Late to the game,I’ve just seen the Battle of Winterfell in season 6 of Game of Thrones, and It could have been much smarter. The basic setup is that the protagonists have 2 dragons, Unbreakable light cavalry and infantry units, as well as some mixed regular infantry units to defend a castle. They have set one of their leadership units outside the castle in case of total defeat. The opposition is a frost lich called the Night King, an undead dragon larger then theirs, and an infinite amount of wights, sub-human intelligence but capable of using weapons and tools and effective fighters. They fight like Berzerkers. The protagonists must kill the Night King to destroy his army, The Night King wants to kill all of them and the rest of humanity. The environment is mostly flat, and subarctic cold.Constraints:
All good exercises have rules, so this is mine.
Rather then build a line of trenches looking like a dragon, a set of herringbone trenches to kettle the enemy into known distance locations that then can be hit by trebuchets and high angle archery. It’s important that these kettles allow a slowed, directed flow of wights through so they don’t overflow and flank around the kettles.
The Dothraki light cavalry do not charge the enemy line but range and harry it, lighting the kettling trenches to give the castle long range fires targets. They also scrape at the edges to keep the horde heading into the kettle rather then around it.
The Artillery and a significant portion of archers engage the horde at distance to reduce total horde size. Archers should use high angle shots to hit targets at range. The artillery will fire until out of shot or the dragon strafing begins.
At a certain distance the light cavalry disengage and either head into the castle or stealthily circle around to Bran and function as dragoons (dismounted infantry) to augment his honor guard. Notebook, the khopesh sickle sword is great for close combat and fairly poor for mounted combat, so maybe spears or even longer handled axes would have been useful to issue to them.
After the light calvary falls back, the archers will switch to direct fire on any horde within range and one dragon will do strafing runs on the horde as possible, the second dragon in reserve to attack the Night Lord, The strafing dragon taking out as many wights as possible and checking for flanking manoeuvres.
The Unsullied spearmen stay to defend the castle gate. The Unsullied and several volunteers around the perimeter have torches ready to light the final trench. The Volunteers understand that they will likely be locked outside the gates and may die. Lighting the trench with a dragon is a backup plan.
The Night King’s weather magic will make artillery and archery useless and dragons limited. This part of the war is much the same, the spearmen who hold the gate will do what they can and eventually die, the wights will eventually bridge the trench with bodies and assault the walls.
The battle shows internal fortifications and defences, so I’d have setup internal doors to fall back through. With a force holding the entryway, and some knowing they’ll be locked out with the enemy to slow them down and the rest of the forces retreat.
The Wights are effectively infinite, so the idea has to be to buy time with space, weapons and bodies. Preferably as few bodies as possible. No fortification will hold permanently, but each level allows the heroes running around (Danyris, Arya, Snow etc) time to engage and destroy the Night King. There are better ways to do this then the battle shown on the screen with tools and systems available for these protagonists. Perhaps they were trying to show that Dnerys is losing it, a bad tactician or just make the battle more legible to the audience. What I got from the battle as shown is the horror and hopelessness of the wight horde, and maybe more reasonable tactics and setup would have made it seem like the protagonists actually have a chance.
None of this changes the stakes or the tensions, the Wrights get through no matter what. The Wight Dragon still does its damage, The weather still hinders everything, the Giant still busts through the castle. The Night King still deflects the dragon fire, tracks down Bran, and gets stabbed by Arya’s cool move. It’s just smarter use of resources.
Site Navigation