Aegon vs Dany: Numbers

[LordImp]

I have been thinking about this upcoming war and how many soldiers Aegon and Dany will have each. 

Aegon:

- Golden company has 10k 

- Dorne probably joins Aegon. Some claims Dorne could raise a 40-50k strong army . But I dont Dorne joins in full force so let's say 30k.

- I'm supporter of the idea that Mace dies at SE and that Tarly and Rowan joins Aegon. So let's say 40k from the Reach. 

- I think he takes KL and gains the support of the Faith. How many are the Faith militant? Let's say 10k. 

- Some support from the Crownlands. 5k?

- Maybe some from the Riverlands. 10k? I dont think all the riverlords joins him.

With these numbers Aegon can have a 100k army give or take.

Dany:

- Let's say 40k Dothraki .

- 8k unsullied

- 3k sellswords( 500 second sons, 500 stormcrows and 2k windblown)

- How many Ironborn does Vic have? 10k? 

- A lot of freed men will join Dany . I'm making a wild guess and says 50k. 

- I think the R'hllor knights joins her. They have 1k. 

This gives Dany a 112k army before she arrives in Westeros. We can expect casualties along the way so it's give or take. 

She can expect allies in Westeros aswell. I think Tyrion gives her the mountain clans , how big are they? 10k. 

Maybe some from the Riverlands. Let's say 10k.

Let's say 5k from the crownlands. 

It's possible she gets support from someone in the Reach aswell. If so she could get a 30k army from there. 

So with westerosi allies Dany can get a 135k army ( The Reach not included). 

Dany:  ca. 130,000

Aegon: ca. 100,000

I did not take Euron or the North into consideration . 

I'm probably wrong about some of the numbers so please correct me. 

 

[Lord Varys]

That is pretty much impossible to guess at this point. If Aegon plays his cards right and actually takes the Iron Throne the entire South (and perhaps even the North, after Stannis' death) aside from Euron's people (whoever they might be) might acknowledge him as their king. How many men he can recruit when Dany arrives will depend on how strong those regions still are at that point, and how many people are going to die in the fights against Euron and Aegon.

Dany is likely to lose a lot of people along the way, especially Unsullied and sellswords, since those are the guys who are fighting her battles right now. Quite a few Ironborn should die, too.

She should have all the Dothraki which means hundreds of thousands, at least potentially. And the entirety of the Volantene army should also come close to 100,000 in total, I guess.

[Gendarrion]

3 dragons and those 100k wouldn't matter to Dany..

Reach is being flank in multiple fronts by ironborn, dorne and GC, their strength will be greatly reduced, i doubt they can still raise 40k men to spare for Aegon, and riverlands is too devastated to raise 10k and also now that winter has come, might be 4k at most(excluding the freys)..

[Makk]

We don't really know if Dany will have 3 dragons. Vic is going to blow that horn (or have it blown at least) and we have no idea what that is going to do.

[TMIFairy]

I know that this is a fairy tale and a la-la fantasy world with magic and dragons.

But there are limits to suspense of disbelief and Laws of Physics.

Before speculating please calculate how many ships do you need to bring 100K men and at least half that number of horses from Essos to Westeros. And the food and feed for them.

40K Dothraki? Well, if you bring over those Dothraki savages over the sea their families will be turned into dogfood by vengeful slaves and other victims. So you either bring over about half of available Dothraki manpower, leaving them as guars, or you bring over ten dependents (and their horses) for every Dothraki savage. Good luch in fiding non-magical transport for that lot.

Getting the GC over the sea with 10K was a problem already. Do not plan for Daenerys to have many more. 15K - max. Probably less. And plan their arrival at no sooner than 2nd quarter 301AC while you are at it.

 

[LordImp]

2 hours ago, TMIFairy said:

I know that this is a fairy tale and a la-la fantasy world with magic and dragons.

But there are limits to suspense of disbelief and Laws of Physics.

Before speculating please calculate how many ships do you need to bring 100K men and at least half that number of horses from Essos to Westeros. And the food and feed for them.

40K Dothraki? Well, if you bring over those Dothraki savages over the sea their families will be turned into dogfood by vengeful slaves and other victims. So you either bring over about half of available Dothraki manpower, leaving them as guars, or you bring over ten dependents (and their horses) for every Dothraki savage. Good luch in fiding non-magical transport for that lot.

Getting the GC over the sea with 10K was a problem already. Do not plan for Daenerys to have many more. 15K - max. Probably less. And plan their arrival at no sooner than 2nd quarter 301AC while you are at it.

 

She will get the iron fleet and probably the volantene fleet and qartheen fleet. These three fleets combined might be as much as 2k ships. 

[SeanF]

Potentially, each side will have enormous forces.

But, the most important issue is logistics.  How does Aegon go about feeding and equipping an enormous army?  How does Dany transport an enormous army to Westeros?

[TMIFairy]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Potentially, each side will have enormous forces.

But, the most important issue is logistics.  How does Aegon go about feeding and equipping an enormous army?  How does Dany transport an enormous army to Westeros?

Indeed. The logistics are daunting, if not impossible. Up to the French Revolution (or rather the agricultural revolution of the late XVIIIth century and the potato) it was very rare to have 100K men (and great number of horses which need oats!) in an army at one time and place.

Feeding those hypothetical Aegon's or Daenerys' mobs is a problem. Especially once they land.

At Lepanto each side had 220-250 galleys and 70-80K men - sailors and soldiers.

Either force was at the end of a separate Line Of Communications/Supply.

And no horses ...

Just had a thought - looking into Ottoman logistics at the Great Siege of Malta could give us a sense of scale of what might be needed.

During WWI the single largest item transported to the front was horse feed ...

[SeanF]

31 minutes ago, TMIFairy said:

Indeed. The logistics are daunting, if not impossible. Up to the French Revolution (or rather the agricultural revolution of the late XVIIIth century and the potato) it was very rare to have 100K men (and great number of horses which need oats!) in an army at one time and place.

Feeding those hypothetical Aegon's or Daenerys' mobs is a problem. Especially once they land.

At Lepanto each side had 220-250 galleys and 70-80K men - sailors and soldiers.

Either force was at the end of a separate Line Of Communications/Supply.

And no horses ...

Just had a thought - looking into Ottoman logistics at the Great Siege of Malta could give us a sense of scale of what might be needed.

During WWI the single largest item transported to the front was horse feed ...

The Ottomans probably had about 30,000 soldiers at the siege of Malta.  Another comparison is Belisarius' attack on Carthage, where he had about 15,000 soldiers.  In both cases, assaults were launched across the Sea over a distance of about 1,000 miles.  Only the most well-organised States could organise such attacks (it would be a big challenge for most modern States).

I imagine that Dany would want to secure Dragonstone and the neighbouring coasts as beachheads, before ferrying in soldiers and supplies.  To do that, she'd probably need Pentos as a base.

[LordImp]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Potentially, each side will have enormous forces.

But, the most important issue is logistics.  How does Aegon go about feeding and equipping an enormous army?  How does Dany transport an enormous army to Westeros?

Aegon will be dependent on getting the Reach , which I think he don't. 

Dany probably also gets a enourmous fleet. And might leave forces behind in Essos , for example the Windblown in Pentos. 

[The Sleeper]

The organized armies running ordered campaigns of the first books are not happening. Logistics and the ability to exercize effective authority prevent that. The conflict will be more about establishing control and maintaining order. More than that it looks like it will heavy religious connotations, with the Faith siding with Aegon and Dany having the support of the red priests.

I expect more smaller scale conflicts than one big battle. Dany potentially has access to unlimited manpower. But she will have trouble ferrying them over and organizing them.

[TMIFairy]

On a related (?) tangent - on other boards a favourite subject which crops up every three months or so is - "What if the Japanese followed up the Pearl Harbour attack with a landing on Oahu?"

This brings out people who open shipping registers and lists of ships assigned to operations in other theatres - or indispensable for such unglamorous purposes like bringing food or raw materials to Japan - who then say - "Hawaiian landing not possible - Japan simply did not have enough freighters for this. And all the ninjas in the world (or TPTWP) cannot change that simple fact."

[Lord Varys]

Dany's fleet has the potential to be enormous. She will have the Ironborn and the Volatene armada. And she is potentially going to capture Qartheen and Ghiscari ships. In addition, the Ironborn are most likely going to continue to capture additional traders.

On the way to Westeros she may capture even more ships once she frees the slaves in Volantis, Lys, and Tyrosh. At the same time the Dothraki should capture Pentos and Myr on the mainland, making the potential effectively insane. She could be deploying Dothraki from two harbors on the coast of the Narrow Sea - Myr and Pentos - while the other part of her army continues with the armada that has set out from Slaver's Bay, growing ever larger on the slow crawl to Westeros.

Once she secures a landing site in Westeros there are no limits as to how many men she will be able to ferry over since the distance isn't that large and ships can be reused again and again to ferry men over.

How many men she is going to bring to Westeros is completely unclear in light of all that.

It could be only tens of thousands but it could also be hundreds of thousands.

[LordImp]

9 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Dany's fleet has the potential to be enormous. She will have the Ironborn and the Volatene armada. And she is potentially going to capture Qartheen and Ghiscari ships. In addition, the Ironborn are most likely going to continue to capture additional traders.

On the way to Westeros she may capture even more ships once she frees the slaves in Volantis, Lys, and Tyrosh. At the same time the Dothraki should capture Pentos and Myr on the mainland, making the potential effectively insane. She could be deploying Dothraki from two harbors on the coast of the Narrow Sea - Myr and Pentos - while the other part of her army continues with the armada that has set out from Slaver's Bay, growing ever larger on the slow crawl to Westeros.

Once she secures a landing site in Westeros there are no limits as to how many men she will be able to ferry over since the distance isn't that large and ships can be reused again and again to ferry men over.

How many men she is going to bring to Westeros is completely unclear in light of all that.

It could be only tens of thousands but it could also be hundreds of thousands.

Let's say Dany gets 2k strong fleet , how many soldiers can she transport with 2k ships?

[TMIFairy]

Do a "forty men = eight horses calculation".

If - and this is a big if - 2000 ships is even possible at that time and place, c.70-90,000 men.

I'm going by wiki and the numbers of ships and men for the 1281 invasion of Japan.

That being across a body of water narrower than the Narrow Sea, some 120 versus 200-250 miles across.

 

 

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, LordImp said:

Let's say Dany gets 2k strong fleet , how many soldiers can she transport with 2k ships?

I don't know. It would depend on the sizes of the ships, I guess. And George has yet to give us a description of a war galley in his books, or comment on the capacity of those ships as troop transporters. We don't even know how large crews of such ships have to be to keep them functioning.

For instance, it would be very interesting to know how large the Redwyne fleet actually is and how many men are with Paxter right now.

A hint how this goes has been given with the Golden Company getting to Westeros. 10,000 sellswords were shipped from Volantis to the Stormlands only by the private traders present in Volantis at that time. They didn't use the Volantene navy for this. And Volantis was planning its own campaign against Daenerys at the same time.

We should also keep in mind that George isn't exactly the covering the tiniest details of troop movements and recruiting. I mean, if you take the size of the North and the Reach/Stormlands is it truly realistic that the armies in those regions were raised as quickly as they were in AGoT/ACoK? I don't think so. Castles can be reached by raven but towns, villages, settlements, farms, etc. have to be reached by rider/messenger. And how long is that going to take? How quickly can even a castle like Winterfell sent word to the people in the remoter lands around the castle? And how quickly can the infantry march to the castle?

[Prince Yourwetdream Aeryn]

There are other ways to say that people from Riverlands and Crownlands are cunts.

[LordImp]

On 8/23/2017 at 0:56 AM, Grazdan zo Azer said:

There are other ways to say that people from Riverlands and Crownlands are cunts.

Huh?

[LordImp]

Aegon can potentially get support from Lys , Myr and Tyrosh , I think Illyrio might arrange a deal with the three daughters. If so Aegon can get the combined fleet of the three daughters and can rival Dany at the sea. 

If Aegon gets support from the three daugthers then maybe Braavos joins the fray ? 

Humprey Hightower is currently in Lys to get sellsails . He might get involved with Aegon aswell , especially if Aegon fights Euron.

[SerBronnsMullet]

2 hours ago, LordImp said:

Aegon can potentially get support from Lys , Myr and Tyrosh , I think Illyrio might arrange a deal with the three daughters. If so Aegon can get the combined fleet of the three daughters and can rival Dany at the sea. 

If Aegon gets support from the three daugthers then maybe Braavos joins the fray ? 

Humprey Hightower is currently in Lys to get sellsails . He might get involved with Aegon aswell , especially if Aegon fights Euron.

Why would Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh join Aegon? They're busy fighting their own war against each other and I don't see how they gain anything from allying Aegon.