SPOILERS!
I love GOT, but that season 8 battle made me cringe. So, you know you’re hugely outnumbered by an army of berserker wights, who don’t fear danger or personal injury, because they’re dead. So, here what you do:
- Don’t use your air forces (dragons and riders) or even cavalry to scout the location, size, and speed of the foe.
- Don’t use your air forces to attrition the enemy as he’s approaching the battlefield.
- Don’t dig trenches, fire barriers, etc. to channel the swarm of enemy guys’ approach. So that you can gang up on them as they trickle through the chokepoint(s). And use your artillery (catapults) on the guys in the farther areas, to attrition them while the front rows are fighting in the chokepoints. Just let them come on and try to fight them from all directions at once.
- Open by sending your mobile light cavalry (Dothraki) on a frontal charge again the center of the enemy, to be enveloped from all sides and wiped out. Instead of using their mobility to work the edge ends of the battle to do feints, flank or rear attacks, and/or disorder the mob or at least prevent it from all being able to charge in the same direction and overwhelm your line.
- Have your attacking cavalry force meet the enemy right at the end range of your artillery. So you have to yell “Cease fire!” to your artillery, to prevent friendly fire damage.
- After your attacking force is no more, forget to start your artillery up again.
- Equip your biggest and most organized infantry unit (the Unsullied) with long pikes unsuited to close melee combat. Actually craft new dragonglass ones for them-- thousands of them. (Granted, the Unsullied seem to only be trained for pikes use. But… getting to that later).
- Use your phalanx troops (again, the Unsullied) as melee troops, for hand-to-hand combat. When their strength is in pushing forward in a unit on offense, or defending against cavalry in defense. And wights have no cavalry.
- Put all of your guys out in the field in front of your castle, and no guys (for example, the armored bannermen infantry and archers) on the walls. Complete ignore the purpose and design of a castle, which is make things hugely bad and costly for anyone trying to assault the people inside.
I know, some may say that realistic medieval tactics might not make for the best modern TV drama. But I’d say that, if you watch the old American cowboys/cavalry vs. Indians movies, things kind of made tactical sense. In a way. But you knew what the problem was, and you saw the characters you’d bought into make hard decisions, about facts that had briefly been presented to you (with dramatic musically phrases before the scene change, to make sure you noticed and got it).
Anyway, I love GOT, occasional TV-ness and continuity lapses and all. Really brilliant. It’s just-- with all of that production money, couldn’t the writers have hired even a Mount & Blade or Total War player, much less a scholar or professional, to just say “Err… doesn’t seem to make much sense here. In my opinion…”
I almost forgot-- The were surprised by how fast the wight army approached, so no time to make preparations, such as trenches and such. But they had enough time to make glass (unforgeable, btw) weapons or weapon heads for thousands of Unsullied, Dothraki, and everyone else. Writers, producers, directors, please? Please now, please?
