Still going to take months if not longer, they are Aiel, to break these women to the collar.




Not really, with the huge gateways linked circles can create they tire less quickly and can move troops exponentially faster. What would take an hour for the Seanchan would take minutes for the Circle. You'd have thousands of men placed with only 13 women holding the Gateway, whereas the Seanchan would need 100 women to place these same men.

PoD
Beginnings

The light of saidar sprang up around the thirteen sisters near the Sitters, around all of them together, and a thick slash of silver appeared in the middle of the clearing, rotating into a gateway ten paces tall and a hundred wide.

a 30' tall x 600' wide door way created by 13 women dramatically larger than what 100 Damane could open up as individuals (cumulatively maybe 400' across). Even if every one of the Damane was strong as hell in the Power the largest gateway even Rand can manage is only 4 paces wide, and the odds of any Damane being able to match that are nil. The AS are likely able to move at least 2x as many men per second from just one circle! Now assume they have 5 circles or 10. It adds up quickly and these women won't be exhausted by the end of the trip either. 100 AS linked v. 100 Damane is no contest.



That's not fixing the problem of having to completely change how all the regular troops move or the fact that they can't bring along the special animal troops, raken, to'raken, s'redit and torlm are all too big to go through a gateway. You're talking about retraining the entire Seanchan army now! These are troops that have spent year training in how troop movements and proper military order. This will all have to change for the Seanchan to use small gateways to move large numbers of troops.

And you keep thinking these women will have all this time to rest between, not going to be the case when you are facing a group that is also using Traveling! Sure for one big jump this would work, but we've seen what happens when you try to use Traveling continuously without links. The Channelers will hit the point of exhaustion rather quickly and then you are stuck. It just isn't the same with circles since they can accomplish so much more with so many fewer people.



1. Less of a problem from one bigger group than hundreds of smaller ones. Like any army I image they would send an advance team out to prep the area though so it's not really going to be dramatically different than normal army staging. Soldiers are much more used to this than appearing from 100 different areas and converging on a camp site.

2. You think this would be any different for the smaller ones? You've got to be kidding me! Smaller gateways would need far more coordination to not bottle neck from one soldier tripping and falling down!

3. using a Gateway of any size is going to alert your enemy unless you are smart enough to plan ahead and Travel to a place outside of their detection zone. Like Egwene did when she moved the rebels to TV. Smaller gateways are only going to give you an element of surprise if you suddenly start gating troops directly into a city. Bryne had plans to do just this to TV.

In the end it gets down to the AS have the huge advantage because they can link. Using far less energy to achieve the task.