Stormcloaks Or Empire (One Of The Three Certainties Of Life)

[druid91]

That "available" qualifier there is a very important one that youre ignoring. The garrison of a border fort is not an available force. Its busy occupying the fort! Its highly unlikely that the Summerset Isles lent their navy to the campaign against the majority-landlocked Cyrodiil, so thats still a thing they have to contend with as well even if they were to attempt to bypass Valenwood for some reason.

Generously that at best puts them still outnumbered by the Empire by significant margins. They were engaged in an invasion, they are not going to have large quantities of troops just sitting around on the home front, and most of their best and brightest would be in the invasion forces, with less successful troops and commanders stuck with garrison duty.

They lost the Great War decisively in a very real sense, yet the powers that be in Cyrodiil handed them everything they wanted on a silver platter to avoid even a shadow of a potential continuation of violence that could touch them personally.

Their victory was purely political. They are not some conquering horde that forced the empire to submit, they got lucky. And we know this because we have one 'post great war' data point for Dominion military achievement and that is their attempted conquest of Hammerfell. Where they lost and were entirely driven out of even the territories they had consolidated under their control during the great war.

Had the Empire not signed the Concordat there is a very real possibility the Dominion would have lost even more and the Empire would have emerged stronger than ever. Instead we're left with an empire shattered by the signing of the Concordat, full of Thalmor agents who despite your protestations that 'they can't do that' clearly are pushing their own operations in Imperial lands with no pushback.