Also, our country is divvied up in some kinda knock-off of the Byzantine theme system--the central government trains and dispatches a regional army of uniform size known as a tagma--all of whom are composed of the same units in the same proportions. Internal trade makes sure that both soldiers from poorer and richer provinces have the same brigandine, the same muskets/rifles/greatswords, etc. Each of these armies is responsible for provincial defense. Each theme, however, must recruit the soldiers for its army, with excess volunteers being rerouted as necessary--in times of peace, each theme fields a single tagma. When going on the defense, reservists are called up--each theme is expected to muster at least a second full reserve tagma, hopefully of equal quality to the first, though this is impractical.
Currently, these four tagmata are the most active: Amarikiyan, Alchemilic, Oumiyan, and Exegentic. They are continuously deployed for frontier defense--their duties make them best used to launch probing/retaliatory raids; they remain, in force, within the Empire's borders at all times (or as often as possible).
On the attack, the Empire noticeably fields smaller, less cumbersome armies--rarely will an invasion force comprise of formations exceeding those of the Utanic, Canichoral, and Momosfikonian tagmata, plus the Imperial Guard units brought along on campaign. Touavgon, Mavrikoukleion, and Satonikon all keep their tagma as, basically, divegrass midfielders. If a MASSIVE push on either defense or offense is needed, we throw them in. they were instrumental in securing and taking the former /pcg/ lands, and it's likely we'll transfer the Satonic Tagma to the frontier once we finish setting the border at the southern river, and carve out Thema Ayania.
I would like to COMPLETELY occupy /voms/, but I need a subject buffer state between us and /tsun/, since we can't just...annihilate those slug-fuckers, Holo(live)domor-style.
Perhaps /pcg/ can finish handing over their northern territories, and we help them take some of the southern lands of /vsj+/? Those are more easily defensible, we both shorten our frontiers at the expense of the regional hegemon.
Why yes, we are imperialist jackasses. Proposed border changes over time. Natural borders now make more sense. We further weaken the continent's hegemon, give PCG some better commercial lands and shorten THEIR vsj+ border. The end goal is to carve up /tsun/ into a rump state between /clg/, /indie/, and /ppg/. /pcg/ is totally welcome to swallow up 774 if they so wish.
Would the lads over at /ppg/, /pkg/, and /wactor/ like to have some fun?
Ayakkayoli is...not Germanic. Not strictly. We come from a HEAVILY "Romanized" (Or Holonized, whatever it may be) subject people of HoloLive, specifically refugees/colonists from the lands that became /hlgg/, Watson, the Gen V splits, NijiEN. On the way, we picked up some influence culturally from /wvt/, but not many of their people. This happened towards the end of the Great Split, view us as, perhaps, taking inspiration for our origins from the Vlachs, Aztecs, Persians, and Neo-Assyrians. When we arrived and set up the Despotate of Canichora, we quickly began assimilating many of the not!Germanic, not!Avar, not!Sarmatian, not!Slavic tribes milling about in the wake of 774's collapse. Those who did not end up in our orbit eventually became, specifically, /pcg/, /pkg/, /tsun/. We made the local tribes culturally in communion with us, encouraging /ñ/ immigration, and establishing a military in the face of what appeared to be unwarranted aggression from other tribes of the people we had just mixed peacefully with and integrated! (Turns out one of our early leaders made a racist joke about some dead /tsun/ leader and we, for whatever reason, were singled out for using more prostitutes as spies than the other countries) Centuries of back-and-forth war ensued--/voms/ was an ancient polity of ethnic connection to the old 774 power, we chose not to fuck with them at first. Naval skirmishes with /tsun/ abounded. /ppg/ rebuffed our trade offers, and the border stalled not too far from the north of the two rivers between us and /pcg/.
And then guns showed up. We were already the only party on the continent who bothered with doing shit like writing strategic manuals, standardizing/centralizing how armies were raised, etc., we were just small. Some regional satraps over at /indie/ had apparently found a few old war treatises? We started an officer's school just to teach out of the smuggled copies we got our hands on, and we would like to point out that our intel says /moon/, /haha/, and /rose/ adopted the teachings within at the same time. (OOC: that's who plays rts and gsg) /kfp/ took a view of these manuals and really only adopted their advice at the squadron and battalion level--they got real good at caravan guarding, small raids, picket/skirmish lines, and battles with a few hundred soldiers on each side. But not much else.
When mass infantry became a general world-wide thing much the same way as it did during the Chinese Warring States period, and like late-medieval Europe OTL, we were poised to exploit the simultaneous development of gunpowder--a cultural exchange between us and /haha/ resulted in our combined efforts producing the first crude DRAGOON tactics (OOC: Selen and Lumi play RTS that's literally it), which spread rapidly to the other nijien splits...and not to OUR neighbors, because fuck us, right? Why would we ever invent useful shit? Only /pkg/ tried this out, and fewer than a fifth of their military leadership got on board--to this day, only their elite Sundemon life guards fight like our normal cavalry troopers. Well, turns out foot archers don't do nearly as well against light cavalry if you outrange them with carbines.