You will have a big round of fire fighting this first time. After that there will be next to nothing flammable in range. Thus it can be more or less ignored after this.

It is also no longer a 300 000 population city. Meaning fresh water is less of a concern and quantity of food needing to be transported isn't as bad as it would have been a few centuries earlier.

Stalemate where they only block the land side. As long as they keep dominion on the water it will last until the Ottomans have to give up due to border friction or rebellions. Even if you break through a wall in a spot you can repair it so it is hard to assault.

3 reasons. He is the general in charge coordinating the various fronts. If he is fighting he can't do that as well. He is the strategic reserve that can fix a problem. If he is on a specific front the enemy can hit another one since they know where he is. If he kills opponents he gets minimal xp and skill levels. If he lets his younger members do it they climb in power while pushing. Same reason the ants aren't going all in at the start.

Think it is a bad call, even if they kill the entire enemy army the losses are not worth it. (A sailor is much harder to train than a soldier.) The Romans also has to trade 10:1 or better to win long term due to population.

2 ways to lose a siege like this. Disease and time. If a plague sweeps through you lose many more people in the army outside since you lack good infrastructure. Time, 100k men is not exactly cheap to keep in the field. As you do you are also losing income since they are not working. Thus you go broke in a year or two.

I think one important reason to have canons in siege warfare is that it pushes the enemy war machines further back, especially siege towers this is important for. If your catapults have 500m range they will put their heavy and hard to move weapons at 600-700m range. If your canon can hit 1km they need to put them at 1.2km range. These extra 600 meters is a lot when you are trying to move something tall enough to crest a wall. Meaning you need more animals and they will be more tired when they arrive. Increasing the time from start of offensive until it hits also means you have more time to get ready (though normally you do see them start lining up well in advance).

This is something that I don't think would have worked. Forming the Varangian guard under rule of a general is basically declaring you want to take over the empire.

Next time you send 1 person instead. That way nobody gets beheaded, or at least you can behead whoever he sends back with the message.

I quite like the story. It is a nice power fantasy with a clear power scale and progress climbing it. The downsides dragging it down are more numerous though. The writing is clearly made by somebody that has English as a second language. There are always a few minor mistakes in each chapter, though nothing that detracts from understanding. The story pacing is a bit odd. You have the author set something up as important, only to go do a side quest for 15 chapters before getting back to it. I think the school combined with a life at the side suffers a lot from this. Where we get into the school and what will happen next, only to suddenly have a massive battle arc in the middle. The characters have thought put into them. The problem is that they might be a bit too pure or extreme. The complexity of a character is only there for the main cast. The antagonists and side characters feels very straightforward, having one main defining feature and nothing else. The world is also strange. You would not expect to have a country with tech similar to earth and then go to large cities in another country where that has no impact apart from a translator they sell. An example from earth would be synthetic clothes and coca cola, you find them where people are living in mud huts.

Imagine being at a modern day industrial slaughter house near a mega city. Would have a million souls a day. Large scale animal husbandry has to be the best way to farm this.