Animesque fantasy setting

One prick with an energy beam can't occupy a city, much less keep a whole country safe round-the-clock

Besides, you need a range of force options to respond appropriately to different threat types. If you trotted out the big guns for every pickpocket and soccer hooligan, you'd wear them out and wouldn't have much left to govern.

Pic unrelated

Reminds me of a setting that had sorta-DnD rules. Basically both sides used cannon fodder to sort of feel out the battlefield and try to determine where the opponents high level characters were.

All the "level one" guys were expected to die. The hope was they could let you know where the opponent's actual army was before getting killed.

IIRC, that also led to a martial-economy of rock-paper-scissors ($soldier-$$assassin-$$$$archmage), where people with minor magical talents were snapped up for training as counter-mage assassins.

>dat filename

>If one side has more powerful mages is basically garanteed to win

Never liked this. If magic in your setting is this powerful and consistent/reliable, then it's not worth doing anything not related to it or playing anyone that's not a mage.

High-level fighters could become army-slaying demigods too. Mages just outnumbered them in the high power tiers, like fighters outnumber mages at the low power tiers.

So you are saying that high level fighters become mages.

Depends on your setting. If your mages are Conan levels of magic then barbarians and fighters have a chance. If your mages are D&D levels then they don't. It's hard to balance them without making either unstoppable.

You can always just rule in that mages can't tank hits and warriors get so strong they can hurl rocks 500 yards away with pinpoint accuracy to counterspell them.

No? That's just a dumb D&Dism.

Just because you can shoot a laser beam doesn't mean you can hold captured territory.

>1 man kills a whole army
>not a mage

It does mean that you aren't going to send an army to recapture it on account of the laser.

Read the series. Dassem Ultor is rescuing small armies and killing dudes by the thousands with a pointy metal stick one at a time, long before he makes a deal with Death; and he's only one of the top-tier no-magic fighters.

I can wait five Namekian minutes.

There won't be much left of the contested territory once everyone's done blasting it with lasers

I guess we'll need some level 1 pointy stick men to do what the laser-men can't, then, and take it intact.

>why do infantry and tanks and fighter jets exist in a world of nuclear ICBMs stored in mobile underwater dungeons

Because nukes can't hold back, they either explode or they don't. High level characters with super powers can use lesser powers or hold back on the higher powers they have.

>hold back or use weaker powers
So now the same investment gets you 100 pointy stick men, vs 1 laserman...with the power of 1 pointy stick man.

This doesn't sound like a winning strategy.

Unless laserman can dial a laser to be equal to the force of 1, 10, 50, 100, or more pointy stick men. In which case he can clean the city out without flattening it. Most people aren't going to fight a guy like that to the death after he kills a couple of dozen people with a finger flick.

To say nothing of that ki powers tend to come with toughness/speed increases that make lesser attacks/opponents useless. Allowing them to stomp all forces "not on their level" with impunity.

A single man can't take and hold territory. He can't root out insurgents, he can't occupy a garrison, he can't keep maintain a constant presence that the entire enemy populace can see. You need regular soldiers for that. It's the same reason why the existence of bomber aircraft hasn't eliminated the need for ground forces in the modern world.

>Achilles, Patroklos, and any number of other Greek heroes are mages

But they die to a mage like all the other fighters and take as long to make, so they're an inefficient investment.

plenty of heroic figures die just as easily against lots of monsters and casters. Doesn't mean they don't slay the monster/caster anyway.

Of course, there's some survivor bias in there.

See anima.
Basically, you "pretend" fight with armies for clay (need boots to oppress new territories) but solve real issues with 5-6 men kill teams.

>not!kamehameha
>notnot
Because exactly kamehamehas means it's just dragonball and they didn't have that.

He's that one faggot who posts in every caster v martial thread.

Do not respond.

That sounds like WH40K
>Die for the emperor! Or die TRYING!

>One prick with an energy beam can't occupy a city, much less keep a whole country safe round-the-clock
Tell that to Superman.

Are op's hypothetical z-fighter knights superrman?

Don't superman fuck up a few times, I remember in a /co/ thread they had a page where superman keeps a collection of letters from the people asking why wasn't their loved ones saved.

I mean there's characters like Lu Bu and Achilles and shit who slay scores of men like swatting a fly.

Idk if they're literally saiyans one (or a small squad) is enough to take over a planet because they don't capture territory as much as they just cow you into submission by annihilating entire cities if you don't play ball.

You mean the prime example of why a single man explicitly CANT save everyone? There are a number of stories where he want to, and even tries to save everyone. But he can't be literally everywhere at once and he agonizes over it. One person can't save everyone, but one man can be the symbol of hope that people look towards.

Neither can an occupation force. The point was that Superman could keep a territory occupied in a scenario where he was working for a government and keep other lesser forces from trying to retake the territory. No occupation force in history could keep every individual person in the occupied territory safe. Nor would they care to try in most cases.

DO NOT PURSUE LU BU!

Considering they can throw kamehamehas at people, they might as well be.
Superman still manages to occupy more space and save more people as one man than a fully armed police force can as dozens. I mean, if given the choice, I'd rather have one Superman than dozens of enforcers who can and will succumb to bias in the pursuit of their jobs.

The dichotomy presented isn't between superman and dozens of law enforcers. It is between hypothetical knights and entire armies.

I'm starting to think that a hybrid approach would be best - use a smaller army to hold territory and beat down minor disturbances while a force of these super-soldiers is dedicated to higher threat levels.

Superman can also fly fast enough to tell relativity to go fuck itself. Dude is literally faster than light.

It's not really a solid comparison for stuff like Ki and Nen, which lend themselves to superhuman but still very limited abilities, such as creating electricity or arrows from nothing.

Tell that to Kenshiro or Goku.

Tell that to Guanyin the bodhisattva with a thousand arms.

Tell that to Asura

The same reason why armies started recruiting unskilled civilians rather than knights who trained for a decade to hone their craft once gunpowder emerged. It's cheaper, easier to refill your ranks, and more effective.

Skilled knights couldn't defeat a bunch of peasants armed with guns. Goku, Kenshiro, or Asura could. With insulting ease at that. In the case of Goku and Asura we still don't have anything that could give them a serious challenge.

So basically Naruto? Large armies and stuff but when shit hits the fan the Feudal Lords drop a few chests of coins at their respective shinobi village and then the world is on fire because some asshole who can throw meteors with a glance decided to fart at the sun

Fun fact, for centuries it seemed like nothing was ever going to surpass a knight in Plate Armor. And then some asshole discovered that shooting a metal ball out of a barrel at 100 MPH made plate armor look like shit.

Fun fact, millennia later and multiple major wars and we still don't have the tech to blow up planets or harm people who could tank such hits. Let alone allow a regular person to think and move at mach 20+ with the grace of a martial artist.

Right, because there's literally no need for planet killers. If such a need ever came to be they'd start working on such things.

Because it's already been done: the challenge of exerting force on a polity without destroying it.

>millennia later and multiple major wars and we still don't have the tech to blow up planets or harm people who could tank such hits.
Because we don't need those things, dumbass. Also, we have had multiple major advancements in weapons. We now have tanks instead of horses. We've added air forces to our armies. We've gone a long way.

There is a need for a lot of things that we still haven't made. Cure for cancer for one. The need does not make it's development a sure bet.

>The need does not make it's development a sure bet.
But it does mean that we at least look into it. How much money does humanity pour into Cancer research? Probably trillions over the last 30 some years. How much money have we put into the development of a Death Star? Nothing. Because we don't need a death star.

See
And back to /k/ with your HFY bullshit.

Is it literally ki, as in you have to go through rigorous discipline training with religious elements in order to understand what it is and how to harness it?

Or do people just sort of stumble into being able to do it like the X-Men?

And were is a hypothetical fantasy army as the OP stated getting this death star tech to match pace with uber KI users?

This isn't Sci-fi's greatest vs Ki, this is generic fantasy world vs Ki.

Goku and Asura can hold back from destroying countries/cities just fine. They can use their abilities to just kill any army/armed insurgence without flattening miles of land.

Is this a fantasy world with magic? If so, find a god damn magic spell to kill them.