Armies of the City-States
Six cities, six armies, and each is its city in arms.
Shining Reach
A professional standing army with a Foelkhaer (militia) behind it: precise coordinated open order, individual marksmanship, sophisticated small-unit work, and an aesthetic of movement that feels almost like choreography. Officers are career professionals and a commission is prestigious. A Servaeth is a man with a checkable fact in his history, and a senator lacking one is a gap the salons notice.
Forgegate
Practical, adaptable guild craftsmen: patient, methodical, excellent with their hands, and outstanding individual shots because they are a people who value precision. Innovative with terrain and improvised fortification. Less elegant than Shining Reach and much harder to disrupt, because the doctrine is less rigid and the men are used to solving things. The most likely of the six to try something new.
Stormharbor
No standing army; every freeman is expected to fight. The warrior tradition suits dispersed fighting without anyone needing to teach it, and small-unit cohesion comes from community bond rather than training — men who have crewed a whaleboat together already know how to do dangerous, violent, coordinated work at close quarters. Less formally organized than elsewhere and extremely effective in rough ground.
Eldershore
A professional warrior class alongside a militia, and the most cohesive small units in the world: men who grew up together and share ancestral bonds fight as brothers rather than as an assembled unit. Harder to break psychologically than any other army, because the bonds are personal.
Clearhold
Elite professional soldiers executing dispersed tactics with extreme precision; individual self-mastery translated directly into combat excellence. Mountain terrain has always demanded dispersed fighting — there is no room for a formation to pass — so Clearhold arrived at the modern doctrine centuries before everyone else. Possibly the most individually lethal soldiers in the world, in small numbers. Every adult is assessed, most are not placed, and there is no shame in it; the only failure is being shown suited and not doing it. See Clearhold#Walls and defenses.
The Iron Coves
Nothing standing. Crews, and a confederation that assembles when Blacktooth Bay is threatened and dissolves the moment it is not.