Magic on the TL 3 battlefield

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

(scritches his head) This might seem a horribly obvious solution, but I'll voice it anyway. Wouldn't the simple answer to you using your mages to ring your city with no-mana zones and Pentagrams be "Then I assault your city mundanely, with infantry and siege equipment and catapults and archers and all of that, and I keep my wizards in camp doing healing and CI3 and making defenses and countermagic and all the things they can do that do NOT involve directly attacking the walls? It's not as if YOUR mages can do squat against me, y'know, through all of those anti-magic defenses."

That's an option, but then you're looking at something more akin to a mundane siege rather than "city walls are useless as mages can just tunnel right through them" or whatever paradigm you'd be looking at with magic fully in play. The point would be to drag things out into a siege. Of course, with the topic of tunneling through, there's the question of how far down the protection of a pentagram applies. Magic-immune walls aren't going to do much good if the mages can just tunnel under them...

Of course, if pentagrams do extend a good distance down, that might be the ticket to having them protect the walls themselves rather than needing a wall-pentagram-wall sandwich - you build a tall wall and put the pentagrams up on the top.

EDIT: For an alternate take, while the description of Pentagram notes it is to be drawn on the floor or ground, is this strictly necessary? Might you be able to draw one on the wall instead? That would allow you to place one on the inner surface of a wall and make that section immune from magic, including from the other side, without having to expose the design where infantry can damage it (or even just temporarily "cut" it with chalk or similar).