Animesque fantasy setting

>Animesque fantasy setting
>The equivalent of Ki, Nen etc is a thing in setting. I tend to call it aether.

Any reason to use normal armies if there are knights who can bombard you with not!kamehameha and similar shit?

Any reason normal armies can't bombard you with not!kamehameha and similar shit?

This.
Changes to the setting will effect warfare. Whether that means that armies are no longer a thing, is up in the air.

>bombard you with not!kamehameha
Bombarding armies with Hawaiian kings?

The kamehameha guys would be kept in reserve as protection. After all, committing your ki users to a fight would just leave them open to being attacked by other ki users.

It's the equivalent of nuclear deterrent. Door to the sheer destructive nature of it, people don't want to use it because of mutually assured destruction. Think of the cold war, but with mages instead of nukes.

Traditional armies are used for defense, but most of the defense spending is in guerilla warfare and espionage because open war invites escalation which invites using mages, which incites essentially a nuclear apocalypse

Tends to make the battle drag on a lot longer than it would have otherwise.

I like the way the Malazan franchise handles mages and armies.

Weak mages just act as support to the squad they're assigned to. They can do things like heal wounds, hide the squad from detection, or facilitate communication between elements of the army, but they don't win battles on their own. Strong mages are primarily used to counter the strong mages on the enemy side while the troops fight it out. If one side has strong mages while the other doesn't, or they have a significantly higher number of them, then the side without mages is pretty much guaranteed to get their shit rocked unless those mages somehow get taken out early.

How common do you want aether-users to be?

He actually was using cannons to bombard his foes, you know :)