I'm pleasantly surprised to see our fort actually hold out longer than I expected it to.  I expected it to fall fairly quickly to the overwhelming size of the enemy force, but as things ended up working out, the enemy force took some time to properly land.  It took a little over ten minutes for each round trip of the row boats, which meant that it ended up taking almost three hours for all the enemy troops to make landfall.

It seems the enemy had made a second miscalculation based on the previous layout of the island when they scouted us two years ago.  Save for the handful of initial landing individuals who had the ability to jump exceptionally high, there haven't been any others who showed up with the ability to potentially siege a fort.  That doesn't mean they didn't have individuals who could kill our forces though.  There were plenty of ranged attacks and magic, but it wasn't particularly effective.

My guess is that their fort fighting individuals were probably sent to the other side of the island to land and attack, since our city has walls as well.  They probably weren't expecting us to have built a large fort on this side of the island, which resulted in them receiving worse casualties than they expected.  Through the fighting, many individuals attempted to simply pass around the fort, and continue their attacks further up the beach, and into the surrounding trees.

A few of those individuals fell prey to pitfall traps, and others were killed by hit and run attacks from concealed locations.  Ultimately, with much of their force preoccupied with the fort, it was difficult to properly mount an attack further out.  With their backs to the fort, many also easily fell to the ballistae mounted high up on the fort walls.

Eventually, it seems some commanders from their side had had enough, and they began a proper, full force attack meant to simply overwhelm the fortress, and break into it.  Some individuals felled nearby trees which were fashioned quickly into makeshift ladders for scaling the walls, while magic users bombarded the top of the wall to prevent counter attacks.

The initial few ladders had burning oil dumped down them at the cost of the individual's life who poured it.  After a few more cycles of that, the fort fell.  I estimate that the enemy lost about a thousand men in that siege itself.  The fact they chose to directly assault the fort tells me a lot more info about both our current position and our enemy's.

There are three reasons they would directly storm the fort, rather than simply moving past it.  The first reason is that they're concerned about their ability to unload supplies elsewhere on the island, and the fort's existence would result in so many casualties over time that the losses of just storming it are likely less than they would receive by attempting to ignore it.  The second potential reason is that they're here to exterminate us.  I think that's at least a partial motivator, but even if that is the case, they could still sidestep the fort for a time, and siege it later to kill it's occupants.  The third reason plays into the first reason a bit, and that is that they're on a clock with their own supplies, and the time it would take to properly siege the fort is time they don't have, for one reason or another.

In actuality, I expect that a combination of all three reasons were the motivators for their decision to storm the fort.  Looking at it that way, our current plan to stall them out is probably our best bet.  Long sieges are won and lost on logistics.  Normally, a sieging force has the advantage in logistics, because they aren't surrounded.  Our battle plan essentially plans to flip that advantage to ourselves.

The Dwarven island has probably acted by now as well.  Now that the majority of the enemy force has long since left that island, they'll be negotiating with any mercenary ships that might arrive there with supplies in an attempt to confuse and stall them as long as possible.  They'll either lie about the arrival of opposing ships, or even go so far as to make vague threats about counterattacks on the supply ships themselves should they refuse to turn around.

Will this turn all the ships around?  Probably not.  Will some of the supply ships at least be stalled for some time?  Probably.  With a single supply route suddenly disrupted, we have the supply advantage naturally.  We've stockpiled and hidden our supplies away to outlast our opponent.

Their problems will get worse as we continue as well.  They started to repurpose our old fort for their own headquarters.  After their successful capturing of the fort, the rowboats began bringing crates of supplies to the shore. They've already begun hauling their supply crates into the fort, and stationed many of their own troops in and around the fort.  As more organized scouting parties set out, we've had to fall back quite far as we've continued losing ground to our opponent in little skirmishes.  We haven't lost any troops in the skirmishes, as we've purposefully retreated each time after inflicting some casualties on the enemy side.

It's more than just inflicting casualties though, it's also causing paranoia.  Like both the Japanese defenses of many of their islands during WWII, and the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war, we're slowly traumatizing opposing troops with the sheer amount of hidden traps and casualties being inflicted on their side.  Within a few days, I suspect their troops will be thoroughly traumatized, and looking for enemies around every tree, slowing their progress even more.

If their troops were hardened veterans with years of military experience, then they'd probably know that their best bet is to simply march forward quickly as a large group, and clear a whole area as fast as possible.  From discussions with Kao's military advisors, I've learned that most of the human armies aren't that.  In fact, the majority of their soldiers probably don't even have combat magic, and likely have non-combat classes, like farmer.  The handful of individuals who we saw earlier in the fighting who had used magic were individuals with combat classes, and even then, there weren't that many of them.

So when the conscripted farmers encounter the constant specter of death, their instincts won't allow them to properly sacrifice the few for the many.  The correct move is to sacrifice a handful of your weakest soldiers to the traps, and keep up the pressure so we don't have time to retreat and set up more traps and ambushes, despite the rough terrain and pre-set traps.  Those farmers likely won't follow an order to march to their death though, and will desert the army and retreat if they suspect that's what they're being asked to do.  Meaning that if they want to execute that strategy, they'll be sacrificing their well-trained soldiers to our traps, which is likely a much worse option for them than simply slowing their advance.

From my understanding, combat classed individuals either work for the military, or as adventurers.  Those handful in the military work full time as standing army soldiers, and are well trained.  They're also considered a somewhat valuable asset to a country, given their relative strength compared to individuals who don't have combat oriented magic.  Unless the situation is desperate, the invading force will probably try to preserve those individuals as much as they can, especially after blundering the numbers that they did during their botched invasion of the beach.

As day turned to night, the enemy has set up their own defenses on the beach, and finished unloading their ships.  Torches are staked throughout the beach and fort, making any sort of sneak attack impossible from our side.  However, it also makes it very easy to see what they're doing from a distance with our telescope.

They've regrouped their forces, and after the sun had set, their scouting parties stopped their attacks.  Ultimately, trying to maneuver through booby trapped territory at night would have been a blunder on their part, even more so given the recently gathering cloud cover, so they made the right choice from a normal strategic perspective.

Many of their troops are set up in camps around the fort, but there are quite a few camps set up further away.  From what I can tell, they have their own flags on some of their tents, with the largest force occupying the fort and surrounding territory.  That flag matches the flagship from earlier today, so I suspect that is Rathland's flag.

What we're about to do is honestly quite evil by many standards, but history is written by the victors.  Either we'll be the winners, or we'll be evil, which many consider us to be anyway since we're demons.  As the night progresses, most of the enemy troops have fallen asleep.  I'll give them a few hours to reach a deep sleep, then give the order.

As we reach the middle of the night, I give the signal, and a goblin begins the half-mile trek down our cramped hidden tunnel to ignite the fuse.  We've timed things out once before this.  As soon as that goblin goes down the tunnel, we'll haul our ballistae to the range necessary, and prepare to shoot it into the explosion.  The enemy has set up lots of torches, so we probably won't need to ignite it ourselves, but it'd be foolish to leave that up to chance at this point.

As we execute the plan, I find myself holding my breath as we reach the point where the explosion should occur.  The ballista has been moved up, and they've ignited the bolt already.  An alarm sounds from one of the slightly closer camps as someone has probably spotted our ballista with it's flaming bolt.

Less than a minute passes and chaos is unleashed on the unsuspecting enemy troops.  A loud blast can be heard from the fort, and some stone is thrown up over the walls.  Seconds later, the ballista bolt flies out as a bright light shooting through the sky towards the fort.  Within a moment, an eerie blue flame rises from everywhere within the fort walls, and climbs quickly into the sky, followed by a loud whooshing sound.  With that our soldiers with the ballista retreat into the night, and I watch the scene unfold on the beach from a safe distance through my telescope...