In the imperial year 2010, the Area 11 military's main battle tanks had been outflanked at high speed by Glasgows in cities and difficult terrain. From then on, many officers had filed conventional tanks straight into the category of obsolete weapons.
But what had truly become obsolete was a tank force without infantry, artillery, reconnaissance, communications, or air support, capable only of lining up along a road and waiting for KMFs to cut it apart.
The E.U. still maintained enormous conventional armored forces, and neither Great Han nor India had ever truly stopped producing tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery.
These weapons simply looked less impressive than KMFs in the media and shone less brightly than Ace Pilots in the military promotion system, so budgets and talent increasingly flowed toward small numbers of high-performance humanoid weapons.
India was one of the few regions that had never entirely abandoned large continental armies.
The Ganges Plain, Punjab, the Deccan Plateau, and the western deserts all required vast numbers of infantry, tanks, and artillery, while India's military-political families were accustomed to measuring their political weight by how many men they could mobilize and how many guns they possessed.
That tradition seemed sluggish in wars between humans. Against the BETA, however, it happened to produce the kind of army most easily converted into frontline manpower and sustained firepower.
The system reopened India's national status. It lacked the deadliest red debuff modifiers Great Han had started with.
India was too independent. Its Autonomous Council of State, local banks, railway consortium, and military-political families had long possessed administrative capabilities of their own. Even if Luoyang were paralyzed, the local machinery of state could keep running.
But India also missed out on many of the nationwide bonuses Great Han had stacked up over the past few months.