User blog comment:Derax-Pagani/Fairy Tail Chapter 494: The Hill Extending Towards Tomorrow Review/@comment-6401212-20160717094147/@comment-4829046-20160720124727

Obviously. Same thing happened in every other arc. That's just story structure. The major enemy armies steadily grow stronger as the story progresses. Tartarus prided themselves in keeping only the strongest soldiers and killing any that showed weakness. Still didn't stop them from being inferior to even Lamy clones. They were useful however, in showing Lucy's combat ability, but that's basically it. Against Natsu or any proper warrior, they were next to nothing. Prior to that, Grimoire Heart was classed as having the strongest forces for a dark guild(mainly because Tartarus was being secretive) and even they only had Kawazu and Yomazu as examples for the strength of their regular forces while the others could be beaten with one blow. They had a menacing introduction, especially with them literally falling from the sky, but that soon went away and they pretty much disappeared from the manga itself once it became night time.

It isn't much of a problem when such an army is countered by a similar army using tactics, but in FT, all you need to know is that every unnamed and random foot soldier is paste compared to an FT mage. In every single confrontation, the enemy outnumbered them 10 to 1 or more. Granted, this is part of the series itself as the introductory arcs established that a handful of FT mages are easily capable of destroying entire dark guilds. To add to that notion, I guarantee you that if Mystogun was still around, by now he would have tossed a bunch of Alvarez battalion flags at Makarov's face before the invasion even began. He hopped around a continent in a matter of hours while decimating multitudes of Phantom Lord branches after all; And those were mages too: This time most of them use swords or spears so he would do it even faster. Factor in that he most likely had to make sure the magic was non-lethal and had controlled output when dealing with Phantom Lord as they were just regular mages doing their jobs, and put that against showing no mercy towards violent foreign conquerors, and you got a much faster routine. Sadly our primary characters these days seem to use such tactics only when they are off-screen and out of focus. :(

This is far off-topic however. Sorry. >_< I'm just stating what everyone knows and associating it with how you shouldn't expect diversity when it came to armies in FT. Mashima isn't too preoccupied with authenticity as long as it looks cool.