Whipping out my copy of the _Imperium Romanum II_ rules, I find a claim in the Designer's notes that the total armed forces of the Empire, including auxiliaries, naval forces, blah blah blah, were getting on for 500,000 men during this period (32-30 BC).
Sandy invites us to:
> Note that the legions varied a LOT in their size
Plus there was legion reform, which seems to have approximately halved the average size by the time of about Diocletian, just to further complicate matters.
> Of course, the Roman Empire was a hell of a lot bigger than
> the Lunar Empire. One estimate I've read was that it was populated by
> around 60 million people.
At what point? I'm sure its recruiting base for legions was never anything like this large. Certainly at the time of Actium, the vast majority of legionary recruiting was being done in the Italian penisula. What was _its_ population, then? And they dredged up about 60 legions, never mind other troops. I'd settle for this sort of ratio, I think... (Which almost certainly represents the peak for such, in the Imperial period.)
Furthermore, as Sandy himself notes, the bigger an Empire gets, the proportionately smaller its army tends to become. So one can't simply assume that the Lunar army ought to be a tenth the size of whatever size the Roman army was, when (and if) its population was 60 million.
> The Lunar Empire is smaller, less wealthy
> (not per capita, of course, but overall), and its people are less
> "romanized" than the Roman Empire's folk.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. That the Lunars aren't as advanced/civilised as the Romans; or that the one empire isn't as culturally uniform?
Probably both are true, but I don't think either argues for a smaller army; just a less advanced, and less uniform one, which we've already posited.
> Looks to me like the Lunar Army is still, IMO, around the
> size of the Dragon Pass contingent.
If this is true, then either: the Historical Outcome of the DP campaigns must have been a series of spectacularly indecisive stalemates; or the latter part of the KoS timeline understates the ease with which the Argrathi squish the Moral Equivalents of the Native Furthest Corps, having defeated the Whole Lunar Army in Dragon Pass (region and game).
Still betting on a Big One,
Alex.
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