Rather pedantic question for you. So when you teach literacy to your rebels during the winter, the next page will mention that many of the children join you. Does the final number of literate rebels include the children or is it just the adults & we should assume children have rudimentary literacy? I’ve been attempting to do a high literacy run with at least 1 in 4 rebels having attained literacy but I want to know which total numbers i should be using to calculate that ratio.
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Can the MC Slave have Allies with the priests or merchant when they destroy the hegemony empire to the ground and support the slaughter of the nobles?
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I’d imagine so. Priests and nobles may both be in power but that doesn’t mean they LIKE each other.
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Shayardene Theocracy would be an interesting idea…
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Merchants won’t like it as the nobles are their best and most high paying customers. Its my assumption that they value a rebellion that will keep a relatively stable economy. If you attempt a deal with the merchants in game 1, they will mention that showing restraint against nobles is a positive (although you can still steal from the nobles but it should be relatively low anarchy and you should spare the aristos if you choose to target a noble house for a raid)
Priests, otoh, don’t have this restriction. In fact, Linus will criticize you for a lack of ruthlessness if it’s too low. While Linus is not representative of the entire priesthood, I’ve completed runs that were absolutely ruthless to the nobility while still retaining a positive reputation with the priesthood.
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I do think the classes really are just umbrella terms to represent a wide range of people, the aristocracy label can represent impoverished nobles that the MC are closer with to Magnates that manage cities and expansive estates, another example are the Yeomen class (do the terms also includes other freeborn peoples @Havenstone?), which probably includes both the wealthy peasants and landless ones who are working on leased lands.
This led me to wonder, when the situation to devolved to a point where Central Authority basically collapsed, when will the status quo die with it, this is dependent on many factors of course, aristocratic groups that still continue to practice military and administrative authority will probably able to retain their power and maybe even rises to be a player in the post-Hegemony world. But this is probably hard to stimulate in-game, so the if “class X supports you/ class Z hates you” mechanics remained then I won’t begrudge Havenstone for it.
It should be noted that the religious hierarchy of the Hegemony (if my thought that they are somewhat similar to the medieval European Roman Catholic Church in this are correct) primarily recuits from relatively wealthy peoples (urban professionals, merchants, wealthy peasants, aristocrats, etc…) and the upper layer of that hierarchy probably tend to interact more with the “high society” of the Hegemony, so I do think the more elite members majority gonna be loyalists, not to mention that the clergies with aristocratic backgrounds are concious of their status and will probably resolutely defends. That’s not to say you can’t woo them into an anti-aristocratic chain of thought!
Tl,dr the “classes” are extremely wide umbrella terms to represent a wide group of people, the differences between two differing “classes” can be more pronounced than others, but in the case between the clergies and the aristocracies they are way more intertwined than opposed.
P.S: Tbh, with the Hegemony using the Xthonism faith as a means of control and use their powers to support the state religious hierarchy, I do think the orthodox clergy will be way more inclined toward loyalism than the average aristocrat.
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“GET ME MY CHILD.”- the stricken Thautmarch on his deathbed to his officers and officials.
His Officers:
“He decreed that the Hegemony will go to ‘to the strongest’.”
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OK, let’s start venturing some tentative military demographics and see how well they hold up. I’ll also share some of the bigger demographic picture so y’all can critique my worldbuilding, but I need to immediately add the caveat that most of the numbers I’m sharing will never be known to the MC with anything but the roughest degree of accuracy. The Hegemony is a state on the cusp of modernity, still struggling to make its population legible, and would probably still be at least a century or two away from developing an effective census bureau even if it weren’t in the process of collapse. Keeping reasonably accurate tabs on how many soldiers are in its army is just about at the limit of its capacity, and there are of course major challenges there too.
With that being said: on my current vision, the total Hegemonic armed forces across the whole continent number 1.4m, of whom some 273,000 are sailors in the navy. So the Phalangites compose less than 1% of the total Hegemonic population of almost 224m; an empire that wasn’t also trying to resource around 3m Alastors and their families could probably field a bigger army (early modern Europe had higher percentages even without benefit of Theurgy). But as it’s grown the Hegemony has had to devote much of its capacity for violence to keeping the 121m helot-and-drudge population from boiling over (plus the 21m free urban poor in the big cities).
A little more than half of the Phalangites’ total strength is stationed near the Halassur border (Moncesano and points east, including an actively contested area roughly the size of Wisconsin) and is periodically engaged in pacification, raiding, and (infrequent) Ward expansion operations. Another 10%-ish of the Hegemony’s military can be found in large concentrations near Aekos and the four provincial capitals. Most of the rest are in garrison towns near significant population centers. A few (1%) are at special garrisons elsewhere, e.g. the exceedingly rare Wardgates that aren’t closely adjacent to a major city.
When we look to the MC’s home province, per @apple’s question, the biggest garrison city is the one in the orbit of Grand Shayard, in Currechert, a camp that has become a small city in its own right. Around 15,000 Phalangites are based there. Nearby, much of the city of Osterport is made up of two garrisons a few miles apart that grew together: a naval base currently supporting 10,000+ sailors (on 60+ ships defending the Abhuman trade routes and the seas west of Scarthe) and a nearby Phalangite camp with 13,400 ground troops. Each of these three forces is headed by a myriarch, overseeing multiple turmarchs.
While the Osterport land garrison is in theory there to fend off an invastion by Abhumans, Halassur, and/or Corsairs (“should the Wards fail”), and does regular drills in preparation for that contingency, the abundance of soldiers in that bit of the Southriding is not unrelated to the risk of uprising among the 4m Shayardenes packed into the relatively small area around Grand Shayard and Osterport.
Elsewhere in Shayard, the Hegemonic Navy also has more than 20,000 sailors at their primary base of operations on Scarthe Isle, and over 8,000 in Aegre guarding the strait that protects access to Aveche (and thus to one of the major existing canal systems for food shipments to Karagon). The Aegre Strait, contrary to my earlier vision, is not crossed by a Ward; there are the rudiments of a great arch on either side which was left unfinished when the Ennearchs failed to muster the massive quantity of blood that would have been required for its completion.
There are no Phalangite garrisons in the Shayard Rim (yet); the nearest is in Vaulens, the 340,000 pop. city three districts deep into the Southriding. The force mustered against you in the summer would have been taken from Vaulens’ 9,700+ Phalangite garrison, which stands ready to support Alastors in keeping order across the whole Rim and the upper Southriding. (An area which also has a total population of around 4m [edit: yikes, sorry, more like 7-8m], but is less restive than the urban pressure cooker that is Grand Shayard/Osterport, and vastly less strategically significant.)
There are large garrisons (10-12k) in the 1m+ pop cities of Corlune and Rheges, and garrisons of a few thousand Phalangites in nearly all of the other non-Rim Shayardene cities named on the map, plus five or six that don’t appear on it.
Phalangite service is for a minimum of 10 years, and most non-nobles who are inducted into the army spend their whole life in it. Soldiers based in garrison cities tend to be accompanied by their families. Most Phalangites deployed to the Halassur border leave their spouses and children with comrades, so the garrison towns are also where most military widow/ers and orphans can be found. Many Phalangites are deployed long-term out of their home province, and it’s not uncommon (though of course vehemently discouraged) for Phalangites to marry different spouses in each province where they serve. Some are diligent in sending support back for all their families, while others leave them to the priests who coordinate help for widow/ers and orphans.
The military used to be significantly smaller, like the population of the Hegemony as a whole; both grew massively over the past century, as the Theurgic agricultural revolution really kicked into gear. Today Erezza is the most heavily garrisoned province, with sizeable garrisons in almost all of its coastal cities; by contrast, Nyryal has only about 60k Phalangites (mostly in Nyrnakan and Umri) and Wiendrj barely 15k (a function of its low helot population, lack of border threats, and rugged terrain). Both Nyryal and Wiendrj have a significantly higher rate of recruitment into the army, with therefore a high chance of being based outside their homeland; the garrison cities are among the most cosmopolitan places in the Hegemony.
Let’s stop there for now. Any questions? 
PS:
It hasn’t been mentioned, perhaps because literally no one in the gameworld is in a place to know that number or even make a reasonably close guess. My current estimate would be about 15% overall, which is a significant jump up after the invention of printing techne and a sporadic literacy campaign over the past couple of generations by the clergy… but that masks wild differences between social classes. The rural helot population’s rate, for example, is 0.5%.
15% is about half what Google tells me was the estimated literacy rate in Europe at the time of Gutenberg, but only a little lower than Nepal in 1981 (20%), and I think fits well with a caste-stratified society whose topmost elite has vastly more incentive than any society in our world to not promote mass education. (For the same reason, though, the Theurgic elite can’t explain in depth to religious functionaries why it’s a bad thing for them to teach more free folk to read the sacred writings, and there are obvious benefits to a more literate administrative class.)
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Tagmatarch - commands a Tagma, roughly like a battalion
Turmatarch - commands a Turma, roughly like a regiment
Myriarch - commands a Myriad?, like a division I guess?
Is that what the unit hierarchy is? What is next in the military structure - army commanded by a Strategos?
In addition:
Looks like a little over half the Hegemony’s population is enslaved, but the proportion in Shayard would be higher because some provinces are relatively low.
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In terms of world building, my mind immediately goes to the military dimension. I think there needs to be some internal logic as to why a Phalangite city garrison is roughly 10,000/15,000. The western urban garrison should be the purest expression of what the Hegemony considers a viable tactical formation, because they will want to minimize those posts in relation to the Halassur front. It also increases legibility and logistics if the needs of that formation are roughly equivalent across the empire. These formation sizes also need to be tied to a tactical imperative. Obviously in practice their true numbers will never truly reflect their tactical aspirations. Units will be under or over strength and one of the oldest tricks in the book is to over report your numbers to skim salary from your ghost soldiers.
I say this because the game thus far has been treating soldiers committed as a dial that gets turned up one soldier at a time. That is not a professional military fights though. Rather than each point of anarchy making the count of soldiers go up by one it should have a threshold that triggers an additional one of the base formation being committed.
Not sure on all the specifics of Phalangite tactics but Roman Legions were roughly divisible by 10 and later 8 post-Marian. Something like this doctrinal template should drive the logic.
Drill in linear tactics like these emphasized changing formations rapidly and the ability to conduct relief-in-place to switch out units in combat without causing a rout or taking pressure off the enemy.
My initial swag is that the prime limiting factor would be theurgic support, but they seemed to fight independently in the last game. The theurges were like fighter jets. The Phalangites rely on the air cover they provide, but have little control over their deployment or employment.
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Looking at the map, it would appear that we will pass relatively close to Vaulens on our way to Irduin, and again on our way from Irduin to Grand Shayard. Do you have any plans for us to interact with the Phalangites and their garrison there?
Similarly, how urgent is the idea of a proper Rim garrison, in the event of a battle winning rebellion that is burning across the Outer Rim (and, hoping our chosen leader did competently with what we left them, into the Norther Rim and Rim Hart proper)? Have we made enough noise to demand that kind of determined response yet, or are we still small potatoes?
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I never realised how massive the Hegemony is, this is a bit of a shock actually. Man this is going to be such a shitstorm when it all comes down.
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The Karagond army is based around the following ideal hierarchy of command:
- Lochagos: commands a lochos (“band” in Koine, called a “lance” in Shayarin) of 10 soldiers. (Around three-quarters of the 100,000+ noble officers in the Phalangites are at lochagos level.)
- Kentarch: commands a hecaton, or 100 soldiers under 10 lochagoi
- Tagmatarch: commands a tagma of 300 soldiers under 3 kentarchs
- Turmarch: commands a tourma of 2,000-ish soldiers under 7 tagmatarchs
- Myriarch: commands 5 turmarchs (10,000-ish soldiers). Everyone this level and higher are Karagonds.
- Strategos: commands 10 myriarchs (100k soldiers). The Nauarchs of the Hegemonic Navy are also considered to be at this level (there are currently three of them).
- Polemarch: top level generals. There are currently 3 polemarchs, each overseeing 4 strategoi (and with a link to a nauarch).
- The Polemarchs are accountable to Ennearch Anakilos, the Archmage responsible for military affairs. The Nauarchs are accountable to Ennearch Lacevra.
The reality is of course messier than this template. Many logistics systems are set up reasonably well to support tagma-sized groups, and as a result there really are plenty of tagmatarchs out there who really do command roughly 300 soldiers. (Though Tagmatarch Aletheia from G1 C4 may have been given command of more kentarchs than usual for her short-term rebel-quashing mission, depending on the scale of your notoriety and the need for a strong show of force in the Rim.)
But the Phalangites have quite a few more kentarchs, turmarchs, and myriarchs than you’d get by dividing the total force by 100, 2,000, or 10,000, and the numbers of soldiers reporting to those officers can be significantly higher or lower than the ideal. Partly that’s down to long-term structural factors including:
- Conscription/recruitment being handled in the same semi-decentralized fashion as so many other Hegemonic government functions. The tourmas that win the right to pull people from the slums of Aveche or Soretto will replenish themselves faster and end up bigger than the ones that have to hunt around the Rim or the mountain country of Wiendrj.
- Political and geographical factors affecting how big a tourma or army is considered to be appropriate/necessary. The myriarchs of Currechert have been determined to stay bigger than their counterparts elsewhere in Shayard (as is fitting for the capital garrison), and their access to the slums of the Hegemony’s second biggest city ensures that they could do so, even as the garrisons of the Westriding and Coast scaled up in response to fears of rebellion.
- A superabundance of kentarchs. This primarily stems from three causes: (a) a buildup of ghost soldiers in the home garrisons, which not infrequently turns theoretical 100s into actual 50-80s, (b) the large numbers of provincial nobles demanding the glory of a military office higher than lance-leader, and (c) the Hegemony’s culture of hierarchy and control being stronger than its ingrained fondness for base ten. There’s a longstanding, reluctant recognition that lochos-level tactical discretion is vital in responding to Theurgic attack, since larger formations get decimated quickly if they aren’t able to split up and maneuver to fight from cover. But having kentarchs officially command only 60 soldiers (i.e. 6 lochagoi rather than 10, leading to tagmatarchs commanding 5 kentarchs rather than 3) allows the kentarchs more of a hands-on role in closely supervising their lochagoi and keeping them from getting too dangerously autonomous.
In addition to this, a significant part of the messiness is only 30-40 years old, when the Polemarchs inflated the Hegemonic army to a much greater size. This was initially in response to Cabel’s revolt and the third Laconnier Pretender; having big military camps near more provincial cities seemed like it would help stem rebellions with less damage and risk of contagion. It was also due to the Ennearchs and Polemarchs of that era convincing themselves that vast human wave attacks might succeed in overwhelming the Halassurqs and changing the face of the war.
This was a shift away from the previous century’s emphasis on intensive lochos-level tactical drill, which was time- and resource-intensive yet had yielded only incremental wins in the east. The new strategy was to soak up more of the (worryingly booming) population of the cities, ship them off en masse to the border, and launch attacks whose sheer numbers were intended to exhaust Halassur’s magic capacity in the area of assault, allowing the Hegemony’s Theurges to follow up with more extensive breakthroughs. Many of these hecatons had minimal training and lochagoi in name only, non-nobles whose only function was to pass on the kentarch’s orders.
The result was the bloodiest decade of the war since Hera’s day, and a slightly increased rate of territorial gains from the shocked Halassurqs. It was of course also devastating for morale (disillusioning even some very high-level members of the Thaumatarchy) and ultimately ignited a series of military revolts in eastern Erezza, 20-ish years ago, in which the human waves were turned on Hegemonic rather than Halassurq magi. The escalating unrest played a key role (along with the shock and uncertainty of Sarcifer’s treason) in inspiring the 14-year truce.
During the peace, the (new) Polemarchs kept recruiting at a scale consistent with an eventual resumption of human wave tactics, the only thing that they believed had been shown to break the stalemate. A lasting quality gap opened up between the Phalangites under noble lochagoi, who continued to receive intensive lochos-level tactical drill, compared to those under non-noble sergeants who were given a lower level of training. (The ones sent after you in G1 are Phalangites of the former type.) But even when war resumed after the Massacre of Muragno, the Hegemonic authorities found themselves never quite daring to give the order to start wave tactics again… always waiting for a moment that felt less internally delicate.
Meanwhile, the expanded garrisons turned into cities themselves. And a Hegemony beginning to face scarcity of various resources tried to reduce the risk of further military uprisings by increasingly prioritizing pay and supplies for the Phalangites over the Alastors. (The latter were more numerous but less well-armed, and better positioned to supply themselves from the people they protected.)
Guilty-ish… and I can only ask you to take my word that even though that’s a fair description of how it works “under the hood” for the Game 4 climax, it isn’t because I imagined the Phalangites were adding soldiers one by one as your offenses against the Hegemony mounted. The base Phalangite force should be roughly tagma-sized, less one “hecaton” of 60-odd troops for an especially non-notorious MC. The notoriety modifier reflects whether an additional kentarch or two have been added to the force to make an example of you for e.g. murdering the Archon’s cousin, and the anarchy modifier reflects how many lochoi had to peel off along the way to support Alastors in responding to small-scale resisters you’ve inspired. It’s true that I didn’t take any steps to make sure the final numbers fell out in neat 10s or 60s, but I’d hope the results plausibly fit the rationale I just outlined.
That’s right. One of the ways I’m imagining a high-COM MC can out-fight the remnants of the Hegemony in the late game is by putting your Theurges and ground troops under a single integrated command and getting them to fight better in combined-arms formations. (As well as a Napoleon-esque ability to outmaneuver the Phalangites when fighting in the Hegemony.)
I’ll mention Vaulens and its garrison in Ch 2, but you passed well north of it on your way to Irduin, and on your way to Grand Shayard, you’ll probably pass through it hidden in a barge.
If you broke the Archon’s army at the end of G1, the demand from the Rim nobles to base a Phalangite tourma in Rimmersford will be reasonably high. If you didn’t stand and fight, most Rim nobles won’t be pushing for a garrison.
It’s a shock for the MC too – that’s what I’ve been writing this month. Coming out of the periphery and really grasping the scale of this continent-sized empire should I think be a shock, to both character and reader.
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How ‘close’ was Cabel’s rebellion really? The text in G1 says it ‘shocked the Hegemony’ and it cost the Archon his seat, but was there any point where the higher-ups in the Hegemony actually feared the worst?
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Will this be something we can influence during Stormwright? Or at least a plot we can track while remote managing from Irduin?
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I think that logic works well on a political dimension, and the forces involved in G1 Ch4 are small enough that all the troops would be drawn from one garrison. It isn’t unreasonable that Tagmatarch Aletheia just asked for volunteers that were game for some rebel hunting, thinking that it would be a easy victory and the number of volunteers increases based on your notoriety. Degree maters in these cases though. To a strategos moving one lochagos around at a time is way to small a beer. Its actually probably below the level he and his staff can even interact with assigned forces. These formations should not be looked at solely as administrative divisions to deal with the limitations of span of control. They need a tactical logic that should be the overriding consideration as it was for the Roman maniple.
Another thing I think is worth considering is enablers. Marines are certainly organized around an infantry squad as a base unit, but we also have squads of engineers, reconnaissance, and machine-gunners that all vary in size and composition from the base of 13. The roman legions considered most of those troops auxiliaries which is a clean model for the Hegemony (and the math), but worth thinking about. Notably missing is cavalry. Fully understand that won’t be the arm of decision it was in the Napoleonic era, but the nobles certainly have been shown to have a tradition for it and a martial class needs some basis for their martial pursuits.
Love this idea and I think it meshes well with the setting. A major Hegemony blindspot is the lionization of theurgy and theurges. It is beneath their dignity to be directly in support of a Phalangite commander!
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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.
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Frankly the XoRvers has way more internal military logic that even multimillion dollar projects with a vested interest in it like Top Gun. I can really do no less than offering my appreciation and congratulations on efforts I think are paying off!
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As long as it gets them rattled and talking about us. Better to “crush” this tiny force now and play it up as bigger than it was than to have to grapple with a real army. At least, for now while we are still trying to get off the ground.
O.o
Honestly as time goes on the idea of my uh… aggressively anti-noble PC infiltrating their ranks and screwing around sounds fun. Turn their fear and paranoia on each other.
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I ask with the understanding that this question may be too comprehensive and premature. What kind of political, economic and social structures can be finally established in the “choice of rebels”? Also, what are the 30 factions like?
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