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In the final battle of Avengers: Endgame, there was one group of characters that seemed to get battle-ready super quickly. I'm talking, of course, about

all of the armies ex machina - the Sorcerers, the Wakandans, the Asgardians, the Ravagers, and even Howard the Duck...

These characters had no idea that the time heist was happening, let alone that it was going to culminate in a classic "Avengers vs. Large Army" battle (barring the Avengers on Titan, who were aware of the general situation and aided by Doctor Strange who knew what was about to happen), so how were they all able to get brought up to speed and ready to fight in the short amount of time between the Un-Snap and the "portals" sequence?

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    The sorcerers are wearing their day clothes.
    – Valorum
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 7:56
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    “barring the Avengers on Titan, who were... aided by Doctor Strange” — everyone appeared through sling ring portals, therefore everyone was probably aided by Doctor Strange. There's a reasonable amount of time from Hawkeye's wife calling him to everyone appearing on the battlefield; Doctor Strange was probably doing the rounds and mustering the forces in the interim.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 9:15

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The Sorcerers and Ravagers appear to just wear their day to day clothes so wouldn't have needed to suit up.

The Wakandans that were snapped did so whilst they were fighting in Avengers: Infinity War so wouldn't have needed to suit up. The ones that weren't probably had enough time. They had at least 5-10 minutes which is more than enough to mobilise. Some units in the real world have 60 second drills.

Were there any Asgardians there? There would only be a handful left before the snap so any there wouldn't be that many left in New Asgard. And again even if some did turn up it's not an unreasonable amount of time to get ready.

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    I did spot Asgardians in the battle wearing their iconic armor (led by Valkyrie on her flying horse). I’d guess once Hulk snapped and everyone came back, a sorcerer was sent by Strange to New Asgard to fetch them to Avengers
    – Shreedhar
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 8:29
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    And since Strange knew how everything was gonna play out, as soon as he was unsnapped, his plan was ready to go
    – Shreedhar
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 8:30
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There are two things to keep in mind:

  1. Dr. Strange knew the final battle in Endgame was going to happen since before the fight with Thanos on Titan, so he was moving the moment he got undusted.
  2. A lot of time passed between the Hulk's snap and the Captain America's solo stand.

To elaborate on the second point, after the Hulk's snap: The Avenger's Compound was blown to bits by Thanos' ship, Thanos told Nebula he would wait while she found the gauntlet, Hawkeye escapes from the demodogs with the gauntlet, Gamora and good Nebula kill bad Nebula, Thanos fights Cap/Thor/Iron Man for a while. Some of that overlaps, but it took maybe 30 minutes in movie time. I would put it at an hour or two in real time.

Regardless of how much time it actually took, let's think about it from Strange's perspective:

  • Looks at futures on Titan.
  • Sees the one future with the all the armies having a showdown on 2023 earth culminating in Tony's snap.
  • Spending at least a few hours sitting around thinking about how to realize that future while they wait for Thanos.
  • Gives Thanos the time stone, then has some more time to think about the 2023 fight (which for him is in just a few minutes).
  • Tells Tony it was the only way and vanishes.
  • Immediately wakes up, tells Peter is has been five years and starts spinning his sling ring.
  • Has all the time outlined above to implement marshaling of the forces around the universe and organizing Wong and the other sorcerers to be their transportation.

To answer your question

how were they all able to get brought up to speed and ready to fight in the short amount of time between the Un-Snap and the "portals" sequence?

Dr. Strange had been working on the travelling salesman problem basically non-stop since he viewed the 14 million futures, and had all that time to optimize the preparation of forces during the (extended) time between the undusting and the big fight.

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    Nitpick: It's not really a travelling salesman when you have 0 travel time (the only important part is finding a path from Titan:Earth hitting all nodes, and when you have 0 distance between nodes and all nodes are connected to all other nodes...). Addendum: there's a chance Strange was working through optimizing that even while seeing other futures - we don't know if the winning case was the 14 millionth future he saw or the tenth.
    – Delioth
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 19:14
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    @Delioth Probably more a problem of information transmission: "How do I tell my fellow mages quickly where to go to fetch the others" as the most time intense would be to talk to everyone, get them ready to fight, clear their confusion and have them hop into the portals at the same time - and to minimize that you parallelize, which has some initial cost in transferring information to the other nodes. And potentially you can optimize in deciding who picks up whom as some of the sorcerers might already know some of the places they need to go to.
    – Frank Hopkins
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 19:47
  • @FrankHopkins Still doesn't sound entirly like the classical travelling salesman (at the very least there seems to be multiple salesmen). I get the analogy, but still. Job shop scheduling, perhaps? Not as well known among lay people, but I think it is closer to the truth.
    – Arthur
    Commented May 25, 2019 at 12:10
  • @Delioth You're right the travel time is zero. As the other commenter said, I was referring not to the distance to get from place to place, but the time to relay information to key people before moving on. Please let me know if there's an optimization problem that is better suited to describe that objective.
    – user1717828
    Commented Aug 8, 2019 at 14:02

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