#because they were too complex and resource-intensive to maintain after the fall of the roman empire

[kradogsrats]

Hello, I had a question for you about the Katolis army.. do you think it is meant to be a standing army? If Opeli says they could take on all the other human kingdoms (and Aanya was worried about losing a million?) that would be a very large army to maintain on a permanent basis? But they seem to just.. be there.. ready to go.. and food, housing, equipment - this would be super expensive, especially if there’s been ten years of relative peace? I don’t really understand why they would have it set it up this way.. surely magma Titan could have been averted if some of these soldiers were farming…

OKAY SO uh ha ha well I am not actually a historian, much less a military historian, but I will do my best to convey my largely-unsupported thoughts

Basically, this would be a much, much easier question to answer if we didn't have Queen Aanya's line about a million men and women being sent to war against Xadia. That's just like... a staggering number of people, even if she's referring to the combined total forces of the Pentarchy and not solely Duren's contribution or the expected casualties.

If we take the size and population of Xadia according to the old reddit post that put it at roughly the size of Mongolia and 40 million, just so we have some kind of ballpark numbers to attach to this, a force of one million from the 20 million humans would be 50 people per 1000 being in the military.

Like, just grabbing some random numbers from the internet, around 200 CE the Roman military was about 450,000 strong for a population of something like 70 million. Only men could enlist, so we’ll knock that population number down to 35 million, which puts us at only 12 men per 1000 being in the military. Just for fun, if we estimate 20% of the Roman population as citizens (free men, essentially) and eligible to be legionaries (rather than auxiliaries), we still get a comparable 13 citizens per 1000 in the military.

(Side note: here in the modern world, only North Korea has an estimated 50 people per 1000 in active military duty. Israel, with compulsive military service, has about 33 per 1000. Just to give a bit more insight into those proportions.)

So we’re already looking at an army more than twice the size and composed of  quadruple the percentage of the populace as Rome, literally notable for it's crazy huge standing army and the society-wide logistics that went into supporting it. Flash forward to a more medieval conflict like the Hundred Years' War, where you get numbers like the Battle of Agincourt having somewhere around 6,000-9,000 English defeating probably 14,000-15,000 French. (For reference, France had a population of about 14 million at the time.) That French number varies depending on whether you're counting an armed, armored military servant to a knight as a combatant, which the 14-15k estimate does not but like... idk, man. Including those dudes, it's more like 24,000... but even if you imagined each of the five kingdoms of the Pentarchy fielding an army that size, you wouldn't even break 100,000.

Now Aanya, bright, forward-thinking young queen that she is, is probably actually estimating based on the assumption of a campaign against Xadia being potentially years-long (if she’s not being entirely figurative). I'm way too lazy to pore over battles of the Hundred Years' War, but we can look at something like the Crusades, instead: the notably "successful" (in that it captured Jerusalem and established a kingdom there, after which everyone went home because their pilgrimage was complete) First Crusade was fought over three years with total crusader forces of 160,000-180,000. The significantly less successful Second and Third Crusade (and we're ignoring like four unnumbered ones in-between) were four years with 35,000-ish and three years at 36,000-74,000 (yeah that's a big estimate range, blame Wikipedia).

Getting into some much... vaguer... numbers, military casualties of the Hundred Years' War (including wartime disease, starvation, etc.) are estimated at 2.3 million-3.3 million. Over the course of *checks watch* 116 years of on-and-off fighting. You just couldn't kill people all that efficiently, back then. Now, granted, a war with Xadia would have a) magic, and b) FUCKING DRAGONS, but... Opeli estimates the casualties of an immediate war between Katolis and the Neolandia/Evenere/Del Bar forces to have an upper end of “tens of thousands,” which really, really suggests that we are not talking about a combined million people, even if Duren was included.

ANYWAY that was a lot of fuzzy math to kick this off, so let's talk about Katolis and realistic-ish possibilities for its military.

First of all, a standing military is not really unheard of even in the actual real-world medieval Europe, it just looked a bit different. Professional soldiers did exist, perpetually equipped and ready to fight, and they made up a large portion of most military campaigns. However, they were broadly dispersed among the nobility, so if you wanted to have a war, you had to wait for everyone to show up. Because of the nature of the feudal society, you kind of had a trickle-down (trickle-up?) standing military--the king could call on his vassals to fight, who would call on their vassals, etc. etc. down the chain until you had an acceptable force of dudes who came with their own armor and could kill each other with a decent amount of skill. (There were also non-professional peasant militia infantry forces, but generally they were not worth the logistical burden of fielding them.)

You also could have mercenary forces, which fell in and out of favor over the medieval-renaissance eras. On the one hand, you then didn't have to be paying the salaries of a whole-ass army during peacetime, but on the other hand... once you stop paying the mercenaries, nothing stops them from getting frisky with all your nice, safe cities to take a bit extra off the top, because they know you don't have an army to stop them. It was found to be more cost-effective to just have your own dudes with some degree of loyalty to king and country, and then pay them on the regular.

But right, Katolis. With the slant that this is a faux-medieval setting with heavy emphasis on the faux, because everyone is wildly over-fed, over-healthy, over-cleaned, and over-educated, I'm willing to fudge things like period-accurate agriculture techniques to allow for feeding a decent-sized group of people being paid to stand around and train for war. Maybe wandering dark mage hedge wizards routinely zing up everyone's fields, or they're all using fertilizer from fancy Xadian livestock with Earth primal poop. Whatever. At some point (which to be fair is probably post-industrial), having more people working the land doesn't actually produce any more. Same kind of deal for housing, we’re just gonna assume much more advanced understanding of and techniques for sanitation and waste removal than would be “realistic,” which removes a lot of the problems with having a bunch of people all living close together. Because let’s be real, none of us really want to think about how much literal shit is just sitting around in the open at any given moment or running into the water supply to give everyone dysentery. (I’m pretty sure it’s only in the post-antibiotics era that you stop having at least as many of your casualties be from disease as from battle.) I personally haven’t decided whether I think the setting has running water and sewage systems for the sake of my own fic purposes, but I kind of lean toward “yes,” because it’s the kind of thing that honestly isn’t that far out of place with all the other modernized incongruities going on. My main problem is how you run indoor pipes through a stone castle, but I also don’t know anything about plumbing.

Katolis also shares the vast majority of the border with Xadia, and controls the Breach--the one place you can march an army through from either side. It makes sense that they have an entire subsection of their military (the Standing Battalion) devoted to guarding that one point, but I would definitely expect there to be at least small fortified outposts along the entire border. I mean, dragons can fly. The only other kingdom that shares any part of the Xadian border is Duren, and it's a pretty small slice north of the Breach. So since Katolis is everyone's primary defense against the persistent threat of Xadia, I would bet they regularly collect some kind of support from the other kingdoms that goes toward maintaining the forces necessary to keep up that security. Whether that's food, other war materiel, straight-up money (it can be exchanged for goods or services), whatever. In a sense, Katolis is acting as a mercenary army for the rest of the Pentarchy. (Though they also have a non-mercenary stake in not fucking around, since Katolis is also the most threatened by Xadia due to proximity.)

We also see that towns in Katolis seem to have fortifications and military presence based on proximity to the border, so in addition to general border surveillance/security, you'd also have forces dispersed for that. It's likely that even the more interior towns have small forces of military ("guards") for general security and law enforcement, since there doesn't really seem to be anything else filling that role. So my general assumption would be that there are some large concentrations of military forces in places like Katolis City, and/or maybe there's some other military-centric location for large-scale training and mustering that isn't on the map or mentioned anywhere, and then you've got a spread-out force across the other population centers, maintaining the security of the major roads, keeping an eye on the borders shared with the other kingdoms, etc.

An alternative could be having a complex rotation of reserve forces in effect, where Katolis has the capacity to muster a large number of troops but only a portion of them are on active duty at any time and the rest go home and maintain the general labor force. That does make things a little more complicated in the “making sure everyone is actually armed when you call them up for war” area and having to suddenly increase your supply logistics by however many times over, but it’s something you can at least plan for. I would assume that in addition to the higher level of discipline and training the Katolian army has (according to Opeli), it also has a more coordinated and robust supply infrastructure. Like I’m sure it’s there somewhere in the force Viren marches with. Way at the back. Out of sight.

We’ll leave what exactly Viren’s plan for an extended campaign in Xadia beyond “reach the Storm Spire, eat the dragon prince” was as an exercise for a later time. Like good lord, dude, if Aaravos hadn’t thrown the Sunfire elves as a whole into complete disarray as a casual side effect of chowing down on the Sunforge, was he like... going to lay siege to Lux Aurea? Did he imagine that once the dragon throne was empty everyone would just capitulate?

Basically I do think it’s possible if you fudge a lot of setting stuff that is honestly already fudged, so I’m willing to allow it. However I will remain almost as salty about the “million” thing as I do about Star Wars claiming that a three-year, galactic-scale war was fought by fewer than half as many soldiers as the US alone served in WWII.