Who's winning the war?

I'm not asking for the official numbering per Bioware. I'm asking for some explanation of why this is possibly on par with things that happened in chapters 1 through 3?

Because it is a turning point in the war due to Makeb's strategic value. It might seem like not much right now, though I'd imagine in the next expansion we'll be seeing a string of republic defeats at the hands of the empire's isotype-5 technology.

It's also a turning point for the empire itself, showing that putting aside past rivalries and general back-stabbiness will bring about results.

While I acknowledge that the story may very well do this, because it is, after all, BW's writers' prerogative, I would like to point out that it's pretty silly for a single technological bump to be the difference between imminent defeat and turning the tide, and that such a thing has zero precedent in actual human military history for good reason. Between Corellia, Malgus, and the Dread Masters, the Empire's military was effectively gutted, and the notion that isotope-5 can suddenly make it all better is a little ridiculous. Hitler staked Nazi Germany's future on Wunderwaffen; I don't see why Marr doing the same thing should give the Empire any better of a chance at victory than the Hitlerites had in 1944.

But hey, BW writers have done things that I think are ridiculous before.

Uhh. Really?

Machine guns, flight, tanks from modern history. Ignoring modern history, we can look at, y'know, the invention of guns and gun powder.

You were joking when you said that technological advancements can't win a war, right? Right?

None of those were war-winning on their own. Take the machine gun; do you seriously think that, say, the Mahdists would've wiped the floor with Kitchener's army if the Brits hadn't had Maxim guns at Khartoum?

Or take firearms themselves. Early small arms and artillery were notoriously unreliable and chiefly good for making loud noises and scaring the living crap out of anybody nearby. They were slow to load, bulky, and frankly didn't do you much good unless you had a bunch of formed infantry with pikes or swords or something similar near them. No army used firearms exclusively until the invention of the bayonet, several hundred years later, and even then some states continued to use a combination of pike and shot with considerable success (e.g. Sweden in the Great Northern War).

Furthermore, it's extremely difficult to come up with a scenario in which an army that possessed firearms in large enough quantities to matter - and, therefore, be creditable for a victory - came up against an army that did not. Even the assertion that firearms allowed the Iberian monarchy to conquer the Triple Alliance and Tawantinsuyu is hard to substantiate; they didn't have many guns, and they weren't very effective, and didn't the fragmentation of the indigenous alliances, the disease that ravaged their societies, and the steel weapons that every soldier carried play just as much, if not more, of a role than boomsticks? Jared Diamond has made many mistakes in his various books, but the title of Guns, Germs, and Steel was more or less dead-on: it wasn't just the guns, but the germs and the steel (and other things) that won the day for the likes of Cortes and Pizarro.

Or tanks. Tanks were developed initially by the British and French shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Because of Erich Ludendorff's skepticism about the viability of armored warfare, a skepticism fed by the early tanks' notoriously difficult maintenance and poor maneuverability, Germany only built a very small number of its own tanks, and only ever captured about a hundred or so, making the Allied possession of tanks a real technological 'advantage' in the broadest sense - an advantage that no army possessed over another comparable opponent at any point in later history, making it of particular interest to us.

Except - the Allied tanks were rarely employed en masse, and when they were employed, as at Cambrai, the results were indifferent on anything but a tactical scale. Except - the Germans rapidly developed techniques and tactics that neutralized Allied advantages in the possession of tanks. Except - Germany launched its own big offensive in the spring of 1918, and was able to capture large amounts of ground and virtually destroy several Allied formations, despite the fact that the Allies had lots of tanks and the Germans had very few. Except - that German offensive's scope, scale, and success dwarfed anything the Allies ever accomplished with tanks. Except - the Allies' ultimate victory was dictated not by tanks, but by the iron ring of the British blockade, the financial support of the United States, the promise of a bottomless well of American manpower, the establishment of a unified Allied supreme command and reserve, and the application by that command of sensible, if unimaginative, operational and strategic plans.

It was never a question of "Germany would've won the war if the Allies hadn't gotten tanks". Germany could have theoretically won the war at various points in the conflict, but tanks had little to nothing to do with any of those.

When you get down to more nitty-gritty stuff, like comparing one kind of tank to another, the problem of assigning agency becomes even more acute. Most people would agree that in a one-on-one fight, a Tiger probably would've destroyed a Sherman, much like how the Panther had an advantage over the T-34 before it was upgunned. Okay: why didn't Nazi Germany's Tigers wipe the floor with the Allied Shermans? Well, there were problems involving excessive maintenance, and Germany didn't ever make that many Tigers in the first place, and a lot of them were incapacitated by Allied airpower, and a lot of them were simply used badly or irrelevantly in solo actions that didn't end up accomplishing much. That shifts the agency not onto whose technology was better, but onto who had better and more productive industry, who was able to utilize combined arms best, who was able to develop tactics that countered technological advantages (or made use of technological advantages) better, and things like that. It was never just about having the best weapons. Did the United States, for instance, win that war solely because of the B-29, or the M-1 Garand, or the Liberty ship? Hardly.

None of that is to say, of course, that it isn't nice to have the best weapons. Better technology makes the life of a soldier easier, and it does confer an advantage. But that advantage, by itself, is never war-winning.

So that's why I get a little cheesed when I see people claiming that isotope-5 will turn the tide. Hitler thought the same about his V-2 rockets, his jet planes, his King Tigers, and all manner of similar wonder-weapons. They didn't work out for him. What should've been much more important for the Empire was the establishment of a sane, relatively stable military leadership, the reduction of racial prejudices allowing for more manpower to trickle into the ranks from nonhuman species, the potential advantages that could come on the heels of Republic overextension (although that would make for a fairly infuriating Pub side storyline) and so on. And perhaps those things will be. But isotope-5 is what's getting play right now, due to Makeb.

I'll admit, you seem to be more knowledgeable about history than me.

That said, how would those on the receiving end of advanced technologies have faired if they did not develop counter-measures? Not to mention that the new techs became more stable with time; there's no arguing that new technology did not change the face of warfare.

Isotype-5 will turn the tide of the war in the sense that it should allow the Empire to go on the offensive/gain some footholds for a time, until the Republic develops counter-measures. Things will go from the Empire falling apart to the Empire gaining strength, which will in turn boost the morale of its citizens.

I agree that the more important development is that the Empire now has a good leader, though discounting Isotype-5 as something that could change the face of the war and give the Empire the upper hand would be a mistake. Especially when considering several of the class stories (most notably Knight/Trooper, though also the Warrior Taris quest line) revolve around stopping new technology before it can have a major impact on the war.

The war won't turn around solely because of Isotype-5, but Isotype-5 will have a major impact.

Neither


I AM WINNING THE WAR!

Knockerz is winning the war.

In my story I put all the people we had to feed in the army and we have the hutt's money and alliance aswell... QQ

New technology has certainly changed the face of warfare. Stick an ancient Chinese crossbowman in the modern PLA and give him an AK and he'd be utterly clueless. But new technology doesn't change the way war works all at once. It's an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary one, and implies small, but not decisive, advantages at any given time that add up to a large advantage over the course of decades or centuries.

That many class stories are structured this way is unsurprising, because ever since the outset of the industrial era, a big chunk of the argument about warfare - and, by extension, funding, and so on - has been about the advantages technology can bring. Buy the soldiers F-14s to replace their F-4s and they'll wipe the enemy out of the sky; don't do that, and they'll be the ones getting wiped out. Procurement people, spokespersons for various militaries, congresspersons, and so on, have been talking in these terms since the nineteenth century. Marginal advantages become war-winning technologies. At least in that context, it's not that a new technology will turn a rout into a dazzling success, like isotope-5 has been painted.

The same sort of sleight of hand is applied to story-telling, too. Go on a mission to sabotage a factory, or something: who cares, it's just one factory. Go on a mission to sabotage a factory that's pumping out war droids that can annihilate whole platoons of soldiers at a time: now that has zing to it. That's something that'll do more to keep players invested, even though it messes with the logic of the course of the war.

That's one of the reasons I can see BioWare's authors doing something like that, regardless of whether it makes sense if you consider the war abstractly. It's also a common trope in Star Wars EU writing and science fiction generally, combined with another, similar one: the superweapon, a technological terror that turns the tide of a war. Never mind that it cheapens storytelling. It's a quick and dirty way to raise the stakes of any garden-variety fight. And, to be honest, when you're writing a video game, it's hard to do something like Timothy Zahn did when he wrote the Thrawn trilogy, and create an realistic military scenario for the revival of a weakened galactic power based more on good tactics, strategy, and leadership than on the possession of a few dandy weapons. All that scene-setting and preparation and so on takes time and can be pretty boring if you're actually playing it.

I agree that, regardless of how marginal any given advantage is, it is still an advantage. I mean, we're playing an RPG here; marginal advantages are the name of a game when you're talking about gear. Given the choice, any Knight or Warrior would take an Advanced Might Augment 28 over an Advanced Might Augment 27. And sure, all else being equal, the person with the better tech would win. The problem is that all else is never equal. We're not dealing with a fight between two evenly matched opponents in which one marginal technology might give one of them an edge; we're dealing with a fight between one power that's taken it on the chin lately and is retreating on all fronts, badly outnumbered, and another that's had an impressive string of victories and has the main economic and industrial motor of the galaxy fueling its war effort.