trying to catch up on all the comments... the etiquette on editing the questions, is usually to avoid invalidating the answers. Unless they are very irrelevant. But if you do, then please comment on said answers to indicate that you have somehow changed the focus, so that the author will be notified and may also adapt their answer.
battles are not just "brute force". A 1-on-1 fight involves a lot of technique, but an army battle involves tactics. The Napoleon wars have had many debates about those. Napoleon and Nelson have proven themselves to be generally excellent tacticians.
The Roman won a lot of battles and thus wars due to their tactics
But JavaScriptCoder (poor you ;-)) wanted to know how to run campaigns with his Avian species...
in an Early phase of History
"Organized Warfare", does not imply Campaign... or maybe consider defining what you mean by campaign
and if you mean organised attack against another tribe... are they living in a city? Are they just living a tent, are they meeting on a battle field, do they want to kill them all, do they want to subdue them, do they want to defend, do they want slaves, etc.
I hope I can convince you that 1) campaign needs to be defined to something that is realistic for the time; and 2) that there are many open question and points to consider to answer your question.
Also you need to consider their inhabitats... you won't use the same tactics to attack a "fortified" city on the ground and one on a cliff...
Also, try to specify precisely the time you consider... are we really still in the chalcolithic? Or was it a fast-forward to some time later?
how can I make a demon transformation worth the cost of giving up magic?
Orgone is the measure of a person's connection with the cosmos. It is the conduit through which the power of the cosmos flows, focused through a sorcerer's will. Ritual practicioners must draw on this reserve of power to ma...
@JavaScriptCoder Well, you haven't included any information about what you mean by 'campaign'. Is this a one city campaign? Is this summer only? What are logistics like? What about the distances between cities? Are there any choke points? Are there any ground units to be used?
There's a long way to go from "I have birds with claws on their wings" to "In a ciy-state society, how are these birds going to wage war on each other".
And, I have no idea what the 'Chalcolithic' era is.
@JavaScriptCoder When I look at the question, I see a thread that has given me trouble on WorldBuilding for a long time. War strategy/tactics are so interconnected with a world that it's really hard to put together a good question on the topic.
Each culture approaches things differently.
In the modern world, the USA, China, and Russia are all major military powers. They all have roughly the same kinds of weapons, give or take a decade or two of R&D. But they all approach warfare totally different. Russian tactics look very different from US tactics.
And since the strategies have to be built on these tactical underpinnings, the strategies differ widely as well.
The strategies themselves have to interact with the society, because they have to be passed down from warrior generation to warrior generation. You really don't want to have to fight enough wars to test out your strategies all the time. War is bad for business (unless you're a Ferengi)
And likewise, these strategies have to adapt to the tactics of the warriors. The young warriors are brought up in the society too. They have expectations.
Shaka, the warrior king who put the name of the Zulu on the map, was so successful because he adapted his strategies to best use the warriors.
An excellent example of this is the difference in martial tradition between Japanese warfare and European warfare in the Middle Ages. Both were feudal societies, both had a dedicated warrior class but the way they waged war was very very different.
Shaka built his strategy off of an analogy of a bull. There were horns of the bull, the face of the bull, and the belly of the bull. He divided his army into those parts. The belly of the bull is the one that I found most interesting. Shaka noticed that his warriors overexerted themselves. Often an opening would appear late in battle which could be exploited, but the warriors were too fatigued to take it.
So Shaka held back part of his warriors, the belly of the bull, to be sent in only when the time was right.
My favorite tactic: he would sometimes face these belly warriors backwards, away from the fight. He saw that his warriors had the thirst for battle, and would sometimes fail to have enough discipline. The belly warriors would sometimes break rank to join the fight before the time. So he would have his warriors face away from the battle to avoid this.
Now I have no idea how you arrive at that in one step of Worldbuilding. That tactic evolved over many years and dozens of battles. To the best of my understanding, to find the strategy of the belly of the bull, and its associated tactics, you pretty much have to play a cat and mouse game with tactics and strategy between nations until you find interesting things.
@Green Yep. And if you look at the differences between those two societies, you see the difference is reflected in the warrior ethos, which is, in turn, a reflection of the society itself.
@CortAmmon Further comparison can be done with Polynesian warrior cultures. I don't know of anyone else who does war dances before a battle to freak out their opponents. That's wildly different than anything else I know of.
Another fun small-scale example is Chess. Strategies for chess vary widely, based on personality. Karpov was a constrictor style player. He loved locked up positions where he could suffocate his opponents. He was the top of the chess player world until Kasparaov came in with an utterly over the top agressive style and became the new reigning champion.
@Green And why those dances also appear in their wedding cerimonies....
The thing I dislike about Hakas is that I feel obliged to watch them all the way through out of respect, especially if they're good. Really inconvenient if I start watching them when I need to leave for work =p
From what I can tell, it has some actual practical advantage. It's like stretching, except instead of stretching your muscles, you're stretching your warrior spirit.
@CortAmmon I've never experienced it live, but most professional Rugby player will tell you that it's impressive... if well made it does impact the opponents... as much as they will deny it.
Lack of resources - society
Tags: society culture food natural-resources
This is one of a group of questions dealing with a fantasy-ish world in which the natural resources (food, trees, metal) have been overused to the point where there is no longer enough for everyone. This means that t...
The Chalcolithc varies, depending on the regions, but in Europe, it was 3500 to 1700 BCE... and not the numbers I mentioned earlier... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcolithic_Europe
Inability to die - government
Tags: government law society immortality
This is one of a group of questions based on a fantasy world. Through
magical means, the inhabitants of the world, once cursed with a deadly
plague, have succeeded in creating a magical device to keep them from
deat...
Lack of resources - society
Tags: society culture food natural-resources
This is one of a group of questions dealing with a fantasy-ish world in which the natural resources (food, trees, metal) have been overused to the point where there is no longer enough for everyone. This means that t...
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor