Does Garlemald have enough for full out war?

[Lauront]

Agreed. I meant whoever is driving the stuff making it into the MSQ, not so much the overall body of lore of the game.

[Jonnycbad]

I think Garlemald is actually a smallish nation. Their military is large because conscript other conquered countries' people into their military but there are actually very few full-blooded Garleans in their military btw, mostly officers. Garleans aren't typically great fighters because they can't manipulate aether or use magic to their advantage, limiting them to mostly gunners and armored warriors who use magitek.

[Claymore65]

I guess a lot of it is a consequence of this being an MMO and not a single player game.

I think this actually cuts down right to the heart of the issue. Having a consistent world that thousands, if not millions, of players need to experience at the same time puts up many limitations. It makes it much harder for villains to, for example, utterly destroy a city, since lower-level players still need to go there. It's the reason that, despite the XIVth legion being mostly defeated, they still have well-fortified and well-armed bases in the middle of Eorzea. It's the reason that, despite Garlemald destroying the rebels at Rhalgr's reach, the city is still available to visit afterwards. It brings a lot of limitations.

I think another reason, though, is that failure from a story perspective, while interesting, can also be frustrating and anti-climatic. To use an example from this thread, the Xaela tribes seemingly had no trouble adjusting to fighting Garlean war machines despite their presumed lack of experience fighting them. While that may not make a ton of sense, having them be completely ineffective against Garlemald would also make the entire arc of acquiring their aid feel pointless. It would also be tedious to have a "let's teach you how to fight Garlemald" segment each time we recruit an ally unused to fighting them. If you spend a lot of time in the story acquiring allies, for example, it's important to make that contribution feel meaningful. To use an example from another game, in Dragon Age Origins your travel the land acquiring allies to aid you in a big battle. During the battle, you get a random NPC from each faction you recruited, making you feel like your efforts are rewarded. This logic is especially important when it comes to video games. Most of the time, you want players to feel like they have agency, and are making meaningful contributions to the plot. Giving their efforts a successful payoff, such as having the Xaela rip apart Garlean ships in a cool cutscene, is one of the easiest and most satisfying ways to reward players. Similarly, having seemingly successful efforts fail is oftentimes frustrating, such as when you beat a character in a battle, but it turns out your opponent "actually beat you" in the cutscene immediately afterwards. Failure definitely plays a significant role in an interesting story, and makes the eventual victory much more satisfying, but it's a really tough balance to strike.

I don't personally think FFXIV has balanced the "Success:Failure" ratio exactly yet, but I do understand why they lean heavily towards making the player's own efforts successful. I would personally love to see a bit more Grey-Grey conflicts in the future, and they have found a measure of success with it in the past. I thought Heavensward did a decent job of balancing the Ishagardian/Dravanian conflict, with both sides holding onto past hatreds and avoiding avenues toward peace, and both sides requiring change. I don't really see the Eorzean:Garlemald conflict developing in the same way, but I definitely could see us interacting with and learning about the better sides of Garlemald in the near future. The existence of not only a more positive Garlean faction, the Populares, along with a named faction for them to oppose, the Optimares, hints toward a more peaceful situation with the nation eventually.

[ObsidianFire]

There's also the problem that lots of people skip the MSQ because they're mostly here for the gameplay. Whatever story is told in the MSQ has to be fairly easy to grasp so that when the next major expansion comes around, those people aren't completely lost as to where the broad story is going next. The important part is that the subtle stuff is in the game someplace (as opposed to not being there at all) and the people who are interested in lore are rewarded for taking their time and looking for it.

[VargasVermillion]

The estinian scenario was especially silly when he wasn't even dodging, just standing there doing nothing. Cid i feel had potential to be a great character but his demeanor towards his former nation makes no sense, I believe he mentioned in the ivalice questline that he "doesn't let the love for his nation blind him to the faults" see that right there would make for a good thing to explore and the duality of doing 'whats right' even though most of his own people are against him. There definitely would be some racism towards garleans on the eorzea side because that would make sense but cid is just there, no conflict from anyone and he doesn't even feel slightly guilty at the idea of abandoning his home land and even if he didn't that part of his character isn't explored either, he's an unnatural character to me, more of a plot device.

[Theodric]

WoW is a pretty dated game yet made effective use of phasing technology. Even without it, though, we don't need to see entire settlements and cities wiped off of the map. We just need to see consistency and less nonsense like Estinien dodging bullets from countless soldiers whilst standing still and disabling a cannon. By all means, he should have destroyed the canon - but since he only showed up as a cameo in the first place he might as well have been injured to better justify him wandering off again. That way Estinien would have had his moment of glory and Garlemald wouldn't be shown to be a hollow threat.

[ObsidianFire]

The estinian scenario was especially silly when he wasn't even dodging, just standing there doing nothing. Cid i feel had potential to be a great character but his demeanor towards his former nation makes no sense, I believe he mentioned in the ivalice questline that he "doesn't let the love for his nation blind him to the faults" see that right there would make for a good thing to explore and the duality of doing 'whats right' even though most of his own people are against him. There definitely would be some racism towards garleans on the eorzea side because that would make sense but cid is just there, no conflict from anyone and he doesn't even feel slightly guilty at the idea of abandoning his home land and even if he didn't that part of his character isn't explored either, he's an unnatural character to me, more of a plot device.

Cid's characterization makes way more sense if you see his cutscenes in 1.0. Pretty much everything you just described is part of his character arc there. For better or worse, almost none of that gets brought up in ARR and forward. Well... some of it is in the Pratorium cutscenes, but those are almost always skipped over by people...

The thing with Cid is that he got a front-row seat into how bad messing with technology can go. His dad, Midas nan Garlond all but abandoned him to work on the Meteor Project which ended with Dalamud nuking Midas and the entire Garlean city of Bozja from orbit. That woke him up to the reality of his situation in Garlemald and he decided he didn't want to keep developing magitek that was only used for war. His goal since then has been to prevent what could be the next Bozja incident which is why he keeps sealing powerful technology away. He's essentially a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, saw the atomic bomb dropped, was horrified about the whole thing and then wasn't able to stop it from happening again. I wouldn't be surprised if he was blaming himself for not being able to halt the 7th Umbral Calamity and he's been trying to make up for that along with everything else.

[Hinoto-no-Ryuji]

I also think that too much is being made of Cid "selling secrets."

There are basically two ways that we can interpret Magitek: (a) that it's monumentally powerful, and depicting the advantage given to Garlemald by possessing it simply isn't being "allowed" for story purposes; or (b) that it's not nearly as much an advantage as one might assume and that Garlemald, for all its bluster, owes much of its dominance to cleverly taking advantage of circumstance rather than sheer brute force.

At this point, I think there's more evidence for (b); at any rate, as the game goes on, (a) has ended up creating a serious level of dissonance with itself and what we see onscreen. The truth could obviously lie somewhere in between - for instance, that the world was conceived with the idea that Garlemald's Magitek makes them an Empire of such might that the whole of Eorzea would struggle with a single legion, but as the story went on this was quietly retconned as it became more convenient for them to be something of a paper tiger - but it's ultimately sort of moot.

The reason I mention Cid is because...well, what exactly has his introduction of Magitek done for Eorzea that could be considered harmful to Garlemald? Certainly, there are a number of small conveniences, and it seems to benefit airship technology in particular, but in a military sense? Remember, we actually see Black Magic totaling a Reaper, and it's not like we need Magitek to beat Magitek in any of the Garlean dungeons or encounters. There's actually not a whole lot of evidence that Cid has been providing the sort of technology that could hurt those he cares about back in Garlemald, and if we take Magitek as more of an alternative to the magics employed by the rest of Hydaelyn rather than the sole secret to Garlean dominance, his decision to leave his fatherland behind to escape its narrow application for technology that he loves becomes far less of a sin.

[CaesarCV]

One of the interesting aspects regarding the Garlond Ironworks in Eorzea is actually that they're fairly limited in what they can do. Since they're bereft of the sort of large magitek manufacturing equipment and facilities common in Garlemald, they have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to replicate Magitek with the fairly limited technology of Eorzea. That's part of why Eorzean airships tend to rely on wood and sails rather than the steel, ceruleum spewing engines of Garlean airships. And to be fair, Cid isn't there to provide a 'fighting chance' to Eorzea. His goal is to promote much more peaceful uses of the technology. He's a deliberate counter to people such as Nael, who utilize technology and knowledge recklessly or for the pursuit of power.

[Ametrine]

One thing that I missed was Camp Bluefog's purpose as a ceruleum mining operation as well as a strategic outpost, most due to how little we see ceruleum utilized by Eorzeans. It makes plenty sense for Garleans to desire it, ceruleum being the exact material that made magitek a possible type of technology, but you never see it used in any day-to-day activities or military use.

If anything, all signs infer that only the population of pureblooded Garleans remains small, and building their army via conscription after a hostile takeover makes for a less that 100% loyal and top-class military. It's an army of prisoners.

It's a SOCIETY of prisoners.