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Castles are basically useless apparently


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Im so confused why Jamie assumed Casterly Rock would be taken WHY? Its quite litterally the strongest castle in Westeros Visenya Targaryan believed even with dragons it would be hard to take. Jamie doesnt know about the secret entrance to CR or he would have ordered it sealed before Dannys fleet even reached Westeros yet the Dothraki take it with ease, even with 300 men guarding CR the invading army would fail period. 

 

Highgarden has no weaknesses and three outter walls and is top 6 strongest castles and was taken almost with no challenge or so it seems. Again even with 30000 men and 500 men protecting HG jamie loses.

 

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Jaime's army to attack Highgarden was 10.000 strong. You can count by stopping the film when Olenna looks out of the window in the tower. I did: Each rectangular formation comprises 72 (12 x 6) soldiers.

Oh, and by the way: The Unsullied take Casterly Rock; the Dothraki are still at Dragonstone, mining dragonglass, carrying boats around and playing cards and standing around to look good - damn where are their horses? Maybe dragon fodder?

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1 hour ago, Greywater-Watch said:

Jaime's army to attack Highgarden was 10.000 strong. You can count by stopping the film when Olenna looks out of the window in the tower. I did: Each rectangular formation comprises 72 (12 x 6) soldiers.

Doesnt really answer the question, the fact that writers decided to change the whole dynamics of the castle and thought what the heck, when Olenna arrives back we'll have her forget to close the front door. High garden has plenty of outer walls and would definitely not be overthrew by a 10,000 strong army. Again bad wiritng

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Oh, and by the way: The Unsullied take Casterly Rock; the Dothraki are still at Dragonstone, mining dragonglass, carrying boats around and playing cards and standing around to look good - damn where are their horses? Maybe dragon fodder?

 

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49 minutes ago, Samwell_Tarly said:

Doesnt really answer the question, the fact that writers decided to change the whole dynamics of the castle and thought what the heck, when Olenna arrives back we'll have her forget to close the front door. High garden has plenty of outer walls and would definitely not be overthrew by a 10,000 strong army. Again bad wiritng

They never brought the horses. They left them all.

They show them on the boats in the final Dany scene of last season.

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I think part of highgarden falling was for the plot but also because the reach didn't seem to be following olenna anymore and I think that highgarden was probably poorly manned since she wasn't expecting an attack. Also tarly had been the military men for the reach and he had gone against olenna. Olenna is great at "the game" and playing her part behind the lines but she isn't a battlefield commander.

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I think jaime was smart to let the unsullied take casterly rock. They emptied the larder's and essentially stranded dany's best forces where she can't get to them. They have to walk across westero's and will have no supplies to do it. Plus caterly rock is useless now since they have no gold anymore and they need food which the reach has. Plus by doing what they did they took out dany's last ally in westero's and made her look weak. That is important since dany essentially came to westeros with what seemed like an unbeatable force and as jaime said noone wants to be on the losing side and the lannisters looked like the losing side. Well they turned that around and will likely be able to pick up allies because of it. I don't think it will last once dany unleashes her dragons but the lannisters are doing what they can. And to give credit to cersei she let jaime handle something instead of trying to do something she has no experience or training with

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Ya... it was kinda weird Jamie expected CR to fall, as he did not know of the secret entrance.

And even weirder that Highgarden falls easily. Tyrrell do have quite an army and HG is a decent castle. They made it look like Lannisters hardly lost many forces in sacking it.

Bad writing I guess.

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5 minutes ago, Random person in the North said:

Quick somebody put D&D in touch with Trump - they could save him billions!

Infact they could save him even more by identifying as few as 20 good men for the US military!

Ser Twenty of House Goodmen has plenty of engagements as it is, he is working on boosting the pie industry in Russia. But his brother Ser Ten is running an insemination clinic, and might be swayed to consider to jump in for the US military in his days off. 

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10 hours ago, snow is the man said:

I think jaime was smart to let the unsullied take casterly rock.

No he wasn't. It doesn't take 10000 men to hold a castle. Especially since we're not talking about holding it for years like Stannis during the Rebellion—as soon as Jaime won the sneak attack on Highgarden, he could turn right back around (maybe even with Reach reinforcements) to lift the siege. So, he only needed to leave behind a few hundred men and a mediocre commander. Which he could have done without significantly affecting his attack on Highgarden.

It's not like it was a close battle. As you yourself said, once Tarly (and presumably a bunch of other bannermen) changed sides, it was a fait accompli. Let's say that, of the Reach's 70000 soldiers, they had something like 15000 following Tarly, 10000 following Olenna but only a third of them in a position to help, and 45000 staying home. Do you really think Jaime having only the best 9500 out of 10000 instead of all 10000 would make any difference?

Of course we know that, thanks to Tyrion's sewer plan, there would have been an immediate assault and the defenders would probably have lost to the Unsullied anyway. But Jaime didn't know that. And even knowing that, it doesn't actually leave the Lannisters any worse off than they are now. So the unlikely worst-case scenario for the obvious defend-the-castle plan is identical to the best-case scenario for Jaime's plan, which makes it a pointless plan at best.

Also:

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 they did they took out dany's last ally in westero's and made her look weak

Sure, losing the seat of her strongest ally does make Dany look weak.

And losing the seat of her own self makes Cersei look even weaker. Remember when Robb lost Winterfell, and some of his allies started looking for an exit strategy?

And again, they could have taken out Olenna without sacrificing their home.

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11 hours ago, snow is the man said:

I think jaime was smart to let the unsullied take casterly rock. They emptied the larder's and essentially stranded dany's best forces where she can't get to them. They have to walk across westero's and will have no supplies to do it. Plus caterly rock is useless now since they have no gold anymore and they need food which the reach has. Plus by doing what they did they took out dany's last ally in westero's and made her look weak. That is important since dany essentially came to westeros with what seemed like an unbeatable force and as jaime said noone wants to be on the losing side and the lannisters looked like the losing side. Well they turned that around and will likely be able to pick up allies because of it. I don't think it will last once dany unleashes her dragons but the lannisters are doing what they can. And to give credit to cersei she let jaime handle something instead of trying to do something she has no experience or training with

Pretty much this.

 

Dany starts with basically 4 armies (Dornish, Tyrells, Unsullied and Dothrak), 500 boats with Yara and 500 boats for the unsullied) and 3 dragons. Let's say each of Dany's armies has 10k fighters, to keep it simple for now.

Cersie/Jamie had 1 army - 10k Lannisters. Then Euron joins and they have 1000 boats.

Yara was carrying the 10k Dornish to KL and Euron sunk them. Dany is down to 30k troops and Jamie still has 10k

Cersie cries patriotism and the Tarly's join Jamie, splitting the Tyrell forces in half. Dany now has 25k troops and Jamie is up to 15k.

Jamie sacrifices 1k troops at Casterly Rock and takes Highgarden with his 14k remaining. Highgarden only has 5k defending it so they lose. Dany is down to 20k troops but 10k are stuck at Casterly Rock as Euron sank her last 500 boats. Jamie still has 14k (give or take).

Of course, there are much more than 10k Dothraki and dragons will kick butt in Episode 4 - totally disrupting Cersie and Jamies attempts to even the odds.

 

Is the show explaining it properly - not really. Is it plausible? Barely, in this sped up game of chess on crack sort of way. But, within the logic of the show (with characters and armies that seem to have warp capability at times) it is cohesive.

It proves that Tyrion and the rest of Dany's strategists are absolutely pathetic - their plan was basically split everything up and they got picked off 1 at a time :D

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1 hour ago, RhaenysB said:

It throws the concept of sieges out of the window. 

Walls don't just stop people. 

I think the novels are at fault here. Most of GRRM's wars are based on real-life medieval English wars, and they're almost always over in about a tenth the time. Which makes sense for, say, the Dance of the Dragons, because that's won by Valyrian dragons instead of by Norman castlecraft. But it makes a lot less sense for, say, the War of the Five Kings, when there are no more dragons.

There's just no time for realistic sieges (or realistic travel times) in that compressed time scale. The only way things are even remotely plausible is if, for some unspecified reason, almost every siege is resolved by an immediate assault. And, except for a couple of cases like Mance's attack on the Wall, it's never a massive army attacking a tiny one, it's always two armies in the same ballpark, which should mean that the assault almost always goes to the defender, but that's clearly not what happens, again for some unspecified reason.

Which works in the novels, but it doesn't work on TV. D&D have to show us the battles, so the reason has to be specified, and it's not their fault that the only thing they can come up with is that walls are useless. What else could it be?

Of course D&D are to blame for making S7 entirely driven by the battles, making it impossible to ignore the problem. ASoIaF isn't military fiction, it's political intrigue fiction with some military action that's mostly in the background, and GoT worked better when it was the same. When the point of showing us a battle is to reveal something about Joffrey's character and get Tyrion from one part of his story to the next, it's a lot less important for the battle to make sense than when the outcome of the battle is the entire point.

48 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

Sieges are expensive to film though, much better to go with a shot of some guys marching, then cut to indoors where it's nice and cheap.

Sieges are cheap to film. The Siege of Riverrun must have been a lot cheaper than the Battle of Blackwater. It's some guys in tents, with a bunch of other tents and campfires CGI'd or even painted in the background, and maybe the sound of occasional catapults going off in the distance. If you want to get fancy, do a scene with sappers in tunnels, show a big CGI or model mobile tower… it's all still pretty cheap. They only get expensive when they're resolved by an immediate all-or-nothing assault instead of by actual siegecraft.

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30 minutes ago, ummester said:

Yara was carrying the 10k Dornish to KL and Euron sunk them.

No, Yara was carrying the Sand Snakes and their escort to Dorne, where they were presumably going to pick up the Dornish army and ferry them back, but they never got there. Ellaria was still talking about the whether their upcoming landing in Dorne was going to be Yara's and Theon's first time there, seconds before they got attacked. So the Dornish army is still sitting in Dorne.

I know why you got that wrong. Because it makes no sense that killing three girls would destroy the military capability of Dorne. So you're left to try to make sense out of what we saw, and there's no way to do so. I suspect that what D&D had in mind is that whoever ends up in charge of Dorne next is going to sit the war out, but they didn't even bother to hint at that, much less show it.

And that's what's wrong with S7. If the show would focus on the politics instead of the military stuff, there is a good story there. Cersei tempting Euron to want to prove himself to her was bound to pay some dividends, even if she couldn't guess what. Flipping Tarly was even more important—it made the Reach a fait accompli. These aren't just the two most important things that happened, they're also exactly the kinds of things the show is good at when they focus on it. But just treating it as a minor detail to get past as quickly as possible so we can have a big battle means they're not pulling it off. Likewise, Dorne going isolationist without the Sand Snakes makes sense, and it's something they could do well, but they didn't even remember to include that part.

Instead, they're focusing on the military action, and there's no interesting drama there. When Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, God gave him a magic horn and said "If you blow this horn, the walls will fall down and you'll win easily". So he blew the horn, the walls fell down, and he won easily. The point of that story is not "Joshua was a brilliant strategist", it's "Having God on your side is really good". Likewise, the point of S7 so far is not "Jamie and Cersei are brilliant strategists", it's "having D&D on your side is really good". Which is pointless.

Seriously, what was Euron's clever strategy? If you have the ability to magically detect enemy fleets no matter where they are, and to teleport there instantly, and if you can somehow win a straight-up battle between equally-matched fleets in a rout, you don't need any strategy, you just do that. Being impressed by that is like being impressed by someone winning an FPS with god mode enabled.

 

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9 minutes ago, falcotron said:

No, Yara was carrying the Sand Snakes and their escort to Dorne, where they were presumably going to pick up the Dornish army and ferry them back, but they never got there. Ellaria was still talking about the whether their upcoming landing in Dorne was going to be Yara's and Theon's first time there, seconds before they got attacked. So the Dornish army is still sitting in Dorne.

I know why you got that wrong. Because it makes no sense that killing three girls would destroy the military capability of Dorne. So you're left to try to make sense out of what we saw, and there's no way to do so. I suspect that what D&D had in mind is that whoever ends up in charge of Dorne next is going to sit the war out, but they didn't even bother to hint at that, much less show it.

And that's what's wrong with S7. If the show would focus on the politics instead of the military stuff, there is a good story there. Cersei tempting Euron to want to prove himself to her was bound to pay some dividends, even if she couldn't guess what. Flipping Tarly was even more important—it made the Reach a fait accompli. These aren't just the two most important things that happened, they're also exactly the kinds of things the show is good at when they focus on it. But just treating it as a minor detail to get past as quickly as possible so we can have a big battle means they're not pulling it off. Likewise, Dorne going isolationist without the Sand Snakes makes sense, and it's something they could do well, but they didn't even remember to include that part.

Instead, they're focusing on the military action, and there's no interesting drama there. When Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, God gave him a magic horn and said "If you blow this horn, the walls will fall down and you'll win easily". So he blew the horn, the walls fell down, and he won easily. The point of that story is not "Joshua was a brilliant strategist", it's "Having God on your side is really good". Likewise, the point of S7 so far is not "Jamie and Cersei are brilliant strategists", it's "having D&D on your side is really good". Which is pointless.

Seriously, what was Euron's clever strategy? If you have the ability to magically detect enemy fleets no matter where they are, and to teleport there instantly, and if you can somehow win a straight-up battle between equally-matched fleets in a rout, you don't need any strategy, you just do that. Being impressed by that is like being impressed by someone winning an FPS with god mode enabled.

 

I don't disagree with anything you have written - focusing on the politics probably would make the show more engaging. And yes, you are right, Yara was on her way to Dorne (there is dialogue to support that) even though it would make more sense for Euron to sink her fleet on the way to KL, fully laden with Dornish troops.

I don't think D&D (or the writers working for them) can write character, dialogue and political intrigue as good as GRRM. Not that I am absolving GRRM, as I'm not sure he knows how to resolve the story he started telling.

There were 3 books and 4 seasons of intricately plotted drama, framed (and spiced up by) by these growing fantasy elements. All of these pieces were brilliantly moved into place, all of these intriguing seeds planted - and then it started to come apart. The goalposts feel like they were moved in the middle of the game.

It was designed as a saga, not a series and saga's have to end. Yet what kind of ending should that be? If it is in line with the way the first 3 books were written, that ending should be low key and mostly conveyed with dialogue. But it all got bigger than that, due to becoming more popular than I think anyone counted for (Kind of like Star Wars in the 70s).

GRRM himself went from the idea of writing for lower cinematic budgets to the idea of finishing it as a 200 million cinematic epic. Now there are multiple spinoffs planned and the original saga hasn't even finished.

D&D know the end game and some major plot elements along the way, which they are fumbling towards in sometimes spectacular but often stupid style. And after seasons 5 & 6, which lacked plotting intricacy, they know that the spectacle sells GoTs just as well as the plotting used to and, even if they wanted to, there probably isn't time to craft an intricately plotted season and film it each year.

So, though your criticism is entirely valid and more intricate political plotting would elevate the last act of this saga, it's kind of impossible to do when they're making it up as they go along, trying to keep up with a schedule. The big issue with GoTs/ASoIaF is that the story was sold for adaptation before it was finished - which is ultimately the combined fault of GRRM, D&D and HBO.

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2 minutes ago, ummester said:

I don't disagree with anything you have written - focusing on the politics probably would make the show more engaging. And yes, you are right, Yara was on her way to Dorne (there is dialogue to support that) even though it would make more sense for Euron to sink her fleet on the way to KL, fully laden with Dornish troops.

I don't think D&D (or the writers working for them) can write character, dialogue and political intrigue as good as GRRM. Not that I am absolving GRRM, as I'm not sure he knows how to resolve the story he started telling.

There were 3 books and 4 seasons of intricately plotted drama, framed (and spiced up by) by these growing fantasy elements. All of these pieces were brilliantly moved into place, all of these intriguing seeds planted - and then it started to come apart. The goalposts feel like they were moved in the middle of the game.

It was designed as a saga, not a series and saga's have to end. Yet what kind of ending should that be? If it is in line with the way the first 3 books were written, that ending should be low key and mostly conveyed with dialogue. But it all got bigger than that, due to becoming more popular than I think anyone counted for (Kind of like Star Wars in the 70s).

GRRM himself went from the idea of writing for lower cinematic budgets to the idea of finishing it as a 200 million cinematic epic. Now there are multiple spinoffs planned and the original saga hasn't even finished.

D&D know the end game and some major plot elements along the way, which they are fumbling towards in sometimes spectacular but often stupid style. And after seasons 5 & 6, which lacked plotting intricacy, they know that the spectacle sells GoTs just as well as the plotting used to and, even if they wanted to, there probably isn't time to craft an intricately plotted season and film it each year.

So, though your criticism is entirely valid and more intricate political plotting would elevate the last act of this saga, it's kind of impossible to do when they're making it up as they go along, trying to keep up with a schedule. The big issue with GoTs/ASoIaF is that the story was sold for adaptation before it was finished - which is ultimately the combined fault of GRRM, D&D and HBO.

I agree with all of this except the idea that somehow there isn't enough time to properly write 10 or 7 or 6 episodes of TV and make it coherent.  There is plenty of time.  Good grief, they could pay half the people on this web site to review the scripts and thereby eliminate the easy mistakes, continuity lapses and so forth.  The fact that the writing of the show seems to come last on the list is the showrunners decision, and yes, it's because they see that spectacle will carry them over bad writing, but the bad writing shouldn't be excused as if it can't be helped because there isn't enough time to make it good.

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20 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I agree with all of this except the idea that somehow there isn't enough time to properly write 10 or 7 or 6 episodes of TV and make it coherent.  There is plenty of time.  Good grief, they could pay half the people on this web site to review the scripts and thereby eliminate the easy mistakes, continuity lapses and so forth.  The fact that the writing of the show seems to come last on the list is the showrunners decision, and yes, it's because they see that spectacle will carry them over bad writing, but the bad writing shouldn't be excused as if it can't be helped because there isn't enough time to make it good.

Yes, they could employ more writers/proof readers etc - but then there are more chance of leaks. Look at the problems they have had with leaks already with season 5 and this season. Not saying you are wrong, from a better writing perspective, just pointing out the more people you involve in the writing the greater the chance of losing control of any secrets or surprises you plan.

Besides, have you been to the cinema lately? Seen how bad the writing is in the new Star Wars films, or those Transformers films? Did you see that recent Alien film? Did you see HBOs last big effort Westworld? There is this kind of indirectly proportional relationship between budget and writing - if you want to see something well written, find an indi flick or a new series, because as soon as they start throwing money at it the writing turns to crap :D

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