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