Ancestry and physical appearance is not the sole marker of ethnic identity
Edit:
Darn storm cut my internet for a bit.
Basically what i was wondering was what the various ethnic minorities - if any (i mean, for all we know the average "ethnic ymaryn" could be one of dozen sub ethnic groups that identify together but has no majority) - make up our population.
I kniw we have a clear-cut north-south cultural divide with the marches, etc there. But are there more? I think its an interesting topic anyway....
Our social divides are less ethnic identity and more social/geographical position identity due to how we keep mixing people in and out.
You are wrong about this basic walls are only good strategically speaking against raiders not Armies, and we do need to get watchtower up but it's never going to be a priority and pretending voters are going to vote otherwise is dangerous. Losing King of the Hill is always going to be some kind of land lost therefore we will always fight a war to keep it. If you think that the Highlanders or thunder horse could get King of the Hill from us without at least making us give up Txolla you're wrong. It all goes to how we fight Wars, we can't stand the thought of the countryside going up in flames and we will never use the defensive policy as it's never the most efficient option, so we fight hard and fast to the hilt and the way to prepare for that is to get our mercenary Armies set up beforehand and keep the tech edge we have.
The bolded is utter bullshit. Walls changed the cost of defense so dramatically that historically you needed ten to one odds
with siegecraft to take truly massive walls, without an extended siege, and even then they often failed because the attacking soldiers could be broken simply by having a good view of seeing the first ranks die horribly trying to force the walls, and even if they won, they have lost a LOT of manpower, and would be hard pressed to take another city. Towers relaying signal fires allowed a given unit of warriors to cover similarly more geography.
That's what makes wars winnable in the transition to professional armies. We can build mercenaries all we want, we'd run out of wealth before we had enough to cover the whole territory.
The bronze age to pre-cannon defense schema was that the attacker always had higher local troop concentration because they choose where to fight, but lower theater troop concentration because the defender always has better logistics to supply a force.
Thus, the attacker's challenge is to attack and overcome locations before defenders could move in theater forces.
Thus, the defender's challenge is to detect attacks and withdraw human assets from the field, to hold off the immediate attack while state armies are moved in place to counter them.
What walls do is change the formula for overcoming locations. Even basic walls require two to one odds to overcome cleanly, but for a large state this is not too difficult to obtain. Five to one odds and a local garrison of 1000 dudes could stop an army dead for months, which is enough time for the state armies to move into position, at which point they can either choose to face hammer and anvil tactics, or they could withdraw to preserve assets.
What towers do is change the loss formula. Without towers, if they attack you WILL lose farms and mines because you don't have enough time to pull back your civilians and militia have no hope of stalling an army in the open field. With towers, you can greatly minimize losses, instead of a 10-20 year loss of productivity of a dead farmer or miner, you lose a few months of productivity to repairing and replacing anything they can smash(burning on the other hand was only really feasible for stuff that could be quickly replaced on the civilization level)
As such the entire model of warfare you're thinking off isn't a real one. Everyone avoided the hell out of big set piece battles where possible because even if you won the battle you lost in terms of sheer manpower invested. Wars were always about striking at and cutting off economic infrastructure, so whoever could make it so that their enemies could afford to take one city every 30 years had won.
...and we already have 100% basic walls(meaning they must have at least twice the local garrison to make a go at it, preferably thrice), and only need to fill in the significant walls and towers.
