At the time, some 15% of the whole Hegemony’s helotry were in the Westriding, and most of the grain that fed Karagon came from/through there. The abrupt disruption to those resources seriously rattled the regime and risked starting a domino chain of revolts closer to home. It was a Tiananmen moment, when instead of negotiating the Theurges opted for scaled-up repression, even at the cost of devastating key farmland and helot populations. (Today, the Westriding has only 10% of the Hegemony’s helots, and fewer yeomen, proportionally, than any other region of Shayard.)
Yes, if you engage in noble intrigue in Grand Shayard.
Absolutely. The myriarch of Vaulens oversees 5 turmarchs and 33 tagmatarchs, and asked his turmarch for the western Rim to deploy one tagmatarch to round up the bandits who were causing trouble in the Whendward. Once on the ground in the Rim, that tagmatarch, Aletheia de Arquin, would have been the one telling her kentarchs to choose appropriate lochoi to back up the Alastors elsewhere in the Rim if the MC has spread a lot of anarchy. The role of those lochoi would have been mainly to show the flag, hearten the Alastors and local nobility, and intimidate villagers back into passivity, rather than being chosen to themselves be the point of the spear in counterinsurgency tactical operations.
I realize that routing up to 5% of Shayard’s eighth-largest Phalangite garrison is not the crushing defeat for the Hegemony that some readers will have hoped that a big G1Ch4 “win” would be. But it’s still an unsettling achievement, even if it’s very, very far from decisive.
Pulling on our nearly decade-old (!) discussion of tactics in a world of Theurgy, I’d suggest in every traditional hecaton (i.e. those not oriented toward human wave tactics) there are lochoi specialized as crossbow units, a pike unit or two (anti-cav capacity is tactically less vital than in our world, see below), and sword-wielding shock infantry, with everyone carrying slings and/or bolas as the most Theurgy-resilient (and pretty effective in their own right) backup option. They drill one set of formations/tactics for facing non-Theurgic troops, and another more fluid set of tactics for when the enemy Theurges show up.
Cavalry have been an interesting one to grapple with because so many of their traditionally decisive military roles are deeply compromised in a world with Theurgy. It’s trivial for a trained Theurge to cause a running horse to break its legs, like Cerlota does with the nomads’ camels in G2Ch1 if you pissed off Jyrrek & co enough. On the Halassur front line, horses would be vital for communications and transport, but I feel like the soldiers would mainly need to fight dragoon style rather than as mounted cav, because cavalry’s traditional shock role (and even Mongol-style horse archery) would be so easily disintegrated as soon as magi appear. Fighting Theurges is I think all about a combination of cover, maneuverability, and high-volume or high-precision missile attacks; you can get some of that on horseback, obviously, but the inability to make effective use of cover/concealment would be deadly.
That would have entailed a huge shift among Shayardene nobility from the old de Syrnon monarchy’s cavalry-centric armies. I’m going to suggest that they continued to train in the old cavalry skills, because those remain extremely useful against peasant revolts unsupported by Theurgy. Shayardene nobles and the better-off Alastors, more than Phalangites, have kept up traditions of mounted combat, and Nyrish horse archers continue to be excellent hunters on horseback. On the Halassur front, any of them might opportunistically lead a mounted attack if they had the horses and were pretty confident there were no Theurges anywhere around, especially if the enemy was light on their spearmen. But that wouldn’t be standard Phalangite (or Halassurq) doctrine.
I’m spinning all of this a little less out of my butt than I would have been a decade ago, having spent a lot more time in research since then, but this is still an area of worldbuilding weakness for me and a strength for you, so please keep up the critique. 