Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part Vb: Pixel Armies for Pixel Societies

This is the second half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va, Vb) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, with fictional worldbuilding and historical patterns in mind. Last time we started checking some fictional militaries against the general patterns we’ve laid out and we’re going to continue doing that this week. This week, I want to turn to some of the more complex militaries structures we’ve discussed and I found they were more common in my repertoire of video games than film or literature, perhaps because the ultra-long-form structure of many video games provides a lot more space to explore complex institutions. So this week, we’re going to look at an example of a professional standing army in the Imperial Legion of The Elder Scrolls series, some private enterprise war through the Vailian Trading Company of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and the finally try to untangle the military system of…