Grandpa Qin smoothly took command from General Kudell. As he walked out of the general's tent, his adjutant, Five Wheels, @-mentioned all the guild leaders in the forum group.
A seasoned commander like Old Qin had already made the strategic arrangements necessary for a war before going to request command. He had a fifty-person staff team under him, and with some offline preparations as well, drawing up a strategy had become much easier.
Just like their preparations for the battle against the gnolls in Shadow Valley, Five Wheels had assigned the young people in the third batch of the "Staff College War Observer Group" to different positions. Each had a designated liaison for coordinating with several player guilds, allowing the command structure to quickly take shape around the guilds.
Unless circumstances called for it, Qin wouldn't micromanage a player's machine gun, telling them to shift it fifteen centimeters to the left.
As the commander-in-chief, his orders went down at most to a player's ten-person squad. More often, he passed the tactical plans directly to guild leaders, who worked out and carried out the details themselves. With each link in the chain working together, the seven thousand players already gathered in the desert could move with maximum efficiency.
Of course, not every player belonged to a guild, large or small. Those lone wolves willing to follow orders would be temporarily organized into "reserve companies" as basic tactical units. Those who didn't want to take orders but still wished to fight could pick up a series of military bounties issued by the staff headquarters.
Most of them involved assassinations or infiltration and sabotage.
They were the sort of minor operations where success would be gratifying, but failure wouldn't affect the progress of the war.
Players with at least five months of experience