While dealing with the problems left over from the last war, in order to deal with the next war that does not know when it will come, but it will definitely come, Zhu Youzhen has also been letting the Qin soldiers fight hard.

First of all, Li Dingguo, who took the initiative to lead his troops to attack, has not been idle these days. He was ordered to lead 500 cavalry to find the thieves and fight, and in seven or eight days, he had marched more than 1,000 miles.

Of course, Li Dingguo did not dare to face the army of thieves who were prone to tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, after all, these 500 cavalrymen were too few, and 400 of them were still recruits who had just joined the army.

Zhu Youzhen also knew this that the task he gave Li Dingguo was originally to train troops. But this kind of training is a real battle, so it is more effective than any hard exercise, and the recruits also grow up quickly on the march and in battle.

Li Dingguo also has a thorough understanding of Zhu Youzhen's strategy, and he has been fighting with small bands of thieves with hundreds or even dozens of people these days. If he can't find a thief, he will also use bandits to train his hands. Moreover, in the course of the battle, Li Dingguo also consciously applied the guiding ideology of "concentrating superior forces"; if the strength of the troops did not reach twice that of the opponent, he would not rush to attack, but patiently waited for the opportunity.

Originally, the equipment and combat skills of the Qin soldiers were much stronger than these weak opponents, and with the addition of fighting more and less, the advantage was even more obvious. However, in seven or eight days, Li Dingguo won five battles and five victories, annihilated three small bands of thieves, exterminated two bandit nests, beheaded more than 1,000 people in total, and captured two bandit leaders "Blocker" and "Li Kui", and sent them back to Qinwangzhuang.

Of course, Li Dingguo's ability to achieve such outstanding achievements is inseparable from his outstanding intelligence work. From the beginning when Li Zicheng had just withdrawn from the siege, Qin Wangwei under Lin Youkun was scattered again, reporting the movements of various bandits and bandits near Xi'an back to Qinwangzhuang.

The importance of intelligence to warfare is self-evident. In his previous life, Zhu Youzhen was also a World War II enthusiast and was very impressed by the intelligence warfare between the warring parties. For example, in the Battle of Midway, which decided the direction of the Pacific naval battle, the moldy army was aware of the Japanese attack target in advance, so it was able to set up an ambush and sink four Japanese aircraft carriers in one fell swoop with the inferior strength of three aircraft carriers, severely damaging the "mobile fleet." And if we had not received information, I am afraid that the outcome of the entire Pacific War would have been completely different.

Therefore, Zhu Youzhen also grasped Qin Bing's intelligence work very tightly. Like Li Dingguo's department, although he had already left Qinwangzhuang, no matter where he went, he had to send a fast horse back to Qinwangzhuang that night to report the position of the troops to Zhu Youzhen.

And Zhu Youzhen also passed on the latest information to Li Dingguo, so that he could have a clear idea before the battle and quickly find a suitable target for attack in the vast wilderness within a radius of hundreds of miles.

Of course, in this era there was no telegraph, let alone satellite telephone, and the transmission of intelligence could only be carried out by this primitive method. Fortunately, Li Dingguo was only fighting nearby, and if he was thousands of miles away, the information transmitted would inevitably lag behind. Zhu Youzhen didn't have much to do about it, so he had to take one step at a time and look at the situation first.

In addition to Li Dingguo, who was fighting outside, the Qin soldiers in the city were also in full swing. According to the decision of the military council, the regular army of the Qin soldiers has now increased to three thousand people, and the reserve has been increased to five thousand. Among them, 500 cavalry had already been taken away by Li Dingguo, so the vast majority of the rest were infantry.

The increase in the Qin soldiers was very different from that of the thieves. The Rogue can often snowball in size, from a few thousand to tens of thousands. But the new troops were neither properly equipped nor trained, so they were not much better than ordinary people.

This is not the case with the Qin soldiers, in the process of recruitment, most of the equipment of the recruits has been in place in advance. Many traditional equipment such as steel knives, spears, and armor were captured from the battle, so much so that Zhu Youzhen wanted to thank Li Zicheng as the captain of the transport brigade.

Only the most critical firearms have always been the bottleneck of Qin Bing. Originally, the Qin soldiers only had 400 bird guns available, but when defending the city, they used them too frequently, and more than 30 were damaged. Although the craftsmen of the arsenal worked overtime day and night, they only rushed to produce dozens of branches, and they had just replenished the number of losses.

In this regard, Zhu Youjian is still buying a large number of foreign goods, as long as he can get a bird, he can pay as much silver as he wants. On the other hand, at the same time, the scale of the arsenal was also expanded, so that the craftsmen could recruit a wide range of apprentices, and strive to increase the production capacity of the bird gun in a short period of time.

But at the beginning, the craftsmen were still a little resistant, and they were reluctant to accept apprentices, for fear that the apprentices would learn to steal the master's job. Moreover, the old rule of the craftsman is to pass it on from generation to generation, and pass it on to men but not women, so as to prevent the outflow of skills due to the marriage of daughters.

After Zhu Youzhen learned about it, he sighed again, thinking that although the concerns of the craftsmen were not unreasonable, they also objectively hindered the development of production and science and technology. The reason why many exquisite crafts in ancient China were eventually lost also has a lot to do with this mentality.

In response to this situation, Zhu Youzhen did not take compulsory measures. Because the twisted melon is not sweet, even if the craftsman is forced to accept apprentices, whether he is teaching him or not, others can't tell. They produce extremely important birds, if the quality of production is not up to par, and a pile of waste products is created, it will be delayed on the battlefield!

Zhu Youzhen's approach is to relieve the worries of the craftsmen. The reason why the craftsmen hid their secrets was actually because they were afraid that their descendants would not be able to eat, so Zhu Youzhen made a promise to them: after the children of the craftsmen became adults, Qin Wangzhuang promised to recruit them as workers and have a stable salary every month.

In addition, Zhu Youzhen also distributed some newly cultivated land to the craftsmen. Of course, none of these lands were planted with crops, but under the unified arrangement of the Jingyang Merchant Gang, trees were planted or turned into grasslands, which were managed by the Jingyang Merchant Gang.

The nature of the land was privately owned, and although the Jingyang merchants used it, they had to pay a certain amount of rent to the landlord every year. This is a "wealth of a hundred years", and it is more stable than the wages of workers, even if they sit at home and do nothing, they can barely make ends meet on rent.

At this point, the concerns of the craftsmen were somewhat dispelled. Zhu Youzhen also offered the magic weapon of "economic stimulus", stipulating that if an apprentice is accepted, the salary of the month will be increased by one or two; When the apprentice becomes a teacher and can work independently, he will also reward the master with ten taels of silver.

Under such a multi-pronged approach, the scale of the arsenal finally expanded rapidly. In just a few days, more than 200 new workers have become apprentices, which is ten times more than the old craftsmen. The factory director Sun Yuanlong was very busy, he wanted to ensure the output, and he wanted to train new people, I really wanted to break the time in half to use!