Xenoblade X is one of my favourite playgrounds for this stuff

[yvannairie]

The fanfic words are Not Going lately so in the meanwhile I've been doing other fandoms -- mostly older stuff, because I realised that despite it being A Bad Time, a lot of the paramilitary stuff I did for Xenoblade X probably translates really well to TF content once tweaked a bit.

I had three big projects for that fandom -- two fairly extensive battle plans and a whole field manual that never materialised despite me having a bunch of materials for it. A bunch of the field guides material does already show up in my headcanons for Wrecker field ops, and I also had a brainwave about how the battle plans could probably be repurposed for TF things, especially the Operation: Death or Glory plan with its map that I fabricated out of whole cloth.

The other battle -- the siege of New Los Angeles -- is slightly harder to just pick up and drop onto the civil war because it's so tied to the geography of NLA. I had a lot more to work with when I was planning it out (an actual map, a rough timeline of the major engagements during the siege, and a fairly thorough understanding of the capabilities of the defenders and the attackers) and I think I did well adapting the strangeness into something that obeys an internal logic.

The biggest problem with the siege of NLA is that NLA itself is a really strange sort of city to defend. It's got high walls with only two gates, but the area around the gates is not fortified in any way, only leveled to make transportation easier and to create a kill plane for their gunners. On top of the walls, there are some AA guns, but mostly the aerial defense is handled by Skells (giant mecha battle suits) with ranged weapons, but in all fairness those walls are damn high and also surrounded by a ring of spiky rock pointing away from the city like pikes in a moat.

On the inside, the defense of NLA is way more lacking. Both gates open into open roads, with the only checkpoint being passing under the ring gate, and no fortified structures on either side of the gate. Furthermore the east gate is actually located on an upper level compared to the other structures, and incoming vehicles need to take a right and a left to get to the elevator taking them down to the main hangar, or across the main road to the loading docks on the west side of the city. Most of the structures near the gates are located right next to the ringwall, which means the safe position to retreat to from defending the gate at either position is quite far away, requiring lots of barricading to stop the enemy from dispersing into the area.

The inside of the NLA is divided into four districts -- the upper-level administrative district around the east gate, the lower-level industrial district near the west gate, and the lower-level commercial and residential districts. Commerical district is parallel to the main road between administrative and industal, and has three access points, all bridges without cover. Residential district is in the southwest corner of the city and the only way to get to it is from either of the the two levels of the administrative district. Both have very low buildings, and aren't particularly easy to defend, but since residential district can only be accessed from one of the gates and is on the ocean-side of the city, it's also away from artillery fire and it's the spot I chose for supply and triage, as BLADE needed to have both engineers and medics on the scene, and could easily transport troops within the city using the few light Skells they had that weren't participating in counter-air measures.

The city ultimately wasn't breached through either of the gates, because BLADE was capable of engaging Ganglion far "outfield" from the city, and the few stragglers that got through of the main force were weakened from the Skell fire and were funneled neatly into the kill planes in front of the gates. However, once it becomes apparent that the outfield defensive line will hold, they sent a Xern troop carrier over the walls, out of the range of effective Skell and AA gun fire, and used it to drop a bunch of mixed units with infantry and medium-weight mecha (so, heavier than the light Skells used internally, but lighter than the Skells used outfield) into the commercial district.

(The Xern itself ended up not really mattering for the battle inside the city b/c for some odd reason it couldn't fire directly down on the city, only around itself and back at the BLADE Skells, denying them access back into the city. The commander of the Xern presumably had... a less than solid understanding of field operations, because the Xern really didn't help them not get routed and couldn't be retreated to b/c it was left so high above the range of the middle-weight mechs they were using that they could retreat back into its protective range.)

And that's kind of where the whole thing falls out of organisation for both parties -- worse for Ganglion, less worse for BLADE -- and becomes too uncoordinated to really qualify as strategic. The commercial district was almost entirely empty, but the Ganglion didn't know that coming in so they didn't have time to start setting up barricades and defensive positions before troops from the administrative and residential districts attacked them, also without much in way of defensive organisation but a good familiarity with the area they were fighting in and the morale advantage of it being their home turf. The way I interpreted the situation, it came down to the more powerful, but less numerous Ganglion mechs being stuck in areas where they couldn't maneouver, compared to the infantry of BLADE who could flank them with impunity, and cut off their access to their allies beyond the gates.

Without the ability to retreat or gain a defensive foothold, the much better equipped Ganglion ground troops got wiped out by the infantry inside NLA, forcing Ganglion to retreat presumbaly to conserve what troops they had on the field, because they did try the same thing later (and were intercepted even further out, because this time BLADE was expecting it). It really is more accurate to talk about the battle of NLA over siege of NLA, because most of the fighting took place over uncontested land.

Inside NLA, BLADE hadn't bothered to really fortify the commercial district, having focused its efforts elsewhere, leaving no defensive position for either party to exploit. Outfield, BLADE's strategy was mostly to do sweeps with Skells, either by striking through key points in the line trying to rout the Ganglion infantry, or by doing repeated "Parthian shot" manoeuvers -- getting close to their mechanised infantry, taking out the first line, and then retreating out of range to conserve their Skells. It's really two different skirmishes, disconnected from one another except by their commander, who eventually has to retreat out of NLA and take the Xern -- their best siege weapon -- out with her.

So, what does that leave me with? Actually, quite a lot! But none of it easily translatable because the composition of the troops varies so heavily from one part of the field to another. If I tried to take any of it and directly adapt the same battle to the Cybertronian civil war, I'd end with way to poorly organised armies doing maneouviers that would obviously not work because the difference in firepower between the parties isn't that big. A shock troop, Autobot or Decepticon, trying to punch its way to the gates of a city where the majority of the ground troops were still inside the city and only a few elite, extremely well-organised and highly mobile companies were engaging them outside wouldn't work, due to the lack of difference between mechanised, armoured units and infantry. Everyone on the field has more or less the same capabilities and limitations.

The only think that would kinda work the same would be to drop a Combiner in the middle of a fortified city, but a) I don't think either side is that prepared to waste a Combiner in a manoeuver like that and b) a Combiner is much more useful doing traditional breach tactics where it can have covering fire from smaller units the entire time it's destroying the gates. Also no cities with such high level of fortification would have such a small area, or be so open and easy to move in, making the prospect of dropping people in and have them push their way through enemy territory into opening the gates even less likely to succeed.

The other battle plan is much less convoluted b/c most units involved are mixed in some way -- infantry alongside light Skells, forming a "light" company, and a mixed mechanised unit with mid and heavy Skells forming a "heavy" company -- against almost uniformly heavy armoured enemy units with their own infantry support, so the relative firepower between the combatants is much easier to work out. The siege of NLA, however, is so closely tied to the environment it was fought in that you can't just look at which troops were more "effective" in a vacuum. That makes it more interesting, definitely -- but less broadly applicable.