In our world, military power comes from manpower, infrastructure, and technology

But the Soul Reapers have like

A solid 80% of their military force tied up in the Gotei 13

13 guys

In Weirkey book 9, Theo gathers 6 authority tier soulcrafters and someone calls it an army

6 guys

With enough power to conquer nations

I don’t really have a point

It’s just weird when your standing army is 4 eccentric fighters who you have to keep happy because otherwise they’ll just get up and leave and then you’re fucked

That’s not an army

The only reason to have grunts is because your real power can only be in one place at a time

But they never really accomplish anything meaningful other than revealing where the real power is needed most urgently

Depending on the setting they can accomplish plenty like weeding out the weaker monsters

But yeah I've thought about this too

Fantasy scaling means you end up in a situation where you have an army consisting of 10000 guys with spears and six reusable tactical nukes

It's very different from real world warfare

And how much power imbalance those stories have, I've thought about that too.

This is something I’ve had to think about for my own writing

And the thing about a “reusable tactical nuke is,” it can’t take and hold territory. Six guys with bullshit powers is not enough to secure a city

They’re not an army, they’re Special Forces

Yeah

You still need the army to do army things, and your wizards do B-2 things

I do think you end up with modern concepts of combined arms/differentiated service branches very easily this way

I mean cf a real world air force. It can kill a lot of people and can only be opposed with incredibly expensive assets, but it can't really exert territorial control or let you do non-war State Things, it's solely useful for peer warfare

superpowers depending on your setting can be like that, basically only good for war, but they can also have a lot more humanitarian applications depending

your local harvest wizard or whatever

I've also been thinking a fair bit about FFXIV as I've been playing it, of how it's basically like "most of the world has renaissance militaries in both equipment and organization, and everyone buffs themselves up with magic in one fashion or another."

but I guess since no one can compel local harvest wizard to do anything and they'll probably be paid off not to make trouble if nothing else and so don't need a job, they have to just like helping out

"The dominant faction in the world is the only one without magic but they have WWII military technology and the occasional Atlantean Metal Gear as a balancing factor"

"Also apparently some people are just Him whether they have magic or not"

yeah it's more of a backdrop thing but the reason the court mage system works in NecRomancer is because it's vastly more popular to let mage thunderdome work out disputes than to actually try to deploy armies on the field

even without the addition of mages that can just tear an army in half thrown in to complicate it, warfare sucks

Yeah another important factor is, if you want your superpowered wizards to do things for your state in this setting, how do you...motivate that

and also mass death is a great way to make land into God Territory

You can't exactly draft a guy who can turn your whole army into newts

Similar to Talia's solution, magical girls in my fantasy setting are treated a little like mecha-- a deterrent force, especially once you start getting to the level of fighting off your local city-destroying getter ray eating monsters, because at that point you're talking more and more in terms of mutually assured destruction than holding ground

Yeah I've actually observed the same thing about mecha

Mecha are always the queen of the battlefield in their setting (except VOTOMS, RIP to those guys)

But even if you make them infantry-shaped they're still more like tanks or helicopter gunships. Great for peer fights and as breakthrough forces, but if you want to hold a line, ten guys in an APC will do the same thing five times as well for a quarter of the cost

I think in a world where people had big superpowers from out of prehistory there'd be a lot of historical theocracies to be honest

therealbliss: This was actually a big thing in Stormlight

'we need a king because only a powerful centralized military can oppose the powerful centralized military of our neighbors' is not longer a thing

Where there are shardbearers, who are largely unstoppable power armor clad death machines

But a common military adage is “Shardbearers can’t hold ground”

Because a large well equipped army might have like 3 shardbearers total

This is a very silly thing in Naruto. It is actually factually canon that nobody except the one Samurai Town actually has a standing army, they all just hire ninja mercenaries to do everything

Which is obviously goofy

Because, like, first of all how are these ninja mercenaries (who seem to be constantly starving for resources!) not constantly overthrowing their feudal lords. Like who’s going to stop them.

Well, yes. Stormlight is good and considered the worldbuilding implications.

But also because the ninja are, you know, ninja. They’re stealthy and tricky. They take decades to train. Why are you putting them on the front lines instead of ‘random peasant with a spear’.

It’s a setup that would so obviously make way more sense if they were specialty units supporting a more conventional army

Naruto is one of the kings of the setting just totally getting away from the writer

Also a think in 40K. The Space Marines are the universe’s greatest fighting force but their supply chain logistics are horrifying and there’s just not enough of them. There’s a reason the Imperial Guard exists.

PikaBot: a Gray Knights strike cruiser has a crew of like 20,000 serfs who live their entire lives on the ship in service of like 15 knights

It’s insane

Do you ever think about like. Where do the Chaos Space Marines get their bolter ammo

Sometimes

I suspect a lot of chaos marine attacks are supply raids

PikaBot: does Games Workshop?