Indrik said: Battle fatigue is not a valid excuse when someone is waging a genocidal war against you. Even if they decided to stop tomorrow, there is no guarantee they wouldn't change their mind again the day after. No human polity would allow themselves to live under such an unpredictable threat, especially knowing what they have already done. And frankly, while I don't deny the chance of some sort of Stockholm syndrome, you seem to underestimate exactly how insular humans can be when faced with an external threat. Further, I don't see how your space elves are deserving of pity. They did not even attempt to communicate before launching a war to exterminate humanity, their preconceptions be damned. If someone is trying to kill you for no apparent reason and will not stop, you try to kill them first then look for an explanation. That's basic human psychology. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

As to your second point, if you describe something as a Deathstar, there is a certain associated image. If you simply meant a planet buster or some such, you really should have been more precise with your wording. In addition, there have to be practical limits to magic. Magic is not hax-level reality warping or there is little point to even facing it. Both magic and science have to have advantages. And you rather seem to be boosting magic so that humans are forced to wage a war of attrition, accepting massive casualties to defeat individual magic capital vessels. My understanding of the earlier discussion was that even the most powerful magical vessels are dependent upon their creators, and fail when they do. Magic can create singularly powerful artifacts, but they are linked to the magic and will of their creators. Immortal space elves rather ruins the point of that weakness, and essentially results in a huge number of capital ships simply through incremental buildup across millennia. That largely defeats the purpose of mass-production ability among humanity. If the space wizards have a few, maybe a dozen or two, such vessels as those are the number of grandmasters or super-wizards, whatever, alive that humans must defeat through force of numbers, then fine. But that isn't what you describe and seems to rather artificially inflate magic's forces. Recall that magic and science are OCP to each other, they should have different and unique paradigms for most everything without either side being unduly wanked. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Also, the ad hominem implication that I desire a human curbstomp is completely uncalled for. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

The fact that pro-Nazi Jews exist shoots your argument in the head. Humans can and will put up with things that want to kill them, even things that have tried to actively wipe them out in the past. I also think you underestimate just how much war exhaustion is an impetus towards finding some other way to settle things beyond 'making the rubble bounce'. It is not, IMO, unreasonable to suggest that they would take an option that allowed them to avoid millions or billions (number depends on the scale you're working on- I guess it could even be trillions if you were being entirely ludicrous) more military casualties, after a decade plus of total war. That's the clincher; it's not just exhaustion, it's the fact that theythey'd have to suffer many more casualties that, now, they don't have to if they negotiate.I'm thinking of ships that operate more like traditional magic artefacts, in that they don't stop working when the creator does. Remember also that there are only a few super-ships; your point that, given enough time, incremental production would offset mass production is valid, but easily countered. Simply don't give them enough time, historically speaking, to have constructed that stockpile, and ensure that people capable of building such ships are sufficiently rare as to effectively make them irreplaceable. They aren't the equivalent of +6 magic swords or whatever, which are rare and expensive but still available. They're the equivalent of one of a kind artefacts forged when the world was young.I totally agree that both sides should have different paradigms without being wanked, but thatmeans they need to be a pretty close match in terms of actual capability, otherwise it just turns into a stomp for one side or the other. If humans have morebetter ships, then they have an effortless walkover. The only contrast is that space magic is crap and tech isn't. If humans have more ships and space elves have better ships, then there's actually a difference that doesn't completely cripple one side.You're implying that making the magic side of the equation competitive with the humans over the short term is unreasonable. That suggests to me that you're after a 'humans walk all over alien face' story. If that's not true, then I apologise. The fact remains, however, that if two roughly equal powers get into a knock down, drag out fight, it's probably going to turn into an attritional war on at least the strategic level if they're both equally competent. Humans have mas production, and therefore numbers, so if you want the space elves to be able to put up any fight at all, you need to either give them generally better ships (which I feel sacrifices some of the 'magic is individual to each shipwright' thing) or a spread of power which has some ships much worse, some roughly the same, and some much better. If the space elveshave more capable ships in some way, then it just turns into a curbstomp. It's all very well saying that magic has its own advantages, but if those advantages aren't applicable or don't help in the situation the plot puts them in, then they aren'tadvantages.