Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20181103233945/@comment-36170150-20181115170717

One thing I'm curious about is how Sierra is going to utilize the Army Size variable in the future. I was a bit dissapointed there wasn't much point increasing the variable past 150 for the 3AW and that was the closest the game could have gotten to a standard war in my opinion, now, in chapter 4, we're interacting with extradimensional forces and our activities in the Tower allows us to teleport ourselves to pretty much any place we'd want to. It feels like at this point any future conflcts should be decided by the strength of our elites (the harem + orcs we can move through the Tower) and naval + aerial supremacy, which would logically be achieved through investments instead of just having a large standing army of orcs, also it was a large time-skip combined with a drastic increase in available resources, it'd feel weird to me if the key aspect of our military was just the remnants of the previous war.

I guess Sierra could just use the variable anyway and make it so the mechanics have a bit of a disconnect with the lore, but I hope she doesn't do that. But off the top of my head I can only think of a couple scenarios where a big Army Size would be a big deal at this point.

First, the event where a regular army attacks the new nations while Simon and company are busy dealing with an attack coming from the Tower and they can't afford to spare any top tier magical support so our army will have to fend for itself.

Second, the event of our opponent being too terrible of an individual so that Simon and company cannot fight them and instead will have to hide and use our regular army to beat theirs, forcing the individual to come out to attack our army and then we can lure them into a trap with some heavy magical preparations, would be quite a change of character since up to this point Simon has been very willing to sacrifice himself.

Alternatively, I suppose the Army Size variable could be used mainly for some non-military effects, perphaps the implication could be that having a large army at the end of the 3AW means that you will have more veterans of your army living in the new nations, and so a more loyal and favorable population, which could be useful in future votes in Tak'kan for example.