Editing User:Trungle/Cataphracts Idis/Recap (section)

=== Supply chain issues ===

I went to great lengths here to attempt to describe the isthmus in this story. I have also mentioned all the many times I foraged in this area. If you put this together, you may be realizing by now that this isthmus is, by this point, entirely picked through. Every army who had spent substantial time on this isthmus was critically undersupplied ''and'' had been a contributor in the of conjuring of a resource desert separating Fenpr from Uuqita by five or so days of travel during which stops to resupply would be extremely dangerous (and not even that fruitful, frankly, given that the territory is sparse in the first place). In short, it was a ''terrible'' place for thousands of troops to spend four months walking up and down.

A few days before setting out from Torvaldsen, Telefor had requested an opportunity to forage for food and come back. I granted this, and even pointed the Narithans to a patch of unforaged ground. On the first day Telefor was out, I thought “perhaps I should do this as well,” and then promptly forgot. On the second day, I had the same thought. When Telefor eventually came back, I had not foraged at all. This came to a head on the day that we were set to invade Ghenio, when I was informed I could not feed my army.

This was easily the least defensible decision I made in the course of the entire game. I still kind of have nightmares about it. I guess I always assumed I would just “get around” to actually giving the order but of course that is flawed logic if you don’t do it at some point.

But there was no use dwelling on the past if I was in danger of losing all of my soldiers to hunger. I insisted that the coalition make our play as soon as possible so that I could get somewhere and find food. There was some chance of finding a few scraps in the ransacked city but I found it unlikely given the conditions. I decided my best choice would be to forage around the city of Hjaltein, which had already been taxed, but only once. It was also not directly on the isthmus but a couple days’ travel away.

I made a decision to keep this excursion a secret from Telefor. At the time, there was not a great deal of trust between us and I was afraid that showing my embarassing lack of preparation would dissuade him from continuing our partnership which I did not want to risk. So I explained it away as an expedition to search for General Yuqiwuara. This was made quite awkward when Telefor made the decision to follow me after I made the baffling decision to tread through poor roads to a remote city. When Telefor caught up to me in the middle of some scrubland, I spoke only in vagueries about what I was doing in Hjaltein. My thinking was that, should Telefor betray me, I may have planted a seed that something important – maybe even the captured general – was stored there. Should an attacker follow this lead, they could be easily surrounded and killed.

I think that my lie ended up not mattering much. As you will see, Telefor did not betray me and even himself gave an order to forage that patch of Scrubland, which turned out to be rather fruitful. We also eventually had to start sharing resources including supplies. In the end, this lie may have just sown confusion and halted us for a bit longer. Still, I’m not convinced that it was ''exclusively'' a bad idea. I actually think that I looked marginally better for having marched off in search of some undisclosed resource than I would have looked if I admitted to not foraging at all in the time that I had been allotted for specifically that purpose. However, any competency that I may have seemed to display would have been offset by something even more embarassing.

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