: True, although here I nitpick. The Hundred-Years' War,
: for example, wasn't one big war (although it was no
: less messy). If there really was twenty years of war
: in Covenant alone, it would easily deplete the
: population. This would achieve quite a lot in Balor's
: favor, but it's only one city, and I have a hard time
: believing that they fought for twenty years nonstop.
: It might have been twenty years of constant
: revolution, one king being replaced by another, or a
: guerilla war, or a series of conflicts spread over
: twenty years' total.
Or a series of raids into the other's territory, akin to how the Trojan war was probably fought, or the attacks of the Norse. But I'm pretty dubious about the idea of a guerilla war. At the early-medieval period in history which the Province and the Cath Bruig seem to be at, your typical peasant cared very little about who ruled him, since vassalhood to one noble was very similar to vassalhood to another. Of course, an attack by Mrykrydia or Undead would have been an another matter entirely- if the choice is between vassalhood and death followed by undeath, you're going to support your feudal lord far more than if the choice was between vassalhood and vassalhood. In human v. human wars, though, it simply wouldn't have been possible to raise the kind of popular support you need for any kind of guerrilla war.
In any case, rulers will want to avoid guerrilla wars if at all possible, simply because they tend to be hideously inconclusive, cause almost as much damage to that over which you're fighting as a conventional war, and very rarely successful. (Seriously! There hasn't been one pure guerrilla army which has ever defeated a conventional opponent. Even North Vietnam was fighting a mid-scale conventional war after 1968. Revolutionaries during the American War of Independence, while they used sharpshooters, relied far more on big blocks of militia and professional French allies. And during WW2, the French Resistance, while they caused the diversion of troops that should have been on the front lines, were not anywhere near victory by the time France was liberated by conventional armies.)
Martel.
