Then they faced a problem: they were short on numbers. They had successfully defeated the enemy in the field, and their casualty ratio looked good—about what elite troops would normally manage against regular soldiers in the old age of cold weapons and magic.
The elite troops hadn't suffered many losses. In fights between ordinary soldiers, each of their men could take out three enemies. The enemy soldiers didn't look particularly elite; they were clearly second-rate.
But they faced another problem: how to take the enemy's cities.
Normally, a siege required ten times the defenders' numbers, and even then they would need to surround a city for half a year before taking it.
But their enemies had evolved. Their cities now had machine guns and cannons, too.
Those would not be easy to deal with.
They weren't the swaggering types from the Northern Continent, who could fire cannons with deadly accuracy and had a whole pile of explosive packs.
They had also mobilized a great many ordinary soldiers, whose combat strength had been boosted by guns.
But they had no guns.
They didn't have nearly enough black powder, either.
If the enemy simply hunkered down in a bunker with a mage, even setting the place on fire wouldn't work.
But they couldn't just give up on fighting, could they?
So Leticia's clever mind came up with a plan. "We can attack the Knight Territories."
"Each Knight Territory has one castle and one or four or five villages."
"The enemy has concentrated its elite troops in the big cities. The castles have some soldiers, too, but the villages can't possibly have garrisons, right?"
"Taking a castle is easy. We could even take one a day."
Luo Li countered, "But what about our supplies? And what if they come out to attack us?"