Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-27007772-20140611204941/@comment-121511-20150324223502

Draevan13 wrote: Harold Burned-Mane wrote: General Tullius leads the 4th Legion, which is the one sent to Skyrim to fight the Stormcloaks. There is only one Legion in Skyrim at this moment.

And yes the Empire was pretty weakened by the Great War. It lost like 3 Legions and the rest lost around half their soldiers. Meaning that they were left pretty devastated. Though that was 30 years before Skyrim, likely the Legions have been reformed by now. That's enough time for an entire generation to come of age where they can fight.

It wasn't just a matter of losing men, although the Empire did lose a massive number of its soldiers and its citizenry: it was also the fact that the Imperial Heartland was pillaged and the Imperial City sacked. A great deal of the Empire's infrastructure was destroyed, and that takes a great deal of time to rebuild. Even by manpower, the Legion does not simply have to meet its pre-War status, it has to surpass it if it wants to defeat the Dominion in another war: considering one of its primary provinces (Hammerfell) has seceded and another (Skyrim) is in the middle of Civil War, that's incredibly difficult to do.