The Storm War

by Mint_Keyphase

Releasing the Beast: Clashing Steel

<Battle Record: The "Battle" for Northern Peak>
Date of creation: Nova Aetas, Feb 19

As I am staving off my drowsiness in my current attempt to flip my sleep schedule, the alarms sounded. Caught by surprise, I reflexively jumped and nearly hit the ceiling doing so.

As my eyes drifted over the screens, I noticed something strange: The alert is from the old command centre, which has been empty since last week, in fact, there isn't even supposed to be an alarm unless they detonate a mine or two near the base of the mountain. In any case, they are now congregating around the bottom of mountain, and they are preparing to go up.

First, they fired their field cannons, nearly all cannonballs failed to hit the command post which is uphill and upwind, and the iron spheres just rolled back down the steep slopes. They didn't seem to care though, as they just marched on. Behind the cannons, I noticed their infantry arranging themselves into a phalanx, I've never seen them in any sort of formation before, so this is definitely concerning. These phalanxes then overtook the cannons and started a charge, their organization is most likely still shabby, as the charge quickly devolved into a mad dash uphill. As there isn't anything can shoot back, they swiftly took over the facility.

Now, that would have been an easy victory, but unluckily for them I rigged up a couple tons of explosives down in the basement, and I have the remote detonator. As the started to camp around the facility, I pressed the big red button.

"Boom!" Another explosion echoed through the mountains, and another wave avalanches is triggered. That should teach them a lesson about taking "defenseless" targets without even trying to find any traps.
<Battle Record: The First Battle for Valley 135>
Date of creation: Nova Aetas 3, Feb 21

The alarms went off again, but this time, I've already rescheduled my sleep to fit their attacks. Conflicts has been escalating for the past few days, and I'm expecting them to be showing off their version of AFVs, so I plan to give them a slap in the face by hiding all the armour forces behind mounds of snow, and have them face off each other.

I transferred command of the armour regiments on scene to the automated defense system, and in a few seconds the vehicles burst out of their cover, with guns pointing at the enemy. I knew I would have an advantage despite lacking on numbers: They are fighting in an unstable valley, their attack is bound to trigger an avalanche that would cut them off, so whatever is on scene is stuck inside for at least 12 hours; And whatever's outside won't be getting in anytime soon either, so they can't just bring in more reinforcements and grind it out. And with the deafening rumble of the avalanche, the valley transformed into a coliseum in which two armies will fight for survival.

I watched as the system starts trying to figure out how to make use of with the new units, I only take control of a few of them, and the system needs to try and achieve the same effect with everything else across the whole frontline. It can't just copy the movements, it needs to learn what actions correspond to what situation. This is why the losses of new units are usually abnormally high, but I don't have much of a choice right now lest I want to spend the next 24 hours coding non-stop.

Guns roar to life as I got into my units into effective range, HE(High Explosive) shells start ripping into vehicles on the other side. Another round is already waiting to be loaded, ant the loader is just waiting for the breach to open. This is the neat part working with an automated system. Once it has learned the correct actions, you don't need to tell them to do anything, they are doing it as it has learned. After pushing another round into the enemy, I saw their cannons destroyed by zooming in, and declared a kill. The system is already following my previous actions, with a shell and a resounding "Boom!" of an ammo rack explosion, the enemy's cannons were pushed off the side by the force of the explosion.

Penicullariy, the enemy AFVs made no attempts to move closer at all, I don't know the reason to that, but is most likely be related to their lack of a reliable engine. It is possible that their flimsy magical engines are just too prone to breaking down, and they just tried to go around the problem by using the engine at little as possible. After a couple of them got picked off by artillery though, they finally began to move.

The first thing I noticed is how strange their movements are, it seems that they couldn't go in curves, so they had to stop, turn on spot, and start moving again. Out of curiosity, I fired at one of them which is on a ledge, the shot hit the edge and the turtle-like vehicle landed the wrong side up. Then I saw the reason for that quirk: they don't have any form of differential, they can only control the direction the wheel is spinning. Moreover, the distinctive "crack" of wood is heard, which means that they aren't even using metal for protection. Now I doubt if their AFVs are actually serious or just something to scare others.

The battle is completely one-sided for the vehicles, but the infantry aren't having a good time. In this confined space, hoof-to-hoof combat situations are frequent, and this is exactly what the bots are bad at. The storm creatures are in no ways weak, even though they are somewhat dumb, they can break the steel body of bots without problem, and can even smash and break some components on my AFVs. Honestly, I'm quite impressed to see them breaking the driving sprocket on one vehicle, those are made of solid 5 cm hardened steel, yet they somehow had it snapped off. In hindsight, it may have been a manufacturing flaw in play as well, but it is scary nonetheless.