Labrat wrote:
Perhaps against a bunch of magicless guys wielding sticks and swords... but against several hundred priests, each with overlapping magical shields and big-freaky energy blasts? Yeah, due to chronic mismanagement they are a lot weaker than the wizzers. But damn near every magic-using male on the continent is owned by these guys. Not to mention that enough bowmen or musketeers will ruin anybody's day if the priests can summon enough energy to take down the wizzers' shields for a few seconds.
The wizzers need somebody or something to act as an ablative meat-shield. Mercenaries, conscripted poor, zombies, giant teddybear cloth-golems. Whatever.
Erfworld is sublime. A lot of the Giant's Playground forum posters are pretentious little shits hiding their faults with shallow critism and factual inaccuracies. Ah what the hell, I'll say it, uncensored; "There's a bunch of fucking lying scum trying to bring erfworld down before it even gets off the ground because they think if they talk trash about things, people will want to have sex with them."
Anyways, Tsuiraku fields military Golems.
If I had to guess at how the Mage/Priest Wars went, I'd say the Opium Wars was the analogy to look at (Britain vs. Manchu Dynasty china). Basically that along with the ability to interdict any activity outside continental Veracia, Tsuiraku could march exactly one army wherever the hell it wanted it to, and said army could smash anything the Veracians cared to put in front of it. Thing being, that would be pretty much all Tsuiraku could do; Veracia's frickn' huge and has a lot of armies. They made it impossible for Veracia to hold onto Farrel, and they walked up to the Veracian capital and looted it (kinda like the raid on the Summer Palace). At some point after that, the Veracians got tired of having their economy trashed with impunity and the Tsuirakans were never interested in the war to begin with, and peace broke out.