Military Overview
Aurelion's armies cannot be ranked by headcount alone. The Codex uses Battle Potential as a rough comparative measure, then asks the more important question: where can each force actually bring that power to bear?
Numbers That Depend on Place
The military overview is an intelligence model, not a divine census. Its Battle Potential scale is explicitly approximate and compiled from chronicles, reconnaissance and Inquisitorial treatises; one unit is benchmarked to an average infantryman with spear and shield. That makes the figures useful for comparing mass, elite quality and special weapons, but dangerous when mistaken for a law of physics. A hundred thousand points behind a wall, at sea, under a ritual field or outside the territory that sustains them can mean four very different wars.
Among human states, the White Kings possess the strongest conventional combination of mass, discipline and logistics. Their weakness is speed and political cost; their special advantage is the ability to suppress magical power rather than simply add more of their own. The Empire of the Black Sun converts fanaticism into offensive shock and can destroy enemy formations at terrible cost to its own. The Federation of Storm Cities is much smaller on land but turns fleets, marines and ritual weather into near-dominance at sea. Dragon Bone forces are middling in raw mass and exceptional in engineered surprises. Three Coins has less standing strength than the great monarchies, yet credit allows it to buy armies and contract magic can change who is still fighting for whom.
Velmir exposes the problem with treating political maps as force maps. It is formally part of the White Kingdom sphere but fields a semi-independent mix of noble retinues, town infantry, militia and temporary mercenaries. Its weakness is unity; its survival mechanism is precisely the opposite - geography, flexible hiring and diplomacy. The same principle applies even more strongly to nonhuman forces. Trolls are living siege engines but few. Vampires are individually powerful and strategically hidden. Ratfolk are weak per body and devastating as disease and infiltration. Orc-goblin hosts combine elite physical force with numbers and machinery.
The undead are the clearest warning against simple ranking. The Dark Forest may support around half a million raised dead, an astonishing total, yet that strength collapses with distance from the dark territory that anchors it. The overview is therefore best read as a map of conversion problems: population into troops, troops into effective force, force into theater-specific advantage. Whoever mistakes the final number for the whole answer is already planning the wrong campaign.
