betiko wrote:well since patches always is ahead of everybody regarding GoT, your golden company is getting me worried lol. I sure imagine the braavos bank has some lethal armed forces but I wouldn't expect themto be so lethal in the middle of a big white walkers standoff.
The Golden Company should be worrying.
A little backstory about the Golden Company. They are a private army that was first formed about 100 years before GoT takes place. They were part of the Blackfyre rebellion.
Their banner is a solid gold in color. Their motto is "Our word is as good as Gold" and their battle cry is "Beneath the gold, the Bitter steel!" The battle cry is a reference to their original founder, Bittersteel.
The number of troops in the Golden Company is 10,000. 8,000 infantry, 1,000 archers, 1,000 heavy cavalry along with some 50 or so War Elephants. They also have among the ranks of their archers a number of Summer Islanders who are considered the very best Archers in all the world.
In the show, Cersi says the Golden Company numbers 20,000 men, but I don't know if that's true or not. In the books they are 10,000. Perhaps in the show they are 20,000. Either way, they outnumber most everyone else.
The Unsulled numbered only 8,000 total when the Mother of Dragons first acquired them and they've taken some heavy losses. There really aren't any professional archer companies of note either in Westeros. Not like the Golden Company.
The Golden Company are bad asses, and they'll be portrayed as bad asses in the show. There is a story about the Golden Company, in Essos the city of Qohor refused to pay what they owed to the Golden Company so the Company went ahead and sacked the whole city in retaliation. So it's a bad idea to hire them and then refuse to pay them.
The Company is composed mostly of Westeros exiles. They are all skilled, quite familiar with Westeros tactics and arms. The Company is extremely well armed, equipped and trained. They are also by all accounts well disciplined, for a sellsword company at least. One of the few battles they ever lost was to Bryndon Tully and Barristan Selmy (the latter of which you should be quite familiar with from the show and the former you should remember as being referred to as "The Blackfish", who is now also deceased in the show).
So yeah, Cersi will have quite the advantage when she gets the Golden Company to fight for her.
In the books, Daenerys' brother, the now deceased Viserys, once hosted the commanders of the Golden Company hoping to persuade them to fight for his cause. The commanders ate his food, drank his wine and then laughed at Viserys and of course refused to fight for him because Viserys didn't have any money.
The only Kingdom that really has any chance of mustering up a force strong enough to challenge the Golden Company is the Vale. Though the best troops the Vale has are the Knights of the Vale, and I'm not sure how many of them there are, I don't think they have 1,000 of them like the Golden Company has. The Vale can, however, muster more than 10,000 men at arms if they have to, but they won't be anywhere near the quality of troops as the Golden Company. The Vale's strength lies in the defense of the Vale, which they are well suited to. In an open field though, they'll get chewed up by the Golden Company, whose Heavy Cavalry is comparable to the Knights of the Vale.
All the Kingdom's arrayed against the Company, well, that'll be a hell of a battle for sure. Maybe the Golden Company will be beaten, but they'll kick a lot of ass on their way down. They are going to kill a whole lot of the main characters. And they ain't gonna be fighting the White Walkers, that's Jon Snow, Daenerys and the North's problem. They'll be the ones bloodied fighting those horrors before they then have to fight the Golden Company. I doubt the White Walkers will even get past The Neck. But I suppose we'll see. Hell, Daenerys might not have any dragons left after beating the White Walkers, so the Golden Company might not even have to deal with those monsters either! But I don't know. Drogon is pretty fucking fearsome, but as bad ass as the biggest Dragon is, he ain't gonna live to see the end of the series, I'm pretty freaking sure about that. If the White Walkers don't kill Drogon, Euron or the Golden Company will, IMO. Without the dragons, the Golden Company is gonna be tough to beat.