Why haven't the orcs been exterminated or gotten better

[Username17]

So what does the "round up a bunch of Orcs" process look like? Say I'm an aspiring Dark Lord with a second iterative attack, enough spellcasting to bind Demons, and a couple squads of elite soldiers. I've that there are orcs in them thar hills, and I want to make them the backbone of my Dread Empire. What happens?

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

So what does the "round up a bunch of Orcs" process look like? Say I'm an aspiring Dark Lord with a second iterative attack, enough spellcasting to bind Demons, and a couple squads of elite soldiers. I've that there are orcs in them thar hills, and I want to make them the backbone of my Dread Empire. What happens?

You walk up to them and you tell their leader that you will give them armor and weapons and the chance to plunder your enemies if they join you. If the leader seems disinclined to accept your offer you straight up murder him. Since their leader is almost certainly the indivually most awesome warrior around nobody else will want to mess with you. And then they will accept you as their new leader as long as you help them raid and conquer.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, how much money would it take to arm, maintain, train, and provide for an elf or hobgoblin or human fighter with decent armor and weapons for five years?

Also, it seems like you can get the best bang for your buck with ghostwise halflings. They require a lot fewer supplies and have a smorgasbord of advantages with their only real drawback being the strength penalty and smaller weapons. Which aren't huge dealbreakers if most of your targets are going to be other level 1 foolios.

[deaddmwalking]

There's a question of whether you're paying their expenses or mostly giving them opportunities to loot opponents/villages.

If you're willnig to let your raiders take valuables, you can have them very cheap (maybe even free). Though if they get wealthy enough, they might wander off.

A 'trained hireling' is 3 sp/day:

Hireling, Trained
The amount given is the typical daily wage for mercenary warriors, masons, craftsmen, scribes, teamsters, and other trained hirelings. This value represents a minimum wage; many such hirelings require significantly higher pay.

I'd assume that they come with equipment equal to a 1st level NPC.

[Username17]

So, how much money would it take to arm, maintain, train, and provide for an elf or hobgoblin or human fighter with decent armor and weapons for five years?

Depends on the edition you're talking about. Price lists have historically been one of the parts of D&D most liable to make you laugh or cry, and the basic services and lifestyle sections of that list are by far the worst offenders. Assuming we're talking something like 3rd edition, the decent armor and weapons cost about as much as the Hobgoblin. The room to hold them in costs even more. This is actually kind of a medieval realism thing, and 3e is far and away the best edition as far as being casually realistic.

The Dwarves and Orcs you hire as grunts work for 6 gp a month, twice that if they are specialist troops like worg riders and three times if they are officers. Five years wages is 360 gp per guard, 720 per cavalryman, and 1080 per lieutenant. Outfitting them in non-bullshit equipment sets you back a bit over three hundred gold per footsoldier.

The basic barracks to keep your soldiers in costs thousands of gold pieces. A no-nonsense army base with kitchen, armory, drill yard, and mess hall for a hundred soldiers (and some cooks) sets you back 24,000 gold. If you want to upgrade that to a Worg riding force with the appropriate kennels and grooms, the building costs 40,000 gold.

Basically, it's extremely middle ages. Property values are so high and the cost of weaponry so high that only very rich people can equip and house a fighting force. But the warm bodies themselves are very inexpensive (comparatively). In part because a considerable amount of the wages of your soldiers is actually just room and board, because livable real estate is out of the price range of any of your bannermen.

But yes, five years of loyalty from a hundred soldiers costs about as much as a +4 sword.

Also, it seems like you can get the best bang for your buck with ghostwise halflings. They require a lot fewer supplies and have a smorgasbord of advantages with their only real drawback being the strength penalty and smaller weapons. Which aren't huge dealbreakers if most of your targets are going to be other level 1 foolios.

Against most opposition, your best deal is to recruit skirmish formations of slingers just before all major battles. Because that's nearly free. Assuming you didn't want your soldiers to scatter to the winds any time they got charged and also wanted your soldiers to be individually well equipped, that's not going to fly. If you intend to keep your soldiers for a long time, the cost of getting them shields and bows and armor and martial melee weapons equals the cost of retaining them sometime around year 4.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Thought experiment time!

So what LA+0 race common to 3E D&D (something that most players have heard of like catfolk or warforged is okay, but nothing obscure like yakfolk) would make for the best investment in:

• Grunts (level 0/1 warriors)
• Special Commando Forces (levels 2-4 in a real class)
• Mage Shock Troops (level 3-5s, armed with crap like scrolls of Animate Dead)
• Cavalrymen (level 1-2 fighters and the like)
• Officers (level 2-3 whatevers)
• Generals (level 1-6 whatevers)

This is assuming that you wanted an army that had good long-term value or was even permanent and had a sizable force. Like, oh, 5000 soldiers. Enough to keep a D&D metropolis in line assuming that you didn't have to worry about rebellion from the high-leveled folk and you weren't trying to rule a populace with unique needs like derro.

Basically, it's extremely middle ages. Property values are so high and the cost of weaponry so high that only very rich people can equip and house a fighting force. But the warm bodies themselves are very inexpensive (comparatively). In part because a considerable amount of the wages of your soldiers is actually just room and board, because livable real estate is out of the price range of any of your bannermen.

But yes, five years of loyalty from a hundred soldiers costs about as much as a +4 sword.

Sounds to me that this is probably the biggest reason why dark lords in fiction are usually spellcasters. Even without djinn binding shenanigans, Wall of Stone + Fabricate + Wall of Iron + Transmute Stone to Mud would cut down on these costs immensely.

[deaddmwalking]

For melee army, I think orcs are your best bet. With 'average' stats (10, 11 in all attributes before adjustments), they're going to hit well and hit hard.

For a ranged force, I think halflings are your best bet. While they have the lower damage than a medium force, they get a +2 to Dexterity, so they hit more often, especially when combined with the +1 for small size.

If you can get Elves, their bonus to Dexterity also makes them an effective military - especially since they're all automatically proficient in martial weapons - it doesn't matter if you're having just Warriors.

In 3.x, there are no morale rules, so there isn't any rules-based reason to have commanders unless you're having them 'single-combat' opposing generals.

[K]

Thought experiment time!

So what LA+0 race common to 3E D&D (something that most players have heard of like catfolk or warforged is okay, but nothing obscure like yakfolk) would make for the best investment in:

The best investment is sadly going to be something munchkin.

I mean, you really should just infect all of your troops with lycanthropy or something otherwise dumb (there is even a spell for it, so feel free to ignore any logic arguments like "hey, but you'd need to find a lycanthrope."). The raw power is too easy to get.

Barring that, I'd go with Neraph out of the Planar Handbook. Cool powers like +2 natural armor and some weird Fient-like throwing trick and real outsider traits like no need to sleep or eat makes them excellent at the things you want non-hero ground troops to do, namely guarding stuff in remote locations at affordable prices.

[Prak]

Despite what happened in high school to you, it's really not that uncommon for people who are athletic to also be pretty smart.

And despite the way we talk about them, orcs are not real, thus fictional archetype metaphors are fairly appropriate.

On the troops question, you can use a mix of grey elves and orcs on your catapults. Grey elves are operators, orcs are winchers. You can use either another elf or orc for the latching/loading, or you have a Dreamsight Shifter* for one of those tasks. Or you make your catapult crews five people, and have two Dreamsight Shifters, two orcs, and one grey elf.

Basically, the two orcs winch the arm down, and basically can't fail (DC 15 str), the Dreamsights latch it down and load it (DC 15 Profession check), and the grey elf fires it (Int based attack rool)

*alternatively you can use an aasimar if your game says they're +0 LA.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I always thought this series had a good insight into what it would be like to mobilize orcs in any sensible fashion...

[zeruslord]

Are the battles in this thought experiment being played out under actual D&D rules, at least in terms of combat effectiveness? That'll make a big difference - some of the most effective stuff in D&D is really really dumb in terms of actual battlefield fighting. In particular, there's not really any representation for stuff like shieldwalls that only really works in mass combat, and discipline and unit cohesion make a huge difference that D&D doesn't bother representing. I'm kinda assuming a non-medieval level of infantry training and professionalism, and a relatively low-level low-magic setting. I figure that if you still care about whether your army is made of lizardmen or kobolds, people are topping out at most somewhere around level 8-10, so I'm assuming your troops (as opposed to direct subordinates and other named characters) top out somewhere between 3 and 5. There's still some room for monsters up to about CR 10, but I'm assuming those are in the named character pool rather than the army pool.

The Armies of Darkness
These are the common, evil CR 1 or less humanoids with 1 starting hit die, but I'm kinda ignoring LA +1 as long as they don't have any fancy powers or options. No way are we excluding hobgoblins from the list of things you can raise an army of.

• Skeletons have DR 5/bludgeoning. That's HUGE for levies or other low-end infantry in medieval warfare, where mid-length spears are generally the cheapest and most effective option. They also avoid a bunch of the problems of actual levies by virtue of being mindless undead: they don't break ranks if they take a cavalry charge and, while they probably can't do really fancy drill, they should be able to do basic pike block stuff on creation, rather than needing months of drilling. Also, they're permanent and have no upkeep. Basically, the shittier your basic infantry would otherwise be, the better a deal skeletons are.
• Orcs are big and they're dumb and they can't spell their names, but raw strength is an advantage on the battlefield. The light vulnerability and darkvision combo basically switches their optimal battle time relative to most of the standard PC races, but can be compensated for if you're a dark lord and have time to ritual magic up some cloud cover. If you can give them decent discipline, esprit de corps, and a couple class levels (even if they're just warriors, hit dice are real strong), they'd make particularly good armored infantry or heavy cavalry - the strength bonus for damage is a bigger deal the more hits you need to take someone down. If you can't do that, they'll be more effective against the enemy's high-end troops than a race without the strength bonus. Basically Uruk-Hai are awesome, but if you can't pull that off, they might end up worse than a smarter, more trainable group would, and their culture really emphasizes the wrong things for a serious army.
• Goblins kinda suck. They're small, have a strength penalty, and have cultural disipline and morale problems so they make pretty bad infantry. While they should make decent sappers, kobolds outdo them on that front. They do at least have a 30 foot move speed and some AC bonuses, so they should make decent skirmishers. They're also relatively effective in small urban or dungeon fights, thanks to stealth bonuses, and their logistics advantage (3/4 the carrying capacity of medium-size troops, but they only need half the food) means they can do better in siege or Stalingrad situations. All in all, they're not worthless, but you wouldn't want them to be your line of battle.
• Hobgoblins have con and dex bonuses, no penalties, darkvision, and a disciplined, martial culture. If you had to pick just one, hobgoblins are the best choice from the 1 HD non-magic core races. They're especially well suited as skirmishers - they're more accurate, have more endurance, and do slightly more damage than the small races. They'd also kick ass in a Roman heavy infantry model, thanks to the to-hit bonus with the javelins and being good at doing what they're told. There's some better shock troops out there, but hobgoblins come as mid-tier infantry right off the bat.
• Kobolds are weird. They're simultaneously the worst combat troops and the best sappers in the game. You don't want to build your army out of them, but don't start a siege without them. They've got strength and constitution penalties, even relative to goblins, and their morale is even worse, but they've got undermining and booby trapping as racial bonuses before spending skill points. You pretty much need some, but you really don't want to use them as the core of your army

Forces of Light
The standard generic good guy races. Again, no really fancy options, although the PC races do have laundry lists of minor abilities that mostly don't matter.

• Dwarves are weird, and there aren't really any historical analogs to them. D&D's movement limitations in armor are pretty exaggerated - even in the heaviest plate armor, you aren't marching any slower, you're just getting tired faster. Dwarves have some fairly substantial advantages, however. The con bonus means they can march longer and makes them less likely to be dropped in one hit. The weapon familiarity bonus basically amounts to a free die step of damage for trained forces. Darkvision without a light penalty is nice, but not really gamebreaking. Stability is actually a real advantage in certain kinds of armored combat, but it's not going to turn the tide of battle. The ancestral enemy bonuses are substantial if they come in to play, but that's basically random. Their skill bonuses make them better siege engineers, but they don't have the degree of specialization that kobolds have. Overall, they should make fairly decent heavy infantry, but they don't have anything huge going for them. If it weren't for D&D's insistence that short good guys needed to be slow, they'd be great, but as-is they're pretty meh.
• Elves are actually pretty good. The dex bonus and constitution penalty more or less cancel out for level 1 guys, except for the endurance issue. Sleep immunity is okay, but unless there's really heavy magic use, it's not worth picking troops for. The free proficiencies are nice, but it's really only a difference for levy-grade troops, not professionals. The biggest advantage elves have is that you can quickly raise a force of decent archers rather than having to keep them as a standing army.
• Gnomes should suck, but if we go by D&D rules they might actually be pretty good. A strength penalty and a constitution bonus doesn't really point to any particular role, but D&D's handling of size bonuses and penalties in melee combat seems to assume that people's ability to hit you is determined by how much of your body there is, rather than how much of it is accessible to their weapon. This means they've actually got more survivability than any other 1 HD humanoid except hobgoblins. However, strength penalty combined with small weapons means they do an average of 2 points less damage than the medium sized guys. They have a survivability advantage in ranged combat by being small and tough, but they aren't any more deadly. The hatred bonuses are nice, but mostly let them get less wrecked by giants than usual or wreck goblins and kobolds slightly harder than average. Their spell-likes are helpful but not the sort of thing you can really mass, the magic bonus doesn't matter for your generic infantry, and their racial weapon is stupid and not particularly good. If they want to join the alliance, sure, but I'd rather grab halfling slingers and dwarven heavy infantry.
• Halflings are great as ranged specialists, but otherwise not good for much. The size, dex, and racial sling bonuses stack brilliantly, so they've got a +3 to-hit out of the gate. They've got pretty good survivability in melee, but also a big damage penalty, which is likely to leave them at a net disadvantage against a stronger melee race. The fear and save bonuses aren't huge unless there's lots of magic flying around, and the sneak bonuses are useful in urban combat but not on a battlefield.
• Humans have a bonus feat, which basically means that your professional soldiers all come with weapon focus or dodge or something. It's not huge, but if your entire army is going to come from one source, humans will make it fairly effective across the board. It's not as good as having orc shock troops, halfling slingers, and a dwarven shield wall, but it doesn't have the weaknesses of other homogenous armies.

Magic and Mayhem
No dark lord worth his salt is running an empire purely on cannon fodder. These are the guys you'll find as auxiliaries and specialists, with innate magic or superhuman strength and toughness.

• Bugbears are the best troops you're going to find short of giants and demons. They've got bonuses to all three physical stats, natural armor, stealth bonuses, and three hit dice. Out of the box, they're better than most professional soldiers, and have the brains for some fairly complex tactics and formations. They also make great shock troops or commandos. If you can get them, use them.
• Drow have a pretty crappy chassis for anything but maybe archers - Dex bonuses are great for skirmishers but Con penalties hurt them even more than they hurt line infantry. Light blindness is a really big problem if level 3 or 4 spells are common, and of course it's a weakness in daylight, but you probably want that covered anyway if you're using baddies as the core of your force. Faerie fire is almost useless unless you're so low magic that it'll freak out the other team, and dancing lights isn't great - it could help pick out targets for your archers or create distractions, but it's not going to win wars. Darkness is questionable. Under standard rules, it blocks darkvision, which means it will hurt pretty much anything you'll find in large quantities on a battlefield, relegating it mostly to covering the details of advances and retreats, or protecting against snipers. On the other hand, a single drow can make a darklantern that covers roughly 50 guys and lasts for ten minutes, or you can use darknessed rocks as sling ammunition to sow confusion or prevent ranged attacks. If you go by tome rules, where it magically creates "nonmagical" darkness like an anti-torch, it can be a big advantage against certain enemies. The place where drow really shine is special characters. They've got a relatively high percentage of PC classes thanks to their societal setup, and Int and Cha bonuses mean they're strong as both sorcerers and wizards. Wizards would probably be a bigger asset to an army overall if it's an E6ish sort of setting and the Dark Lord mostly throws down ritual magic rather than teleporting all over the place, but mid-level sorcerers could be more effective battlefield casters thanks to spells per day. Basically drow are nice to have, but you might do better by recruiting major lieutenants without regard to race than you would by hiring drow mercenaries or controlling a drow city.
• Gnolls are big, lazy hyena men. They've got strength and constitution bonuses, 2 racial hit dice, and a natural armor bonus, which means that any gnoll at all is going to be better than most conscripts. Unfortunately, they are also dumb and lazy, so it's going to take some real motivation to get them into your ranks. Once they're there, however, they make fantastic shock troops. While their statline kinda begs for them to be heavy infantry, they're unlikely to have the discipline and organization that the best units need.
• Lizardfolk look like they're pretty much the baseline 2HD humanoid, but they have some advantages you might overlook. On top of their strength an constitution bonuses, they have 5 points of natural armor, some big racial bonuses to swim checks, and the ability to hold their breath for extended periods of time, making them good for sneak attacks and showing up from rivers unexpectedly. On the downside, they don't have darkvision, which is nearly standard for monstrous troops, and start off as swamp dwelling savages, which is going to hurt your plans for a disciplined legion of darkness in snazzy uniforms. If you can get discipline and metalworking through their skulls, you've got a recipe for some seriously scary heavy infantry. If not, you've still got a pretty nasty commando force.
• Lycanthropes are extremely effective assuming they're badass viking werewolves and not cursed eastern European werewolves. They've got free hitdice, and big stat bonuses in hybrid form, but more importantly they have DR 10/silver, which means they can pretty much slaughter normal troops with impunity. On the other hand, infecting a bunch of enemy soldiers with lycanthropy could be dangerous if they learn how to control it, or if you win and there's now a bunch of wild lycanthropes running around in your occupied territories.

Special Characters on the Battlefield
This is basically an overview of what casters can do at certain levels, and how one might actually use a level 5-10 fighter in a real war.

• Arcane Casters can be very effective or very weak given their training time and rarity, depending on the situation and their level.
  
  1st or 2nd level guys are at best levy-grade troops that can take out maybe 10 enemies per battle before turning into bad crossbowmen or whatever. Sorcerers really shine at this point - diversity isn't as important as being able to get more AOEs off to enlarge breakthroughs. Their best use in a pitched battle is probably pre-battle buffs for captains, monsters, and shock troopers, or focused attacks to create a break in enemy lines for your heavy troops to exploit. In a breach , attack on a wall, or urban warfare situation, however, quickly clearing a small area with color spray or burning hands or the like can be the only way through.
  
  A level 3-4 caster has some strong single-target abilities, which could have significant effects when used on leaders - for instance, panicking any 6-HD guy in an army of level 1-2 troops is going to cause serious morale problems. Pyrotechnics is very effective - fireworks causes large AOE blindness for 1d4+1 rounds, which means a charge will hit while about half the enemies are still blinded, and smoke basically works like modern smoke grenades, but you might be able to do that with alchemy on the cheap. Glitterdust is a great support spell for an attack on a chokepoint, but won't be much better than color spray on a real battlefield. Mass use of fog cloud could be very effective on a still day, but 40 feet of fog is really only useful if you've got specialists to follow up on it (Grimlocks or something). Buffs aren't really terribly useful at this point - they only affect one dude, so basically you're paying wizard prices to add less than a level to a handful of infantrymen.
  
  At level 5, the really strong spells start coming online - stinking cloud is a major debuff to basically anything, and you can follow it up with a charge as soon as the cloud expires, while fireball can blow a hole in pretty much anything you'd be able to mass. If the other guys are actually throwing around units of 4+ HD guys, a wizard works more or less like actual D&D - you're basically trading spells for dudes at about a one-for-one ratio, so you come out ahead as long as the wizard is protected. Buffs can be quite effective if you're running on champions and load-bearing generals, but if armies are fairly historically composed and there aren't any princes or such on the front lines, they aren't great.
• Clerics actually have some AOE buffs and debuffs from very early levels, so I'm not going to break them out as much. Basically they fit into your heavy infantry units well, and their spells end up giving a fairly significant advantage in an engagement - bless and bane only influence one attack out of 20, but there's 40 attacks being made per round in their area of effect. They've got the same kind of effect that better equipment, or slightly better training would have, and that's just with first level spell slots. By fifth level, a few more things have come on line, and a cleric can make one in ten attack rolls go in your favor, and also be a champion. Healing is not as big as you'd think - unless you're really massing divine casters, they'll do more good for your standard troops by using combat spells than they will by healing a couple guys, so your healing is basically going to be reserved for champions and monsters. The mass cure spells don't show up until 5th level spells, so they aren't going to be flying around the battlefield. Clerics, not wizards, are the real force multipliers.
• Druids are pretty much just champions. They've got some AOE spells, but most of them are area-polluting, but don't have lasting effects after they end (entanglement is great in small engagements, when you have ranged weapons, but with thousands of guys it's a local pause in the action that only you can take advantage of). Call Lightning looks and sounds impressive, but ultimately it takes out maybe 10 guys, and that's if they're all 2 HD. They've got some decent barricade creation/removal powers for urban warfare. The one spell that looks really powerful on this scale is Spike Growth, which is basically a totally undetectable movement barrier with a decent chance of killing the first guys to cross it. Of course, champions with some nukes is a really strong individual unit, but it's not going to alter the way battles actually play out any more than the presence of mid-high level fighters will.
• Champions, including Barbarians, Clerics, Druids, Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers at level 5+ actually will change the way battles play out. They really can wade through large groups of low-level enemies, so if there's only a handful of warriors above level 3 on each side, fights between them may actually be the dominant factor in a battle. They aren't invincible, of course, but even under 3.5 RAW, Great Cleave or Whirlwind Attack can put real holes in a formation.

[RadiantPhoenix]

• Skeletons have DR 5/bludgeoning. That's HUGE for levies or other low-end infantry in medieval warfare, where mid-length spears are generally the cheapest and most effective option. They also avoid a bunch of the problems of actual levies by virtue of being mindless undead: they don't break ranks if they take a cavalry charge and, while they probably can't do really fancy drill, they should be able to do basic pike block stuff on creation, rather than needing months of drilling. Also, they're permanent and have no upkeep. Basically, the shittier your basic infantry would otherwise be, the better a deal skeletons are.

Skeletons can also sprint 24/7, allowing them to move over 320 miles a day.

Compare that to 24 miles a day for a human, or 16 for a dwarf.

[Grek]

You're stuck in adventurer thinking mode, zeruslord. Wars are won with strategy and logistics, not small unit tactics.

A trio orcs can, with access to a set of log rollers, push two tons of material along the ground at a walking pace. An orc working solo can heft 260lbs.

Goblins work best if you do not train them as Warriors. Get Experts with Hide, Move Silent, Ride, Spot, Listen and Handle Animal instead. Everyone gets a Heavy Crossbow and a Riding Dog. Usually they do ambushes or HorseDog Archer style flanking tactics, but in pitched battles they get off their mounts, send the wolves into battle and serve as an archery division from the rear.

Hobgoblins do actually want to be deployed as stealthy warrior commandos or as medium armour foot soldiers. But if you do count the LA, they're basically shmucks. I'd honestly rather have a level 2 Kobold than a level 1 Hobgoblin - the Kobold has slightly more AC and HP, is more accurate and only slightly less damaging on attacks.

Kobolds are basically inferior goblins. Net gain is +1 Natural Armour, +2 to Craft(trap), Profession(miner) and Search, -4 to Ride and Move Silently, +2 to Charisma, -2 to Strength and Constitution and Light Sensitivity. Goblins and Hobgoblins make much better sappers and stealth units.

Elves, much like Goblins, lend themselves to being Experts rather than Warriors, but for a different reason. Elves get all of the Martial Weapon proficencies a person really needs just for waking up in the morning. Trading out 1 BaB and 1 HP for 4 extra skills is a winning move, especially given that elves get bonuses on perception checks.

Gnomish SLAs are surprisingly useful on the battlefield once you break out of the mindset that "useful in a war" means "something you do to enemies". The ability to converse with badgers means for frightfully effective tracking by scent, while wolverines are basically as good as a level 2 Barbarian but a whole lot cheaper to get ahold of. A third of your foot soldiers also have Prestidigitation, Dancing Lights and Ghost Sound once per day. Prestidigitation means that gnomish cooking will always be warm and flavorful, even if you're cookin boiled shoes, and that a lot less work goes into cleaning the barracks than in a normal unit. Dancing Lights can make a set of 4 lanterns 110' in the air for a minute - perfect for extended semaphore conversations with the HQ, while Ghost Sound lets you whisper messages to allies the next trench over. They're still slow and weak, but as far as communication goes, they're top notch.

Halflings are useful in that their preferred tactic of "Everyone and their mum shows up to the battle with a sling and a quarterstaff, then fucks off back to town." happens to also be one of the least gold-intensive ways of fighting a defensive war.

Humans work best as specialists, due to their bonus feat. Mounted Combat + Mounted Archery/Ride-By-Attack makes for fine cavalry. Combat Expertise + Improved Trip makes Guisarme and Armour Spikes a rather effective combination.

But, of course, the real winner when it comes to having an army to take over the world is the legion of Wights.

[Whipstitch]

The tome endorsed goblin-worg partnership is also pretty damn sweet for light cavalry. Your average worg is no rocket surgeon, but he is a stealthy scent tracker and is smart enough to continue battle or report home on his own initiative in the event that his goblin shield bearer/fire support is lost. By contrast, even a warhorse is secretly only as durable as the guy riding him--put a lightly equipped peasant on its back and even a good horse will likely scarper once it realizes that Joe Dirt Farmer took a rock to the head.

[Mord]

I always thought this series had a good insight into what it would be like to mobilize orcs in any sensible fashion...

Thanks for the link. I spent a few hours yesterday reading and got a real kick out of it.

[Cyberzombie]

You're stuck in adventurer thinking mode, zeruslord. Wars are won with strategy and logistics, not small unit tactics.

Not in D&D land. The evil warlord who raises armies of orcs/goblins/ogres typically loses to the adventurers. This because armies tend to suck and because the death of the dark lord generally causes any assembled army to fragment to uselessness.