It’s also worth remembering that the charr are a carnivorous species. It takes substantially more farmland to produce a certain quantity of meat than it would to produce the same quantity of vegetables and fruit. Combine that with the charr being somewhere between 800-1,500 pounds (just eyeballing them and estimating the weight) while having a high activity metabolism befitting a mammalian predator, and the charr would need a massive source of food to sustain their population.
It’s extremely unlikely the charr Legions are comparable in size to major human empires in the real world. The sheer amount of farmland they’d need would be tremendous.
I feel this is actually a really important note. Humans are capable of a much wider range of diet because of our omnivorous diets. Charr, on the other hand, have a much lower rate of growth because of their carnivorous diets.
As far as their weight goes, in Gates of Maguuma Taimi says that her, Scruffy, Braham, and Rox altogether weigh “as much as ninteen kasmeers”. I’ll assume that Scruffy took up about 45% of that weight, being a contraption of metal and magic and such, leaving Braham and Rox (assuming they both weigh about the same) to be 27.5% of the weight.
Kasmeer seems to be an “average” human woman (curves notwithstanding) and stands about 5’6" therabouts. That puts her weight at about 130 pounds. Doing a little math, that puts Rox’s weight at 680 pounds (rounded). Now, female charr are smaller than males by a few inches, so we can presumably look at them and simply add about 40-50 pounds. This gives us an average of 700 pound weight to charr.
This is important because it gives us a sense of scope. Large male siberian tigers can hit up to 700 pounds, while females weigh closer to 400. so the average siberian tiger (weighing in at 550 pounds for the purposes of this) eats about 20 pounds of meat per day, up to 60 pounds if they’re starving. Now, because of Charr society they’re most certainly not starving, and the added weight means they have to eat about 25 pounds of meat per day or so. We can pare that down a bit if they have a metabolism similar to humans, but even then that only takes it down to about 6 or 7 pounds per day.
That’s still huge. Let’s assume for a moment they can eat like hyenas and eat bones as well for the marrow (not an unreasonable assumption, given the hyenas that live in Ascalon) and it’s still pretty massive. As Ehecatl pointed out, they simply don’t have the farmland necessary for too big of a population. Add in the fact that they’re apex predators, as well as the fact that females don’t actually like to be sidelined due to pregnancy, and you’ve got 100k-200k Charr in Tyria being a reasonable estimate. There’s only about 3200 tigers left in the world after all, and that’s with only about 7% of their natural habitats remaining. If anything, charr are facing overpopulation for the land they have.
