How big is a division?

[zute]

I apologize for another lame-ass question, but in the story I'm writing now this actually has relevance. It's the difference between paranoia and reasonable concern.

When you rescue Riordan he tells you that Loghain had turned away 200 Grey Wardens and two dozen divisions of cavalry.  When I looked up division sizes I got utterly enormous numbers like 10,000 for single light infantry division, in the modern army. I'm sure that must be vastly larger than in middle ages terms.

Does anyone have a feel for how many actually people that would be? 

My thanks!

Zute

Comments

[prisoner_24601]

Niniane has a great post above that deals with this, but I'm pretty much going to echo what she said. It's true that there's a lot of telling and not so much showing, but this is not Anora's story. It's the warden's. And most of what would make Anora a good ruler happened in the five years prior to Ostagar, and probably wouldn't be very interesting to observe as it would mostly be administrative stuff. A lot of people praise her skill - Eamon, Alistair, Loghain, Celene as well as random NPC's - although I do agree that it would be nice if they were more specific about what she's good at.

We do, however, get a glimpse in the game of an intelligent and savvy and ruthless and flexible woman - which strikes me as the sort of person who would make a good ruler. And the differences between her and Alistair's answers when you ask them at the Landsmeet about why each of them should be in charge are huge - she comes across as far more reasonable and articulate than him.

But I do agree that Alistair makes a great looking package to Ferelden nobility. Anora hasn't produced an heir, which totally gets dumped on her unfairly, her father has completely undermined her authorty by siezing control, and he's one of the Grey Wardens. Alistair is the sort of dude that would appeal to a panicked group of nobles that use the idea of superority of bloodlines to keep their own priviledged place at the top of the food chain. I think it's entirely plausable that the nobles would go for him over her, but really I think it's a terrible decision overall.

What I'm saying though is that really, when you take everything into context, without the biases of the nobility towards favoring bloodlines and their panic about the blight, Alistair is totally unqualified to be the king (at least without some major help from either Anora or the Warden). He's not a leader and defers at every possible opportunity. He has none of administrative skills to rule, hasn't been trained for it, and has no real desire to do it unless you harden him and piss him off. To me, it's sort of like taking Derek Jeter and making him the head of Ford Motor company - yeah he's popular and good looking and probably a nice guy, but that doesn't make him qualified to put him a job where hundreds of thousands of people depend on making complex decisions.

Don't get me wrong, I do see why some wardens would pick him over Anora - like your city elf example before, but that almost strikes me as "Okay this is the lesser of two bad choices, and I'm going with him because there's no third option" more than "Alistair would be a great leader."