Earth vs the Orcish Horde

[Thage]

Mages and warlocks are capable of spells that either form shields around their person or give them fortitude enough to shrug off a bullet. The Earth knows that using nuclear weapons is more damaging for the planet and isn't worth the cost. So nuking the Horde isn't an option unless we want nuclear winter. Also, I think you underestimate just how much damage one orc can take before falling down.

Let's extrapolate from existing data, shall we?

Point one: Warlocks can form shields or enhance their fortitude with magic.
Counterpoint: This is true. However, these spells are limited in what they're capable of absorbing, it's not like a paladin's Divine Shield where all incoming blows are completely averted, or like even a priest's Shield spells where all damage is taken until the shield's magic is exhausted. It just makes them a bit sturdier. This is not enough to counter 4,000 rounds per minute from one 30mm minigun, to say nothing else of humanity's numerous other forms of heavy ordinance--the 30mm barely qualifies as medium ordinance.

Point two: Earth wouldn't nuke Draenor.
Counterpoint: Why the fuck not? The Dark Portal can be collapsed and destroyed from our end. Failing that, we can do what was done in Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, send a few heavily-armed battalions and air/artillery support, and close it from their side. Suicide missions are not unknown concepts to the military if the need is great enough. If the Dark Portal can be destroyed, there is literally nothing stopping Earth's militaries from running a missile train on Draenor culminating in a thermonuclear bukakke the likes of which would make Argus look like small potatoes, because with no Dark Portal there is no risk of fallout seeping through the portal into Earth.

Point three: Orcs are hardy.
Counterpoint: They are, but they're not 4,000 armor-piercing bullets per minute hardy, never mind sustained artillery fire, thermobaric explosives set off in their midst, or sustained drone strikes and ICBM launches. Explosives have been repeatedly shown to be quite effective against orcs in Warcraft alone, and the ordinance modern humanity is capable of makes the biggest Iron Star look like a kid's sparkler. They're definitely not hardy enough to survive charging a firing line that consists of dozens if not hundreds of rifles and mounted miniguns cracking off hundreds if not thousands of rounds in the span of a second, so the orcish infantry can close in to be of any threat.

edit: Again, if orcs in Warcraft lore can't shrug off bullets from Azerothian firearms, and warlocks can't make themselves immune to the same, there is no situation where the Horde has any hope of winning in an invasion against modern-day Earth, even if we give them the full breadth of the Old Horde's magical capabilities (which were warlocks, full stop, as orcs had no mages and the elements had cut them off) and even if we're super duper generous and give them Iron Horde technology. A modern machine gun can cut a man in half after a few seconds of sustained fire. Fucking hell, a .50 rifle leaves an exit wound the size of a basketball. Orcs are tough but they're not the Hulk, bullets don't bounce off them and even if Azeroth's chump bitch guns couldn't pierce them, modern military hardware is more than capable of doing the job.

[TheRevenantHero]

Let's extrapolate from existing data, shall we?

Point one: Warlocks can form shields or enhance their fortitude with magic.
Counterpoint: This is true. However, these spells are limited in what they're capable of absorbing, it's not like a paladin's Divine Shield where all incoming blows are completely averted, or like even a priest's Shield spells where all damage is taken until the shield's magic is exhausted. It just makes them a bit sturdier. This is not enough to counter 4,000 rounds per minute from one 30mm minigun, to say nothing else of humanity's numerous other forms of heavy ordinance--the 30mm barely qualifies as medium ordinance.

Point two: Earth wouldn't nuke Draenor.
Counterpoint: Why the fuck not? The Dark Portal can be collapsed and destroyed from our end. Failing that, we can do what was done in Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, send a few heavily-armed battalions and air/artillery support, and close it from their side. Suicide missions are not unknown concepts to the military if the need is great enough. If the Dark Portal can be destroyed, there is literally nothing stopping Earth's militaries from running a missile train on Draenor culminating in a thermonuclear bukakke the likes of which would make Argus look like small potatoes, because with no Dark Portal there is no risk of fallout seeping through the portal into Earth.

Point three: Orcs are hardy.
Counterpoint: They are, but they're not 4,000 armor-piercing bullets per minute hardy, never mind sustained artillery fire, thermobaric explosives set off in their midst, or sustained drone strikes and ICBM launches. Explosives have been repeatedly shown to be quite effective against orcs in Warcraft alone, and the ordinance modern humanity is capable of makes the biggest Iron Star look like a kid's sparkler. They're definitely not hardy enough to survive charging a firing line that consists of dozens if not hundreds of rifles and mounted miniguns cracking off hundreds if not thousands of rounds in the span of a second, so the orcish infantry can close in to be of any threat.

edit: Again, if orcs in Warcraft lore can't shrug off bullets from Azerothian firearms, and warlocks can't make themselves immune to the same, there is no situation where the Horde has any hope of winning in an invasion against modern-day Earth, even if we give them the full breadth of the Old Horde's magical capabilities (which were warlocks, full stop, as orcs had no mages and the elements had cut them off) and even if we're super duper generous and give them Iron Horde technology. A modern machine gun can cut a man in half after a few seconds of sustained fire. Fucking hell, a .50 rifle leaves an exit wound the size of a basketball. Orcs are tough but they're not the Hulk, bullets don't bounce off them and even if Azeroth's chump bitch guns couldn't pierce them, modern military hardware is more than capable of doing the job.

I didn't say anything about nuking Draenor. I was saying we won't nuke the Horde when they're on Earth. Also, orcs aren't utterly stupid. They have knowledge of tactics and the like. They would send an advance force and once seeing the weaponry, I could absolutely see warlocks instead sending a metric fuckton of demons. Because unlike the orcs, they can continuously be summoned.

[WaltherLeopold]

The more I read this thread and think about it, it's way more likely to ask "how would the Orcish Horde (or legion w/e)" try to deal with OUR invasion into their worlds, because once we established contact and realized they are nothing more than savages with swords, we'd annihilate their entire civilizations for some human lebensraum into draenor.

[Thage]

I didn't say anything about nuking Draenor. I was saying we won't nuke the Horde when they're on Earth. Also, orcs aren't utterly stupid. They have knowledge of tactics and the like. They would send an advance force and once seeing the weaponry, I could absolutely see warlocks instead sending a metric fuckton of demons. Because unlike the orcs, they can continuously be summoned.

And then Earth sends their troops into Draenor and scorches the place. Also, warlocks' mana is finite. Eventually those demon assaults are going to taper off, and, see sentence one. The US and Russia alone have far more than enough ordinance to turn Draenor into the universe's biggest, roundest parking lot, never mind if they make friendly contact and the draenei help them set up ambushes and raid the orcs' supply lines. Additionally, it's much easier for Earth's forces to constantly resupply and funnel fresh troops through the Dark Portal than it is for the Horde, especially if Earth's advance is heralded with a dozen thermobaric explosions sent through the Dark Portal first

You're free to keep cheerleading the Horde here, but every logistical edge goes to Earth. It's not like Gul'dan was some tactical genius, and Orgrim's tactical brilliance capped out at 'throw more orcs at the thing.' The reason the Warlords got shitstomped so hard by Azeroth is because the Warlords are not master tacticians. They rushed in, the advance force got annihilated, and from there it was one humiliating loss after another as Azeroth kept sending fresh troops in through the portal and the Iron Horde made one massive blunder after another. There is no reasonable expectation that this would be different with most of the Warlords hyped up on fel magic and Gul'dan calling the shots, considering how rapidly most of Gul'dan's plans go awry as soon as people start pushing back.

[Whitedragon]

Agreed that our tech is very advanced but we're not considering what exactly these Orcs are capable of. Even without the aid of magic they are already supernaturally powerful compared to us, but add the fact that they drank demonic blood and became even more powerful and I think that many of our smaller caliber firearms would be useless against their forces. Engaging in CQB would in most cases be suicide, so that leaves infantry with large caliber firearms and explosives.

Our best bet is artillery and aerial superiority, but what about magic? Some people think the Orcs didn't have access to powerful magic but the Warlocks of the Shadow Council would disagree. Fel magic has many uses, and so do demons.

And keep in mind, the Orcs invading is to set the stage for the Burning Legion to take over anyhow. The war with the Horde is effectively a proxy war with Sargeras.

In the warcrafts universe, only the very largest civilizations recorded where able to reach the hundred of thousands mark. As far as I know the 3 races that managed to get into the 6 digits populations where the Trolls (during the troll empire), Nightelves (pre WoA), and Humans. Orcs on the other hand most likely had a population somewhere between 6000-20000. Earth on the other hand has over 7.5 BILLION people living on it now. even if we doubled the orc population to 40k and took the assumption that every single one of them went into battle, every single orc would need to kill over 187,500 humans per one of their own dieing (Or basically every single orc needs to kill the human population of Azeroth...), at numbers like that I think we could charge into battle nood with nothing but sharpend sticks and still win with over 90% of our population alive...

[Saltysquidoon]

EDIT; Just so I'm clear I'm talking about the proper legion here, not silly orc shenanigans. The horde gets ruined 100% of the time without question.

They Destroy it after getting the souls they need from it yea, but when it costs so many soldiers and resources to just get a few and distract from their main goal it is not worth it.

Souls are not Infinite and their fel magic requires constant fuel.

?
It's canon demons infinitely respawn in the nether even with argus destroyed it's just perceptibly slower (which I'll reiterate humanity can't get to argus), there's nothing to suggest killing the entire legion a million times would even slow them down in the lore.

Further making your planet a 'bitter pill' is not even close to a defence, as was proven when unable to stop the aldrachi after extended fighting Papa S rolled into town killed their leader and had the world rosted the world from orbit.

It requires someone opening the portal inside our cities to begin with, I don't see how they would be able to infiltrate earth outside of the direct vicinity of wherever the dark portal happend to be at.

Like yeah, would they be a threat and a nuisance that required resources to deal with? Yeah, of course but beyond that, terrorist cells in our real world are much more sophisticated than whatever the Legion is capable of mustering.

We could probably stop a single portal legion invasion if we acted quick enough (because a single destructible portal is such a hilarious weakness I can't believe the legion tried it three times), in which case the biggest problem would be how many dreadlords got through to start corrupting world leaders and summoning demons in civilian centres.

If its a full star destroyer invasion it's just ogre, assuming we don't get roasted after winning too many battles or the old Sargy planet chop. Eventually, the terraforming and destruction to civilian centres is going to render our ability to resist moot. That's the problem, being laughably ineffectual doesn't matter if you can do it forever.

That's all assuming some people don't just straight up join and hand over our tech (because let's be real people would for a chance to be immortal) or the entire planet just doesn't get invited in.

[WaltherLeopold]

If its a full star destroyer invasion it's just ogre, assuming we don't get roasted after winning too many battles or the old Sargy planet chop. Eventually, the terraforming and destruction to civilian centres is going to render our ability to resist moot. That's the problem, being laughably ineffectual doesn't matter if you can do it forever.

That's all assuming some people don't just straight up join and hand over our tech (because let's be real people would for a chance to be immortal) or the entire planet just doesn't get invited in.

But the Legion star destroyers don't operate in space, they operate in the twisting nether which is decidedly not space, this is evidenced by the fact that we fought and killed Kil'jaeden ontop of his ship in transit inside the Twisting Nether during his raid encounter in Legion.

Would they come to Earth, they would have to do so by teleporting into our atmosphere like they did on the pre-expansion event for Legion, given that they actually couldn't keep that up vs Azeroth, I don't see how they would be able to gain much ground on Earth.

[huth]

If Earth had magic, they wouldn't have the massive amounts of technology we have today because we progressed that way BECAUSE we didn't have magic. Also, Earth doesn't have the diverse species like Azeroth does so, imo, that's another disadvantage. So earth lacking incredibly advanced technology and not having the tactical knowledge of several races would cause them to lose. But that's my opinion.

The majority of people would still be reliant on technology. And that magic can't replace a lot of the machines we have. We'd probably have even more due to research into and combining technology and magic. Sure, we might not have the exact same technology we do now. But that's not really the point anyway. There's little reason to believe we'd be less advanced.

And your supposed disadvantage is nonexistent. The combined tactical knowledge of those races doesn't even reach what we managed to come up with by ourselves.

[Sagenod]

There is perhaps one warlock for every five hundred orcs, and that is an extremely generous overestimation on my end. That one warlock is not going to stand up against even five Humvees each armed with a belt-fed 30mm minigun spewing out thousands of armor-piercing bullets per minute, if they can't even make themselves immune to Azerothian gunfire which largely relies on muzzle-loaded or bolt-action loading mechanisms. This is to say nothing of sustained artillery shelling, drone strikes, or, if need be, tactical nuclear strikes at the site of the Dark Portal and/or through it to eviscerate the Horde's reserves and supply lines while conventional ICBMs and drone strikes reduce the invasion force to chunks of meat.

The Horde's invasion would last perhaps a few hours once a coordinated international response was mobilized.

- - - Updated - - -


Warlocks can't stop Azerothian firearms, how are they going to contend with modern warfare technology? Even if we just stick to conventional warfare, a row of attack helis set up with air-to-surface missiles and miniguns would hamburger a warlock before he got his first cast off. Word would spread pretty quick among Earth's forces to focus fire on any orc you see in a robe first to neutralize the warlocks. If we introduce drone strikes, ICBMs, and tactical nuclear strikes to the equation, the Horde is mince meat within hours and a few nukes shot through the Dark Portal solves the problem once and for all, long before anyone has to worry about missing dinner except maybe the poor saps tasked with cleaning up all the viscera.

edit to add: And I do believe that, in the event of a hostile alien invasion like the Horde, nuclear strikes would absolutely be used to cripple their numbers, especially if there is an interdimensional portal we can shoot it through and collapse to negate any risk of fallout seeping through to our end. Doubly so the second recon teams sneak through the portal and realize the orcs' magic is killing their world, in order to prevent it from happening to Earth.

There is just no feasible situation where the orcs, whose infantry use melee weapons and wolfriders form the bulk of their cavalry, whose spellcasters are easily-identified and ill-suited to modern warfare, would have the upper hand. Even the Iron Horde would crumble in no time flat--their invasion was stopped dead with less than half the Blasted Lands occupied and the counterattack was one humiliating defeat after another for them.

Don't forget about demons!

[Logwyn]

Earth wins unless some tool of a nation decides to help the Orcs....

[Saltysquidoon]

But the Legion star destroyers don't operate in space, they operate in the twisting nether which is decidedly not space, this is evidenced by the fact that we fought and killed Kil'jaeden ontop of his ship in transit inside the Twisting Nether during his raid encounter in Legion.

Would they come to Earth, they would have to do so by teleporting into our atmosphere like they did on the pre-expansion event for Legion, given that they actually couldn't keep that up vs Azeroth, I don't see how they would be able to gain much ground on Earth.

They do operate in the great dark beyond (space). It's never explained why the legion didn't just fly to azeroth so that leads me to believe it's simply slow to fly through real space compared to teleporting through the nether.

[Skayth]

Im pretty sure our supreme leader kim jong un would be able to obliterate the orcish horde on his own. (Thats with 40 yr old equipment)

As for the rest of world, it becomes even more of a stomp. dont get me wrong, the initial invasion will do damage, as its a surprise attack, but the horde is nothing to our weapons. Bringing summons into the mix? Sure sure. But unless the legion can do a full scale assault like in legion, then they will lose too.

Our weapons are currently that good. Once the legion is identified as a proper threat, after the initial invasion force, our weapons would get better and better.

Now if it were a full scale legion assault and a surprise at that, and if they had proper shielding on their ships (we dont know) then i can see the world falling to the legion. But then that is going into extraterrestrial warfare, and we dont know if their proper armor could repel bullets or if their barriers could repel bunker blasters. Thats subjective and all fictional. Some people will say a bunker buster missle will penetrate a barrier or shielding others will say it wont. Do we know? Nope.

Currently, our weapons are vastly superior to sharp swords and sticks. Want a good anagram? Watch the last battle in the last samurai. (But now our weapons are superior to hundred year old guns, hence why i said north korea could deal with the horde)

Magic? That's where things get iffy, but the horde sucks with magic, so they are pretty much slaughtered.

[Thage]

Don't forget about demons!

Demons aren't immune to Azerothian firearms, why would objectively-superior modern military hardware fail against them? Besides, as I said, warlocks' mana is finite, and they can't summon demons if they're getting swiss-cheese'd at 4k rounds per minute.

[Lazuli]

Because Draenei are just incredibly stupid, using blades and the like, despite having extremely advanced technology. Just create firearms and then gun the orcs down from a distance, create aircraft and bomb them into oblivion. Heck a draenei child should have been able to kill hundreds of orc warriors without a problem, if these idiots would have used technology properly, they could have steamrolled the orcs in so many ways

Its true, I guess they have to write them like that or they would be insanely powerful, but why write them to be so technology advanced then in the first place lol. Draenei would be 9000x more powerful than orcs invading earth, they could bombard us from fucking space.. though I guess since legion so could the demons apparently. Can a space ship fit through the dark portal?

[huth]

They do operate in the great dark beyond (space). It's never explained why the legion didn't just fly to azeroth so that leads me to believe it's simply slow to fly through real space compared to teleporting through the nether.

There's another simple reason: They have no idea where it actually is. And randomly flying through space trying to find one specific planet isn't a terribly great idea even if you can get to any planet in a day, nevermind having to do so at sublight speeds.

[jellmoo]

It's utterly a non contest. ICBMs means we don't even need to engage them. If we aren't concerned about casualties, we literally just press buttons and they all die. They wouldn't even have a frame of reference for what was happening to them. There wouldn't even be a fight. They would just die.

[WaltherLeopold]

They do operate in the great dark beyond (space). It's never explained why the legion didn't just fly to azeroth so that leads me to believe it's simply slow to fly through real space compared to teleporting through the nether.

Where's the evidence for this, because in all ingame portrayals they are shown as traveling via the twisting nether and appear to be teleported into "reality" straight from there, not via "the great dark beyond", aka space.

[Saltysquidoon]

Its true, I guess they have to write them like that or they would be insanely powerful, but why write them to be so technology advanced then in the first place lol.

Draenei have to be lawful stupid pacifists with a low population because biologically they read like the worst of OC doughnut steel.

They're:
Physically powerful;
Technologically advanced;
Magically inclined (so much so big S just had to have them); and;
Functionally immortal.

[Jastall]

I didn't say anything about nuking Draenor. I was saying we won't nuke the Horde when they're on Earth. Also, orcs aren't utterly stupid. They have knowledge of tactics and the like. They would send an advance force and once seeing the weaponry, I could absolutely see warlocks instead sending a metric fuckton of demons. Because unlike the orcs, they can continuously be summoned.

Then why didn't they do that during the First and Second wars? The Orcs aren't entirely stupid, but they're still a culture heavily based on martial honor, and these particular Orcs are high on demonic murder juice as well, and their world is dying and cannot sustain them anymore. Ain't no way they'll accept sitting their asses at the other end of a portal while Warlocks trickle in reinforcements. To say nothing of the fact we'd quickly find the source of said reinforcements and either bomb the portal to oblivion, or invade Draenor ourselves through it which would be quite doable if pressed.

[Feanoro]

Depends on how fast the politicians declare them refugees and mewl about understanding and tolerating their culture of viciously murdering everything in sight.