Diary, there may be a way to gain an advantage over Yoth-Atal and the kelpies under Tethys.
Assuming that Tethys wouldn’t immediately attack, I could potentially offer to help the kelpies and Yoth-Atal, and then take advantage of their complacency to deal a mighty blow against the kelpie population.
… It’s an incredibly underhoofed strategy though. I don’t think the kelpies are being sincere in their offer, but to take advantage of that in this way? That would go against… many of the concepts of honor and justice that my parents… and the Empress would have taught me.
The problem is that the kelpies are getting so much better at fighting, I… I am beginning to think… we might lose this war.
Today they destroyed a battalion of my seaponies and deep ponies. They used complicated, advanced tactics, most of them copied from us. These tactics aren’t the small-unit tactics they’ve used previously. The kelpies always employed a lot of small-unit undersea tactics, employed against our squads, but because they have had such low numbers, they hadn’t quite mastered large-scale undersea warfare unlike us.
But now...these are… larger unit tactics, employing far better timing, advanced planning, and strategy on a scale we haven’t seen. For while every single kelpie can work in small squads, army-level formational combat is critical in undersea environments, when we have to fight in three dimensions and with hundreds of kelpies and sea and deep ponies in the ocean.
This is not to say we use squad formations to break other formations, but the larger the units, the harder it is to position our units, to move faster, to employ them in a method that allows us to exploit the weaknesses in other factions formations, and to maximize firepower and shock at the moment of contact with the enemy.
And of course, enacting and employing these formations is a work of art. A kind of trade. They require good officers, well-trained ponies, and most of all, a good commander who can judge the angles of attack and fire, the morale and discipline of his or her ponies, and most importantly, get the timing right.
All tactics and strategy is about timing and positioning, because those dictate the strengths of your and your enemy’s units, and because of the 3-D nature of undersea combat, you have to predict the enemy’s movements in a myriad of ways before contact. Throw in hydromancy and that gets even more complicated as you have to read the currents whilst organizing your units.
It was using these larger formational tactics that allowed the kelpies to rescue the kelpie fry, despite the protection they were under. None of the battalion of seaponies and deep ponies remained. No, the kelpies…haven’t quite figured out the larger unit tactics completely. They haven’t started coordinating armies in the thousands yet, but they’re starting on the steps to do this, and this… this is scary.
All of this reminds me something Panthalussa has told me… when it comes to the Old Ones, nothing isn’t unnecessary.