Strategists; should the Yuuzhan Vong have stretched themselves sooner?

Well, I don't think its that simple.

The galaxy is big, Just because information passes to you dosen't always mean you are in position to take advantage of it. Tacticaly, Politicaly, Physically. They attacked when it was the most advantageus for them to in a time and place of their choosing.

what more can you say than that?

 

In my opinion, there were only three faults that led to the downfall of the Yuuzhan Vong and even with those; they were still going to win had it not been for what happened in the finale. The first major problem that was out of their hands was the firing of Centerpoint Station; that seriously depleted their fleet. I mean they had done quite well and managed to trick the New Republic into defending the wrong target and did damage to the Fondor shipyards. It was only the firing of Centerpoint did the Republic get saved in a sense.

The other two mistakes are more on the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong really. The first of this bunch is the huge losses sustained at Coruscant... sure, they took the capital but as Shimrra said; they just lost too many resources in that endeavour. Had that not happened, they would have had quite a few forces to spare to further their advances. The second mistake is of course Ebaq.... quite frankly, they shouldnt have listened to Nom Anor and instead focused on Corellia. I mean it was an important shipyard and defeneded world and if they had infiltrators - they could have easily taken it out and dealt a heavy blow to the Republic. Instead, Nom Anor was desperate to prove himself and got his spies fooled easily. Thats what I would have done if I was in-universe should I say...

Otherwise, I think their strategies were quite good. They managed to interdict a lot of the hyperlanes and space travel, turned the Republic against itself and secured quite a lot of ground. Not only that, they did neutralize a lot of threats such as making the Imperials not take an active part in the greater portions of the war and lets not forget them purging the surface of N'zoth. The Battle of Mon Calamari would have been their victory even had Zonama Sekot not intervened. They even got wise on the use of Alpha Red so not sure if that would have been worked.

 

While it isn't followed much upon after the initial chapters of Vector Point, the implication appears to have been that the Praetorite Vong was very successful in their mission - the lack of major response on the NR is pinned a lot on the "Core vs. Rim" mentality, but the New Republic had a lot of internal strife. A Practical Man followed up on this by showing some of the other manipulations. While Nom Anor was busy in the post-DE era sabotaging the last gasps of the original Empire, their galactic manipulations probably had not matured at that time to cause enough chaos.
The warlord days was also a time of high warship production. Despite the new Bothan Assault Cruisers, Viscounts and Mediators, I would presume that the NR would have been scaling back on their military significantly after the NR-Imperial peace treaty.

 

There's no saying if the Vong could even have changed their invasion corridor. Just how many more years would it have taken for the Vong to reach a different vector. Who can tell what would've happened if they had to wait any longer. Now I'm not sure but weren't their Worldships on their last legs when they invaded?

 

Yeah they were, they really couldnt delay the invasion any longer since a number of the worldships were dying. Its said that the vibrant algae colonies that produced light were not as bright as they used to be. One of the worldships was so bad that it could not reach hyperspace (darkspace) travel and was drifting slowly in the extragalactic void to the galaxy. It was why the Shipwomb on Serpindal was so important; to not only produce warships but also replacement worldships. My suspicion that quite a few Yuuzhan Vong died in the void before they could reach the galaxy which was another major loss for them.

 

Which is why shipwombs make a really good target for bombing! Never did get why bombing an enemy shipyard was so heinous an act - you're at war, it helps the enemy, so yeah, bomb it.

 

Say the Vong attacked after say the Fall of Coruscant in the NR-Empire war than they could have use the split to their massive advantage. Or anytime before teh Jedi Temple was to say recreated. They could have been on a spree for a while.

 

*puts on Fleet Junkie hat*

*pauses, removes it, blows off dust*

My interpretation is that the Yuuzhan Vong should NOT have tried to wage a Blitzkrieg against the galaxy as a whole. The whole lightning war concept served them well at the beginning but they simply exhausted themselves against the superior numbers of the GFFA. There simply weren't enough Yuuzhan Vong or military assets to deal with the staggering endless resources of over a million inhabited worlds (or however many exist now thanks to the Atlas. I'm rather unclear.)

A better strategy would have been to come in through Wild Space and conquer that region or crush the Hand of Thrawn before attempting to engage the galaxy as a whole. You run the risk of alterting the rest of the galaxy to your presence but the Vong had no resources to draw from. A bit like Imperial Japan, they were essentially doomed fron the beginning to run out of steam. Had they been able to set up a substantial forward position to evacuate their civilians, breed more warrior caste, use civilian slave labor, and repair its exhausted/ancient fleet then they honestly might have been able to wage a more successful war.

 

Well Jaina was upset about that for a couple of reasons; 1) Kyp used her reputation to get an ok for this operation 2) he lied by saying they were making a superweapon when it wasnt; worldships are simply mobile cities and not necessarily weapons of doom so it was basically claiming there were weapons of mass destruction when there werent any 3) they didnt really destroy the shipwomb, it was just the developing worldship. That was why she was upset, I don't think everyone was upet about the attack.... well except for the Yuuzhan Vong who died in the cold void outside the galaxy.

Really if Tsavong didnt lose so many troops at Coruscant and lose those fleets at Ebaq, I think they would have been in a stronger position. Shimrra immediately ordered a breeding program for more warriors after Coruscant and instead they decided to dig in and once more back use of their covert operations to weaken the galaxy such as what they did to the Koornatch Cluster and Ssi-ruuvi space. Even at Mon Cal it was heavily hinted that had Zonama Sekot not intervened; Choka would have won against the defending forces. It was act of plot that the Galactic Alliance won really.

 

Naw, they should have won anyways, the rest of the galaxy was pretty much saved by deus ex machina

Yun-Yuuzhan, Do'ro-ik Vong Pratte

 

They destroyed the shipwomb I believe.

 

Did they actually destroy the Shipwomb? Its been a while but my understanding was that they destroyed the developing worldship. Not the Shipwomb itself (which pretty much seems to be the entire planet almost). They were using a web of dovin basals to relay star matter from the sun as nourishment for the developing worldship that was said to be as large as the second Death Star I think. Been a while since I read the book though.

 

I was under the impression they wrecked everything.

 

Well, they only got that far thanks to Dues Ex Machina anyway. There is no way they should have been able to defeat the numerous and veteran Republic soldiers, not without some serious stupidity on the part of the Republic government.

I agree with C19. No matter how spectacular their successes, they were too heavily outnumbered to win, at least in the long run.

 

Which is why they did the whole infiltration and sabotage thing as well as long running intelligence operations. Ultimately, once they got their foothold, they were doing very well. They essentially pioneered the tactic of turning the Republic against itself long before the True Sith did. (well actually that might not be true, I think the Yevetha did something similar since they made the Senate lose confidence in Leia)

 

I think fans rebelled because.

1. It was a dumb plot point.
2. There was no way of knowing that.
3. Kyp Durron had no reason to act that way.

 

I'm not sure we're ever going to get to the bottom of this due to the lines being muddied by the EU itself:

EOV2: Sernpidal was building a new worldship - with worldships being amongst the ultimate in dual-use tech, could be used for war or peace. The Vong were apparently planning to use it to transfer a population on a dying worldship and banked on it being available, they didn't bring in ships from the war effort to evacuate them or move them to another planet. Nor would Kyp or the NR be in any position to know this!

SBS: Establishes a direct causal link between the worldship under construction at Sernpidal and the Vong deaths on another ship, effectively saying Kyp did know what would happen. Would the ship have even been complete on time to get to the dying worldship? We don't know, but if that had happened what would the Vong have done with their new worldship? It's unlikely they'd have used to help their civilians.

For me it was a sequence that basically said that for all NJO's talk of doing a realistic war it woussed out big time. So what if a load of Vong die due to blowing up the shipyard? That was the point. Civilians are not to be targeted? In total war, all bets are off and the Vong were waging total war.

Too nasty? It has the heroes being too dirty? Too vicious? Thought you wanted a real war? Because that is what that logically entails and it isn't anywhere near entertaining! It's all very well to talk of moral principles, but they don't matter much if no one is alive to care about and uphold them. NJO would have us believe you can fight a restrained war against an enemy waging total war and win, it just isn't so, war is the ultimate case of fighting fire with fire, preferably with far more than your enemy has if possible.

 

I always thought the deeper point is that Kyp outright fabricated evidence because he couldn't be bothered to convince people that he was right.
From a military perspective, he also wasted the NR's time - maybe he should've spent more effort looking for one of their military shipyards. If the NR's forces had been decimated and the true nature of the target had been then revealed, how would've that looked?
In the long run, that may have played a role in the major push on Coruscant - desperation over the failure to build new worldships.

 

Interesting notion, but you'd agree that part of an effective war effort is one that deprives your enemy of the material resources needed to drive their war machine? Certainly that was what the Vong were initially establishing - the shipwomb on Sernpidal, the coralskipper nurseries on Belkaden.

The problem is the failure to build new worldships when the Vong were already actively terraforming worlds to their needs, which has to include population transfer from the dying worldships, doesn't logically translate to a need to take Couruscant, which will take much resources both to take and to transform.

 

Wasn't the Vong drive to take Coruscant more out of a religious fanaticism? Since they tried to remake Coruscant into their ancestral homeword, although there's something to be said for taking out the enemy capital, but it also came at a high cost. Although even by the end, after the Vong pulled back a bit, they still had a huge fleet and were on the verge of winning (if I remember TUF correctly). Any Republic victories (not that there were many) might've egged them on... but they were obsessed with remaking Coruscant into Yuuzhan'tar anyway. Though they could've used any random planet they found, but it was probably part of their whole plan to subjugate/convert the galaxy, which included taking the galactic capital.

I think the problem with that particular battle was Kyp lying and using Jaina to get them there. Although I didn't really see a problem with them blowing up a mostly empty ship, but then the heroes were supposed to be righteously indignant over something at all times during the war or something like that. At this point, the Jedi were still debating whether killing things you couldn't feel in the Force was darkside behavior or not, right? Especially since I thought most of the other soldiers were cheering at that point, but still, Kyp lying wasn't that great either. But that was just part of how they had remodeled Kyp's personality when the NJO started, and how Luke was basically holding back from doing anything significant.

If we were talking logic, destroying that worldship/shipyard would force the Vong to divert resources to save their people... but the Vong are fanatical enough to not bother, but at the same time that would place the blame on the Vong... except since the NJO onwards, everything seems to be the fault of the Jedi somehow or other.

 

Problem is lies get told frequently in war, Kyp's was to make the target bigger, a superweapon, but given the worldship was at least SSD-size, does that not stil qualify as a superweapon?

What I didn't get was Jaina's about-turn and insistence on doing everything in perfectly moral fashion because prior to this, in DT, she wants to fight the Vong so much she gets her mum to bully Gavin into taking her into Rogue Squadron and, in BP, is forever laying into Jacen for being a wousse and not fighting, and then, after she's hurt the Vong badly in EOV2, she's upset because she did? It just doesn't square, but then Jaina was all over the place in NJO.

 

The taking of Coruscant was a symbol; 1) it was an abomination of the highest order for them since it was a city wide planet and 2) to establish their claim as the new galactic power in the galaxy.