fe-bruary, post öt: half-assed battle meta

[queenlua]

aka: "is there a military historian in the house?"

So there's this throwaway line in FE10 when the laguz alliance + Ike's bros are about to attack Daein at Fort Nox:

Ranulf: Ten thousand? They aren't really going to try and fight us with only ten thousand men, are they? It'd be suicide!

And that got me wondering HEY WAIT HOW BIG ARE THESE ARMIES REALLY

Unfortunately, I wasn't really able to find anything else in the script that referenced population or army size, so we don't have much to go on. (I legit asked a history major friend how one goes about guessing an army's size. She was like "well usually we look at census records or bla bla…" Then I explained to her that I didn't have documents like that since this was for a fictional army in a video game and she was all "Lua seriously" and threw a pillow at me. Alas.)

But NEVER LET LACK OF ACTUAL EVIDENCE GET IN THE WAY OF VAGUE GUESSES

I wikipedia'd a bunch of random battles that I was vaguely familiar with and looked at the relevant numbers:

• Siege of Fort Ticonderoga: 3,000 US versus 7,800 GB, GB victory (the US retreated pretty much right away)


• Battles of Saratoga: first battle was 9,000 US vs 7,200 GB, with 600 GB losses and 300 American losses—GB gained the field but had suffered critical losses, weakening them to where the second battle was a decisive US victory. second battle was 12,000 US vs 6,600 GB


• Battle of Gettysburg: 93,000 Union vs 71,000 Confederate, Union victory, about 23,000 casualties/losses on each side


• Battle of Shiloh: 66,000 Union vs 44,000 Confederate, noted as one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War with 13,000 Union casualties/losses and 10,000 Confederate casualties/losses, Union victory


• Battle of Waterloo: 72,000 French vs 118,000 Seventh Coalition, decisive Seventh Coalition victory (though this outcome was far from obvious at the battle's beginning) with 51,000 French casualties/losses and 24,000 Seventh Coalition casualties/losses

Some vague observations based on these battles:

• Wow, Revolutionary War battles were super-tiny compared to Civil War battles. D'aww just a couple thousand per side, so cute. This is probably due to (1) the US was honestly not very heavily populated at the time of the Revolution, and (2) the Civil War necessarily drew in everybody, whereas the Revolution just needed to kick out occupying British forces to be successful, which were probably centered around a smaller number of areas.


• Casualty counts in more "modern" wars are much higher, which makes sense given how military technology progressed. This does bring in the moderately interesting question of, would FE battles more closely resemble, say, medieval Europe in terms of casualty counts, or more like the Revolutionary War? or the Civil War? etc? Obviously there aren't rifles or gatling guns in Fire Emblem, but there are mages with both close- and long-range magic, and transformed laguz probably count for considerably more than a single beorc unit, and the presence of hawks/ravens/wyvern riders/pegasus knights adds a "he who controls the sky controls the battle" element to it that we don't really see in RL until World War II. Actually, given that maxim you'd almost expect the bird laguz to dominate battles, since they're just an entire nation of winged murder-machines... except I guess we don't see them using large-scale explosives, which would limit their utility.


• There are battles with pretty big differences in numbers which, nevertheless, did not have totally obvious outcomes. But this makes sense, given that your positioning in a battle is often more important than your raw numbers. And honestly, Daein's position at Fort Nox wasn't categorically awful; in general it's way easier to hole up in a castle and fend off your enemies by pelting them with bows (or, in FE's case, long-range magic) than it is for someone to barge down your castle's walls (at least, if my understanding of general military strategy is correct). So, this suggests that the laguz alliance + GM must have been truly massive to warrant Ranulf's confidence.

Here's where I would put a conclusion, if I had any, but I don't think I really do—you could really interpret Ranulf's throwaway statement any number of ways to get any number of projections on the battle's size—but I thought it was a kind of cute thing to consider, anyway :P

Comments

[lyndis]

Fire Emblem battles can be really diverse. If they're saying "only ten thousand" the battles are huge for medieval-style battles. Ten thousand is a really big medieval army for the most part. If this had come up last semester I'd have the figures on hand and everything. :( But "only 10,000" must mean these are large countries with huge populations.

[queenlua]

this is good to know!

I honestly probably should've compared some historic medieval European battles as well, but when I tried finding some I realized I know absolutely zero about major medieval European wars so I was just kinda lazy and gave up :D;;;

[lyndis]

It really depends on like, the size of the countries, who their allies are, how good recruiting is, how important the war is, et cetera.

In FE9/10 it's safe to say they're large-scale wars because they encompass a LOT of territory (and therefore population). I'm no expert but I think the first couple battles in the Hundred Years' War had like 15,000-25,000 (differed per side English/French). Like uhh maybe the Battle of/at Crécy.

That's a lot of people but that was a huuuge war and a large battle, so it's kind of to be expected. (Plus, later medieval times for those battles.)

I feel like FE takes place close to 1400s (our real life history timeline) if we're gonna get picky.

10,000 might be a great army coming from, IDK, Laus, but coming from Bern it's probably pretty piddly. (There's a reason Laus is part of the Lycian Alliance.) I've tried to pick my way around sizes of various FE7 cantons but I feel that FE9/10 is way different because IMO the countries are huge (landmass wise).

[queenlua]

I've tried to pick my way around sizes of various FE7 cantons

ooh, do you have any meta written up about this? if so, I'd love to read it :D

[amielleon]

You might be able to come up with figures for approximate geographic size by comparing routes taken by the time it took and the probable speed at which they're traveling.

PoR-wise I remember the sea route from Crimea to Begnion being pretty good for this purpose:

Having narrowly escaped Daein's grasp the Greil Mercenaries are pleased to feel the ocean beneath their feet as they set sail. According to Captain Nasir, the voyage to Begnion will take roughly two months.

So you could like, run a piece of string across the sea route they take, figure some average sailing speeds, take into account navigating the islands and reefs, and now you've got a "scale" for the Tellius map. :D

[queenlua]

—ammie why do i get the feeling you already have this figured out and if i dig through your old meta i will find the answers? :P

[amielleon]

I don't, but I'll do it for today! :D

[mark_asphodel]

Yeah, when x-reffing theoretical sizes for FE battles in cases where we have known armies, I tend to look at the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years' War, and various Italian campaigns-- things that straddle that late medieval/early Renaissance divide. The battle of Towton was an ungodly bloodbath, and that was 50K soldiers and 28,000 dead-- unheard of for the time. Whereas the strategically important battle of Wakefield a year earlier had fewer than 30K participants (maybe far fewer) and only about 3K dead, but it took out the Yorkist leadership on the scene. (Kill the Lord? Insta-win!)

And then in a couple of cases we outright don't have invisible armies alongside our PCs and we're given to understand that a unit is a unit-- FE4 in particular and I can't see FE5 being any other way either.

[amielleon]

FE7 the "invisible" "kinda not really war" too.

[queenlua]

a couple of cases we outright don't have invisible armies alongside our PCs and we're given to understand that a unit is a unit-- FE4 in particular

I hadn't known that about those games—that is super-amusing.

[rosage]

I don't have anything to add as I never thought about this before, but this is really interesting stuff.

[queenlua]

:D

[amielleon]

Have you considered looking up medieval populations vs army sizes? Especially in those countries with compulsory service. I suspect that'd reflect Daein's condition. And then you might be able to project Daein's postwar population, therefore its prewar population, and therefore an estimate of Crimea's too. 83

okay maybe I'm more interested in population than army sizes.

Anyway I mean Daein's whole entire fucking army is in Fort Nox so you have a pretty interesting number there. Meanwhile you have a splinter of the Begnion army, plus the offensive segment of Gallia's army, plus apparently the whole Phoenecian army. (I assume this is how the slaughter happened. Never trust Tibarn with tactics.)

[queenlua]

the problem with Daein in this case, though, is that Daein in RD is already recovering from a recent war + three years of their young men being forced to flee / forced into labor camps (were conditions I assume were probably not great and led to higher-than-normal mortality)—so any estimate that you make of their population based on a comparative medieval-society-with-compulsory-service is going to have to account for the fact that they probably already had a throttled gender ratio (if you're assuming the majority of Daein soldiers are male, which may not be the case in FE—but it still holds that in either case, a big portion of your able-to-do-military-service-population is still throttled)

—that being said, I'm sure this can be accounted for if I can happen on the right records and such. maybe I'll take a look at this sometime later—probably outside the scope of an hour's wikipedia-ing, but I'd be curious about the populations too :D

[amielleon]

Yeah, I think you could find some historical attestations of countries forced into repeated wars/occupations in a short period of time and maybe say something...

I mean, that 10k is practically only hard number we have, so let's milk the fuck out of it.

[amielleon]

WAIT MOAR NUMBERS

Crimean Rebel: The Royal Knights have left the capital! We estimate roughly
4,000 soldiers are marching on Felirae.

Ludveck: That means about 2,000 are left in the capital... That's more than I'd
expected. ...Hmm, I suppose it can't be helped. The column headed toward
Felirae is primarily cavalry, is it not?