The size of the Garlean Empire's military

[Conradus]

The Garlean Empire is said to have quite the impressive military force. But just how big is it in term of manpower?

The Final Fantasy wiki gives some idea of it's size, but it's a wiki, and its valdity is in question. The wiki lists it this way:

14 Legions

1 Legion = 10 Cohors

1 Cohor = 3 Manipulae

1 Manipulae = 2 Centuries

If this is true, then the size of the army is dependent on how big a "century" actually is. In real-life Roman military terms, a century could consist of anywhere between 100-1000 soldiers. Assuming the usual definition, you get 100x2 = 200 as one manipulus. 200x3 = 600 as one cohor. 600x10 = 6000 as one legion.

Ultimately, this means that Garlemald's military force is 84000 total. that's...really, really small. In today's terms, that's at most 4-8 divisions. By real life comparison, the initial force that Germany attacked with in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII was about 13 divisions with 200,000 soldiers, and that was with a severely depleted military.

Given what I've seen, I find this hard to believe, even given the Empire's technology advantage. Watching some cinematic scenes (Like End of an Era) I suspect that the Garlean Empire's manpower is considerably greater, especially given the disposable nature the tribunes seem to think of the legionnaires.

It's not made clear just how large of a military the Garleans have.

This is important for me as I'm writing a fanfiction in which the Empire invades another country, and the smaller legion wouldn't have a hope in hell of winning that fight because of numbers.

I don't know of any period in the Roman army where a century was anything like 1000 soldiers. As far as I know, a century generally varied between 80 to 160 legionnaires.

84,000 is really, really small by modern standards. That's in modern times, when you have advanced agriculture and industry to support a large army, and the large population needed to recruit that large army, and a mechanized supply chain to get it all to them. When you go back to medieval times, it's pretty damn big. Garlemald has some pretty impressive technology, but how widespread is it? They've only been fielding this tech for a few decades. You have to have implemented it across society, from top to bottom, and had time for the population to grow in response to the increased agricultural output, to be able to field the kind of army sizes seen in modern times. You use the Roman army to figure its size since it uses Roman terms for its units. The Imperial Roman legions themselves never had much more than 100,000 troops, although there was at least that many again in the auxiliaries (which Garlemald may have as well).