman to invest Helm's _Gate_ (Helm's Deep is the name of the valley behind the fortification, not the fortification itself. That's Helm's Gate) ASAP, and given said time constraints, he has to take it pretty much at once (both because of time constraints, and because there's a number of experienced Rohan soldiers out there, being gather up by Gandalf and Erkenbrand), meaning it has to be taken by assault, rather than by siege.
You don't need covered walkways or streets to protect from the air. This is not a novel problem. You need air raid shelters like London in the Battle of Britain. Also, you need local air superiority. Waterdeep has griffon-rider mages and colossi to deny the air to enemies
Walls work, 'nuff said. If nothing else it will stop a horde of orcs, considering the likelyhood of that happening as opposed to a dragon burning down an entire city for a lark, I'd say it's a worthwhile investment.
A walled fortification is a force multiplier for defense. It's not meant to be indestructible but it forces the enemy to waste time and resources in reducing it. Very few human enemies, mostly nomadic ones, could bypass fortified strongpoints with little fear that the lines of communication and resupply would be cut off by a force in the fortification. Even in our world Paris was besieged in 1870 although there were proto-machine guns in limited use and giant artillery that could smash walls easily. Walls match a pre-industrial level of technology very well and unless magic and flying creatures were the norm rather than the exception, walls would still be the primary defensive structure. Also, Nets spread between the roofs of buildings could deter many airborne attacks.
Even in the modern world, besieging a city is just incredibly costly. Sure you can flatten a city, but if Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar, and Mariupol were of any indication, you just gave the defenders more fortifications. That you have to go in and clear out. Also you've just run out of thermobarics.
Heck - historically the great wall of china was used during the world war, with machine gunners on top. Granted the Great Wall of China actually has a terrible track record of actually stopping any invasions - but it was actively used as a vital defense point in near modern technology war. With planes, with mortars, tanks
The elven multi-generational stealth siege idea filled me with a dread I’ve never felt from fantasy. Imagine living your life in a great city, you’re safe, you’re prospering. And then for seemingly no reason at all, things just start to gradually get worse. It starts with trade issues here and there, then agricultural starts to fail, money doesn’t flow like it used to. You go from a modest, comfortable life to working day and night to put food on the table, and there are people who have it even worse than you. You don’t even have any certainty about who to blame, there’s rampant speculation and accusations being thrown around, life just becomes miserable for apparently no reason. You have hope that any day now, things will turn around, it’s just been a long string of bad luck for the city. But without even knowing, there’s an invisible colonial force that is choking you slowly, has no intention of stopping, and probably won’t even remember your society once they’ve finally starved you out. Your watched your entire life and everyone you love descend into suffering, and to them it was just a busy summer. I understand elf hate now.
With all modern technology, with plains and cyber warfare, walls are still useful. So in fantasy and with magic and even dragons, there's no reason walls will not be built.
In a fantasy world, the walls aren't there to hold back an army Its to keep the monsters out Its also why sieges wouldn't work. Just gonna attract more monsters if you just sit your ass around the a wall And thats assuming its not surrounded by forest, meaning not only do you need to guard against striking parties coming out of the city and roaming monsters, but also the fey poking their heads up to fuck with you
It was historically rare for the walls to actually be stormed. Not saying it didn't happen, but vaaaaaast majority of sieges, were a lot of sitting outside hoping the defenders run out of food and surrender without fighting. A good fortress could defend quite well in actual combat even with as little as 50 soldiers manning it - of course they were doomed to fall, but they would inflict HEAVY casualties
If flyers are avilable in a setting, then the one definitely working way to deal with them is to have your own. Airforce vs. Airforce is how most of Airforce casualties were inflicted before guided weaponry was invented. If a dragon or gryphon or rutting pegasus is a threat that is on the table, then towns and cities would hire and keep up an airforce of their own to deal with them. If there is a race that lives a thousand or so years, then they gonna be the heroes, the lords, kings, demigods, gods and pantokrators of a given setting, simply because they can outlive their competitors, and keep their experience and knowledge whilst others need to tech every new generation. This means if an elven army decides to besiege a city in the long term, then the very likely veteran marshall of that place would notice the signs of said elongated siege, and do countermeasures. If dwarven sappers are so formidable that every army would employ them, then so would every town and city that can afford even just one such creature. Counter-tunneling is a thing, and if dwarves have the inherent ability to notice if a tunnel is about to collapse, then they can also easily find each other's tunnels and engage in dwarven tunnel fighting. If dwarven siege engineers are so formidable that all trebuchets, siege towers and battering rams would be built by them, then you bet your long shank towns and cities will be hiring their own dwarven engineers to build the most impressive and ahistorical battlements and star forts and multi-layered overseeing defenses that would make the opponent's siege enginners work hard for their salt. TLDR.; Fire beats fire. If having thing is OP, then both sides would fight tooth and nail to have it, then it would be the battle between the OP things that decide history. Case and point: Gunpowder
You may want to read up on German aa towers which made entire ww2 bomber formations think twice about flying into their effective gun range. The Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward trailer give you a glimpse how such an installation fights of a swarm of dragons in a fantasy setting.
I imagine the reason wizards in Harry Potter use brooms is because they used them to fight dragons rather than just transportation. In my own fantasy story, not only are some species of dragons trained like attack dogs to fight off dragons, but early mages domesticated griffins and pegasi as mounts so they could attack from the sky as well. The best tactic I can imagine for fighting a dragon is first grounding it by taking out its wings. After that, it would probably be treated the same way tanks were dealt with in past wars. Idk really know tbh.
@@Alpha_Digamma Thank you, I'm a history buff though, and pretty well versed in the success rate of such AA installations. Case and point: Allied bombing campaign started after dealing with the luftwaffe, not before dealing with the AA guns.
@@kovi567 I think if I were going to be fighting airborne enemies using ground based artillery, the best way to do it would be to use ballistae with weak bolts to them, ones unlikely to cause much damage, but that have explosive pots on them. You could ideally time these to explode right where the enemy is (ie at 500ft if that's where the enemy is at), but short of that, you could still time them to explode well before hitting the ground. In this way, they would arc up, and maybe hit the target and explode, or maybe explode near them and do some damage there, but anything that then fell to the ground would be relatively light damage, equivalent to small hail or less, so you wouldn't have to worry about friendly fire.
In my books, I (partially) address the issue of flying creatures with watchspires on walls, loaded with cannons; as well as using floating islands as sentry points/deterrents above cities. Walls were critical earlier in the world's history when monsters and bandits were a more prevalent danger, and defenses became more lax as these went away. There are also walls that box in The Lost Lands, where monsters predominantly live. There, they don't have to worry about firing into their own territory if they see a flier come too close. But now that monsters and other magical threats are returning in the industrialized world, people have to adjust. Warding magic plays a role as well, though that will have a deeper dive later on.
The first example of a fantasy setting where the "walled city" is still relevant despite the high fantasy setting that comes to my mind is the video game Skies of Arcadia. The empire that functions as the main antagonist in that game is geographically a walled city despite the fact that the entire game revolves around sky pirates sailing from one floating earthberg island to another in airships. If the fantasy setting is high enough, then the walls of the walled city can be scaled up with the fantasy level. If you're sticking with classic fantasy, you can always defend a walled city with its own airforce. Wyvern, Pegasus, or Griffon mounted sky knights. Maybe one or two dukes or barons are literally dragons that just prefer to live in the city and serve their community by defending the skies and walls. Maybe the "walled city" doesn't literally have a wall. Maybe it's like Sigil, and it's floating half a mile above the ground or ocean. Maybe the city is an airship or space/sky station. Maybe the world is based on the movie Mortal Engines, and each city is a mobile mega vehicle with the "walls" of the biggest walled cities being the tank treads at the base of the city. In the video game Final Fantasy XII, there are airships that go almost anywhere, but there are also regions called "Jagds," where the ambient magic or whatnot just prevents most if not all airships from functioning. In fact, the opening cuts scenes of that game depict a battle on the walls of a walled city that is holding its own against an airship armada until an enemy unit sneaks into the wizard tower where the mages are maintaining the magic forcefield over the city and kills the mages. There are countless stories where a wall is still an important defensive feature despite magic and flying monsters. Walls are easier to guard and maintain than standing military units of wizards, and walls are always going to be the best defense against whatever critters live in the woods just outside the walls.
Your point about the possible timescales of elven sieges is great but I think it ignores the obvious counter humans have numbers and attrition . The elves simply cannot afford to lose anywhere near the amount of people a human one could and if the siege is generations long then the human army effectively regenerates. When under siege therefore the best strategy for humans would be to launch constant sallying actions or mount constant patrols, because even if the elves cause disproportionate casualties they might still lose in the long run. Also I find it hard to believe that the elves could remain as undetected as you suggest(without the heavy use of magic). Historically even the best rained guerrilla forces and special forces teams are fairly easily detected by local populations and Guerrilla operations typically only succeed with their help. This could lead to an interesting scenario where an elven siege is essentially a decades long hearts and minds campaign/guerrilla war between the elves and the city lords.
Most likely scenario given a long enough timeframe would be mixed empires where elves are lords while humans provide the manpower. Such a mixed empire is better than either pure elvish or pure human empire
@@TonttuTorvinen That could be a very successful model and in my own world there is a major empire with a Elf aristocracy and a human peasantry. However I could also image massive cultural differences that might make integration more trouble than it is worth. For instance I can image a culture that remembers grudges and alliances from thousands of years ago, might struggle to get along with one whose alliances and rivalries can massively change in just a few decades.
@locky7443 historically the cultural differences between high nobles and peasants was quite big. There would still be human nobles as nobles are warrior class.
@@TonttuTorvinen If you are referring to my world then it is not just the high nobles that are elves. Elves make up most of the professional warriors including the knights, calvary, mages and elite troops of the army. Humans on the other hand tend to be peasants, freedmen or yeoman and are usually part time or levied rather then professional soldiers. Also worth mentioning that the society is not a conventional feudal system, with rank being largely determined by ones magical abilities. Instead of houses or clans there are schools of magic that govern over their territory (though schools will often typically be controlled by a single family). A bit like murin novels if you have ever read them.
In my main fantasy world, I have a species called troglodytes who often come into conflict with the neighbouring humans. Trogs live underground (hence the name), but have to go to the surfance to acquire resources to live on. They became so effective at tunnelling under fortress walls that the humans abandoned the idea of walls. Their fortresses consist of a keep with the second floor overhanging the main floor with murder holes. They also feature a heavily-reinforced basement to make it hard for the trogs to tunnel into the keep, and they have underground listening stations to give advance warning of enemy tunnelers coming their way.
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With Teleportation you can have anti-teleportation wards in all bigger cities. Maybe not small villages, but teleporting into a city that is protected by magic should be either impossible or hard, unless you find a workaround, like portals, but portals need to be build inside somehow. Even such small thing as teleportation circles require some work to be done - ergo - a prior infiltration of the city.
The walls vs flying enemies subject i have certainly taken your perspective before, but the more I think about it I keep coming up with the fact that though the airborne target is more manueverable, it also has no cover, something that is very important against a high volume of fire. You did vring up the point of friendly fire with said arrows hitting allies, but ultimately I think it comes down to whether or not the defenders see the flying creature before or after it is above the city. If its before no need to worry, just fire as many arrows as possible. If its after, take cover under a roof or in a cellar. This video certainly got my brain thinking about it, and I think ultimately a wall is just one method to stop or delay an enemy. Because you are right, not every type of wall is good for every situation. So we should expand our defenses from just the wall, to include things like a series of chest high fences to delay an enemy approaching and give the locals a chance to notice someone across a field. We could also have trenches, if walls are too expensive, especially with the dnd spell mold earth. I love the idea of elven sieges take ages. It could be quite funny as a human settlement. 'Elves show up in armor, setup a trade outpost against your government. They claim its a siege, but treat you well enough and basically pay you, your friends and family to move in with them. Till eventually no one wants to stay. Only getting violent if someone shows up telling them to leave. The siege only ending after the great grand sons/daughters of the humans are fully grown, basically having a new settlement.' XD
When I think about it, walls are pretty effective against flying enemies. They can fly super high up and drop things on you, but how effective is that actually? You can probably shoot far larger objects into a city using a trebuchet, than you can magically floating it over the city. They would be useful for scouting, but they don't have much siege potential by themselves unless they are willing to take fire and attempt to land.
@@brianhowe201 Well there is likely a height limit, as people are not flying up in space(probably). Also what is your accuracy of hitting individual people at that height? And how much can you carry when flying? Obviously flying is a massive advantage, but there is other factors involved. Potentially the advantage could be negated just by going inside. So it depends.
The thing with walls is that they hold out a huge number of different creatures, like you said, for long enough. And you can combine them with other methods. i.e. detecting and/or destroying siege tunnels. A magic barrier that stops an Army may be possible. But maybe it's way easier to build a wall and Protect the room above with a magic shield that only hinders magic in passing through. In many fantasy worlds dragons are mighty and dangerous. but they are masters of their own and most of them would have no interest to risk their life against an Army in a fortified place. An army that may have spellcasters and specialists for Killing Dragons.
2:04 you have normal fantasy+D&D, then you have Warhammer fantasy where if leave your highly fortified town chances are that you'll have to fight for your life against a pack of beastmen. And yeah, Walls are great at keeping out intermediate threats like beastmen.
To be fair, airborne attackers that lack range (griffon riders, etc.) are vulnerable to wall-based archers, and in confined spaces (e.g. small cities) those projectiles are coming from multiple directions. Now "bombers" are effective (as demonstrated irl), but if there are air-based attackers then the first thing any settlement will do is build bomb shelters they can retreat to - again, as we did irl. So while dragons may be the bane of any city, smaller creatures will struggle to be any more effective than a catapult. And for the elven argument, I do think you make a strong case. However, the problem with such large-scale sieges is that you need a large-scale army to do it. The farther you are from the wall, the more soldiers you'll need to patrol it, and the thinner your lines will be. If the goal is to prevent messengers from escaping, all the defender needs to do is mount a small cavalry charge and beeline down the road - the elves won't be able to react in time to stop them. And while elves are long-lived, they also tend to not be as populous as humans, so mustering such a large army would be difficult. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think the eternal arms race would prevent some of the situations you've presented from being as catastrophic as they seem. We're good at killing each other, but we're also good at staying alive lol. I got nothing for dwarves, other than a river-fed moat with deep cisterns scattered around the city - flood the dwarves out of their tunnels if they breach them, or force them in certain directions. Either way buys you time. Could be an interesting story, now that I think of it.
Normally, flying intelligent creatures aren't depicted as common. At least when it isn't something already OP like demons. And just as the longer lived races would have more patience for sieges, they may be more cautious with their own lives, making storming castles rarer, but also meaning they'd be more cautious (especially against shorter lived races) of counterattack while they are parked around a fortress.
Years ago I found myself frustrated with depictions of fantasy worlds where powerful magical projectiles are at least somewhat common but military architecture still looks exactly the same as medieval castles in our world. I wanted to see worlds where fortifications at least tried to account for this sort of magic. And then it occurred to me to ask - in our world, how did they account for cannons? Our world actually underwent a period of development where artillery got more and more powerful, eventually rendering medieval castles obsolete, but castle engineering must have tried to keep up for a while, we didn't go straight from motte and bailey to bunkers and trenches, surely? Turns out there was a centuries-long transition period, and its awesome. Bastion forts (also known by the extremely cool name of star forts) don't solve the flying enemy problem but they do solve a lot of the same problems you would get from ground-based forces having wizards to cast fireball or shatter at your walls. I highly recommend looking them up, they're equal parts mathy and pretty, and there's some still surviving today.
What i like to do in my fantasy world building is to have it be common to include anti-magic wards in your walls. Obviously you dont want the have your whole city under such a field, but having it on the wall, just reverts the whole thing to a standard wall, like we know it from our world. It also comes in handy against any criminals or the like that use magic to conceal their identity, since that will mean that passing through the walls, their magic wont work.
That's the neat detail for why the area full of vampires and undead is separated off from the human kingdoms, in the MMO "Runescape": The river between the two had been blessed to be a barrier of holy water. Fantasy settings that include Clerics might include such a feature of any border rivers/moats in order to prevent invasions by the armies of any enemy necromancers.
Bear in mind walls still existed with gunpowder, they just adapted into star forts. I could see walls being built more like enclosed buildings to protect from flyers, along with nets and ropes on poles being set up in the city. Underground defenses could be built with areas built to callapse, and with tunnels built to intercept sappers before they can work on the foundations. Protection from a withering elf lifetime siege might involve politicking with what ever beings are long lived enough to at least notice their activities like divine beings or spirits.
Ground based enemies seem far more likely than flying enemies. So the walls will be built in any event. Regarding dwarves, employ kobolds as a counter. Especially Tucker's kobolds. >:D
@@tuomasronnberg5244this is starting to seem like an endless cycle where im just filling my fair city with various monsters and making an even larger problem for myself lol
My first reading of the greater lore of the UnderDark made me consider the Dwarven Empires in a wholly different manner. Imagine tunnels just packed to the brim with heavily armored folks fighting. Just pushing on each other rugby scrum style, while sappers try to dig flanking actions...crazy. and that's just looking at physical options. Melee.
"Do walls work when there are flying fantasy creatures?" Yes. They don't work against specifically flying creatures, because they aren't designed to. But they still serve their roll of protecting against most outsiders. You'd need specific innovations to defend against specifically flying enemies, Or indeed, digging enemies. But just because an enemy *could* bypass a wall (just like in real life - no wall is impervious) doesn't mean that walls didn't serve their purpose of making it more difficult for them to be bypassed than an empty field would be (again, ignoring fliers since they aren't what it was designed to protect against). *Fliers:* If the primary threat is from the air, fortifications might include anti-air weaponry, or reinforced roofs covering vulnerable areas. **Diggers:** If tunneling enemies are the issue, walls might be reinforced by moats or filled with materials like gravel or loose sand that disrupt digging efforts.
Add to that, that he goes on about sieges... You cant have a siege if there is no wall. There just would be a battle, and then its done. To get a siege, the army has to consider "waiting it out" is less costly than the battle. That, and why cant the defenders have flyers? Or counter diggers? Spells that reinforce/regenerate the ground below? Spells that rob flyers of their ability to fly? Gravity spell with high range would turn an expensive unit into a one shot bomb with no splash damage (basically a bad tradeoff)
@@lukasnuesch6236 He did specify a low-magic setting (aka, fantastical creatures, but very rare actual magic or spells). And it did seem fairly clear that the defenders were all considered to be humans (perhaps for time's sake). To briefly consider other races: Elves: Literally impossible to siege. Not only is their ability to harass from behind walls supreme, but they barely eat, don't conventionally sleep, and live for centuries. Dwarves: Known for their exceptional engineering and stonework and stubbornness. Add onto their natural mining tendencies, and you have someone that you can't effectively siege down from the surface, and probably not from underground either without something severely Fantasy happening. Your best bet would be spycraft to open the gates for you. Gnomes: Don't tend to build walls, preferring to hide instead of stand their ground. They go invisible and run. No siege. Halflings / Hobbits: Given their high metabolism and relatively hedonistic tendencies, would probably be the easiest of the fantasy races to siege out.
@@SangoProductions213 Yeah, but that is vague. Low magic can mean that Magic is there, but it is HARD to access. Or it can mean you only ever manage to make something like light a campfire or levitate a sword slowly, even if you train your whole life (also called useless magic, where slight of hand is probably more useful). Weak magic and powerful creatures are also a bad mix, which is why I interpreted he meant "hard to access". Now if you have a city that is valuable enough to be sieged by stone throwing gyphons (or something of similar size, so the boulders they drop from a kilometer down on you), I would wager that any ruler worth their salt would have a contingency plan (trained eagles (little magic required, quite fierce if you have many) or similar), or some black magic that might cost the life of a few slaves... remember: Hard to access can mean extremely unpleasant things like blood magic. But yeah, if your entire attacking army is flyers, and you only have bows, you are dead in the water. Bows are crap at shooting into the air, and anything higher than 100 m is basically save. And even if it isnt and you have a VERY strong archer that can shoot a bit higher, it isnt that much of an effort to fly 100m higher if you managed 100 m already. Flying is an extremely broken mechanic if you exploit it - especially if flying means you can hover and do not have to beat your wings (magic flying usually does).
Walls are more than just a defense in isolation. Parapets atop a wall provide a fighting position to defend against besiegers, giving height and protection for ranged defenders. This also gives opportune perches for defending archers to shoot at flying attackers, or to mount ballista for larger threats. When it comes to sappers there are a few things that can be done. Moats offer a easy method of dissuading sappers from undermining the wall, due to the threat of flooding the tunnels. Ultimately the wall makes a place harder to attack. It forces the enemy to besiege you, something that is a race against time. Can they starve you out before help arrives or disease ravages their army. Like most security, it raises the effort to raid. For most, the effort is just not worth it. For some it is, but the effort is more than the reward you can escape with. And for very few it is, and the reward is necessary. In that case no defense will dissuade an attack. You have to defeat them.
So for this subject "Walls" walls are good but then you have to think what can you do with walls? what are you going to make your walls out of? is this a wall of simple wood or are we going hardcore stop and hold an army wall?, is this a wall that acts as it's own settlement? a wall of apartments for the merchants, guards and locals? what is it protecting what are the natural threats of the area? and then there was the Siege of Crete (24 years) that would have been the entire serves of a legionnaire. dwarf sees the great high wall.. "ay this is just a spicey mountain, we'll get you through in no time but it'll cost ye a great deal o gold!" "spicy mountain?" "Aye it shoots and drops things at us. 'Spicy'". I love these videos they always get me thinking.
I would imagine that if things like dragons and tunneling dwarves were common, defenses would be geared more to them. Although if the setting is like A Song if Ice and Fire, where magic and Dragons are rare, I can imagine cities being ill prepared when they do show up. The Wall in the North is actually infused with magic, such that Dragons refuse to cross it. Despite the fact it shouldn't hinder them at all. They just land, and pitch a fit, when told to cross, because some deep magic is preventing them.
The counter-balance to the existence of flying creatures negating walls is, in my opinion the sheer dizzying amount of wild and terrible monsters that don't fly or burrow. True enough, your castle walls won't hold back a dragon. But dragons are (usually) rare, trolls, goblins and every manner of dire beast are all over the place. Contrary to the idea that there would be less walls, I think that nearly every settlement would be walled, and even farmland enclosed when feasible to keep rampaging monsters at bay. Dragons would necessitate a response force. Now magic throughs a loop I don't dare bother with. In my own games and fiction, there are charms and barriers that prevent magic from easily manipulating walls.
Depending on the setting walls could also be a lot more economical to build. Mages with the ability to raise permanent stone structures using magic or make building walls faster and cheaper indirectly could make them much more efficient which would again alter the balance in favor of building walls. Mages are essentially taking advantage of a resource that we don't have in the real world and those savings could make walls significantly cheaper. If they're cheap or free then walls might just be built because any amount of slow down they create could make them useful.
Counter-sabotage would likely be a thing. Have sections further beneath that sappers could fall into. Redirect a river or build a sluice gate so you can flood tunnels. There are some terrifying things that you can do. But walls, like all military structures and actions, depend on context to determine usefulness. Most walls at this point are mobile, in modern militaries. A tank is a bunker. An aircraft carrier is a gigantic water bound castle.
I mean elves live long sure, but they still need to eat and survive counterattacks. You are correct that warfare would be more complex in a fantastical setting. But walls are simply effective. If there are sappers, there will be counter tunnel's. Vienna can sing songs about it. Flying creatures still need to survive projectiles and defending flying units. Walls would still be great. They just get way weirder. Enemy has funky siege tools, build your own funky tools. Enemy want to dig down, build underground fortress. That would help great with the flying units aswell. Walls get knocked down constantly, use magic to make the auto repair or repair them faster. Especially with fortresses being build way faster the offensive use of forts would be magnified greatly. Enemy keeps dropping rocks. Magical dome/ flying Units/ an area that prevents flying (the dead birds that keep dropping are a bother but ey)/ tall towers that reach much higher than the walls/ a mobile roof system. You don't need to cover all of the town, just certain parts. (If the rocks get big enough this stops working, but having no wall doesn't help with that i fear xD) Hiring a dragon for a fortress would also be great, dragon plus wall is straight up offensive. I'm not attacking that Gate. I don't care u pay me triple. Of course this would cause elemental armor, teleporting, the enemies hiring dragons, more tunneling. And so forth. It's always a arms race, a wonderfully complex one at that. Until u get to fighter jets, bombs and rockets ,walls will stay around i believe. Even then they might, since there are some magic iteration that render certain object indestructible. The hole mess with that and potentially making the sharpest blades and them being unbreakable, as a tame example, is its own mess but yeah. Or the obvious one, indiscructible armor. Indestructible Mobile ceiling sounds pretty useful even when jets exist. I don't think wizard's of the coast thought indrcuscible arrows through. Although even those break with animagic fields, so Antimagic weaponry would rise to prevalence.
OK, cool - Very setting dependent and something that really needs considering based on ancestry composition a world has, and monsters, and this is going to be heavily dependent on region as well in many cases. ...But my main takeaway is that we should probably be seeing blitz-like dragon-raid shelters if not instead then at least as well in many settings.
In Afterworld, Anelims are a subspecies of human with feathered wings, very angelic you could say. They're also slightly shorter than normal humans and naturally skinny, because reduced weight goes brrr. They arrived in Lamara 600ish years ago, and were immediately some of the biggest menaces around. They quickly took over the Chained Isles (which actually have their name because of the Anelims... they liked to obtain "volunteer workers") and went about demanding tributes from other Lamaran groups, raining death from above if denied. Anelim-baseliner hybrids are generally the same size and build as baseliners (normal humans), but their wings are weaker, limiting them to short bursts of flight and gliding. The Anelims of the Chained Isles saw these hybrids as abominations and mockeries of their aerial supremacy and beauty, and so would cut their wings off and treat them as baseliners, who they viewed as lesser. Sky Horrors are creatures that live high in the sky, but can't go too low for too long without air pressure making their brains explode. They're also near-invisible thanks to some funky crystal refraction stuff. Anelims that fly too high, which Anelims religiously perceived as intruding on the home of the gods, are likely to be subject to a Sky Horror swooping and torn apart. During the Lamaran Unification Wars, in which the Krysa-ruled Lamaran Unity sought to make its name accurate, the Anelims finally met their match in the form of the Krysa and Tummens. Krysa can grow stronger-than-steel crystal from their skin in any shape they want, and Tummens are capable of super strength and speed, as well as being protected from blunt impacts. An Anelim trying to drop something on the heads of either of them doesn't work, especially when the Tummen is wearing Krysa-made crystal armour in case the Anelim drops anything sharp. The Tummen is able to throw spears or fire heavy bows at the Anelim as long as the Anelim is in sight, and some Krysa are skilled enough with their abilities to create pre-loaded single-use crystal crossbows, whereas the Anelim can't really attack them at all unless directly above them (in close quarters combat, the short-and-skinny Anelim is bound to lose against the super-strong Tummen, or the Krysa who can grow crystal armour, spikes and blades). Yeah the Anelims couldn't really do a thing. The Krysa even made crystal ships too strong to be broken by Anelim rock-dropping to sail onto the Anelim isles, and forced a surrender out of them. That said, I am making it sound easier than it was. The first ones tasked with conquering the Anelims were one of the Unity's subjugated groups, and they lost hard, though that may've been a deliberate move by the Unity to weaken them, humiliate them, and provide them a new thing to hate other than the Unity's government so that they'd be less likely to rebel, and be easy to use against the Anelims again if they rebelled once conquered. Anelims launched offensive attacks in which they'd target and massacre civilians for a kind of reverse scorched earth policy (scorched earth but you're scorching your enemy's earth), attacked supply trains, etc. Big problem here is that the Lamaran Unity doesn't value human life unless that life has strategic value, and the Anelims were attacking conquered lands home to potentially rebellious people the Unity was happy to see getting thinned out, so the Unity just kept trucking along with the conquest until the Anelims were forced to surrender. Also, the Lamaran Unity's capital's walls are so high that standing atop them risks getting attacked by Sky Horrors (Sky Horrors are an invasive species, and the walls date back further than their presence. Nobody's sure how or when the walls were built, just that they encircled a pretty nice hunk of farmland, which eventually became a city). The Unity just kept the majority of its VIPs in the capital for the duration of the war, and even used this as an opportunity to have lots of "accidents" in which trouble-makers unfortunately lost their lives.
I solved this in one of my fort towns specifically because I agree with normal walls not being enough. In my case, I used magical warding alongside the walls. The town is maintained by a series of kobolds. They do this under contract with a local forest god, and so look after these wards as a form of worship. The walls form a massive spell circle and the wards themselves are a protective mechanism tied to a "town registration." Anyone who is within the walls and NOT listed in the book within a certain timeframe experiences intense burning, akin to a chemical burn. Animals are considered as well, needing to be "owned by a registor" and thus be tied to a being who is listed in said book. The kingdom that owns this town is famous for using griffin riders to travel, and there are lookout towers in the town, so there is some natural air defense that could be called on anyway. But the fort is already well defended by it's magic. Which of course makes it an interesting political point in the region, with some nervous about it's over reliance on old magic.
Gemmell's "Legend" is a great fantasy siege, but a fairly low magic setting.. Of course, elemental magics may make walls cheap and even capable of self-repair. For anyone interested in a portrayal of counter siege underground, the Australian movie "Beneath Hill. 60" is a gem.
if fantasy world have to face wyvern, roc bird and dragon on daily basis I think there would be a lot of underground settlement which could span from hobbit style housing up to artificial underdark (could be dwarven made). and in case of food resource there could be more focus on fungi and animal that can be raised underground or partially underground. utilising dense forest (rainforest especially) could be elven main settlement style, and it would be cool if they had tree houses supported by trees that has really long lifespan (hundred up to thousands years old). either way thanks for the great video, it makes me thinks a lot on how fantasy people would actually built their settlement.
One thing I'm wondering about that I don't see brought up much: how long can flying creatures in your Fantasy setting actually stay in the air? Flying is already energy-intensive for small animals and they rely heavily on air currents to extend their flight time. How helpful would those same air currents actually be to flying creatures the size of horses like pegasus or gryphons, or even larger ones like house-sized dragons? And if those creatures are carrying any heavy equipment or a rider, that flight time would be drastically shortened too. Which is why in my mind, while yes flying creatures incorporated into an army would definitely be useful, a more traditional ground force would still be needed for them to retreat to so they can rest. Maybe if it's a very mountainous area they could get away with operating more on their own. As for dragons, they're kind a wildcard in that regard. More often than not, they can just seem to fly for as long as they want, or as long as is needed. I guess for dragons with more overtly magical abilities, they could be using magic to make flying easier in one form or another. If those kinds of magical aids exist, they could be extended to the smaller flying creatures as well - alternatively, maybe a less magical solution that could be introduced eventually would be mechanical wings or a parachute to let their mounts spend some time gliding or floating down for a time without needing to expend their own energy?
Best use of walls I've ever seen comes not from fantasy but from sci-fi - Red Rising specifically. In a setting where nuclear bombs are as ubiquitous as hand grenades and glassing a planet is yesterday's news, the use of broad shield domes makes ground forces necessary and the response to that is massive walls. They don't abuse this fact either, there are excellent examples of siegeworks and fortification in most of the grand epic battles throughout.
Yes, we have abstracted and distilled down what walls are and stand for; they are also social touchstones in addition to a real-world functional artifice. This is a game of stories, not a physics/tactical simulation. The symbolism and meaning of the wall exceeds the physical consideration of the wall in this context (and always will). Even if we were to introduce an intricate mechanical game of siege warfare to the setting, we are not telling a story of the wall. Rather, we are now telling a story about our feelings on other people's treatment of the wall and what they "**should** be focused on." It does not become more true or meaningful; rather, it becomes more political, as a means of arguing a point through a story. This is exactly what the people with the abstracted, distilled, and symbolic uses of the walls were doing already, but more authentically, earnestly, and honestly (and perhaps naively). Take a look at the reams of "Realistic war stories" that come after the World Wars and it quickly becomes obvious that the real intent was to criticize war in barely concealed acts of political advocacy and manipulation. The "realists" only allow realism to the extent that it serves their purposes... which is not realism at all. Thus, whenever I hear about how a campaign is going to "fix" things by being "realistic", I shudder. In this single decision, a story departs from a naive, but honest expression of the storyteller's point of view in the world in collaboration with the players. Instead, it becomes the lecturing and scolding of someone who has already determined that we need correction and that he is our better and our teacher.
I think it really depends if the magic in your fantasy world can be inscribed or imbued into a wall. Sure, it would probably drastically increase the cost, but depending on your magic it could protect against aerial attacks (to a certain degree) or against collapses. Sieges only really work if the fields need to be outside the walls, although that elven siege you described resembled a mix of siege and brain drain, which feels a bit unconventional. Besides, just because it isn't the best way to defend, doesn't mean it wouldn't be used for some time, until it is proven useless or detrimental.
I'm not sure a discussion of walls outside the context of D&D is all that useful for general dungeon mastery. Unless the conclusion is that walls have no place in D&D. It seems like it would be better to start at the default and work downward to low magic. But maybe that's just my interest in understanding the natural ecosystem created by a game's rules.
In my stories, walls protect and conceal runic arrays that create sensory and defensive barriers. These walls are inscribed with runes to withstand conventional attacks, with maintenance scaling by area, so cities are typically compact. Large, sprawling cities with only sensory barriers are rare, found only at the core of dominant powers as symbols of might. Even small settlements have basic runic protections on wooden walls to guard against fire and provide sensory functions. Sensory barriers are constantly active, while the more energy-intensive barriers activate only as needed, often triggered by the sensory arrays or lookouts. Sieges aim to exhaust a city’s energy supply for barriers rather than simply outlasting defenders. Attacks weaken barriers, which then require restoration, and barriers may break under sustained or overwhelming assaults. These defenses are segmented, so breaching one part doesn’t compromise the entire system. Advanced barriers can form a dome over the city, extending underground. Purpose-built fortresses have foundational runic arrays, and cities anchor barriers from all directions using pylons below ground and towers above. When two forces are evenly matched, infiltration and sabotage become essential for a swift victory. Saboteurs inside the city can disrupt barrier systems and deplete energy reserves, weakening defenses. By coordinating with an outside attack, a saboteur can intentionally bring down a barrier segment at a critical moment, creating an unexpected breach that allows for a surprise assault. This collaboration forces defenders to react quickly, often shifting resources or leaving other parts of the barrier vulnerable, accelerating the siege.
I do not think the problem is with walls. It instead is with poor world building. If a story has a lot of dangerous flying creatures and humanity has expanded far then humanity will naturally have a good way of dealing with flying enemies. Magic, magical technology or straight up science that has advanced far in a particular area to meet a threat.
I'm imagining a situation where dwarves are treated like gophers... Impossible to get rid of them all, constantly tunneling under your land, messing up your fields, leaving holes for your feet to fall into and twist your ankle...
One of the really cool things i did for a world-building session my group participated in was actually figuring out which species would be the Empire builders since we created a world without humans. Of the species we selected, Dragonborn were the ones most likely to colonize and expand their territory. The society that developed was inspired by the Emerald Empire in L5R where, from the outside, the Empire looks like one incredibly dominant and united force since their army includes dragons for all the biggest threats... But on the inside, nobles of all kinds would wage skirmishes with each other, allow Orc war camps to survive so they could use the Orcs to train their soldiers and generally inspire a Dictatorial Meritocracy. (Reminiscent of the Turians from Mass Effect)
This video has inspired me to add sieges as a dynamic event to a hexcrawl module I'm writing. Since there'll only be one main outpost (western marches), it'll be critical for all players in the campaign to devote time and resources to protecting that outpost, because it is their lifeline to civilization and the heart of their expedition.
This makes a fair bit of sense. Though something you didn't mention was that a large city might have some type of trained arial combat unit to deal with the most common arial threats in their region or that have been used by their enemies in the past. In many fantasy settings, I could see the walls as a part of a multi tiered approach to defense. Something underground to help prevent or counter sapping attacks, walls at ground level to stop or slow down marching armies, and magical wards along with arial combatants to defend against anything trying to fly in. This gives me an idea for a possible short story or novela, where someone raises an army to attack a city and then goes to try and hire some Dwarven mercenaries to sap the wall only for them to turn him down due to the city having the best defenses that could be created by the combined efforts of the greatest dwarves and elves in the last millenia. The only hope of trying to take the city would require three massive armies attacking from deep underground, on the ground, and in the air at the same time with the arial combatants riding true dragons, not pseudo dragons or wyverns.
That brings to my mind a point raised by the Isaac Arthur channel, which was that is impossible under know physics to have stealth space fleets. I tend to disagree, because as sound as it may be when one consider physics camouflage is not a game to be played with the laws of physics. It is a game played on top of the laws of physics, but, between prey and predator. The entire point of stealth is to know your adversary and explore the blind-spots it has. Every perceptive system has blind-spots. Somewhere in your enemy army there is someone you can bribe to not see the dot moving in a monitor, or something like that. The point about walls seems to be similar. Whatever tools your enemies have, are they available to you? Usually they will be, after some time, because either those without access to a military advantage too good are going to find a way to get access to it. Spying, stealing, torturing, bribing or what have you. Or they will lose their rights of existence as a free people, and end up slaved, extinguished, or reduced to wild nomadic existence. So, if you have your air force of gryphons and were-crows, protecting your walls against the enemy with similar tools, situation is not too bad for you and your walls. If that's still low magic, no anti-tank explosive spells available to anyone. I can see the walls having good cost benefit. John Norman's Gor despite being sci-fi, with no magic system per se, has more or less that situation. With an army of giant birds (the tarns) caring elite troops of warriors, in fights between State Cities. But only the main global powers have tarns. Those birds are hard to capture, hard to tame, and hard to keep. Expensive investment. When you bring the subject of fantasy races, that changes the consideration. There are two very different situations, determining different kinds of setting. One where the races fight each other, keeping unity, elves against dwarves, humans against orcs, kobolds allied to humans against bird people, merfolk allied to centaurs against gnomes, etc. That is a setting of strategy videogame, where each side gets the natural advantages of their racial traits. I believe that is interesting, but less plausible. More likely, more often, I think we would have different branches of elves fighting each other, for resources that are important for elves but not too relevant for other races. Centaurs doing the same. Humans we know, never fight each other or ally with alien strangers to destroy their close neighbours. Never happened in History. But, for fantasy races, I think that behaviour would make more sense. So, perhaps our side has only 10% of elves, and not the kind of elf that has those powerful spells that give them a cutting edge. Still, we have our elves. We have more gnomes, and more centaurs, but they have some of those too. Even if our centaurs are the stronger kind that has the lower body of buffalos, while their centaurs are mostly mere half-horses. Maybe no side has were-crows, but both employ freelance mercenaries for tasks that require than particular task. That gives us a setting where stories are harder to tell. Reader must make more effort to visualize what is happening. On the other hand, I think situations like that make the world a bit more believable, once we get beyond the learning curve needed to understand the setting. In a world like that, low magic or even no magic beyond the racial advantages, I think walls can de as useful as they used to be in ancient and medieval times in our (arguably) real world.
Fun thing is, some civilizations and native tribes allied with colonial invaders so they could assure their rivals will go down. It happened in the Aztecs and is thought to have happened amongst Filipino tribes.
Yes,@@fishyfishyfishy500akabs8, it usually happens. Happened among the native tribes here in Brasil too. And, goes without saying, those alliances of European nation and natives usually dedicated the best part of their efforts to fight other European nation, and their local allies. Europeans are all the time making alliances with strangers against their own neighbours. It makes sense. Those who look and behave more like you, share more history with you, are a more present and concrete treat to you. You have more reasons to want vengeance against them. They against you. Besides, a Catholic is way more likely to convert to Protestantism than to Buddhism or even the much less alien Islamic Faith. More points in common, less effort to learn the new practice. Ergo, Protestantism in the short term is a more important treat to Catholic majorities than Buddhism, under most contexts. There is no justification to see anything strange in non-Europeans doing the same. It is human, and probably more than just human. Humans are the only instance of talking people we happen to have available during our life time. But we will soon find or (more likely) make some talking non-humans to share existence with us. I hope. My bet would be that AIs will fight each other too. And find allies among humans, in their wars. Same for uplifted cats, bats, spiders and octopuses.
I got way into this. Had the idea that there are entire magical engineer schools on how to build city defenses. Magic baked into the walls and buildings to increase their resistance to damage. Specially trained wizards to repel other magical attacks. Plans to counter attack enemies before they can mount large attacks on the walls. Entire enchantments on a city to restrict the use of magic by the enemies or block specific spells. some form of flying cavalry to protect the sky from attack. Id also say the fact that walls are more likely to be breached in a fantasy world could lead to more proactive hunting. Like adventurers job is to find, track, and maybe eliminate any monsters dangerous enough to breach a wall within the a few days ride from the city.
Your aside on elven 'sieges' being preceded by years long guerilla campaigns interdicting supplies remimded me that that is exactly the optimal way of playing elves in the fantasy 4x series dominions. Elves have a trait which makes them hidden from kost enemies until they attack, and prepositioning forces across your enemies lands before popping up in their back right as you declare war is an insanely effective strategy.
Great video. Even though I disagree that walls are ineffective in fantasy settings, it was an interesting topic to think about. We must look not just at the iconic curtain walls of medieval castles, but at the broader purpose and history of real fortifications. The purpose of a wall will never be obsolete, it is to stop oncoming ground forces and to protect from ranged attacks. Without a wall, competing forces must meet on the field. In that situation, no kingdom is going to attack a city without overwhelming force. This means that to prevent a city from falling in a day, it needs a wall. When we look at walls in a fantasy setting, I think it is most effective to compare the magic and creatures to real wold technology. For instance, in a high magic setting where spells like fireball are common enough to be used as artillery, walls would be less likely to be tall masonry and instead would be earthen banks to absorb the force. With a steep enough slope this is still impassable to ground forces, or could be topped with a shorter and thicker wall. Against dwarven sappers, moats could be dug to discourage tunneling. You could even make an underground cistern as a trap. At the very least it would cause significant delays, and if a city employs counter-sappers would create another front of the conflict. Bastions would protect against trenches, providing multiple angles of fire. Against an army of elven snipers, the walls could have system of tenailles and ravelins to protect the inner walls from ranged attacks. This can be used to hide your cavalry behind cover as it assembles, minimizing losses in a charge. It would also make trenches impossible to reach the inner walls, as they would need to funnel through flanked pssageways. Against something as spectacular as a dragon attack, walls would be useless as a barrier. However they would still act as a staging ground for archers and ballistae. It has the tradeoff of giving a clear line of sight for the disadvantageof becoming a centralized target. In a world where opposing armies have an air force of gryphon/dragon/etc riders it is likely that your city would have some access to that as well. As with sappers it would create another front of battle, likely not even interacting with a wall. These are just some examples, there is a long history of additional fortifications used in conjunction with walls to be drawn from. To make them properly effective, walls would be more complex and would utilize the more modern construction which we see in the real world up until the creation of explosive missiles. In a high magic setting, they could even be repaired and strengthened with magic to make them nigh impenetrable without the use of magical attacks. TL;DR in fantasy settings with warring factions we would most likely see something similar to star forts around large cities. (Though with monsters and hostile races in the wilderness I think even the smallest of towns would have wooden palisades at the very least.)
I think it is important to think about: - sapping might be more effective, but so is the building of the wall, or perhaps the building of several walls. Storries like there to be one wall to breach, to signal to the reader/consumer of the story, when this wall is breached, shit just got serious. But in fantasy, depending on what magic can do, a fort or city might have 5-10 walls to breach before it is fully taken. (But unless your whole story is about one siege, people probably don't want to hear about the 4th wall being breached, only 5 more to go before things get really serious.) - flying creatures will be a menance, but if you can get word out, you should see an advanced force of flying creatures come to relieve the city fairly quickly. The besiegers are likely more spread out than the defenders, in order to close all the entrances to the city. Being more spread out, it is probably harder for the besiegers to protect their assests against arieal attacks. Also the besiegers have to protect their supply lines against arieal attacks. I am not convinced adding flying creatures to the mix is a boon to the attacker.
I think that even with medium levels of magic or high levels, you can easily make walls work. Walls themselves aren't THE answer but they are a component to make things a little safer. Keep wild beast out, deter the nonmagically inclined, direct and restrict travel, and peace of mind to the populace. Maybe there's warding stations along the wall or city that protect from teleportation magic and most magic attacks? Maybe mages are restricted not from the prevalence of magic but the lack of time and money most people can commit to study, so armies may have plenty of casters but one who can toppel the walls, breach enchantments, or teleport everyone in is rare? A complex barrier dome to block dragons to supplement the stone walls. Lol maybe one of the safety measures is that the whole city can take off and become a floating island? Tyranny has pretty prevalent magic buy uses reasoning like that for why walls are still important. Most soldiers don't have much, if any, magic. To be trained enough to topple it requires specialized training and proximity. All things, warfare and crime especially, are games of adapting to adaptations. Like missiles track heat so we made flares, so missiles track IR, we made chaff. People made walls so we make spells to break them, people enchanted walls so we went around them, people warded cities so we adapt. Just because it isn't a perfect counter doesn't mean it isn't worth doing for other reasons. Even better, we didn't stop using walls because cannons became more common. We changed how walls were used. Star forts for range and coverage, or the castles in the east that packed dirt within or layered like a cake.
Another use of walls I've seen in fantasy: an anchor for magic diagrams. Magic circles and other diagrams are often seen in fanatsy. A wall built in the proper shape may be supporting a powerful, city-wide magic that would be hard to disturb and would protect the city or improve the conditions within.
With magic, you could also use a spell like shape earth to build massive hill barriers, or perhaps equally as usefull, completely hill and trench the whole landscape perpendicular to the tangent of the defending wall, now theres no dispersed square of infantry, just a shooting gallery for the defending army in each of the valleys in front. Alternatively, you could partially slope the crevices and then pour some oil or water down down each of them.
In my world building project many cities have walls, but most have additional defenses. If we take the greatest city as an example, a big trade city at the edge of the desert where three rivers meet. They have quite sizable walls around (most) of it and even internally. Additionally they have regularly dispersed towers all over the city that function as watchtowers and have some big arcane crystal on top. These crystals can be activated in a few minutes and then interrupt specific types or even all magic. (As any bigger creature and anything people use to fly, uses air magic. Interrupt that a dragon, flying person or airship will just crash.) The inside of the outer walls also have another type of crystal, that is always active and creates a shield / force field over the whole city to keep sand, hot air and unwanted people and creatures out. The rivers can be blocked only letting water through. The city is so big that only very few armies even could consider a full siege around it. And then the tunnels below or portals would still work. (The portals are between fixed positions and take extremely powerful people to create them.) Smaller cities and castles also have some of these defenses, so most can stop flying or magic from breaching. (How to counter common magic? With powerful antimagic.)
So, to create free aim zones within the walls of a castle or city might be an option against flying opponents. Though these will still be a limited range of aim, but it wouldn't be terribly different from having a kill arena for your defending archers to simply pick off the invaders from above. So, have vacant aim zones for aerial weaponry projectiles to land when they miss. Alternatively, you could have the aerial bombardment placed farther from the walls so that projectiles can still go over the walls, but there is a greater range of anti-aerial projectiles.
Fantasy fortifications will be built under the assumption that some enemies can and will breach or bypass them. Thus, they'll be designed to maximize the "non-barrier" functions you mentioned -- slowing enemy movement, channeling enemies into chokepoints and kill zones, while providing the defenders with cover, speedy paths of movement and communication, and ready access to ammunition, medical supplies, and other materiel. Rather than a shell defense, there will be a defense in depth, with multiple lines of defense to fall back on. Where feasible, these will include networks of secret tunnels, underground bunkers, hidden supply caches, and multiple secret routes past potential siege lines. Tunnels, walls, and redoubts will all be built with self-destruct features to deny their use to the enemy and to serve as one-time traps. Non-combatants will be relocated to emergency shelters and evacuated friom the area at the first possibility.
I always include a Druid Kingdom in my worldbuilding. That Grand Druid can shatter a city’s walls in a single spell, so he is the de facto ruler of parts of the world and his borders aren’t just imaginary lines on the map. Likewise, my goblins will sneak into the city in the dark. They won’t attack en masse. They’ll try to get in from every possible entry, just to create havoc inside of the city. Even a single goblin scaling the walls alone is a danger if it can get to the gate and throw it open or if it can use fire arrows to start fires from a spot atop the walls.
I have been thinking through this for my D&D game for probably a year now, and it becomes obvious that a nice palisade is ample for most basic settlements to just keep the wild animals at bay, and if you genuinely have to worry about giants or dragons, YOU DONT LIVE THERE… unless there is a gold mine or something equally valuable to hold onto there. And then you build a huge castle because that’s a smart idea. I have issues with the notion that magic will prevent all these issues - an enemy priest cast stone shape and ruined a section of castle wall in our game but the player priest patched it up enough with his own spell to prevent a full breach of the castle. Most of the obvious problems have obvious answers.
Are they practical? Well that very much depends on context. What is the fantasy world like? What exists in that world and what are you planning to defend against? Against flying threats? Probably useless. Against hordes of monstrous beasts or armies of humanoids? Very useful. Does that world have explosives or magic of great destructive potential? Are there specific counter-measures for those things? All those things matter. A great example is Malazan, where powerful magic users could easily destroy city walls, but a lot of walls are imbued with a material that deadens magic. Cities are also defended by mages and expending your own magical resources to take down the wall leaves you vulnerable for a magical counter-attack.
In Frieren, most major cities are both walled and bolstered by magical defenses. Barriers which keep demons out and prevent flying monsters from going over the defenses. One particular city is of note in that it didn't appear to have any such defenses and so a dragon easily got inside and terrorized the place before it was seemingly forced to flee but the lucky arrival of a hero.
Keep in mind crushes are mainly caused by actually stopping flows of people. Identity is incredibly important in regulating such things as people really wont induce such things if they have identifiers as simple as wearing the same shirt. Magical markers and specialized openings to shelters could be very easy mechanisms to mitigate flying enemy terror campaigns.
I oneced GMed in setting with a lot of flyers where cities that were in risk had special domes over them. There are also underground cities kind of dwarf things or similar.
I think the best point ive seen is that fantasy walls are rarely for warfare; to put it bluntly, humans build walls to keep the fantasy out. Nobody wants forest monsters being able to wander freely into the city
I created for my campaign the concept of a dragonfort, a fort on the top of a plateau that housed anti air scorpions and contained pretty much all the infrastructure under the surface
In one of my game worlds I had a small nation with four cities, each protected by a Barrier. The Barrier stones were provided, one at a time, over many years, by the patron Deity of the realm. The stone created a magical barrier that had several functions. I was a literal dome over the city, extending twenty miles from the stone itself. The principle enemy 'type' of the region couldn't pass the barrier at all (Fey) In addition, because the local deity that provided the stones was a Goddess of the Sea, all of the sea life within the barrier was much more plentiful. The bounty of the sea was magnified by the barrier. This was mostly as a compensation for the fact that it wasn't safe for them to travel too far from home. Outside of the barriers, the wilderness was under a constant threat from the Fey in a variety of forms. So only large armed groups would travel. The use of Iron weapons was the greatest tool against them in combat, but in this land, Iron was so rare that it was the commodity of currency. So the people could thrive in their domed barrier cities but venturing out was extremely dangerous. The barriers also kept out demons and undead, which the locals lumped in with Fey in their own understanding. Once the capital got large enough, a second barrier stone was given and they founded the second city. etc. They always built them near water, but not always as effectively. It was a very interesting setting when I ran it and the lessons I learned from making it and running it stick with me.
I think it’s also worth considering the ease of building walls in some of these settings, it might not help against dragons but if one person with a strong enough earth spell can make a wall in a day, I think they would be quite popular
Its a rather easy solution, but most fantasy scenarios forget about it (mostly because it is "not for adventurers magic"): Magic wards. Take viking style runes above doorways that should offer the gods protection for the "house" (abstract concept - Magic can handle stuff like this, it mostly runs on narrativum, and "House" isnt clearly defined by "needs to be X meters in diameter, made from stone" or something like that). Now add stronger, more aggressive wards to some solid structure, say a wall (that keeps mundane intruders out, and offers a nice obstacle quite a lot of stuff anyway) and attune it to protect the contents of it to "monsters" (another loosly defined term, that may or may not start to react to murder hobo characters...). And walls start to work again. Why not only put the wards down? Well... Wards may fail if they are overloaded and being a 8 meter high wall helps against rabble monsters that cant fly. Wards could also catch flying creatures, as they probably create a dome shaped structure (Circle being a traditional warding structure, Globe is the 3 dimensional version)... Also: if you create a ward that works against your neighboring empire because they might invade - thats it for trade and diplomacy then. Wich may lead to war... So having a pile of rocks stacked and warded properly/smartly will do you a lot of good.
In a magic world, could be walls even stronger. It feels naturaly, that the walls would be connected with barrier spells, that increase the defense of the wall itself, and making a barrier for air attacks. With checkpoints, where the cores of the barrier are placed.
Garth Nix's Abhorsen books have a very interesting take on the wall as mystical/magical and symbolic barrier. Likewise Gaimans Stardust. I think walls are very effective when used as a border between a magical and non magical world, and explorations of who is being defended from whom.
i could see a network of "razorwire" being spread across the city to "wall the sky" against a lot of flying creatures. this is particular useful if the setting also has some kind of super-metal (adamantine) that can withstand the weight and attacks of a dragon or similar.
It is a very good thing I decided to make elves live less obscenely long lives and decided to make dwarves not exist in my world. My reasoning in-universe with dragons was basically that its just an incentive for them to stay away. Yes, a dragon *could* fly over, or even just barrel through the wall, but the fact that there is a giant stone wall is already enough for the dragons not to care. As you say though, magical transport/messaging WOULD make sieges a lot more difficult.
In my own setting, walls are present in a few forms. cities built on the surface of the world (most cities are built in the sky) make use of walls, because while many many creatures can fly, meany cannot, so while a wall cannot ward off all monsters they still do good work on the many creatures that walk on the ground. this is true for human wars as well, while flight is very common both through magic and with machines like air ships, not everyone can fly so they serve as a minor nuisance for the enemy that takes very little effort from the defenders to set up. but the primary purpose of most walls is to serve as the foundation for barrier domes which are a mix of technological and magical barriers that prevent people from flying over them as well as prevent physical objects and projectiles from passing through. the way the magic system works is that a shield is only as strong as the material it is connected to, so without the wall the shield would break easily. the greatest of citadels and castles are fully enclosed domes where the wall covers the entire castle like a steal shell. these domes are usually built around specific buildings like prisons, bunkers and evacuation sites rather than entire cities, but they are generally considered the most well fortified places in the world.
I think walls will still have a place as much as fencing does today. For mundane things and smaller or nonmagical monsters earthen and wood walls and/or castles would be a nice go between using possibly expensive and/or rare magic to protect against local wildlife or bandits. They are quicker, and much cheaper to build than stone and can be plastered to be fire proof (ish). There were everywhere in our world.
as im sure many people have mentioned, dwarves are not a hard counter to walls, they would simply just open up a new subterranian front consisting of undermining and countermining operations. Seige of vieana is a good example of this, and i think it goes without saying that a wall is just part of a defense, it is not intened to defend alone but insead as a part of a greater stragagy. A wall creates a fixed obstacle that the enemy must expend most of their resousese in order to overcome whilst being harried by the defenders and their grander stratagy. as for air units, since the sky is so large it would probally result in the rise of local "air forces" as part of the over all stratagy.
I am now imagining a situation where an underground war of dwarven sappers has been going on for so long that a group of adventurers are able to conquer the city when they realise that nobody is actually defending the walls anymore.
Imagine a siege where both sides hired dwarven sappers and there's basically a second war going on underground.
so like a normal siege?
all the counter mining. close combat. the tank size drills filled with a ten man squad rumbling under the battle field. praying their going the right direction and don't fall into undiscovered caverns or finding one that has no breathable air, creatures and elementals attacking the soldiers all the while your still on a time schedule because the surface units need you to break through. kind of reminds me of Gears of War 2.
@@yjlomcame to say the same thing
This has happened a lot in history.
Don't need dwarves for that.
You don't NOT need dwarves
@rogerwilco2
When it comes to dwarven engineering specifically, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that yes, they can do it faster and better than humans can, but *they still have to do it*. Your wall is still forcing the enemy to expend time and resources that they otherwise wouldn't have to. It does affect the cost vs benefit equation of building walls, but there are almost certainly still going to be situations where the cost is still worth it.
They’ll just make cheaper walls or stronger ones depending on their defense doctrine and economy
sounds like they need enchant their walls or use them as hold for a magic barrier going downward and upward
Also walls aren't built just against invading armies, but also to keep away illegal immigrants and other undesirables. I can see high elves building walled off cities for themselves even if the walls were simple to reduce to dust with magic during wartime.
@@tuomasronnberg5244Aren't those just forests? 😂
it also doesnt take into account counter mining operations as seen throughut history. undermining is not a hard counter, it simply opens up a new front
7:20 "walls are a two-way street"
I think we may have some conflicting definitions of what streets and walls are.
Not sure if this is sarcasm, but if you can't get in through a wall you also can't get out through that wall.
Inevitably if you make it too difficult to enter you make it near impossible to escape should you need to bail in a hurry.
@@larstollefsen1236 Yes.
But also, it was funny.
Perhaps he was confusing walls and doors. A common mistake, judging by the frequency of signs on doors which state they are to remain closed at all times on account of being accidentally placed where walls were intended to go.
No. They are rarely one way streets. Like you can only go one way over the Hao-Gung wall, but the other direction is on the ground level
To a conventional army, the walls are a barrier. They can be crossed, but only with great effort.
To an airborne dragon, the walls are a boundary marker. They can be crossed as easily as any other piece of land, but doing so without permission draws attack.
To sapping dwarves, the walls are a target. They are what the surface-dwellers hired you to bring down.
Mining walls has always been a tactics in historical warefare. It alone is not a guarantee of success.
To 40k's Orks, walls indicate where the enemy's hiding the good fight.
@@MeepChangeling Fun fact: the Orkish word for "englobement" literally translates as "target-rich environment".
you forgot other reasons for walled towns: effective taxation of and enforcing tarriffs on foreigners, thus defending against some forms of economical warfare; information about who comes and who goes; security theatre and status symbol, ...
This is what I was going to mention. In a medieval world where commerce and trade occurs, walls are extremely important for collecting taxes. While divination magic does exist I cannot imagine the material cost and or training to “big brother” the people would be possible.
Walls aren't just defense, they're also attack: you have a height advantage over the other army. It's easier to see them and launch a ranged attack. Compared to being on the ground, walls are useful, even if they are imperfect. It can be just a well connected chain of watchtowers and archers/cannons, that also serves some protective functions.
In a magical world, they can have their own magic. In my world, an example of a wall meant to keep people in, intead of out (a prison yard), uses both heat and shock magic to prevent people from climbing over the wall.
Even thinking with the possibly very "broken" DnD spells, a lot of the spells require usage on a spot or area that you can see. So at the very least, a chain of towers connected by walkways, coupled with fitting them all with carefully designed visual cover, would both give you a very good view over the area to be much more effective at aiming your spells while also protecting your side from a lot of the more direct spell threats. Especially since most magic users would definitely be utilising the lower level spells with much less range and much fewer options for not seeing where to cast.
@@houndofculann1793 Yeah get a few dozen wizard spires along the wall and 90% of your issues are solved. Just gotta cough up the money needed to keep the wizards on staff.
@@igncom1 or keep the staff on the wizards, eh?
And depending on how they're constructed, a damm good force multiplier in general. Oftentimes, a densely built up city is the wall.
During WW2, a dozon troops occuping a castle held off continuous assaults. And the Siege of Budapest took so long, and tied up so many troops, that Stalin's schedule got completely derailed
Even if walls are less effective then they were irl, I'd still much rather be in a walled settlement than not
walls keep out wolves and that's a good enough reason
I'm very confident that any fantasy setting where the primary form of movement isn't flying - would still have walls. Just because Dragons or Harpies or mages with levitation exist - doesn't change the fact the walls are still needed. Now - if in our fantasy setting there are ONLY drqagons, or ONLY harpies or levitation is a spell that every human can do - yeah now the walls would likely be too much effort for too little gain. But assuming more standard fantasy setting, with majority of the sentient beings walking on foot - walls are needed.
Yep, it's forgetting that a locks main purpose is to keep honest men honest, next is to keep out the unskilled. Walls reduce the threat profile faced, with walls more focus can be put on AA
if you think about this it’s a great reason for dnd-style fantasy worlds to have so many underground passages that keep getting infested with monsters. they’re remnants from old trenches and sapper tunnels that never got filled in, or better yet, they’re bunkers meant to keep people safe from dragon attacks! maybe the local lord has been skimping on infrastructure maintenance and now all the dragon-bomb shelters have goblins.
I have to disagree with most historical sieges failing, and Helm's Deep is actually a pretty good analogy for this. Because it's most sieges you read about in casual/surface level history books that fail, while most of the ones you don't hear about succeed.
Thing is, Helm's Deep was never the target of the war, the main battle everyone wanted to reinforce was at Minas Tirith. It's that urgency that forced Saruman to storm the walls pretty much immediately. And you see this sort of thing repeated a lot in history, but you only find out about this if you really dig down to the specific details of a campaign.
As an example, there was a march by the Bohemian king to relieve the siege of Buda, and on the march there, he conquered several castles (IIRC about a dozen) as he went by, simply because he didn't want them to be a pain in his rear. These were small fortress castles meant to slow down an enemy, and they would have done a much better job is Hungary at the time wasn't so badly fractured that half of them surrendered without a fight. (Source for learning this: a biography of a noble who was directly involved)
Another example is the Mongol invasion of Hungary, after the main battle at Mohi was over, the Mongols had to fight a huge number of siege battles (close to one hundred, estimated from the number of destroyed fortifications), most of which they won. Some Danubian fortresses held off until winter when the river froze and the Mongols could cross over and encircle them, and a few fortresses in high hills held off as well, but most of the flatlands castles were conquered and burned to the ground. (Source for learning this: a PhD thesis on defensive strategy of late Arpad kings)
Even then, if there is a major siege and the besieged city surrenders after two months of fighting, do we count it as a successful siege? If we do then sieges are closer to 50/50 odds, if we do not... then yeah, most sieges that see you storming the walls fail - you have to be pressed for time or desperate to storm the walls instead of just waiting, so the odds aren't in your favor to begin with.
Main character of The Wheel of Time books, after reintroducing teleportation to the setting and helping found a military group of people who are living artillery pieces, has a moment where he's looking up at the most famous fortress in the world and thinking about how it stood for centuries, and he rendered it meaningless in months.
In Final Fantasy XIV, the Severe and Reclusive theocracy of elves and such that is forever fighting dragons has massive spikes on their beautiful, equally massive gothic buildings and walls. As a friend noted, they aren't decoration: they're giant pigeon spikes, to keep dragons from perching atop them.
If you want a really fun, if slightly irreverent, look into how sieges can go from someone else with a UK accent, Lazerpig's video on Black Agnes is absolute gold.
Larger-scale pigeon spikes makes so much sense it's absurd lol
In regards to Saruman and Helms deep, Bret Deveraux at A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry(ACOUP) has a great series of post going over the battle of helm's deep, and Saruman makes mistakes because he is in haste to defeat Rohan, and critically isn't a good military commander. But likewise Theodan is also under time constraints, due to the bigger battle being prepared for in Gondor.
Furthermore he has a good set of posts on the Development of cities. And one of the things he brings up is that even within medieval cities there can be quite a lot of farming and livestock going on within the town, even with historical maps showing how cities included this. For the farmer, being within the walls is good sure maybe not as large as a field, but less of a worry of wolves or other monsters rampaging through his fields, as well as quicker access to markets. Since in a per-modern society food spoilage is a thing to be concerned about, thus being within the city allows one to sell say your carrots, potatoes, or cabbages at market without them spoiling as fast if it say takes you a days travel to get there. Maps of historical cities like Lyon, Exeter, Paris and more show it.
This same series also points out that we typically imagine the castle or city on an empty grassland for some reason when natural envirornment plays a major role. Being built next to a river, hilltop, mountains, sea, etc. all impact the nature of the settlement and its design and its defensises, and it might not be the most important one. If a port town isn't blockaded then your attempts to siege and wait them out are kind of useless.
@@herkles5416 A great series. It also points out that the battle in the books goes quite differently to how it goes in the movie. For one, there's no civilians there, but rather 1,000 Rohan cavalry, a formidable force that can't be allowed to remain in place. This forces Saruman to invest Helm's _Gate_ (Helm's Deep is the name of the valley behind the fortification, not the fortification itself. That's Helm's Gate) ASAP, and given said time constraints, he has to take it pretty much at once (both because of time constraints, and because there's a number of experienced Rohan soldiers out there, being gather up by Gandalf and Erkenbrand), meaning it has to be taken by assault, rather than by siege.
I think you overestimate frustration and underestimate sheer running out of food as a factor for the besieging army.
Dragon
Well if we're talking about DnD Running out of food isn't an issue because for some godforsaken reason goodberry feeds people for an entire day
@@xolotltolox7626if you have several dozen druids sure.
You don't need covered walkways or streets to protect from the air. This is not a novel problem. You need air raid shelters like London in the Battle of Britain. Also, you need local air superiority. Waterdeep has griffon-rider mages and colossi to deny the air to enemies
Walls work, 'nuff said. If nothing else it will stop a horde of orcs, considering the likelyhood of that happening as opposed to a dragon burning down an entire city for a lark, I'd say it's a worthwhile investment.
A walled fortification is a force multiplier for defense. It's not meant to be indestructible but it forces the enemy to waste time and resources in reducing it. Very few human enemies, mostly nomadic ones, could bypass fortified strongpoints with little fear that the lines of communication and resupply would be cut off by a force in the fortification.
Even in our world Paris was besieged in 1870 although there were proto-machine guns in limited use and giant artillery that could smash walls easily.
Walls match a pre-industrial level of technology very well and unless magic and flying creatures were the norm rather than the exception, walls would still be the primary defensive structure.
Also, Nets spread between the roofs of buildings could deter many airborne attacks.
Even in the modern world, besieging a city is just incredibly costly. Sure you can flatten a city, but if Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar, and Mariupol were of any indication, you just gave the defenders more fortifications. That you have to go in and clear out. Also you've just run out of thermobarics.
Heck - historically the great wall of china was used during the world war, with machine gunners on top. Granted the Great Wall of China actually has a terrible track record of actually stopping any invasions - but it was actively used as a vital defense point in near modern technology war. With planes, with mortars, tanks
The elven multi-generational stealth siege idea filled me with a dread I’ve never felt from fantasy. Imagine living your life in a great city, you’re safe, you’re prospering. And then for seemingly no reason at all, things just start to gradually get worse. It starts with trade issues here and there, then agricultural starts to fail, money doesn’t flow like it used to. You go from a modest, comfortable life to working day and night to put food on the table, and there are people who have it even worse than you. You don’t even have any certainty about who to blame, there’s rampant speculation and accusations being thrown around, life just becomes miserable for apparently no reason. You have hope that any day now, things will turn around, it’s just been a long string of bad luck for the city. But without even knowing, there’s an invisible colonial force that is choking you slowly, has no intention of stopping, and probably won’t even remember your society once they’ve finally starved you out. Your watched your entire life and everyone you love descend into suffering, and to them it was just a busy summer. I understand elf hate now.
With all modern technology, with plains and cyber warfare, walls are still useful.
So in fantasy and with magic and even dragons, there's no reason walls will not be built.
In a fantasy world, the walls aren't there to hold back an army
Its to keep the monsters out
Its also why sieges wouldn't work. Just gonna attract more monsters if you just sit your ass around the a wall
And thats assuming its not surrounded by forest, meaning not only do you need to guard against striking parties coming out of the city and roaming monsters, but also the fey poking their heads up to fuck with you
Well irl the attackers who would siege would also create their own fortifications around the siege.
Likely it would just mean the besiegers would be required to build battlements of their own. Like Caesar during the siege of Alessia.
It was historically rare for the walls to actually be stormed. Not saying it didn't happen, but vaaaaaast majority of sieges, were a lot of sitting outside hoping the defenders run out of food and surrender without fighting. A good fortress could defend quite well in actual combat even with as little as 50 soldiers manning it - of course they were doomed to fall, but they would inflict HEAVY casualties
If flyers are avilable in a setting, then the one definitely working way to deal with them is to have your own. Airforce vs. Airforce is how most of Airforce casualties were inflicted before guided weaponry was invented. If a dragon or gryphon or rutting pegasus is a threat that is on the table, then towns and cities would hire and keep up an airforce of their own to deal with them.
If there is a race that lives a thousand or so years, then they gonna be the heroes, the lords, kings, demigods, gods and pantokrators of a given setting, simply because they can outlive their competitors, and keep their experience and knowledge whilst others need to tech every new generation. This means if an elven army decides to besiege a city in the long term, then the very likely veteran marshall of that place would notice the signs of said elongated siege, and do countermeasures.
If dwarven sappers are so formidable that every army would employ them, then so would every town and city that can afford even just one such creature. Counter-tunneling is a thing, and if dwarves have the inherent ability to notice if a tunnel is about to collapse, then they can also easily find each other's tunnels and engage in dwarven tunnel fighting.
If dwarven siege engineers are so formidable that all trebuchets, siege towers and battering rams would be built by them, then you bet your long shank towns and cities will be hiring their own dwarven engineers to build the most impressive and ahistorical battlements and star forts and multi-layered overseeing defenses that would make the opponent's siege enginners work hard for their salt.
TLDR.; Fire beats fire. If having thing is OP, then both sides would fight tooth and nail to have it, then it would be the battle between the OP things that decide history. Case and point: Gunpowder
Basically irl cavalry arms race before the invention of the pike square (and firearms)
You may want to read up on German aa towers which made entire ww2 bomber formations think twice about flying into their effective gun range. The Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward trailer give you a glimpse how such an installation fights of a swarm of dragons in a fantasy setting.
I imagine the reason wizards in Harry Potter use brooms is because they used them to fight dragons rather than just transportation.
In my own fantasy story, not only are some species of dragons trained like attack dogs to fight off dragons, but early mages domesticated griffins and pegasi as mounts so they could attack from the sky as well. The best tactic I can imagine for fighting a dragon is first grounding it by taking out its wings. After that, it would probably be treated the same way tanks were dealt with in past wars. Idk really know tbh.
@@Alpha_Digamma Thank you, I'm a history buff though, and pretty well versed in the success rate of such AA installations. Case and point: Allied bombing campaign started after dealing with the luftwaffe, not before dealing with the AA guns.
@@kovi567 I think if I were going to be fighting airborne enemies using ground based artillery, the best way to do it would be to use ballistae with weak bolts to them, ones unlikely to cause much damage, but that have explosive pots on them. You could ideally time these to explode right where the enemy is (ie at 500ft if that's where the enemy is at), but short of that, you could still time them to explode well before hitting the ground. In this way, they would arc up, and maybe hit the target and explode, or maybe explode near them and do some damage there, but anything that then fell to the ground would be relatively light damage, equivalent to small hail or less, so you wouldn't have to worry about friendly fire.
In my books, I (partially) address the issue of flying creatures with watchspires on walls, loaded with cannons; as well as using floating islands as sentry points/deterrents above cities. Walls were critical earlier in the world's history when monsters and bandits were a more prevalent danger, and defenses became more lax as these went away.
There are also walls that box in The Lost Lands, where monsters predominantly live. There, they don't have to worry about firing into their own territory if they see a flier come too close.
But now that monsters and other magical threats are returning in the industrialized world, people have to adjust.
Warding magic plays a role as well, though that will have a deeper dive later on.
The first example of a fantasy setting where the "walled city" is still relevant despite the high fantasy setting that comes to my mind is the video game Skies of Arcadia. The empire that functions as the main antagonist in that game is geographically a walled city despite the fact that the entire game revolves around sky pirates sailing from one floating earthberg island to another in airships.
If the fantasy setting is high enough, then the walls of the walled city can be scaled up with the fantasy level.
If you're sticking with classic fantasy, you can always defend a walled city with its own airforce. Wyvern, Pegasus, or Griffon mounted sky knights. Maybe one or two dukes or barons are literally dragons that just prefer to live in the city and serve their community by defending the skies and walls.
Maybe the "walled city" doesn't literally have a wall. Maybe it's like Sigil, and it's floating half a mile above the ground or ocean. Maybe the city is an airship or space/sky station. Maybe the world is based on the movie Mortal Engines, and each city is a mobile mega vehicle with the "walls" of the biggest walled cities being the tank treads at the base of the city.
In the video game Final Fantasy XII, there are airships that go almost anywhere, but there are also regions called "Jagds," where the ambient magic or whatnot just prevents most if not all airships from functioning. In fact, the opening cuts scenes of that game depict a battle on the walls of a walled city that is holding its own against an airship armada until an enemy unit sneaks into the wizard tower where the mages are maintaining the magic forcefield over the city and kills the mages.
There are countless stories where a wall is still an important defensive feature despite magic and flying monsters. Walls are easier to guard and maintain than standing military units of wizards, and walls are always going to be the best defense against whatever critters live in the woods just outside the walls.
Your point about the possible timescales of elven sieges is great but I think it ignores the obvious counter humans have numbers and attrition .
The elves simply cannot afford to lose anywhere near the amount of people a human one could and if the siege is generations long then the human army effectively regenerates. When under siege therefore the best strategy for humans would be to launch constant sallying actions or mount constant patrols, because even if the elves cause disproportionate casualties they might still lose in the long run.
Also I find it hard to believe that the elves could remain as undetected as you suggest(without the heavy use of magic). Historically even the best rained guerrilla forces and special forces teams are fairly easily detected by local populations and Guerrilla operations typically only succeed with their help. This could lead to an interesting scenario where an elven siege is essentially a decades long hearts and minds campaign/guerrilla war between the elves and the city lords.
Also, if the elves aren't able to cut off the city from supply, then they have to take it by assault which negates many of their physical advantages.
Most likely scenario given a long enough timeframe would be mixed empires where elves are lords while humans provide the manpower. Such a mixed empire is better than either pure elvish or pure human empire
@@TonttuTorvinen That could be a very successful model and in my own world there is a major empire with a Elf aristocracy and a human peasantry.
However I could also image massive cultural differences that might make integration more trouble than it is worth.
For instance I can image a culture that remembers grudges and alliances from thousands of years ago, might struggle to get along with one whose alliances and rivalries can massively change in just a few decades.
@locky7443 historically the cultural differences between high nobles and peasants was quite big. There would still be human nobles as nobles are warrior class.
@@TonttuTorvinen If you are referring to my world then it is not just the high nobles that are elves. Elves make up most of the professional warriors including the knights, calvary, mages and elite troops of the army. Humans on the other hand tend to be peasants, freedmen or yeoman and are usually part time or levied rather then professional soldiers.
Also worth mentioning that the society is not a conventional feudal system, with rank being largely determined by ones magical abilities. Instead of houses or clans there are schools of magic that govern over their territory (though schools will often typically be controlled by a single family). A bit like murin novels if you have ever read them.
In my main fantasy world, I have a species called troglodytes who often come into conflict with the neighbouring humans. Trogs live underground (hence the name), but have to go to the surfance to acquire resources to live on. They became so effective at tunnelling under fortress walls that the humans abandoned the idea of walls. Their fortresses consist of a keep with the second floor overhanging the main floor with murder holes. They also feature a heavily-reinforced basement to make it hard for the trogs to tunnel into the keep, and they have underground listening stations to give advance warning of enemy tunnelers coming their way.
With Teleportation you can have anti-teleportation wards in all bigger cities. Maybe not small villages, but teleporting into a city that is protected by magic should be either impossible or hard, unless you find a workaround, like portals, but portals need to be build inside somehow. Even such small thing as teleportation circles require some work to be done - ergo - a prior infiltration of the city.
The walls vs flying enemies subject i have certainly taken your perspective before, but the more I think about it I keep coming up with the fact that though the airborne target is more manueverable, it also has no cover, something that is very important against a high volume of fire. You did vring up the point of friendly fire with said arrows hitting allies, but ultimately I think it comes down to whether or not the defenders see the flying creature before or after it is above the city. If its before no need to worry, just fire as many arrows as possible. If its after, take cover under a roof or in a cellar.
This video certainly got my brain thinking about it, and I think ultimately a wall is just one method to stop or delay an enemy. Because you are right, not every type of wall is good for every situation. So we should expand our defenses from just the wall, to include things like a series of chest high fences to delay an enemy approaching and give the locals a chance to notice someone across a field. We could also have trenches, if walls are too expensive, especially with the dnd spell mold earth.
I love the idea of elven sieges take ages. It could be quite funny as a human settlement.
'Elves show up in armor, setup a trade outpost against your government. They claim its a siege, but treat you well enough and basically pay you, your friends and family to move in with them. Till eventually no one wants to stay. Only getting violent if someone shows up telling them to leave. The siege only ending after the great grand sons/daughters of the humans are fully grown, basically having a new settlement.' XD
When I think about it, walls are pretty effective against flying enemies. They can fly super high up and drop things on you, but how effective is that actually? You can probably shoot far larger objects into a city using a trebuchet, than you can magically floating it over the city. They would be useful for scouting, but they don't have much siege potential by themselves unless they are willing to take fire and attempt to land.
Yo! Dwarves and trench warfare is something that should be more common
You also separate the flying enemies from the land based. while you have your flying And land based ranged units to fight them.
How high can you shoot arrows versus the unlimited height you can drop things from.
@@brianhowe201 Well there is likely a height limit, as people are not flying up in space(probably). Also what is your accuracy of hitting individual people at that height? And how much can you carry when flying? Obviously flying is a massive advantage, but there is other factors involved. Potentially the advantage could be negated just by going inside. So it depends.
The thing with walls is that they hold out a huge number of different creatures, like you said, for long enough. And you can combine them with other methods. i.e. detecting and/or destroying siege tunnels. A magic barrier that stops an Army may be possible. But maybe it's way easier to build a wall and Protect the room above with a magic shield that only hinders magic in passing through. In many fantasy worlds dragons are mighty and dangerous. but they are masters of their own and most of them would have no interest to risk their life against an Army in a fortified place. An army that may have spellcasters and specialists for Killing Dragons.
2:04 you have normal fantasy+D&D, then you have Warhammer fantasy where if leave your highly fortified town chances are that you'll have to fight for your life against a pack of beastmen. And yeah, Walls are great at keeping out intermediate threats like beastmen.
To be fair, airborne attackers that lack range (griffon riders, etc.) are vulnerable to wall-based archers, and in confined spaces (e.g. small cities) those projectiles are coming from multiple directions. Now "bombers" are effective (as demonstrated irl), but if there are air-based attackers then the first thing any settlement will do is build bomb shelters they can retreat to - again, as we did irl. So while dragons may be the bane of any city, smaller creatures will struggle to be any more effective than a catapult.
And for the elven argument, I do think you make a strong case. However, the problem with such large-scale sieges is that you need a large-scale army to do it. The farther you are from the wall, the more soldiers you'll need to patrol it, and the thinner your lines will be. If the goal is to prevent messengers from escaping, all the defender needs to do is mount a small cavalry charge and beeline down the road - the elves won't be able to react in time to stop them. And while elves are long-lived, they also tend to not be as populous as humans, so mustering such a large army would be difficult.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think the eternal arms race would prevent some of the situations you've presented from being as catastrophic as they seem. We're good at killing each other, but we're also good at staying alive lol.
I got nothing for dwarves, other than a river-fed moat with deep cisterns scattered around the city - flood the dwarves out of their tunnels if they breach them, or force them in certain directions. Either way buys you time. Could be an interesting story, now that I think of it.
Normally, flying intelligent creatures aren't depicted as common. At least when it isn't something already OP like demons.
And just as the longer lived races would have more patience for sieges, they may be more cautious with their own lives, making storming castles rarer, but also meaning they'd be more cautious (especially against shorter lived races) of counterattack while they are parked around a fortress.
Years ago I found myself frustrated with depictions of fantasy worlds where powerful magical projectiles are at least somewhat common but military architecture still looks exactly the same as medieval castles in our world. I wanted to see worlds where fortifications at least tried to account for this sort of magic. And then it occurred to me to ask - in our world, how did they account for cannons? Our world actually underwent a period of development where artillery got more and more powerful, eventually rendering medieval castles obsolete, but castle engineering must have tried to keep up for a while, we didn't go straight from motte and bailey to bunkers and trenches, surely? Turns out there was a centuries-long transition period, and its awesome. Bastion forts (also known by the extremely cool name of star forts) don't solve the flying enemy problem but they do solve a lot of the same problems you would get from ground-based forces having wizards to cast fireball or shatter at your walls. I highly recommend looking them up, they're equal parts mathy and pretty, and there's some still surviving today.
What i like to do in my fantasy world building is to have it be common to include anti-magic wards in your walls. Obviously you dont want the have your whole city under such a field, but having it on the wall, just reverts the whole thing to a standard wall, like we know it from our world. It also comes in handy against any criminals or the like that use magic to conceal their identity, since that will mean that passing through the walls, their magic wont work.
Antimagic isn't a catch all term, I prefer private sanctum. Which while limited has explanation and is more achievable.
That's the neat detail for why the area full of vampires and undead is separated off from the human kingdoms, in the MMO "Runescape": The river between the two had been blessed to be a barrier of holy water. Fantasy settings that include Clerics might include such a feature of any border rivers/moats in order to prevent invasions by the armies of any enemy necromancers.
Bear in mind walls still existed with gunpowder, they just adapted into star forts.
I could see walls being built more like enclosed buildings to protect from flyers, along with nets and ropes on poles being set up in the city.
Underground defenses could be built with areas built to callapse, and with tunnels built to intercept sappers before they can work on the foundations.
Protection from a withering elf lifetime siege might involve politicking with what ever beings are long lived enough to at least notice their activities like divine beings or spirits.
Ground based enemies seem far more likely than flying enemies. So the walls will be built in any event.
Regarding dwarves, employ kobolds as a counter. Especially Tucker's kobolds. >:D
And to counter counter kobolds you can use gnomes!
@@tuomasronnberg5244this is starting to seem like an endless cycle where im just filling my fair city with various monsters and making an even larger problem for myself lol
My first reading of the greater lore of the UnderDark made me consider the Dwarven Empires in a wholly different manner. Imagine tunnels just packed to the brim with heavily armored folks fighting. Just pushing on each other rugby scrum style, while sappers try to dig flanking actions...crazy. and that's just looking at physical options. Melee.
"Do walls work when there are flying fantasy creatures?"
Yes. They don't work against specifically flying creatures, because they aren't designed to. But they still serve their roll of protecting against most outsiders.
You'd need specific innovations to defend against specifically flying enemies, Or indeed, digging enemies. But just because an enemy *could* bypass a wall (just like in real life - no wall is impervious) doesn't mean that walls didn't serve their purpose of making it more difficult for them to be bypassed than an empty field would be (again, ignoring fliers since they aren't what it was designed to protect against).
*Fliers:* If the primary threat is from the air, fortifications might include anti-air weaponry, or reinforced roofs covering vulnerable areas.
**Diggers:** If tunneling enemies are the issue, walls might be reinforced by moats or filled with materials like gravel or loose sand that disrupt digging efforts.
Add to that, that he goes on about sieges... You cant have a siege if there is no wall. There just would be a battle, and then its done. To get a siege, the army has to consider "waiting it out" is less costly than the battle.
That, and why cant the defenders have flyers? Or counter diggers? Spells that reinforce/regenerate the ground below? Spells that rob flyers of their ability to fly? Gravity spell with high range would turn an expensive unit into a one shot bomb with no splash damage (basically a bad tradeoff)
@@lukasnuesch6236 He did specify a low-magic setting (aka, fantastical creatures, but very rare actual magic or spells). And it did seem fairly clear that the defenders were all considered to be humans (perhaps for time's sake).
To briefly consider other races:
Elves: Literally impossible to siege. Not only is their ability to harass from behind walls supreme, but they barely eat, don't conventionally sleep, and live for centuries.
Dwarves: Known for their exceptional engineering and stonework and stubbornness. Add onto their natural mining tendencies, and you have someone that you can't effectively siege down from the surface, and probably not from underground either without something severely Fantasy happening. Your best bet would be spycraft to open the gates for you.
Gnomes: Don't tend to build walls, preferring to hide instead of stand their ground. They go invisible and run. No siege.
Halflings / Hobbits: Given their high metabolism and relatively hedonistic tendencies, would probably be the easiest of the fantasy races to siege out.
@@SangoProductions213 Yeah, but that is vague. Low magic can mean that Magic is there, but it is HARD to access. Or it can mean you only ever manage to make something like light a campfire or levitate a sword slowly, even if you train your whole life (also called useless magic, where slight of hand is probably more useful). Weak magic and powerful creatures are also a bad mix, which is why I interpreted he meant "hard to access". Now if you have a city that is valuable enough to be sieged by stone throwing gyphons (or something of similar size, so the boulders they drop from a kilometer down on you), I would wager that any ruler worth their salt would have a contingency plan (trained eagles (little magic required, quite fierce if you have many) or similar), or some black magic that might cost the life of a few slaves... remember: Hard to access can mean extremely unpleasant things like blood magic. But yeah, if your entire attacking army is flyers, and you only have bows, you are dead in the water. Bows are crap at shooting into the air, and anything higher than 100 m is basically save. And even if it isnt and you have a VERY strong archer that can shoot a bit higher, it isnt that much of an effort to fly 100m higher if you managed 100 m already. Flying is an extremely broken mechanic if you exploit it - especially if flying means you can hover and do not have to beat your wings (magic flying usually does).
Walls also have economic uses as well to funnel travelers for customs, etc. That was the main use for Hadrian's wall
Walls are more than just a defense in isolation. Parapets atop a wall provide a fighting position to defend against besiegers, giving height and protection for ranged defenders. This also gives opportune perches for defending archers to shoot at flying attackers, or to mount ballista for larger threats.
When it comes to sappers there are a few things that can be done. Moats offer a easy method of dissuading sappers from undermining the wall, due to the threat of flooding the tunnels.
Ultimately the wall makes a place harder to attack. It forces the enemy to besiege you, something that is a race against time. Can they starve you out before help arrives or disease ravages their army. Like most security, it raises the effort to raid. For most, the effort is just not worth it. For some it is, but the effort is more than the reward you can escape with. And for very few it is, and the reward is necessary. In that case no defense will dissuade an attack. You have to defeat them.
So for this subject "Walls" walls are good but then you have to think what can you do with walls? what are you going to make your walls out of? is this a wall of simple wood or are we going hardcore stop and hold an army wall?, is this a wall that acts as it's own settlement? a wall of apartments for the merchants, guards and locals? what is it protecting what are the natural threats of the area?
and then there was the Siege of Crete (24 years) that would have been the entire serves of a legionnaire.
dwarf sees the great high wall.. "ay this is just a spicey mountain, we'll get you through in no time but it'll cost ye a great deal o gold!" "spicy mountain?" "Aye it shoots and drops things at us. 'Spicy'".
I love these videos they always get me thinking.
I would imagine that if things like dragons and tunneling dwarves were common, defenses would be geared more to them. Although if the setting is like A Song if Ice and Fire, where magic and Dragons are rare, I can imagine cities being ill prepared when they do show up. The Wall in the North is actually infused with magic, such that Dragons refuse to cross it. Despite the fact it shouldn't hinder them at all. They just land, and pitch a fit, when told to cross, because some deep magic is preventing them.
The counter-balance to the existence of flying creatures negating walls is, in my opinion the sheer dizzying amount of wild and terrible monsters that don't fly or burrow.
True enough, your castle walls won't hold back a dragon. But dragons are (usually) rare, trolls, goblins and every manner of dire beast are all over the place.
Contrary to the idea that there would be less walls, I think that nearly every settlement would be walled, and even farmland enclosed when feasible to keep rampaging monsters at bay.
Dragons would necessitate a response force.
Now magic throughs a loop I don't dare bother with. In my own games and fiction, there are charms and barriers that prevent magic from easily manipulating walls.
Depending on the setting walls could also be a lot more economical to build. Mages with the ability to raise permanent stone structures using magic or make building walls faster and cheaper indirectly could make them much more efficient which would again alter the balance in favor of building walls. Mages are essentially taking advantage of a resource that we don't have in the real world and those savings could make walls significantly cheaper. If they're cheap or free then walls might just be built because any amount of slow down they create could make them useful.
Counter-sabotage would likely be a thing. Have sections further beneath that sappers could fall into. Redirect a river or build a sluice gate so you can flood tunnels. There are some terrifying things that you can do.
But walls, like all military structures and actions, depend on context to determine usefulness. Most walls at this point are mobile, in modern militaries. A tank is a bunker. An aircraft carrier is a gigantic water bound castle.
I mean elves live long sure, but they still need to eat and survive counterattacks.
You are correct that warfare would be more complex in a fantastical setting. But walls are simply effective. If there are sappers, there will be counter tunnel's. Vienna can sing songs about it.
Flying creatures still need to survive projectiles and defending flying units.
Walls would still be great. They just get way weirder.
Enemy has funky siege tools, build your own funky tools.
Enemy want to dig down, build underground fortress. That would help great with the flying units aswell.
Walls get knocked down constantly, use magic to make the auto repair or repair them faster.
Especially with fortresses being build way faster the offensive use of forts would be magnified greatly.
Enemy keeps dropping rocks.
Magical dome/ flying Units/ an area that prevents flying (the dead birds that keep dropping are a bother but ey)/ tall towers that reach much higher than the walls/ a mobile roof system. You don't need to cover all of the town, just certain parts. (If the rocks get big enough this stops working, but having no wall doesn't help with that i fear xD)
Hiring a dragon for a fortress would also be great, dragon plus wall is straight up offensive. I'm not attacking that Gate. I don't care u pay me triple.
Of course this would cause elemental armor, teleporting, the enemies hiring dragons, more tunneling. And so forth. It's always a arms race, a wonderfully complex one at that.
Until u get to fighter jets, bombs and rockets ,walls will stay around i believe. Even then they might, since there are some magic iteration that render certain object indestructible. The hole mess with that and potentially making the sharpest blades and them being unbreakable, as a tame example, is its own mess but yeah. Or the obvious one, indiscructible armor. Indestructible Mobile ceiling sounds pretty useful even when jets exist.
I don't think wizard's of the coast thought indrcuscible arrows through. Although even those break with animagic fields, so Antimagic weaponry would rise to prevalence.
OK, cool - Very setting dependent and something that really needs considering based on ancestry composition a world has, and monsters, and this is going to be heavily dependent on region as well in many cases.
...But my main takeaway is that we should probably be seeing blitz-like dragon-raid shelters if not instead then at least as well in many settings.
In Afterworld, Anelims are a subspecies of human with feathered wings, very angelic you could say. They're also slightly shorter than normal humans and naturally skinny, because reduced weight goes brrr.
They arrived in Lamara 600ish years ago, and were immediately some of the biggest menaces around. They quickly took over the Chained Isles (which actually have their name because of the Anelims... they liked to obtain "volunteer workers") and went about demanding tributes from other Lamaran groups, raining death from above if denied.
Anelim-baseliner hybrids are generally the same size and build as baseliners (normal humans), but their wings are weaker, limiting them to short bursts of flight and gliding. The Anelims of the Chained Isles saw these hybrids as abominations and mockeries of their aerial supremacy and beauty, and so would cut their wings off and treat them as baseliners, who they viewed as lesser.
Sky Horrors are creatures that live high in the sky, but can't go too low for too long without air pressure making their brains explode. They're also near-invisible thanks to some funky crystal refraction stuff. Anelims that fly too high, which Anelims religiously perceived as intruding on the home of the gods, are likely to be subject to a Sky Horror swooping and torn apart.
During the Lamaran Unification Wars, in which the Krysa-ruled Lamaran Unity sought to make its name accurate, the Anelims finally met their match in the form of the Krysa and Tummens. Krysa can grow stronger-than-steel crystal from their skin in any shape they want, and Tummens are capable of super strength and speed, as well as being protected from blunt impacts.
An Anelim trying to drop something on the heads of either of them doesn't work, especially when the Tummen is wearing Krysa-made crystal armour in case the Anelim drops anything sharp.
The Tummen is able to throw spears or fire heavy bows at the Anelim as long as the Anelim is in sight, and some Krysa are skilled enough with their abilities to create pre-loaded single-use crystal crossbows, whereas the Anelim can't really attack them at all unless directly above them (in close quarters combat, the short-and-skinny Anelim is bound to lose against the super-strong Tummen, or the Krysa who can grow crystal armour, spikes and blades).
Yeah the Anelims couldn't really do a thing. The Krysa even made crystal ships too strong to be broken by Anelim rock-dropping to sail onto the Anelim isles, and forced a surrender out of them.
That said, I am making it sound easier than it was. The first ones tasked with conquering the Anelims were one of the Unity's subjugated groups, and they lost hard, though that may've been a deliberate move by the Unity to weaken them, humiliate them, and provide them a new thing to hate other than the Unity's government so that they'd be less likely to rebel, and be easy to use against the Anelims again if they rebelled once conquered.
Anelims launched offensive attacks in which they'd target and massacre civilians for a kind of reverse scorched earth policy (scorched earth but you're scorching your enemy's earth), attacked supply trains, etc. Big problem here is that the Lamaran Unity doesn't value human life unless that life has strategic value, and the Anelims were attacking conquered lands home to potentially rebellious people the Unity was happy to see getting thinned out, so the Unity just kept trucking along with the conquest until the Anelims were forced to surrender.
Also, the Lamaran Unity's capital's walls are so high that standing atop them risks getting attacked by Sky Horrors (Sky Horrors are an invasive species, and the walls date back further than their presence. Nobody's sure how or when the walls were built, just that they encircled a pretty nice hunk of farmland, which eventually became a city). The Unity just kept the majority of its VIPs in the capital for the duration of the war, and even used this as an opportunity to have lots of "accidents" in which trouble-makers unfortunately lost their lives.
I solved this in one of my fort towns specifically because I agree with normal walls not being enough.
In my case, I used magical warding alongside the walls. The town is maintained by a series of kobolds. They do this under contract with a local forest god, and so look after these wards as a form of worship.
The walls form a massive spell circle and the wards themselves are a protective mechanism tied to a "town registration."
Anyone who is within the walls and NOT listed in the book within a certain timeframe experiences intense burning, akin to a chemical burn. Animals are considered as well, needing to be "owned by a registor" and thus be tied to a being who is listed in said book.
The kingdom that owns this town is famous for using griffin riders to travel, and there are lookout towers in the town, so there is some natural air defense that could be called on anyway.
But the fort is already well defended by it's magic. Which of course makes it an interesting political point in the region, with some nervous about it's over reliance on old magic.
Shoutout the Icewings wall in Wings of Fire. Didn't know a wall could be racist but a bit of magic and BAM.
The dwarven sappers remind me of that Scottish counter-sapper in Rise of Empires: Ottoman on Netflix.
Seems like the logical fortification in fantasy is the dungeon. :)
Gemmell's "Legend" is a great fantasy siege, but a fairly low magic setting.. Of course, elemental magics may make walls cheap and even capable of self-repair.
For anyone interested in a portrayal of counter siege underground, the Australian movie "Beneath Hill. 60" is a gem.
if fantasy world have to face wyvern, roc bird and dragon on daily basis I think there would be a lot of underground settlement which could span from hobbit style housing up to artificial underdark (could be dwarven made). and in case of food resource there could be more focus on fungi and animal that can be raised underground or partially underground. utilising dense forest (rainforest especially) could be elven main settlement style, and it would be cool if they had tree houses supported by trees that has really long lifespan (hundred up to thousands years old).
either way thanks for the great video, it makes me thinks a lot on how fantasy people would actually built their settlement.
One thing I'm wondering about that I don't see brought up much: how long can flying creatures in your Fantasy setting actually stay in the air? Flying is already energy-intensive for small animals and they rely heavily on air currents to extend their flight time. How helpful would those same air currents actually be to flying creatures the size of horses like pegasus or gryphons, or even larger ones like house-sized dragons?
And if those creatures are carrying any heavy equipment or a rider, that flight time would be drastically shortened too. Which is why in my mind, while yes flying creatures incorporated into an army would definitely be useful, a more traditional ground force would still be needed for them to retreat to so they can rest. Maybe if it's a very mountainous area they could get away with operating more on their own.
As for dragons, they're kind a wildcard in that regard. More often than not, they can just seem to fly for as long as they want, or as long as is needed. I guess for dragons with more overtly magical abilities, they could be using magic to make flying easier in one form or another. If those kinds of magical aids exist, they could be extended to the smaller flying creatures as well - alternatively, maybe a less magical solution that could be introduced eventually would be mechanical wings or a parachute to let their mounts spend some time gliding or floating down for a time without needing to expend their own energy?
Thank you for continuing to make these think pieces. They definitely are shaping how I create and run my gaming worlds.
Best use of walls I've ever seen comes not from fantasy but from sci-fi - Red Rising specifically. In a setting where nuclear bombs are as ubiquitous as hand grenades and glassing a planet is yesterday's news, the use of broad shield domes makes ground forces necessary and the response to that is massive walls. They don't abuse this fact either, there are excellent examples of siegeworks and fortification in most of the grand epic battles throughout.
Yes, we have abstracted and distilled down what walls are and stand for; they are also social touchstones in addition to a real-world functional artifice. This is a game of stories, not a physics/tactical simulation. The symbolism and meaning of the wall exceeds the physical consideration of the wall in this context (and always will).
Even if we were to introduce an intricate mechanical game of siege warfare to the setting, we are not telling a story of the wall. Rather, we are now telling a story about our feelings on other people's treatment of the wall and what they "**should** be focused on." It does not become more true or meaningful; rather, it becomes more political, as a means of arguing a point through a story. This is exactly what the people with the abstracted, distilled, and symbolic uses of the walls were doing already, but more authentically, earnestly, and honestly (and perhaps naively).
Take a look at the reams of "Realistic war stories" that come after the World Wars and it quickly becomes obvious that the real intent was to criticize war in barely concealed acts of political advocacy and manipulation. The "realists" only allow realism to the extent that it serves their purposes... which is not realism at all.
Thus, whenever I hear about how a campaign is going to "fix" things by being "realistic", I shudder. In this single decision, a story departs from a naive, but honest expression of the storyteller's point of view in the world in collaboration with the players. Instead, it becomes the lecturing and scolding of someone who has already determined that we need correction and that he is our better and our teacher.
I think it really depends if the magic in your fantasy world can be inscribed or imbued into a wall. Sure, it would probably drastically increase the cost, but depending on your magic it could protect against aerial attacks (to a certain degree) or against collapses. Sieges only really work if the fields need to be outside the walls, although that elven siege you described resembled a mix of siege and brain drain, which feels a bit unconventional. Besides, just because it isn't the best way to defend, doesn't mean it wouldn't be used for some time, until it is proven useless or detrimental.
I'm not sure a discussion of walls outside the context of D&D is all that useful for general dungeon mastery. Unless the conclusion is that walls have no place in D&D.
It seems like it would be better to start at the default and work downward to low magic. But maybe that's just my interest in understanding the natural ecosystem created by a game's rules.
In my stories, walls protect and conceal runic arrays that create sensory and defensive barriers. These walls are inscribed with runes to withstand conventional attacks, with maintenance scaling by area, so cities are typically compact. Large, sprawling cities with only sensory barriers are rare, found only at the core of dominant powers as symbols of might.
Even small settlements have basic runic protections on wooden walls to guard against fire and provide sensory functions. Sensory barriers are constantly active, while the more energy-intensive barriers activate only as needed, often triggered by the sensory arrays or lookouts.
Sieges aim to exhaust a city’s energy supply for barriers rather than simply outlasting defenders. Attacks weaken barriers, which then require restoration, and barriers may break under sustained or overwhelming assaults. These defenses are segmented, so breaching one part doesn’t compromise the entire system. Advanced barriers can form a dome over the city, extending underground. Purpose-built fortresses have foundational runic arrays, and cities anchor barriers from all directions using pylons below ground and towers above.
When two forces are evenly matched, infiltration and sabotage become essential for a swift victory. Saboteurs inside the city can disrupt barrier systems and deplete energy reserves, weakening defenses. By coordinating with an outside attack, a saboteur can intentionally bring down a barrier segment at a critical moment, creating an unexpected breach that allows for a surprise assault. This collaboration forces defenders to react quickly, often shifting resources or leaving other parts of the barrier vulnerable, accelerating the siege.
Elves would just wait for a local dry period to develop and move in as the population naturally starves.
I do not think the problem is with walls. It instead is with poor world building. If a story has a lot of dangerous flying creatures and humanity has expanded far then humanity will naturally have a good way of dealing with flying enemies. Magic, magical technology or straight up science that has advanced far in a particular area to meet a threat.
I'm imagining a situation where dwarves are treated like gophers... Impossible to get rid of them all, constantly tunneling under your land, messing up your fields, leaving holes for your feet to fall into and twist your ankle...
One of the really cool things i did for a world-building session my group participated in was actually figuring out which species would be the Empire builders since we created a world without humans.
Of the species we selected, Dragonborn were the ones most likely to colonize and expand their territory. The society that developed was inspired by the Emerald Empire in L5R where, from the outside, the Empire looks like one incredibly dominant and united force since their army includes dragons for all the biggest threats... But on the inside, nobles of all kinds would wage skirmishes with each other, allow Orc war camps to survive so they could use the Orcs to train their soldiers and generally inspire a Dictatorial Meritocracy. (Reminiscent of the Turians from Mass Effect)
Depending on how Walls are designed, they can also provide shelter from the elements as well as shade. 4:00
This video has inspired me to add sieges as a dynamic event to a hexcrawl module I'm writing. Since there'll only be one main outpost (western marches), it'll be critical for all players in the campaign to devote time and resources to protecting that outpost, because it is their lifeline to civilization and the heart of their expedition.
This makes a fair bit of sense. Though something you didn't mention was that a large city might have some type of trained arial combat unit to deal with the most common arial threats in their region or that have been used by their enemies in the past. In many fantasy settings, I could see the walls as a part of a multi tiered approach to defense. Something underground to help prevent or counter sapping attacks, walls at ground level to stop or slow down marching armies, and magical wards along with arial combatants to defend against anything trying to fly in.
This gives me an idea for a possible short story or novela, where someone raises an army to attack a city and then goes to try and hire some Dwarven mercenaries to sap the wall only for them to turn him down due to the city having the best defenses that could be created by the combined efforts of the greatest dwarves and elves in the last millenia. The only hope of trying to take the city would require three massive armies attacking from deep underground, on the ground, and in the air at the same time with the arial combatants riding true dragons, not pseudo dragons or wyverns.
I think the best approach is to consider counter measures tailored to what can defeat stone walls, consider how to counter the counter.
That brings to my mind a point raised by the Isaac Arthur channel, which was that is impossible under know physics to have stealth space fleets. I tend to disagree, because as sound as it may be when one consider physics camouflage is not a game to be played with the laws of physics. It is a game played on top of the laws of physics, but, between prey and predator. The entire point of stealth is to know your adversary and explore the blind-spots it has. Every perceptive system has blind-spots. Somewhere in your enemy army there is someone you can bribe to not see the dot moving in a monitor, or something like that.
The point about walls seems to be similar. Whatever tools your enemies have, are they available to you? Usually they will be, after some time, because either those without access to a military advantage too good are going to find a way to get access to it. Spying, stealing, torturing, bribing or what have you. Or they will lose their rights of existence as a free people, and end up slaved, extinguished, or reduced to wild nomadic existence.
So, if you have your air force of gryphons and were-crows, protecting your walls against the enemy with similar tools, situation is not too bad for you and your walls. If that's still low magic, no anti-tank explosive spells available to anyone. I can see the walls having good cost benefit. John Norman's Gor despite being sci-fi, with no magic system per se, has more or less that situation. With an army of giant birds (the tarns) caring elite troops of warriors, in fights between State Cities. But only the main global powers have tarns. Those birds are hard to capture, hard to tame, and hard to keep. Expensive investment.
When you bring the subject of fantasy races, that changes the consideration. There are two very different situations, determining different kinds of setting. One where the races fight each other, keeping unity, elves against dwarves, humans against orcs, kobolds allied to humans against bird people, merfolk allied to centaurs against gnomes, etc. That is a setting of strategy videogame, where each side gets the natural advantages of their racial traits. I believe that is interesting, but less plausible.
More likely, more often, I think we would have different branches of elves fighting each other, for resources that are important for elves but not too relevant for other races. Centaurs doing the same. Humans we know, never fight each other or ally with alien strangers to destroy their close neighbours. Never happened in History. But, for fantasy races, I think that behaviour would make more sense.
So, perhaps our side has only 10% of elves, and not the kind of elf that has those powerful spells that give them a cutting edge. Still, we have our elves. We have more gnomes, and more centaurs, but they have some of those too. Even if our centaurs are the stronger kind that has the lower body of buffalos, while their centaurs are mostly mere half-horses. Maybe no side has were-crows, but both employ freelance mercenaries for tasks that require than particular task.
That gives us a setting where stories are harder to tell. Reader must make more effort to visualize what is happening. On the other hand, I think situations like that make the world a bit more believable, once we get beyond the learning curve needed to understand the setting.
In a world like that, low magic or even no magic beyond the racial advantages, I think walls can de as useful as they used to be in ancient and medieval times in our (arguably) real world.
A fellow Isaac Arthur fan. Nice.
Fun thing is, some civilizations and native tribes allied with colonial invaders so they could assure their rivals will go down. It happened in the Aztecs and is thought to have happened amongst Filipino tribes.
Yes,@@fishyfishyfishy500akabs8, it usually happens. Happened among the native tribes here in Brasil too. And, goes without saying, those alliances of European nation and natives usually dedicated the best part of their efforts to fight other European nation, and their local allies. Europeans are all the time making alliances with strangers against their own neighbours.
It makes sense. Those who look and behave more like you, share more history with you, are a more present and concrete treat to you. You have more reasons to want vengeance against them. They against you. Besides, a Catholic is way more likely to convert to Protestantism than to Buddhism or even the much less alien Islamic Faith. More points in common, less effort to learn the new practice. Ergo, Protestantism in the short term is a more important treat to Catholic majorities than Buddhism, under most contexts.
There is no justification to see anything strange in non-Europeans doing the same. It is human, and probably more than just human. Humans are the only instance of talking people we happen to have available during our life time. But we will soon find or (more likely) make some talking non-humans to share existence with us. I hope.
My bet would be that AIs will fight each other too. And find allies among humans, in their wars. Same for uplifted cats, bats, spiders and octopuses.
I got way into this. Had the idea that there are entire magical engineer schools on how to build city defenses. Magic baked into the walls and buildings to increase their resistance to damage. Specially trained wizards to repel other magical attacks. Plans to counter attack enemies before they can mount large attacks on the walls. Entire enchantments on a city to restrict the use of magic by the enemies or block specific spells. some form of flying cavalry to protect the sky from attack.
Id also say the fact that walls are more likely to be breached in a fantasy world could lead to more proactive hunting. Like adventurers job is to find, track, and maybe eliminate any monsters dangerous enough to breach a wall within the a few days ride from the city.
Your aside on elven 'sieges' being preceded by years long guerilla campaigns interdicting supplies remimded me that that is exactly the optimal way of playing elves in the fantasy 4x series dominions. Elves have a trait which makes them hidden from kost enemies until they attack, and prepositioning forces across your enemies lands before popping up in their back right as you declare war is an insanely effective strategy.
Great video. Even though I disagree that walls are ineffective in fantasy settings, it was an interesting topic to think about. We must look not just at the iconic curtain walls of medieval castles, but at the broader purpose and history of real fortifications. The purpose of a wall will never be obsolete, it is to stop oncoming ground forces and to protect from ranged attacks. Without a wall, competing forces must meet on the field. In that situation, no kingdom is going to attack a city without overwhelming force. This means that to prevent a city from falling in a day, it needs a wall. When we look at walls in a fantasy setting, I think it is most effective to compare the magic and creatures to real wold technology.
For instance, in a high magic setting where spells like fireball are common enough to be used as artillery, walls would be less likely to be tall masonry and instead would be earthen banks to absorb the force. With a steep enough slope this is still impassable to ground forces, or could be topped with a shorter and thicker wall.
Against dwarven sappers, moats could be dug to discourage tunneling. You could even make an underground cistern as a trap. At the very least it would cause significant delays, and if a city employs counter-sappers would create another front of the conflict.
Bastions would protect against trenches, providing multiple angles of fire.
Against an army of elven snipers, the walls could have system of tenailles and ravelins to protect the inner walls from ranged attacks. This can be used to hide your cavalry behind cover as it assembles, minimizing losses in a charge. It would also make trenches impossible to reach the inner walls, as they would need to funnel through flanked pssageways.
Against something as spectacular as a dragon attack, walls would be useless as a barrier. However they would still act as a staging ground for archers and ballistae. It has the tradeoff of giving a clear line of sight for the disadvantageof becoming a centralized target. In a world where opposing armies have an air force of gryphon/dragon/etc riders it is likely that your city would have some access to that as well. As with sappers it would create another front of battle, likely not even interacting with a wall.
These are just some examples, there is a long history of additional fortifications used in conjunction with walls to be drawn from. To make them properly effective, walls would be more complex and would utilize the more modern construction which we see in the real world up until the creation of explosive missiles. In a high magic setting, they could even be repaired and strengthened with magic to make them nigh impenetrable without the use of magical attacks.
TL;DR in fantasy settings with warring factions we would most likely see something similar to star forts around large cities. (Though with monsters and hostile races in the wilderness I think even the smallest of towns would have wooden palisades at the very least.)
I think it is important to think about:
- sapping might be more effective, but so is the building of the wall, or perhaps the building of several walls. Storries like there to be one wall to breach, to signal to the reader/consumer of the story, when this wall is breached, shit just got serious. But in fantasy, depending on what magic can do, a fort or city might have 5-10 walls to breach before it is fully taken. (But unless your whole story is about one siege, people probably don't want to hear about the 4th wall being breached, only 5 more to go before things get really serious.)
- flying creatures will be a menance, but if you can get word out, you should see an advanced force of flying creatures come to relieve the city fairly quickly. The besiegers are likely more spread out than the defenders, in order to close all the entrances to the city. Being more spread out, it is probably harder for the besiegers to protect their assests against arieal attacks. Also the besiegers have to protect their supply lines against arieal attacks. I am not convinced adding flying creatures to the mix is a boon to the attacker.
I still think that ditches are a go-to option. Easy to make, helps to prevent armies from simply waltzing in.
I think that even with medium levels of magic or high levels, you can easily make walls work.
Walls themselves aren't THE answer but they are a component to make things a little safer. Keep wild beast out, deter the nonmagically inclined, direct and restrict travel, and peace of mind to the populace.
Maybe there's warding stations along the wall or city that protect from teleportation magic and most magic attacks? Maybe mages are restricted not from the prevalence of magic but the lack of time and money most people can commit to study, so armies may have plenty of casters but one who can toppel the walls, breach enchantments, or teleport everyone in is rare? A complex barrier dome to block dragons to supplement the stone walls. Lol maybe one of the safety measures is that the whole city can take off and become a floating island?
Tyranny has pretty prevalent magic buy uses reasoning like that for why walls are still important. Most soldiers don't have much, if any, magic. To be trained enough to topple it requires specialized training and proximity.
All things, warfare and crime especially, are games of adapting to adaptations. Like missiles track heat so we made flares, so missiles track IR, we made chaff. People made walls so we make spells to break them, people enchanted walls so we went around them, people warded cities so we adapt. Just because it isn't a perfect counter doesn't mean it isn't worth doing for other reasons.
Even better, we didn't stop using walls because cannons became more common. We changed how walls were used. Star forts for range and coverage, or the castles in the east that packed dirt within or layered like a cake.
Another use of walls I've seen in fantasy: an anchor for magic diagrams. Magic circles and other diagrams are often seen in fanatsy. A wall built in the proper shape may be supporting a powerful, city-wide magic that would be hard to disturb and would protect the city or improve the conditions within.
An elven siege next to a forest sounds terrifying now.
With magic, you could also use a spell like shape earth to build massive hill barriers, or perhaps equally as usefull, completely hill and trench the whole landscape perpendicular to the tangent of the defending wall, now theres no dispersed square of infantry, just a shooting gallery for the defending army in each of the valleys in front. Alternatively, you could partially slope the crevices and then pour some oil or water down down each of them.
In my world building project many cities have walls, but most have additional defenses. If we take the greatest city as an example, a big trade city at the edge of the desert where three rivers meet. They have quite sizable walls around (most) of it and even internally. Additionally they have regularly dispersed towers all over the city that function as watchtowers and have some big arcane crystal on top. These crystals can be activated in a few minutes and then interrupt specific types or even all magic. (As any bigger creature and anything people use to fly, uses air magic. Interrupt that a dragon, flying person or airship will just crash.) The inside of the outer walls also have another type of crystal, that is always active and creates a shield / force field over the whole city to keep sand, hot air and unwanted people and creatures out. The rivers can be blocked only letting water through. The city is so big that only very few armies even could consider a full siege around it. And then the tunnels below or portals would still work. (The portals are between fixed positions and take extremely powerful people to create them.) Smaller cities and castles also have some of these defenses, so most can stop flying or magic from breaching. (How to counter common magic? With powerful antimagic.)
So, to create free aim zones within the walls of a castle or city might be an option against flying opponents. Though these will still be a limited range of aim, but it wouldn't be terribly different from having a kill arena for your defending archers to simply pick off the invaders from above. So, have vacant aim zones for aerial weaponry projectiles to land when they miss. Alternatively, you could have the aerial bombardment placed farther from the walls so that projectiles can still go over the walls, but there is a greater range of anti-aerial projectiles.
Fantasy fortifications will be built under the assumption that some enemies can and will breach or bypass them. Thus, they'll be designed to maximize the "non-barrier" functions you mentioned -- slowing enemy movement, channeling enemies into chokepoints and kill zones, while providing the defenders with cover, speedy paths of movement and communication, and ready access to ammunition, medical supplies, and other materiel. Rather than a shell defense, there will be a defense in depth, with multiple lines of defense to fall back on. Where feasible, these will include networks of secret tunnels, underground bunkers, hidden supply caches, and multiple secret routes past potential siege lines. Tunnels, walls, and redoubts will all be built with self-destruct features to deny their use to the enemy and to serve as one-time traps. Non-combatants will be relocated to emergency shelters and evacuated friom the area at the first possibility.
I always include a Druid Kingdom in my worldbuilding. That Grand Druid can shatter a city’s walls in a single spell, so he is the de facto ruler of parts of the world and his borders aren’t just imaginary lines on the map.
Likewise, my goblins will sneak into the city in the dark. They won’t attack en masse. They’ll try to get in from every possible entry, just to create havoc inside of the city. Even a single goblin scaling the walls alone is a danger if it can get to the gate and throw it open or if it can use fire arrows to start fires from a spot atop the walls.
I have been thinking through this for my D&D game for probably a year now, and it becomes obvious that a nice palisade is ample for most basic settlements to just keep the wild animals at bay, and if you genuinely have to worry about giants or dragons, YOU DONT LIVE THERE… unless there is a gold mine or something equally valuable to hold onto there. And then you build a huge castle because that’s a smart idea.
I have issues with the notion that magic will prevent all these issues - an enemy priest cast stone shape and ruined a section of castle wall in our game but the player priest patched it up enough with his own spell to prevent a full breach of the castle. Most of the obvious problems have obvious answers.
Definitely going to make a dwarvish sapper mercenary. Great video
Are they practical?
Well that very much depends on context. What is the fantasy world like? What exists in that world and what are you planning to defend against? Against flying threats? Probably useless. Against hordes of monstrous beasts or armies of humanoids? Very useful. Does that world have explosives or magic of great destructive potential? Are there specific counter-measures for those things? All those things matter. A great example is Malazan, where powerful magic users could easily destroy city walls, but a lot of walls are imbued with a material that deadens magic. Cities are also defended by mages and expending your own magical resources to take down the wall leaves you vulnerable for a magical counter-attack.
In Frieren, most major cities are both walled and bolstered by magical defenses. Barriers which keep demons out and prevent flying monsters from going over the defenses. One particular city is of note in that it didn't appear to have any such defenses and so a dragon easily got inside and terrorized the place before it was seemingly forced to flee but the lucky arrival of a hero.
Keep in mind crushes are mainly caused by actually stopping flows of people. Identity is incredibly important in regulating such things as people really wont induce such things if they have identifiers as simple as wearing the same shirt. Magical markers and specialized openings to shelters could be very easy mechanisms to mitigate flying enemy terror campaigns.
I oneced GMed in setting with a lot of flyers where cities that were in risk had special domes over them. There are also underground cities kind of dwarf things or similar.
I think the best point ive seen is that fantasy walls are rarely for warfare; to put it bluntly, humans build walls to keep the fantasy out. Nobody wants forest monsters being able to wander freely into the city
I created for my campaign the concept of a dragonfort, a fort on the top of a plateau that housed anti air scorpions and contained pretty much all the infrastructure under the surface
Imagine sieging elfs for 10 years to find out they was sneaking in and out freely this whole time.
In one of my game worlds I had a small nation with four cities, each protected by a Barrier. The Barrier stones were provided, one at a time, over many years, by the patron Deity of the realm. The stone created a magical barrier that had several functions. I was a literal dome over the city, extending twenty miles from the stone itself. The principle enemy 'type' of the region couldn't pass the barrier at all (Fey) In addition, because the local deity that provided the stones was a Goddess of the Sea, all of the sea life within the barrier was much more plentiful. The bounty of the sea was magnified by the barrier. This was mostly as a compensation for the fact that it wasn't safe for them to travel too far from home. Outside of the barriers, the wilderness was under a constant threat from the Fey in a variety of forms. So only large armed groups would travel. The use of Iron weapons was the greatest tool against them in combat, but in this land, Iron was so rare that it was the commodity of currency. So the people could thrive in their domed barrier cities but venturing out was extremely dangerous. The barriers also kept out demons and undead, which the locals lumped in with Fey in their own understanding.
Once the capital got large enough, a second barrier stone was given and they founded the second city. etc. They always built them near water, but not always as effectively. It was a very interesting setting when I ran it and the lessons I learned from making it and running it stick with me.
I think it’s also worth considering the ease of building walls in some of these settings, it might not help against dragons but if one person with a strong enough earth spell can make a wall in a day, I think they would be quite popular
Its a rather easy solution, but most fantasy scenarios forget about it (mostly because it is "not for adventurers magic"): Magic wards. Take viking style runes above doorways that should offer the gods protection for the "house" (abstract concept - Magic can handle stuff like this, it mostly runs on narrativum, and "House" isnt clearly defined by "needs to be X meters in diameter, made from stone" or something like that). Now add stronger, more aggressive wards to some solid structure, say a wall (that keeps mundane intruders out, and offers a nice obstacle quite a lot of stuff anyway) and attune it to protect the contents of it to "monsters" (another loosly defined term, that may or may not start to react to murder hobo characters...). And walls start to work again. Why not only put the wards down? Well... Wards may fail if they are overloaded and being a 8 meter high wall helps against rabble monsters that cant fly. Wards could also catch flying creatures, as they probably create a dome shaped structure (Circle being a traditional warding structure, Globe is the 3 dimensional version)... Also: if you create a ward that works against your neighboring empire because they might invade - thats it for trade and diplomacy then. Wich may lead to war... So having a pile of rocks stacked and warded properly/smartly will do you a lot of good.
In a magic world, could be walls even stronger.
It feels naturaly, that the walls would be connected with barrier spells, that increase the defense of the wall itself, and making a barrier for air attacks.
With checkpoints, where the cores of the barrier are placed.
Garth Nix's Abhorsen books have a very interesting take on the wall as mystical/magical and symbolic barrier. Likewise Gaimans Stardust. I think walls are very effective when used as a border between a magical and non magical world, and explorations of who is being defended from whom.
i could see a network of "razorwire" being spread across the city to "wall the sky" against a lot of flying creatures. this is particular useful if the setting also has some kind of super-metal (adamantine) that can withstand the weight and attacks of a dragon or similar.
It is a very good thing I decided to make elves live less obscenely long lives and decided to make dwarves not exist in my world. My reasoning in-universe with dragons was basically that its just an incentive for them to stay away. Yes, a dragon *could* fly over, or even just barrel through the wall, but the fact that there is a giant stone wall is already enough for the dragons not to care.
As you say though, magical transport/messaging WOULD make sieges a lot more difficult.
In my own setting, walls are present in a few forms. cities built on the surface of the world (most cities are built in the sky) make use of walls, because while many many creatures can fly, meany cannot, so while a wall cannot ward off all monsters they still do good work on the many creatures that walk on the ground. this is true for human wars as well, while flight is very common both through magic and with machines like air ships, not everyone can fly so they serve as a minor nuisance for the enemy that takes very little effort from the defenders to set up. but the primary purpose of most walls is to serve as the foundation for barrier domes which are a mix of technological and magical barriers that prevent people from flying over them as well as prevent physical objects and projectiles from passing through. the way the magic system works is that a shield is only as strong as the material it is connected to, so without the wall the shield would break easily. the greatest of citadels and castles are fully enclosed domes where the wall covers the entire castle like a steal shell. these domes are usually built around specific buildings like prisons, bunkers and evacuation sites rather than entire cities, but they are generally considered the most well fortified places in the world.
I think walls will still have a place as much as fencing does today. For mundane things and smaller or nonmagical monsters earthen and wood walls and/or castles would be a nice go between using possibly expensive and/or rare magic to protect against local wildlife or bandits. They are quicker, and much cheaper to build than stone and can be plastered to be fire proof (ish). There were everywhere in our world.
as im sure many people have mentioned, dwarves are not a hard counter to walls, they would simply just open up a new subterranian front consisting of undermining and countermining operations. Seige of vieana is a good example of this, and i think it goes without saying that a wall is just part of a defense, it is not intened to defend alone but insead as a part of a greater stragagy. A wall creates a fixed obstacle that the enemy must expend most of their resousese in order to overcome whilst being harried by the defenders and their grander stratagy. as for air units, since the sky is so large it would probally result in the rise of local "air forces" as part of the over all stratagy.