Killer Cyborg wrote:Nightmask wrote:It was time for it to lose one when it went after Tolkeen. Everyone who should have gotten involved didn't, including bitter enemies of the CS who should have promptly attacked while it was busy with Tolkeen but instead bizarrely sat back and said 'gee I hate the CS for its history of persecuting and killing my kind and to show that hate I'm going to sit back and watch while they kill even more people like myself and do nothing else'.
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend, and there's no sense wasting good blood after bad.
Tolkeen did get a LOT of support from enemies of the Coalition... it's just that that support didn't matter much in the long run.
More support still wouldn't have mattered much, except there'd be more dead bodies scattered around the smoking ruins of Tolkeen, and perhaps some more smoking ruins of other citystates that decided to get directly involved.
Again, the CS has more guys in SAMAS than most places have
in their entire population.
They have more Dog Boys than the entire population of Tolkeen AND all the people who rushed to Tolkeen's aid.
Look at it like the US's recent activities in the Middle East.
Like the CS, we went to war with two nations at once.
Like the CS, we have many enemies who hate us.
Like the CS, we saw the people we were attacking bolstered by enemy forces from all around.
Like the CS, we pretty much crushed all hard opposition anyway.
Because, like the CS, we have a large and powerful enough nation, with enough high technology, that even the combined forces of our enemies aren't really going to stop us.
Do the math.
Look at the CS populations and their military numbers.
Look at the populations of their enemies.
Look at the technology differences.
As we're told from the outset (RMB 191):
The Coalition has the most powerful army in the known world. Their level of technology is unsurpassed in the Americas.And that's NOT by a small margin.
The City of Dweomer has about 50k people as of 105 PA (FoM 17)
The Kingdom of Dunscon has about 31,500 people (FoM 32)
Magestar has <2k people (FoM 53)
Stormspire has <20k people (FoM 59)
So the Federations of Magic, even if they decided to all work together to chip in, and even if ever man/woman/child/creature decided to fight and was capable of it, could bring about 103,500 more bodies to the war.
That's a drop in the bucket.
New Lazlo (RUE 31) has a population of 86k today, but 34k of that are Tolkeen refugees, so their entire population was only about 50k before the SoT.
The city of Lazlo is one of the relative big-boys, boasting a population of 1.25 million people (RUE 21).
So let's just say that every man/woman/child/critter in these areas banded together. They'd have an army of 1,403,500 or so troops.
The Coalition States, back in 100-101 PA, had a
minimum of 1,400,000 Dog Boys alone (SB1 12-13),
and that's going off of the conservative numbers.
The numbers more likely were as high as 2.4 million Dog Boys, and "that number is growing by the day."
They also have around 3.2 million SAMAS pilots.
They also have at the very least least 1.6 million ISS Peacekeepers.
God only knows how many grunts they have, but (iirc) most of the million grunts used in the SoT
were new recruits that didn't even really dip into the CS' regular numbers.
Do the math.
The CS has more disposable cannon fodder troops than they have enemies.
They have the overall best technology in North America.
They have the most resources.
And NOT by anything resembling small amount.