Dark Sand: My Players Are All Actors
Chapter 258 - 204 Strategy

Chapter 258: Chapter 204 Strategy

The camp of fifty thousand occupied a vast area, with Ma Anbang situated at the core position. Even if Li Hongyun, playing Yu Jiaxuan, truly possessed invincible bravery and slaughtered his way in, Ma Anbang would definitely get the news early and slip away, rather than foolishly wait to be captured.

Moreover, Yu Jiaxuan, too, was human and didn’t have three heads and six arms; Li Hongyun’s attempt to charge the camp with fifty cavalrymen resulted in them fighting to their deaths.

Li Hongyun pondered that if only he had an infantry fighting vehicle and a Gatling gun, it might be possible.

Yet somehow, Yu Jiaxuan achieved this, and various historical records corroborate that this event truly happened.

So, how exactly did he manage it?

Li Hongyun couldn’t help but fall into deep thought.

Clearly, there was a verified incident, but the historical records didn’t detail the specifics.

It was still up to the players themselves to work hard on replaying and thinking of a viable strategy.

Li Hongyun laid out all the known conditions openly and started to analyze.

Although the records lacked details, the content of the context verified each other multiple times, possibly allowing for the deduction of answers.

This was indeed what made studying historical records interesting: the truth of history was not explicitly written on the surface but hidden beneath it, accessible only to those clever enough to see the essence through phenomena.

The first thing Li Hongyun thought of was General Qin Kaiyun’s tactic of charging the formation to slay enemy commanders during the Cavalry Trial.

Though he still hadn’t cleared the Cavalry Trial yet, after so many attempts, his riding skills had greatly improved, and with the training of riding horses without stirrups, riding those equipped with them was even easier.

So in this instance, riding skills didn’t pose a barrier to him.

The reason he thought of the Cavalry Trial was because the situations he encountered there were somewhat similar.

In the Cavalry Trial, General Qin Kaiyun’s maneuver to slay Gao Yi was also not elaborated in the histories, and players had to analyze it thoroughly before finding the correct solution.

This time was the same.

Seemingly straightforward, yet countless details were hidden behind.

Li Hongyun embarked on his analysis.

"First off, fifty cavalrymen taking on fifty thousand head-on is outright impossible. No matter how much Yu Jiaxuan channels the War God, breaking the human body’s limit is not feasible.

"Fifty vs. fifty thousand, even if it were General Qin Kaiyun reincarnate, and even if all fifty were legendary commanders, it couldn’t be done.

"Moreover, the key point is that such an approach has too low a chance of success. On one hand, if Yu Jiaxuan intended to fight it out, he would surely want as many men as possible; he could have brought hundreds, even more than a thousand cavalrymen, so there was no need to limit himself to fifty. On the other hand, with a frontal attack, Ma Anbang could flee at any moment during the battle, so this definitely wasn’t a good plan.

"So... while Yu Jiaxuan’s combat power is crucial, there must be many factors in this operation more important than combat power.

"The reason why Yu Jiaxuan only brought fifty cavalrymen was because his initial plan wasn’t to assault, but to outsmart!

’Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will never be imperiled in a hundred battles.’ To execute this plan, one must first analyze the composition of the enemy camp.

"Many records use ’Jin Camp’ to describe it, and also, it was mentioned that at the time, Ma Anbang was seemingly wining and dining with generals from Jin Country.

"This seems quite credible.

"After all, Ma Anbang had just betrayed Commander Geng and switched allegiance to Jin, and the Jin people had just appointed him Prefect, so a celebration was normal.

"The fifty thousand in the camp were likely real, but though it was termed a ’Jin Camp,’ it wasn’t necessarily all Jin soldiers, as it was still Ma Anbang’s own force after all.

"If it were fifty thousand elite Jin soldiers, and Yu Jiaxuan was moving through as if entering an uninhabited territory, that’s unimaginable.

"So, this camp was likely mostly comprised of the Rebel Army previously commanded by Ma Anbang, mixed with some Jin soldiers and a few generals from Jin who had come to take charge.

"Since Ma Anbang had already surrendered to Jin, using ’Jin Camp’ to describe his encampment seemed not entirely inappropriate.

"Mmmm... as long as this military camp isn’t utterly unified, there might be a way to exploit it."

After his analysis, Li Hongyun felt that the so-called "Jin Camp" actually had only a handful of Jin people, with the majority still being Ma Anbang’s subordinates, and perhaps a large part of them were still former members of the Rebel Army.

After all, Ma Anbang had allied with Commander Geng before he abruptly betrayed him.

And this mixed situation was akin to the vulnerability General Qin Kaiyun witnessed during the charge, which could be exploited.

From the backdrop at the time, although Jin nominally occupied extensive territories in the north, their numbers were surely in the minority.

Thus, Jin’s rule was actually indirect, stabilizing the situation through many puppets and defectors like Zhang Anguo.

Also, the Jin leader Wanyan Hailing had just successfully usurped the throne not long before and was planning to conquer Qi southward, although launching the official operation would still take ten years. Yet the relentless exactions and various levies across the north never paused, leading to continuous uprisings everywhere.

This meant that a sizable part of the people in Ma Anbang’s camp were neutrals or even sided with the Qi Dynasty. Many of them were compelled to serve under Ma Anbang due to various reasons and sufferings."

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