Liu Bei's side was also arguing while Yuan Shao's people were discussing matters.
How should they deal with Yuan Shao's two hundred thousand troops?
"Yuan Shao's army is enormous. I believe we should focus on defensive warfare. We're not the ones in a hurry right now. Besides, defending the city will allow us to bring out the strengths of our elite troops. The smaller the battlefield, the more we can minimize the advantage Yuan Shao's army has in numbers." Xi Zhicai spoke eloquently while pointing at the sand table near Ling County.
After Xi Zhicai finished, Liu Ye and Li Ru nodded in agreement.
Guo Jia frowned, pursed his lips, and stared at the sand table with one hand supporting his chin. He felt that something was wrong, but he couldn't find anything to criticize.
Forty thousand against two hundred thousand was not as simple as a one-to-five ratio. Once the number of troops reached a certain point, it could produce a qualitative change.
A single Liu Bei soldier could not defeat five of Yuan Shao's soldiers, but a thousand Liu Bei soldiers could beat the crap out of five thousand of Yuan Shao's soldiers.
However, once the numbers exceeded one hundred thousand, a qualitative change would occur.
Across the entire North China Plain, the terrain was flat and open. When the battlefield could be laid out on a sufficiently large scale, the greater the troop strength, the greater the geographical advantage one could occupy.
When an army of a hundred and twenty or two hundred thousand troops was deployed across a sufficiently vast battlefield, no matter what happened at the front or in another direction, or how many people died, the troops in the other directions would not know a thing. This could minimize the fear caused by casualties.