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Sky Citadels make no sense

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Swolllliosis

Swolllliosis

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The sky citadels were once heavily occupied by Armadyleans during the god wars, and it wasn't until the 5th age did Avalani reestablished a portal connection and "rediscovered" them.

However, why were all the citadels abandoned after the god wars in the first place? Why didn't a single aviansie stay at home base to run everything? Why were they all sent to Forinthry? A few of them could have even avoided the forinthry blast and Armadyl wouldn't have been so lost. That's like sending every single living being in the United States to war, completely abandoning the country. There are thousands of floating islands in the sky, and no one is going to watch over them during the war? Not even a human to deliver military orders? This makes no sense.
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01-Mar-2017 09:06:00

Hazeel

Hazeel

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Something you need to consider...Armadyl had the siphon, Saradomin had the stone, Bandos was tier 3...and yet, according to GWD lore, at the time of the God Sword's creation, Zamorak was winning the war against three other Gods. You really have to question how Zamorak was able to do this considering he was fighting with a new, unorganized nation made up of remnants from the Zarosian empire. Personally, I believe there are two key factors that allowed him to hold his own for 4000 years.

1) From what we've been told, he was more active and present with the millitary.

2) Demons, Vyres, Mahjarrat, etc. are different from Aviansie...there are no civillians. In fact, being considered a mere civillian in a time of war would probably be considered dishonorable and pathetic in Zamorakian society, so even his human followers were all likely contributing in some way.

Ultimately civillians are liabilities, they're dead weight. And the three allies were losing a lot of their following races. The aviansie were nearing extinction, the centaurs were nearing extinction, the icyene were nearing extinction, ourgs were near extinction, fayrgs and raurgs were dead. Meanwhile Zamorak's following races are still raring to go without significant casualties and things were getting more desperate. It wouldn't surprise me if Armadyl drafted everyone in the war or was pressured into it by Saradomin by the end. Runescape doesn't need a hero...it needs a villain. An all encompassing force of evil that will remain ever-threatening and use chaos to make the peoples of Gielinor tolerate each other, grow strong together, and fight side by side against this evil. I am that villain.

01-Mar-2017 09:32:15

Rifleavenger
May Member 2022

Rifleavenger

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Hazeel said :
Ultimately civilians are liabilities, they're dead weight.

Until your soldiers run out of food and supplies and your economy completely fails so you can't even trade for those things, because no one is on the home front working to support the war machine. You can get by just raiding supplies if your force is small enough and the war mobile enough, but in a war as massive, long, and dragged out as the 3rd Age you need operating supply lines from civilian centers to the warfront.

I suppose that would favor Zamorak even further though, given a lot of his forces have innate magic (no need for weapons) and either don't need to eat or can just eat their enemies/the dead.

01-Mar-2017 15:33:07 - Last edited on 01-Mar-2017 15:34:06 by Rifleavenger

Deltaslug

Deltaslug

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Why were all of the Avianese sent to Forinthy?
- not all of them went (you still had the ones back on Abbinah)
- Zamorak even called out Aramdyl during Sliske's Endgame on that very fact.
NO ONE anticipated Zamorak nuking Forinthy.
But Armadyl wasn't exactly the shrewdest battlefield commander

Why didn't they station 1 Avianese at each Citadel even after the God Wars?
There might have been a small presence post god wars, but that was thousands of years ago.
If there was 1, they would have all been abandoned anyways within a generation. Even just a handful, you wouldn't have had a viable population long term.
They might have been able to maintain a single citadel, and eventually branch out. But not enough to maintain all of them.

Why are all of the Citadels still floating?
Logical answers
- magic
- we don't know the exact numbers still floating about
- it's possible some of them had more advanced Avatars performing maintenance
- it's possible that a number of fallen over the ages, it's just they fell in unpopulated areas or over the oceans.
If you saw a collapsed castle in the middle of nowhere, you'd probably just assume someone built it "a long time ago" and it has fallen into ruin.
- it's possible that the citadels had been periodically occupied, but with secrecy, accidents, raids, and other events, information on them was hearsay at best. (would you want people to know about your super secret clubhouse where you stashed a bunch of valuables?) So citadels get periodically occupied for a few years or decades by a group. they die off or something, a few decades later, a new group moves in, spruces the place up, then they die off, and the whole cycle repeats.

01-Mar-2017 16:23:29 - Last edited on 01-Mar-2017 16:24:51 by Deltaslug

Hazeel

Hazeel

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Deltaslug said :
NO ONE anticipated Zamorak nuking Forinthy.

In DaT, Armadyl saw it coming a mile away.

Rifleavenger said :
Until your soldiers run out of food and supplies and your economy completely fails so you can't even trade for those things, because no one is on the home front working to support the war machine.

Your farmers would need to be protected though, otherwise they'd regularly get raided and their food would be used to feed the enemy. This ends up draining manpower and leaves your troops in a vulnerable situation. And considering the time, it might be impossible for them to even send supplies to the troops and could purely be a civillian operation. Runescape doesn't need a hero...it needs a villain. An all encompassing force of evil that will remain ever-threatening and use chaos to make the peoples of Gielinor tolerate each other, grow strong together, and fight side by side against this evil. I am that villain.

01-Mar-2017 17:58:53

Rifleavenger
May Member 2022

Rifleavenger

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Hazeel said :

Your farmers would need to be protected though, otherwise they'd regularly get raided and their food would be used to feed the enemy. This ends up draining manpower and leaves your troops in a vulnerable situation. And considering the time, it might be impossible for them to even send supplies to the troops and could purely be a civillian operation.

That's why you don't send all of your national defense to a single front at once, unless you're a nomadic warrior tribe with a small and entirely mobile population.

If you're trying to argue that holding open supply lines to civilian centers to resupply forces was harder to do/less important in ancient times (which relied more on raiding), Runescape is hardly a truly medieval setting (and even then, any plans for long term occupation or annexation most often involved moving noncombatant settlers to conquered lands). Even in the 3rd age there was access to higher technology and various forms of fast overland transit, making troop and supply mobility closer to modern warefare. And that's before even considering how things like teleportation and other magic would break tactics and logistics as we know it.

EDIT: If you can argue for a real life agricultural, sedentary society which would have been better served in sending every last member to the battlefield in a historical war, I will concede that civilians are useless and we should all be green-collar.

01-Mar-2017 18:20:42 - Last edited on 01-Mar-2017 18:23:54 by Rifleavenger

Hguoh

Hguoh

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Hazeel said :
Deltaslug said :
NO ONE anticipated Zamorak nuking Forinthy.

In DaT, Armadyl saw it coming a mile away.

Not really. It took him seeing the unstable stone and Zamorak's desperation to 'save' mortals from them for Armadyl to consider that mass destruction could ensue. Heck, Zamorak only expressed a desire to take out the other gods with him so even he didn't know he'd be nuking a continent that day.

So less seeing it coming a mile away and more seeing the threat once its a couple of feet away.

01-Mar-2017 18:50:50 - Last edited on 01-Mar-2017 18:52:11 by Hguoh

Summerleaf
Nov Member 2012

Summerleaf

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Swolllliosis said :
That's like sending every single living being in the United States to war, completely abandoning the country. There are thousands of floating islands in the sky, and no one is going to watch over them during the war? Not even a human to deliver military orders? This makes no sense.

So, all of the Avianise non-combatants (elderly, and children) were left on Abbinah. All of the fighters were brought to Gielinor (this was revealed a loooong time ago in a podcast, or something). So, it makes sense that he would send all of his troops to Forinthry for the biggest battle of the war.

As for why they were abandoned, I haven't the slightest idea. Probably because human's can't regularly fly to Skylands, or waste energy on teleportation. Maybe they didn't understand portal magick's yet, either.

01-Mar-2017 18:53:39 - Last edited on 01-Mar-2017 18:55:29 by Summerleaf

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