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[corporal doody]

Doing a run through the first two games before starting DA:I....Is Amaranthine worth saving? it constantly reminds me of a festering pool of filth ready to bubble over with a few good people caught in the midst.

 

is it better to let it burn and let all the vileness turn to ash to let the place be rebuilt?  or less loss with the loss of the Keep (which was already in disrepair)?

[KCMeredith]

There are innocent people in that city, getting attacked by darkspawn. You're a grey warden, its your duty to go in there and get as many people out as possible.

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

is it better to let it burn and let all the vileness turn to ash to let the place be rebuilt?  or less loss with the loss of the Keep (which was already in disrepair)?

You seem to assume one needs to be lost. If you do all the quests to rebuild your fortress so that it's no longer in disrepair, you can save Amaranthine knowing that you've already saved your castle.

 

As for the city's vileness, that's not all there is to it. The city still has innocent people in it. Furthermore, the Codex says that Amaranthine's one of the richest cities in Ferelden. (The richest, if I remember the Codex rightly.) If there's nothing in it worth saving, Ferelden is screwed.

[Merle McClure II]

Although this is one of the "Take a Third Option" choices that I actually like (Conner just feels "cheap" for example and I can't bring myself to save both him and his mother.), if you are going to make the choice in your play through something to consider is that as a Grey Warden your job is to sacrifice a few to save the many and as sad as it may be to burn the city to the ground you are killing a lot of Darkspawn and having a stronghold to retake and rebuild is always a good thing. 

[Aimi]

To add to that, the Grey Wardens have been collecting grain taxes from these citizens since the Wardens replaced the Arl of Amaranthine. Some of your "govern the Keep" subquests involve dealing with peasants struggling with tax collecting, food shortages, and military recruitment. The food riot even makes it clear you have large stores of grain, and it wasn't collected from the Grey Wardens bending over the dirt growing their own wheat.
 
These people aren't too vile to collect taxes from to get you rich and well-fed during peacetime, but suddenly they're not worth saving when it's time for you to actually do what they pay you to do and protect them from darkspawn during wartime?

Fully agreed on all points. Quality post.

I thought it was faintly ridiculous that the game allowed the Keep to survive if you saved it but not Amaranthine, actually; the food source gets curtailed, taxes dry up, access to commerce is restricted, and all of these things have little prospect of being changed anytime soon because nobody trusts the Wardens. All of these things were, to be fair, acknowledged in the epilogue, but they did not prevent the reestablishment of the city and Keep. (One wonders who paid for all of that, and why it happened.)

As usual, BioWare military writing passes over practical issues and instead frames things in terms of making the "tough" (i.e. "usually shortsighted and stupid") choices. From Ludendorff to Loghain...

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

What vileness? From what I saw, there was nothing especially corrupt about Amaranthine. It's just another city in Ferelden, no better or worse than most of the others we've visited (like Redcliffe and Denerim). Sure, there's some criminal activity and corruption, but where is there not? Where did this accusation of it being too vile to save come from?

There are blood mages in the city, at least before you do the quest to murder them all in their faces. I don't know that being a blood mage automatically makes you a bad person, but I get the distinct feeling I'm in the minority as far as that goes. And at least one of the mages-on-steroids pretty clearly has mental issues. And one of the gifts for Nathaniel is a vase that seems to have been stolen from your castle. Then there's the smugglers who are somehow able to make money moving stuff that is legally permissible and not in any way stolen, judging by the fact that the cops want to distribute it to the needy. (Maybe one of you can explain this; I sure can't.) If you're wondering why this ordinary vileness is enough to burn the city down, I guess that means I'm not alone.

[Kimarous]

There are blood mages in the city, at least before you do the quest to murder them all in their faces. I don't know that being a blood mage automatically makes you a bad person, but I get the distinct feeling I'm in the minority as far as that goes. And at least one of the mages-on-steroids pretty clearly has mental issues. And one of the gifts for Nathaniel is a vase that seems to have been stolen from your castle. Then there's the smugglers who are somehow able to make money moving stuff that is legally permissible and not in any way stolen, judging by the fact that the cops want to distribute it to the needy. If you're wondering why this ordinary vileness is enough to burn the city down, I guess that means I'm not alone.

 

Denerim had blood mages, crime syndicates, foreign assassins, slave trading, abusive nobles, various flavours of abominations... well, they're clearly screwed up. Better let the darkspawn overrun it after all. Oh, and Redcliffe should burn as well since it harboured apostates, one a blood mage and the other an abomination. Oops, and Honnleath harboured an apostate too... sure, he's dead, but there's a demon in his basement. Better put them to the sword. *gasp* And Orzammar has corrupt nobles, crime syndicates, and I found a Pride Demon in a nearby thaig! They're scum as well; better greenlight the darkspawn invasion!

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

Denerim had blood mages, crime syndicates, foreign assassins, slave trading, abusive nobles, various flavours of abominations... well, they're clearly screwed up. Better let the darkspawn overrun it after all. Oh, and Redcliffe should burn as well since it harboured apostates, one a blood mage and the other an abomination. Oops, and Honnleath harboured an apostate too... sure, he's dead, but there's a demon in his basement. Better put them to the sword. *gasp* And Orzammar has corrupt nobles, crime syndicates, and I found a Pride Demon in a nearby thaig! They're scum as well; better greenlight the darkspawn invasion!

See also: "If you're wondering why this ordinary vileness is enough to burn the city down, I guess that means I'm not alone."

[Merle McClure II]

I happen to agree that the "vileness" of the city isn't any worse then anywhere else we are shown and is a good deal better then some locales, but something to consider about the "They paid their taxes, protect them!" argument is that without PC being stamped on the Warden-Commander's head charging into a city that should already be lost instead of retreating to the Stronghold and saving the supplies that will be needed to rebuild should probably have ended with everyone's death.

 

Not to mention the possibility of saving as many refugees as possible and the saving the fort doesn't have to be nearly as heartless as it is portrayed. 

[Kimarous]

See also: "If you're wondering why this ordinary vileness is enough to burn the city down, I guess that means I'm not alone."

 

I know. I simply meant to extrapolate on the notion and got too invested to add the clarification.

[Aimi]

How do you mean? I don't know much about military tactics or history, so I can't comment on this. I do agree about the contrived "tough" choices that BioWare keeps touting, which are actually short-sighted and would realistically cause more problems in the long run than they solve.

The approach to the military and to warfare is kind of slapdash.

Sometimes, fairly serious things are ignored. Military supply is probably the most egregious; the Kingdom of Ferelden and the Inquisition appear to be able to sustain large armies off of...I dunno, lembas bread or something. Council and Alliance forces in Mass Effect aren't much better. To the extent that support services are discussed, it's confined to cash instead of the much more important consideration of food. Ignoring supply creates bizarre situations, such as Loghain's apparent belief that he can keep an army in the field, maneuvering for tactical opportunity against the darkspawn horde, in the middle of a Blighted moonscape. (True, we needn't accept that he could do such a thing, but...well, talking about Loghain is its own separate pile of crap.) Orzammar apparently survives on food imports that are, to all intents and purposes, impossible to manage from a technical standpoint before the invention of refrigeration. And then there's the Vigil's Keep issue mentioned above.

Major spoilers for DA:I appear below.

Spoiler

In Inquisition, one of the main plot lines culminates in a decisive siege of the Grey Warden fortress of Adamant in western Orlais. The Wardens amass all the forces they have in southern Thedas - Orlais and Ferelden and, apparently, the Marches - and defend the fortress from an Inquisition besieging army. The Inquisition force is augmented by auxiliaries from local Orlesian aristocrats. It is, by all accounts, a major set-piece engagement.

Which happens. In the middle. Of a desert.

That's...kind of insane. I touched on this with Orzammar, but premodern armies couldn't carry much food around with them; they could move a certain amount of stock and swine, but those would require fodder as well. They couldn't ship it in from elsewhere, because anything not moved over water would go bad...and moving food over water was still expensive as all hell. (And also not an option available to the Inquisition in the Western Approach, let alone the Wardens.) Most food supply would come from the surrounding area, and when armies depleted local food supply (causing hardship and starvation among the inhabitants of the area) they had to move on to somewhere else where there was more food.

Armies that tried to cross deserts just didn't succeed. The most famous example is Alexander the Great, who supposedly tried to march an army across the great salt desert of southeastern Iran. His chroniclers were at pains to point out that the greater part of his army actually went over sea or through passes further north into more fertile country. Even the relatively small force that he kept with him hopped from village to village across Gedrosia. And it still suffered tremendous amounts of wastage - dead or deserted soldiers - before finally struggling back into more hospitable climes. Some modern commentators refer to it as Alexander's only military disaster. Disaster. Bringing a full-on army out into the middle of the desert to fight another full-on army even more ludicrous.

And this fight wasn't just a battle, where the two sides would draw up opposite each other, duke it out for several hours, and withdraw. No, this was an attack on a fortified position. Yeah. The Inquisition correctly opted for a direct assault on Adamant's walls, since it lacked the time for a blockade and formal siege. But that assault required siege engines, which reached the site...somehow. IIRC Cullen states that local Orlesian allies possess them, which is nice, except there's no way they're so local as to be within a couple of miles, and siege equipment is incredibly heavy and difficult to transport at the best of times. With no way to move the trebuchets and whatnot by water, and no wood to construct fresh ones in the vicinity of Adamant, they would have to be hauled from that friendly Orlesian territory. Across the desert.

You get the idea.

The same problem is on display in the Inquisition's choice of base. Haven, and later Skyhold, are terrible places to put the headquarters of a continent-spanning organization with major military forces and massive interest in trade. They're in the mountains, far from everybody and everything. How do you sustain an army up there? How do you keep in regular contact with everybody else? (The rookery at Skyhold is supposed to be a solution, but avian messengers have reliability issues, especially with places and people they aren't already familiar with.) How do you manage to stay tied into the trade web of southern Thedas?

Amusingly, this is actually lampshaded during the game itself, when Haven's resident blacksmith, Master Harritt, points out that no traders want to haul anything up into the mountains. He's explaining why the Herald needs to gather resources for crafting instead of just being able to buy them, but the same thing suffices to explain why the mere fact of the Inquisition's presence in Haven is silly.

Another problem is the issue of romantic/sexual relationships between soldiers and their direct superiors, which is deeply unprofessional at best and an actual violation of military law at worst. Mass Effect was worst about this, Knights of the Old Republic was bad about it if self-aware about how bad it was, and Dragon Age oscillates from "not a problem" (DA2) to "questionable" (DA:O) to "serious squick potential" (DA:I). I like romance arcs as much as the next girl, but yeesh, find some civilians that don't have the freaky potato version of Jessica Chobot's face.

Then there's fortress design. Historically, the advent of gunpowder siege artillery in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries heralded a tectonic shift in the way forts were designed and built. Cannons tore the tall vertical walls of many fortresses to pieces, and those walls rarely had the physical capacity to safely support their own defensive artillery pieces. Instead, fortresses were designed on the model of the "Italian trace": shorter, sloping walls, often comprised of packed earth, radiating out from a central area in a star shape, with bastions and ravelins jutting out from the wall bristling with their own cannons to help keep siege artillery at bay. In Thedas, the qunari already possess gunpowder artillery, and accounts of the Exalted Marches explicitly state that magical explosions are equivalent in power and force. Yet this has not resulted in any change to fortress design over hundreds of years of gunpowder use and thousands of years of magic use. From Ostagar to Ath Velanis to Skyhold, we still see tall, thin masonry walls in a box or circle shape.

Minor DA:I spoilers follow.

Spoiler

One of the things I loved about Inquisition is how this appeared to be changing. In the Exalted Plains, Gaspard and Celene loyalists have established major fortifications to serve as bases in contesting the region, often making use of the ruins of older fortresses into the bargain. These fortified places look much more like the sixteenth-century equivalents than did anything in previous games: extensive use of woodwork to shore up damage, sloping thick walls sturdy enough to take siege artillery, lots of abatis, and trenches.

There's no explanation for the change that makes any sense: the magic - and Qunari weapons - that ought to have caused the change have been around for a long time. I think it has more to do with the adoption of a 16th/17th century European aesthetic for much of the game (exhibit A: the Inquisitor's clothes; exhibit B: the Orlesian court in Halamshiral...), rather than a consideration of military history. But frankly I don't care that much about where it comes from so long as it's here.

Sometimes the errors are just weird. In Origins, Riordan refers to legions and divisions of Orlesian forces standing ready to assist against the Blight. But if the size of a "legion" and a "division" are the same in the real world as they are in Thedas, then the Orlesian military's expeditionary force consists of well in excess of half a million soldiers. That's a number that no field army in the history of the world could muster until 1812. There are three possibilities, none of which makes any sense. The words might mean something else than they do historically, in which case, why use them at all? Riordan might be an unreliable commentator, but unnecessarily giving the player bad information about that particular subject is just strange. Or it might be a number that is entirely serious, in which case it makes no military sense that Orlais could muster an army of that size, could put it all in one place, and could send it all to aid/occupy Ferelden.

Those unnecessary details are often best left out of the discussion. Extremely minor spoilers for Inquisition follow.

Spoiler

The Inquisition's first quartermaster, a Fereldan named Threnn, is an Ostagar veteran and Loghain loyalist that was seconded to the Inquisition to get her away from the rest of the Fereldan military. Surprisingly, being a Loghain loyalist made her unpopular in the post-Landsmeet world. Anyway, she claims that Loghain was the best field general in world history (whatever) and describes in detail the reasons behind his actions at Ostagar, claiming autopsy ("I was there"). According to Threnn, one of Cailan's cardinal errors was "overextending his position". Which is an actual military error: if you spread your troops out over too wide an area, they can't support each other effectively and can suffer something called "defeat in detail".

The problem is that it makes no sense to claim that Cailan overextended his position. He had few troops, yes, but they were the troops Loghain left to him; if Cailan had too few men to hold his ground, that was Loghain's error, not his. (Assuming Loghain acted in good faith, of course.) And it's not like the king's men and the Wardens were spread out all along a long perimeter: they were crammed together beneath the walls of Ostagar. It's true that, by the later battle cutscenes, the army was so spread out that soldiers were separated by ten feet or more with no unit cohesion, no flanks, and no rear, but I'd ascribe that to Hollywood battle scenes, discussed later; the darkspawn at that point are equally spread out.

And that's leaving out the question of how Threnn knew all this.

On one level, it's a fun referential joke, getting at all the people who go on about the coulda-shoulda-woulda what-ifs of military history in the real world (and, possibly, poking fun at the endless Ostagar arguments on this very forum). On another level, though...it would've been funnier if Threnn's thing had made any sense.

Wait, maybe that was the point. Sigh.

And then there are the famously unreliable battle cutscenes. In Mass Effect, they violated established lore on the way space battles actually worked, and then they violated lore about what was actually being depicted. In Dragon Age, they just make no military sense, with only relatively minor lore violations. Ostagar and Denerim are pure Hollywood.

There are climactic infantry charges where the attackers apparently run a really really really long way in full armor and then fight at the end of it. Infantry is in reasonably close formation up until the moment the fighting starts, at which point individual soldiers need telescopes to see each other. A single general delivers commands to the whole army by voice. There is no skirmishing, and no breaks in the general melee. Use of missile infantry is rare, and only appears to happen at the beginnings of battles. Then there are the lore violations: where is the combat magic? Mages are supposedly prized for their military role, yet we never see them participating in any general engagement.

---

None of this is a Bad Thing. There is a cost to having a story that makes military sense, and that is research. Research is not simple, easy, fast, or cheap; it is no cardinal sin to be poorly versed in a field of study that takes academics years to become conversant in. Other aspects are sometimes canned for other reasons: perhaps the research isn't costly (the devs know that Thing X isn't realistic) but implementing it is. Perhaps the vision for the game runs contrary to the realism angle. I know most BioWare fans expect companion romances and are let down, if not angry, at the prospect of non-companion romances; if Shepard had only non-companion romances, a lot of people would be pissed off, even if it was the only legal option for a Shepard in the military.

And I know I described it as an issue with "BioWare military writing", but the same problem applies to almost all depictions of the military in video games and movies. This isn't something that BioWare is unusually bad at, or anything.

It's just particularly noticeable in this case.

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

I know. I simply meant to extrapolate on the notion and got too invested to add the clarification.

I was half-sure of that. I just wanted to knock off the "half."

[dragonflight288]

@ Eirene, regarding your take on Ostagar with Cailan overextending himself. I'll put it in a spoiler tag, and this will be the only time I'll bring it up as it's off topic, and we can discuss it in a PM later if you so choose.

 

Spoiler

He actually did, and it's right there in the cutscene. "For Ferelden!" and leading a charge into the valley. His part in the plan was to stay put and let the darkspawn come to him in a bottleneck, but he charged out. If you look down from the bridge while crossing it, you'll see that he and the Ferelden army got themselves surrounded on three sides. 

 

And since the darkspawn tunnled and overwhelmed the Teyrn's men in the tower, Cailan and his men were essentially, thanks to that one charge, over extended and surrounded on all sides. He only had a token force, meant to draw the darkspawn. Him, his men and the Grey Wardens. Loghain had most of the army.

[Aimi]

Answered in PM. At best, it's a misuse of vocabulary, which still qualifies for the "military writing is not BioWare's strong suit" bit; like you, that's all I have to say about that.

---

One of the things that surprised me most about the Keep, when it first went up, was that the decision for saving the Vigil and/or Amaranthine was a binary choice for a long time: you could choose either the Vigil or Amaranthine, but not both. Since saving both was firstly sound military practice and secondly an obviously desirable outcome that was recognized in the game, I'd have thought it would have been implemented at the same time as the other two choices.

[Merle McClure II]

Faerunner, the only reason that charging into the city and allowing the keep to be lost (I'm not talking about the "take a third option" that is possible if the Keep is repaired at the moment.) isn't suicidal is because "PC" is stamped on the Warden-Commander's forehead in big red letters whether you want to admit it or not and the Grey Wardens' job is to rebuild the order and stabilize the region as a whole, not risk losing all of Fereldan had the attack really been another Blight as opposed to one of the Architect's epic failures. The Grey Warden's "job" as a whole isn't to protect the people, but to quell the Blights, which even in Alistair's rose-colored view of the order "includes some pretty extreme things", such as razing entire human settlements to stop the Darkspawn.

 

As for how much foodstuff is in the Keep's larders, probably not nearly enough for everyone but surely enough to feed your men and keep whatever refugees could be saved from starving until the hoard could be pushed back or outside help been rallied if the hoard had truly been the opening of another Blight.

 

---

 

Eirene, it's my understanding that the writers tend to be somewhat regretful of some of the "happy endings" that are in the game (Using the Circle to save Connor for instance.) so I'd blame the Keep not recognizing being able to save both at first on that. -- Although if I remember correctly, didn't Dragon Age II also have issues with importing both the city and the stronghold being saved? 

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

Faerunner, the only reason that charging into the city and allowing the keep to be lost (I'm not talking about the "take a third option" that is possible if the Keep is repaired at the moment.) isn't suicidal is because "PC" is stamped on the Warden-Commander's forehead in big red letters whether you want to admit it or not and the Grey Wardens' job is to rebuild the order and stabilize the region as a whole, not risk losing all of Fereldan had the attack really been another Blight as opposed to one of the Architect's epic failures. The Grey Warden's "job" as a whole isn't to protect the people, but to quell the Blights, which even in Alistair's rose-colored view of the order "includes some pretty extreme things", such as razing entire human settlements to stop the Darkspawn.

The problem is that you're also a lord. You should not be one, since being a lord and being a Warden are both really involved jobs that shouldn't leave time for the other. But you are. You could argue that your job as a Warden is to raze the city (if you ignored the fact that even a nuclear blast can't take out an entire city without survivors, and the Warden has nothing that seriously nasty,) but it's harder to argue that your job as a lord is to do so. Especially if you're a non-Orlesian, and thus have survived crap in the past that leaves you wondering if you don't have "PC" stamped on your forehead.

[Merle McClure II]

Actually I'm not quite sure that I'd agree that being Warden-Commander and Lord are mutually exclusive per-say, or even that falling back to your best defensible position in order to retake the land from the Darkspawn at a later date (while saving as many refugees as possible) as opposed to losing your army in the open wouldn't have been the proper course of action for a Lord to take as well. As much hate as Loghain gets for retreating at Ostager aside (the battle was already lost largely due to Callian's overconfidence and refusal to even consider reinforcements), the entire region would have been lost had the Keep fell in Awakening. I do agree that razing the city wouldn't have killed all of the Darkspawn in there, but it should have thinned their numbers considerably.

 

 

As for the Hero of Fereldan thinking that they are "a sexy shoeless god of war" and allowing their stronghold to fall by saving the city ... perhaps but I'd still argue that it was an emotional choice made in the heat of the moment and "should" have been portrayed as the wrong one given what the logical fallout would have been. -- For that matter, unless I missed seeing it (Which is very possible.), the arguments for saving the city are largely emotional in nature and ignore the reality that had Awakening really been the Sixth Blight as was feared then throwing your men away retaking an indefensible city would have been as big as a folly as Loghain's post Ostager antics.  

[corporal doody]

yup...King Theoden said, "hey, forget Helm's Deep. Let's sure up Rohan!"

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

yup...King Theoden said, "hey, forget Helm's Deep. Let's sure up Rohan!"

A better comparison as far as my games go (when I'm not abandoning Amaranthine, which I did with my Chaotic Evil Mage and my somewhat close-circled Dalish Huntress) would be if Theoden had spent twice the Gondorian Army's yearly upkeep rebuilding Helm's Deep's Walls, and had figured out and countered the weakness of that grate, and thus decided Helm's Deep didn't strictly need him. To continue the comparison, Theoden had already killed the crap out of Sauron more or less solo and was not much afraid of an army of orcs. If you are sure of Helm's Deep and think you can survive saving Rohan, saving Rohan is what you do.

 

Actually I'm not quite sure that I'd agree that being Warden-Commander and Lord are mutually exclusive per-say, or even that falling back to your best defensible position in order to retake the land from the Darkspawn at a later date (while saving as many refugees as possible) as opposed to losing your army in the open wouldn't have been the proper course of action for a Lord to take as well. As much hate as Loghain gets for retreating at Ostager aside (the battle was already lost largely due to Callian's overconfidence and refusal to even consider reinforcements), the entire region would have been lost had the Keep fell in Awakening. I do agree that razing the city wouldn't have killed all of the Darkspawn in there, but it should have thinned their numbers considerably.

 

 

As for the Hero of Fereldan thinking that they are "a sexy shoeless god of war" and allowing their stronghold to fall by saving the city ... perhaps but I'd still argue that it was an emotional choice made in the heat of the moment and "should" have been portrayed as the wrong one given what the logical fallout would have been. -- For that matter, unless I missed seeing it (Which is very possible.), the arguments for saving the city are largely emotional in nature and ignore the reality that had Awakening really been the Sixth Blight as was feared then throwing your men away retaking an indefensible city would have been as big as a folly as Loghain's post Ostager antics.  

Most of this is fair, but I have two objections. One: you don't take your army to Amaranthine. It's made clear you are going alone, because if anyone can survive that it's you and there's no time to ready anything larger than your small group of Wardens. And if you've survived the events of Origins, there's something to that idea even in-game. Two: As I've previously noted, the dichotomy where you save one or the other is not strictly coded into the game.

[Merle McClure II]

I've never been able to stomach reading the entire Lords of the Ring Series so I'm not sure if you are agreeing or refuting my argument, would you care to elaborate?

[Merle McClure II]

Sorry about the double post, but for some reason the "edit post" function isn't working for me today.

 

 

 

... Riverdales, I think you are referencing the "take the third option" and saving both the keep and the city, and in that case I'm not entirely sure that we disagree but it is my understanding that the premise of the discussion is if you had to choose which one you were going to save.

[Riverdaleswhiteflash]

... Riverdales, I think you are referencing the "take the third option" and saving both the keep and the city, and in that case I'm not entirely sure that we disagree but it is my understanding that the premise of the discussion is if you had to choose which one you were going to save.

Corporal Doody (whose original post is the premise of this discussion) has said nothing to convince me that he's aware that you don't have to choose, and at any rate his arguments seem to be centered less on the benefits of the Keep's survival than on the benefits of Amaranthine's destruction.

 

As for his LoTR reference, Helm's Deep was the castle of the King of Rohan, which King Theoden emptied his capital into because he knew he couldn't hold it. It's not really the best comparison, since Amaranthine had better walls than Rohan (if the movies are anything to go by) and since he was able to defend trains going from Rohan to Helm's Deep which carried the civilians to safety. Since Theoden had already seen that the civilians were more or less safe, he had no reason to hold the City of Rohan. By the same token, since my Warden has (if I understand correctly) spent twice the yearly upkeep of the Orlesian army building a superfortress and closed an Ender's Game style loophole in its walls of the sort that nearly doomed Helm's Deep, there's no reason not to trust it to hold. And since my Wardens have already survived odds that are supposed to be literally impossible, it's not too irrational for them to try their luck in Amaranthine.