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habeasdorkus posted:Spoilers for Book 4: The costs of raising and maintaining soldiers goes above and beyond the raw economic output of the 7000 soldiers. The soldiers need gear, their gear needs maintenance, resources are expended raising and training the troops, and losses are costs are incurred before enemy action is even considered. The Line being what it is, manufacture and outfitting multiple Standards can be assumed to be more involved and resource-intensive for the general population than just rounding up 1% of the population. This is purely speculative, but the topic gets stressed repeatedly in the later books - the Second Commonweal is walking a tightrope between two existential threats, invaders and starvation. It has to balance the need to push resources into growth and the economy and find replacements for materials and production that was previously handled in the First Commonweal and is no longer accessible, with the need to be able to repel invaders and not be subjugated. Too many resources put into the Line, and the Second Commonweal faces famines as their carefully rationed stockpiles from the split run dry. Insufficient resources put into defense, and the Second Commonweal gets overrun. Except avoiding starvation isn't enough - the worry is that defense costs, and the minimum input into the economy is a slow death if the Second Commonweal doesn't grow faster than the costs associated with defending it. And merely defending the Second Commonweal isn't enough - if attackers are merely fended off and permitted to retreat, they can gather their forces and inflict damage and losses at a time of their own choosing, which can be devastating in a way the Second Commonweal may not be able to defend against or recover from. The later books also subtly go into this a bit more - one of the reasons why the Commonweal does not engage in wars of conquest (and implied to be part of why both Commonweals are able to identify pending invasions far enough in the future to do something about them) is that the act of empire building and performing large magical works in the aid of conquest is extremely visible, sorcerously speaking, and with most nations functioning as a kind of sorcerous pyramid scheme organized by a Bad Guy Sorcerer, attracting attention encourages your neighbors to view you as a threat and attempt to eliminate you and absorb your resources and population in the furtherance of their own power. Most Bad Guy Sorcerers, on discovering that a neighbor state exists, immediately start making plans to conquer them, so the Commonweal has a vested interest in not attracting attention.
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Apr 1, 2023 09:15
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 06:31 |
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