Jora the Explorer

They couldn't include a 10 second piece with Jon saying goodbye to his loyal pet of many years, 'Ghost', because of time constraints on the episode......are you kidding me.....So, no one considered what Jon would have done then.???.....

The problem is that in TV land the Dothraki using their well tried horse archer tactics, (which GRRM based on his reading of historical tribes), is not as cinematic as a mass charge into an unseen, much larger enemy at night........

1000 horse archers loose off 20 to 30 shots a minute. Typically, each man carries 48 arrows, ..that's circa 48,000 undead down....rinse and repeat in relays of 1000 of new horse archers or resupply . Its not meant to slow or stop them, just thin them out a bit.....The Parthians at Carrhae 53BC, had 9k of horse archers and beat 50k of slower Romans and their allies resupplying their horse archers during the battle,...agreed they weren't facing undead, a zombie dragon, or needed obsidian tipped arrows, but the Dothraki are supposed to number 30k, and all are trained from boyhood to be expert horse archers. The Dothraki had a whole day at least before the undead arrived at Winterfell...Tormond etc managed to ride around the undead, and arrive long before nightfall...There only real limit would be the supply of Obsidian arrow heads, and they could be as primitive as flint arrowheads.....They could have weakened the undead army, even with only 48 arrows each.....with few losses, and /or forcing the NK to use his dragon.......which is what team alive wanted anyway....No, its not going to stop them attacking Winterfell, but every little helps.

I gave it six. I really wanted to like it, and we've all been waiting a long time for this.....BUT... Pros; Good cinematography, acting, stunts, sets, and visuals Cons: A bit too dark Silly plot, the whole strategy of the army of the living had numerous flaws....from characters with military training and experience, the writers left the heroes common sense out of the script.....What military genius thought deploying in front of a castle, with your artillery in front, and a ditch and palisade, BEHIND, (impeding any retreat), was a good idea......Sam surviving from the thousands of frenzied zombies at the end by....crying.!!!! ......Brienne seemed to die at least three times, but didn't....and Jorah got stabbed THROUGH his metal breastplate!!! Etc etc Clearly a lesson that spending even treble the normal budget does not necessarily result in a better script.

Some of the Dothraki would have been put to better use skirmishing, using their legendary bow skills to start whittling down the undead......500 to 1000 of the best horse archers spread out, shooting 48 arrows apiece, at 200 to 300 metres, loosing off 20 to 30 arrows per minute....avoiding contact, and retreating, to flow around Winterfell, or through the gates...second nature to the Dothraki horse lords taught to fire bows from horseback from boyhood....assisted by a few large bonfires on the plain to give some idea of the undead dispositions...keep the rest of the Dothraki behind Winterfell as a counter attack.....that would have provoked the undead to charge the walls etc, and thus no one else needed to be outside the walls in the first place.!!!.....and that's without dragons!!!!

Yep, all that military know how and experience, and to be brutally honest common sense, standing around the battle map......and the big idea was to NOT man the walls with as many missile troops as possible, (even though Jon asked for women folk etc to be able to use a bow in S7), stick the artillery in front of your lines, throw a pointless 30k of cavalry frontally, and unsupported, into 120k plus of frenzied undead, they couldn't even see....have no polearms, etc to fight on/over the battlements, use archers piecemeal, not use the dragons from the get go, or fire, embers, oil, or indeed anything flammable to chuck down the walls, sacrifice your best troops to cover a retreat, for the troops outside your best assett, a massive curtain wall, and have a ditch and stakes BEHIND your deployment, hindering your retreat, and protect Bran with 20 men, ....in the hope the NK will fall into the trap, before everyone gets slaugtered....because the NK isn't as intelligent as we are....(lol).....now that's a plan..... time for drinking....

I agree the NK didn't fight Jon didn't because he didn't have too.....even IF Jon had a 1 in 2, 5 or 10 chance of destroying him etc ....he knows Jon posses a weapon capable of it.......why take the risk, when he didn't need to.....and in line with his modus operandi he tends to hang back let the wights do their job....he didn't even send a single WW in with the Wights, as he knew he could loose him......and that is the difference between Hearthhome, and Winterfell.....at the former he sent one WW into combat, maybe to see if anyone had a weapon capable of killing himself, and the WWs, and he got his answer......

As Tywin Tytosson said......The Dothraki are based on Mongols, Huns, Alans, etc.........I can certainly see the Dothraki taking towns without walls, slaughtering most of the inhabitants, and allowing a few survivors to spread fear amongst other nearby walled towns, who then simply surrender their wealth and some inhabitants as slaves to avoid the slaughter of everyone.

Pikes are not very flexible tactically....but as said using them would have left the infantry unable to use a shield effectively.....and as said prone to leaping wights etc.....The Unsullied, for all their training, discipline, high morale and shield wall phalanx tactics, fell victim to the ferocity and overwhelming numbers of the wights, and can be seen slowly falling back, as they are ground down.

Yep you're right, I think like a lot of other ideas it would have made the whole drama more diverse.....it seems that only Tyrion owns one.!!!....obviously, they can make trebauchet, but not crossbows up north?.....I thought Jon made a point of getting as many as possible, including the women folk, trained up to fire bows in S7....but the was little evidence of it in ep3.?

The point of trebauchet is that they have a high arc of fire, as shown, so they can fire over walls, either offensively or defensively. Depending on the size of the counter weight, and the projectile, they could fire some 450 metres, in our universe......Yes, they may not have fitted many into Winterfell, but they would have got more than one shot off.!!!...the catapults should have been made smaller to fit in the towers, and fire, hot showers of coals from all those forges, or all the dragon glass shards and bits they would have had left over, to cover the outer defences, in front of the palisade etc. Hindsight is a wonderful thing....but Jon, made a big speech on how to kill them at Kingslanding, and then promptly underutilized the easiest method to kill the undead, or even see better!!!.....would have made a big difference probably not.......but it would have made the battle scenes a bit more diverse.

I'm pretty certain they had winters in Esos, and IKEA did run out of rugs.!!!