Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-25343239-20150319182007/@comment-260563-20180104065813

Take a good long look at the forces that are able to hold back Ulfric's "revolution". Most of them are not battle-hardened legionnaires. Most of them aren't even legions transferred from Cyrodiil. As the Stormcloak propaganda book "Nords Arise!" attests, these guys are levies recruited by the Legion in Skyrim. The actual legionnaires from the legion wear the heavy armor while the local recruits wear the light Imperial armor. These guys are wearing leather with some having small bits of chain mail, and they wield swords, shields and bows. No battlemages outside of Helgen, no spellswords. Meaning that the "Corrupt and dying Empire" that Ulfric is trying to expunge from Skyrim hasn't even sent its best to quell this uprising; they're recruiting locals and equipping them the bare minimum in order to fight, and yet Ulfric and his men are still having problems defeating them.

If they can't even defeat leather-wearing auxiliaries and levies, what chance do they have against Thalmor soldiers who waltz into the battlefield wearing plate mail or malachite glass armors backed up by experienced battlemages? Those Thalmor agents in wizard robes are high mages from Alinor, brought in by Elenwen to not only enforce the White-Gold Concordat, but also protect the Thalmor Embassy from dragons. Against Stormcloak forces with chain mail and no magics, they'll have an easy time decimating the Nordic forces. The few Thalmor that they can kill in Skyrim are only a few platoons. What happens when they face an entire army of them?