So the time has come once again when I throw myself at your mercy and beg you for ideas. Like in my earlier post, which you responded to amazingly well, I have stuck my characters in a situation where they are expecting me to come up with some brilliant plan to get them out of it but I’m drawing a blank.
The situation is this: the enemy army is sitting pretty in a nicely defensible walled city while the protagonists army, which is about half the size, has a plan to defeat the enemy by destoying the city in such a way as the enemy cannot escape. Exactly, what the plan is, I’m not sure. They refuse to tell me. That’s where you come in. How do you destroy a city and everyone in it with minimal losses and risk to the other side????
Any ideas, no matter how ridiculous, will be welcomed with open arms!
R.E. Navan 
Why not just put it under siege? That worked all the time. Eventually the defenders will run out of supplies and either give up or commit suicide. By the way, I absolutely love your site! I just set mine up and I am completely envious!
Glad you enjoy the blog. I thought about a seige but without some serious deus ex machina, it’s not going to work. Thanks for the suggestion though! 🙂 Best of luck with your own blog.
Thanks, and I finally found the follow button on yours, lol. ummm What about an infiltration? Trickery? Magic? Something that would make no sense in the real world and doesn’t seem like it belongs in the setting yet is awesomely appropriate to the generals personality and totally expected despite the fact that no-one else thought of it?
You might be on to something there… 🙂
🙂 Makes sense to me.
Doing a twist on a story that’s already been done can always give you some plot ideas. In one of the Game of Thrones books, Daenarys and company are in a similar situation, and they get in through the sewers. Interestingly, in Mockingjay, Katniss and her pals enter the center of the Capitol through the sewers, too. You could always go the biblical route, too, where the good guys walked around the walls of Jericho with the Ark of the Covenant for seven days and God made the walls fall down. Good luck!
Thanks for the suggestions! 🙂
Sewers are always a fun tactic and the Walls of Jericho could be fun. What about 1000’s of rats that have bombs (or gunpowder) strapped to their backs and then let out into the city. If you get enough rats into the city then you just need a unit of archers to keep firing fire arrows into the city until they hit a few to set off a chain reaction. It would look pretty.
Might not look so pretty from inside the city walls 🙂
I would say get creative with the structure of the city. Find a way to use their own defenses against them. Say they have an extra chamber running along the perimeter of the outer wall designed for trapping invaders, and the invaders figure out a way to flood that using the enemy’s own water supply. Or say that when in full defense position, the enemy’s escape routes are limited to their herd of flying mammals (or something), but the invaders cripple that. Or the invaders take out all of the watch towers, so that the enemy can’t see what’s happening beyond the wall. I saw a movie once, too, where chunks of meat infected with the plague were launched over the wall of a fortress and infected everyone within. That’s obviously more grim than necessary, but you could thing along those lines. Something that renders their main defense useless.
Hmm. Some very interesting ideas. Thank you! 🙂
Think Icarus and fly in under cover of darkness.
Have a human-fly or three scale the walls and let down ropes.
With either of the two above, you could have the folks inside stay there in disguise a few days before letting the others in.
Try Willow’s gopher trick or a Trojan horse to fool the enemy into opening the door.
Drug the water supply with a sedative so no one will be defending the gate.
Offer them something the masses find irrisistable. Assuming there’s a greatly disproportionate poor:rich ratio as in traditional seige-type stories, offering something as simple as food *might* stir the poverty-stricken enough to get the doors open with minimal life-loss and property damage.
The trojan horse thing did cross my mind 🙂 The other suggestions are all very helpful too. Thank you!
Maybe you could combine all of the ideas , with a siege and then combine it with what lynx child said. Maybe we could skip the rats…
Anyway love the blog , and I wish my posts would be as we’ll received .