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Crazycryodude posted:Invade the Aztecs Might just go for the moon then!
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Dec 16, 2019 19:26
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It can only be YES.
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Dec 17, 2019 02:24
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RagnarokZ posted:Might just go for the moon then! First China, then... THE MOON.
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Dec 17, 2019 03:02
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 The vote is closed. Yes (42): (Ferrovanadium, Lord Cyrahzax, Grizzwold, Sindai, Sanzh, Mirdini, verbal enema, habeusdorkus, TheFlyingLlama, megane, Technowolf, Wes Warhammer, Soup du Jour, AJ_Impy, Freudian, Pacho, puppets freak me out, Ikasuhito, MaxieSatan, pinchofginger, Akratic Method, The Sandman, Empress Theonora, winterwerefox, RagnarokZ, Yavuz, Erwin the German, QuoProQuid, Angstrom Gothington, PetraCore, An Anonymous Idiot, Viola the Mad, GunnerJ, Xelkelvos, Fivemarks, Jossar, Peanut Butter, Snipee, Sir Mopalot, i81icu812, Complications, Sleuth Diplomacy) No (3): Flesnolk, HereticMIND, Tulip) Invade Jerusalem (1): NewMars Invade Cemanahuac/Aztecs (2): jalapeno_dude, crazycryodude Maybe (1): ThatBasqueGuy Abstain (1): Rody One Half The war will be here soon.
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Dec 17, 2019 03:04
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Chapter 55: 1370 to 1376: Tsenmo Purgyal Lasya 'the Holy' The Life of Qian Chuan [錢川傳] was a document of dubious authenticity, believed to have been written sometime in the mid-15th century. Qian Chuan, a hated and despised figure, was the target of much ridicule by later writers. His historical reputation is comparable to Yang Su of Sui, Lai Junchen of Tang and Tu Angu of the Spring and Autumn Period. Alas for poor Qian Chuan! He was once a good soldier, a model of heroic virtue, a loyal servant of the empire with a rank badge sewn proudly on his chest, almost a target for a half-blind hunter. You will not find him in the history of the previous dynasty, compiled by its successor, except for a few short lines about 'Han troops' around the time of the invasion. He was once a brave and collected individual in the wars against the Miao, defeating them with a strategy reminiscent of Zhuge Liang. He salvaged a disastrous retreat against the ferocious troops of the southern Yue. He brought as many back as he could, and went back to the capital, expecting to be beheaded for cowardice. And such a young man was promoted further, but not well-liked at court.  He would be sent west, to the great empire of Tibet, in service to their demonic empress Lasya. This would be under the grand deception that Tibet would prepare a war with the Mongolians, having already excommunicated their Great Khan, and so would require Han assistance.  And so the young promising general Qian Chuan, having just reached 30 years of age, was sent off to distant Lhasa in this vital task.  When he was first brought before the empress, he was so nervous he could barely speak. Her reputation for violence and paranoia had long preceded her. She demanded his opinions on the uses of cavalry and how to overcome various kinds of difficult terrain. He gave his opinions soberly, and she only nodded and let him go. She gave the impression of a serious, ambitious ruler who thought deeply about great projects, her eyes clouded by distant thoughts. He had again expected to be dead, he was given a comfortable house and surrounded by handsome servants with kind faces. The other Tibetans were polite and deferential, a few daring to talk about Sun Tzu and one or two even mentioned their love of Du Fu.  In October 1370, the new vassal king of Persia and Mesopotamia had declared that she could no longer serve such a foul and blasphemous ruler, and had broken away, taking all of the empire's westernmost possessions.  Lasya had only lowered her immaculate head and pursed her lips before saying that they would receive their own due reward in time.  Those lands would soon be invaded by Timur, another fierce conqueror in his own right, an admirer of the great Gyalyum and renowned still for his armies' swiftness and violence.  And that the Queen-Priestess Cogrobza, a pale shadow of the great Tse, would be driven out. No woman of the red cloth was she, Lasya said, but a semiliterate fraud and naive cheat.  The young general Qian, unwilling to find himself the target of the empress' hatred and extreme punishments, followed his assigned duty and instructed the Tibetans on the laws and methods of warfare.  The empress staged elaborate hunts and mock campaigns as a test of her skills and the abilities of her generals. In one event, she had decided to play as the ruler of the Han, defending an attack from the Mongolians. She had encircled and destroyed the Mongolian Army. She shook her head after sweeping aside all the little model horses off the map with her hand, and said, "You will have to do better than that," leaving all to marvel at her grasp of tactics and strategy. It was said that she had the ability to discern a man's true intentions after a minute's conversation, that she could uncover every lie or dismantle every stratagem. She would but point and have a traitor or spy in her midst taken away.  By this point, Qian must have heard of the rumors of villagers disappearing in the night, or of bloody sacrifices or other crimes not permissible by either Tibetan or Han law. There were stories that she could change her shape, or fly, and use other secret teachings for her own purposes.  All of Tibet had become her possession, to toy with or destroy as she wished. But where other rulers might lose themselves in greed, hedonism, or other corruption, Lasya retained her ambitions and set herself upon the largest war seen in history since the time of the Mongols. She would invade China. Tibet, which had become itself a creature of stone, iron, and leather, would break all the east into itself. Three vast armies would invade the heartland of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, one from India, one from the Silk Road, and one across the mountains of Sichuan into the valleys near Chengdu. She herself would stay near Tibet and defend it against any counter-invasion. The empress found her young general in despair, with his head in his hands. "Why are you doing this?" he said, not expecting an answer. "And now he talks back to me," she said. "Do you think I am here to hurt you? I am here to ask you to join me. China has given you nothing. I have given you many things, and you may have more. Any mistakes you think you have made are nothing to me." "I've clearly made a mistake," he said, "or else I would not be here." She ignores that. "I ask you to think it over."  "Think it over. How long do I have to think it over?" he said, in his monotone. "You have all the rest of your life." He nodded his head.  The campaign began in 1371.  It began under the false pretense that the Xuanyan Dynasty was illegitimate and that the kingdom would be best ruled under Tibetan tutelage. Lacking much of an immediate family -- indeed the rumors were that she had massacred them all -- Lasya had plucked a distant relative from obscurity to be her puppet ruler in China. She was -- unusually for a woman of the royal family -- shy, quiet, and reserved. This, Lasya believed, would make her submit to any directives.  The Han had sent letters out to all of their allies and protectorates for aid -- the Aleman people, the Jerusalem Raj, some Mongolian khanates. Only the latter were able to come to their aid, as the campaign was so sudden that none were able to gather their troops or take them off the fields in time. The Tibetan army had poured into China, with Tibetans, Assamese, Rajputs, Nepalese, Persians, Tamils, other Mongolians, and Carantanians in their great horde.  The Han were not completely adrift in their first attack. They were able to send over 100,000 troops west across the gates and into Tibetan territory.  Qian was still despondent, his pale head bowed. He traced his finger over the map -- LHASA, NAGQU, YUSHU, GE'ERZE, YA'AN, NEIJIANG, CHONGQING -- while the other generals chattered among themselves. "You know," one of them told him, "We have great respect for China. This will be the most difficult campaign for us all. We can take Persia again like it's nothing, but it will take us at least two years for all of China." Qian smashed a silver bowl over the general's head.  He was still barely of any use to the Tibetans, and indeed if he had not joined up with them, his story would have remained admirable; a story of a good man caught in an evil place.  I do not understand why, but he sided with them ahead of the first battle, near the Kaidam Basin east of the Tian Shan and Kunlun mountains.  The empress led the assault herself, cutting down the general of the forces of Jiuquan. He died so swiftly he did not even scream.  There was really no resistance to such sustained and powerful force.  The Tibetans charged the second detachment of the Han army. The Han troops fought bravely, but they were overwhelmed from every side and even in the rear.  The empress, leading this charge, cut down every soldier in front of her. She was covered in viscera and gore as if she had smeared it over her face like a beast.  She fell upon the dying and the retreating and reduced them to their component parts - limbs, heads, snapped tendon, spilled blood, ground bones, making out of them objects of sacrifice.  The Han army fell away in general disorder, arrows stuck out of them, their army followed by clouds of dust and their horses terrified and screaming.  Her forces, along with those of General Qian, moved into the far western provinces in a maneuver to split the remaining army.  Yumen, near the site of Gyalyum's last triumph, was the first town to fall. What little grain there was went to the troops.  Another detachment of the army was cut off near Dunhuang,  and they were reduced to nothing.  The empress felt safe in breaking off other detachments of her army to take the cities - Jiuquan had fallen at the same time as Chang'an, near the Lantern festival. The city was abandoned so suddenly that the troops found a heap of paper lanterns and a great dragon costume. The Tibetans, I am told, had a good deal of fun in setting aloft the lanterns and writing profanity on the paper casings.  The fall of Chang'an in the north and soon Chongqing in the west led the Tibetans to sack army headquarters, discover plans, and interrogate prisoners. A general Han Licheng was found and brought to Qian Cheng -- the former had survived for many days after eating only a bit of drowned horse and acorns. He had only babbled when he saw his former comrade in arms, who shook his head sadly. "Completely lost his reason," he said.  The demon-empress grew visibly nervous, still noting how many other armies there were, even after she had ground so many down with barely any losses at all. She summed up the figures - sixty thousand thousand people, and if each was given a pike or sword...  There is another story I have heard, that I have not yet confirmed its truth, but I shall record it anyway. The empress of Tibet had consorted with the masters of arcane and secret rituals, whose power should not be revealed to the uninitiated. She knew no bounds to her ambition nor her abilities. General Qian had inquired as to what she had learned, rather naively, and she refused to answer him except in the most oblique terms. She said that she had learned of the future, the past, and all of the history of the world and the mechanisms of nature.  Her sweeping away of the frontier continued.  But was it true, was it true, that she had summoned or consorted with individuals who were said to have died long ago? Or grief, of sword fights, of the founders of religions and the wives of great conquerors? I have heard rumors but I have seen nothing to contribute to them.  Tibet's coffers, as vast as they were, were not infinite, and so she had to cut her expenditures and dismiss mercenary companies before they would renege without payment.  It was not a serious impediment. Dunhuang itself had fallen.  The Zhaozong Empress had died of exhaustion and grief, not long after the fall of Wuchang. Her daughter, benevolent and gracious, enduring and patient, would take the throne.  The demonic empress of Tibet would conceal her movements, fearing any attempts on her life. General Qian, I am told once saw her in a single room for hours staring at a statue of Gyalyum the Benevolent.  The Jade Gate fell. The site of Gyalyum's last and greatest triumph.  The Tibetan army, split up to best plunder the countryside, was threatened by another Han army.  Yet we had allowed ourselves to be separated and destroyed.  While on her campaign, Lasya had received news that those who defied her were destroyed;  Timur the Conqueror, as he was now called, had won all of Persia, and the Queen-Priestess of the territory had fled west to her remaining possessions.  She then attacked and cut off another Han army as it approached an oasis. That, in turn, led to the decisive battle of the war in the far west.  It was near the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, as I recall it. The Han had brought up a Mongolian army and the last desperate set of reinforcements, and the Tibetans pieced together the separate parts of the army as fast as they could.  The Empress launched herself into the battle, and all the sorceresses of Tibet behind her, and behind them the traitor general.  Over fifty thousand Han troops against a reduced Tibetan army in the west. I, the author of this text, was at this battle. I am told it was vast, but I had only seen a part of it. I shall retell what I have seen and heard. A few hundred of us were separated from the main army and were pursued by a detachment of Tibetan cavalry. They wore paint on their faces, like the operatic singers and acrobats I saw a long time ago in the capital. They were decorated with the trophies of their recent conquest - one wore white funerary robes, another woman wore a man's hair and top knot on top of her helmet, another with a Mongolian's hat and boots, and others with faces of otherworldly creatures painted on their shields or armor. Their horses and armor were decorated with carved human bones and bits of cloth tied to their tals. They were a small band, of perhaps twenty, and they moved with such speed and savagery we felt that we were overwhelmed by a group five times that number. They had thrown clay pots at us, and when they shattered, bursts of flame and noise knocked us off our feet - and shards of broken glass and metal nails had lodged themselves in armor and open flesh. My compatriots were forced to the ground, and one had tried to knock his arrows as his face bled, open, another was cut down as he drew his sword, a third had the top of his head sliced away as he stood, and I ran to save myself and I heard the screams of the dying soldiers and horses.  The army was lost.  The war was lost. Whatever soldiers came home, myself among them, were left to find the ruins of our houses and what remained of our families.  What had taken the Mongolians or the Jurchens decades, the demon empress had accomplished in just over four years. The Later Han Dynasty had fallen. It was at this point that her puppet empress would take the throne for her, and this was the greatest shock of all.  Purgyal Dringma, who would ascend the dragon platform and would later assume a regnal name, had made an open break from the rest of the family. She was no longer secretly, but openly a Buddhist. When she discovered this betrayal, Lasya's screaming would be heard from the Valley of the Kings.  At the last moment, her inimitable military triumph was swept out of her grasp. Tibet's long-standing enemy had returned. What did General Qian think of all this? He probably feels guilt. But whatever we know is locked behind that sad and silent face of his, and I have no doubt he will be tormented for his role in bringing about the fall of his country and the defeat of his own people. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Dec 20, 2019 05:16
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even when everything goes right, it still goes wrong
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Dec 20, 2019 05:25
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Well that went better than expe- Oh. Oh. 
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Dec 20, 2019 05:42
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Dec 20, 2019 05:45
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.... wait is Tse alive again?
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Dec 20, 2019 05:49
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Well, Time to invade China again.
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Dec 20, 2019 05:54
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There's only one reasonable response to this. INVADE CHINA
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Dec 20, 2019 05:58
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Do we even get China-money from them? Or are they just immediately like "welp, thanks for the dragon throne, idiots. LATER"
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Dec 20, 2019 06:09
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lmfao god drat 
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Dec 20, 2019 06:10
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Akratic Method posted:Do we even get China-money from them? Or are they just immediately like "welp, thanks for the dragon throne, idiots. LATER" I'm pretty sure mechanically the only change is that now we don't get an extra grace a month for being the same religion as the empire, but narratively this is probably a pretty big deal
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Dec 20, 2019 06:12
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Unless Kangxi adds a bunch of mechanical tweaks/events this is still an insane boost for us. Like we should still getting the biggest pile of gold ever, a bunch of broken artifacts, a giant pile of Grace, and even without the same religion, the same culture and same dynasty grace gain is huge. E: for the remainder of CK2 anyway, which is only a few decades. Once EU4 comes Asia will probably be defined by Chinese-Tibetan hellwars for centuries.
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Dec 20, 2019 06:36
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Ahahahahahahahaha. So much for knowing the past, the future, all the history of the world, and so on. What’s the cooldown? Can we invade China again before our empress passes away?
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Dec 20, 2019 07:54
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One problem with that is the new Empress is literally the only claimant Lasya could find, thanks to having murdered her entire family.
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Dec 20, 2019 10:01
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What the actual gently caress just happened. No, really, WHAT THE gently caress.
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Dec 20, 2019 10:07
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Ha ha ha, wonderful!
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Dec 20, 2019 10:10
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I like that from an unreliable narrator/long arc of history standpoint, the Demon Empress thing makes sense. Like, of course she would be vilified in retrospect.HereticMIND posted:What the actual gently caress just happened. No, really, WHAT THE gently caress. Timur is somehow Bon, but the relative we installed on the Chinese throne was a secret Buddhist.
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Dec 20, 2019 10:25
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Time to holy war China to impose the true faith, then.
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Dec 20, 2019 10:26
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Holy poo poo. I love these Purgyals so much.
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Dec 20, 2019 10:26
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The only thing the Purgyals have refused to do is collapse Tibet into a million pieces. Holding out hope for that one.
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Dec 20, 2019 11:11
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Some of those battles are bonkers. Outnumbered and mostly running light foot, absolutelty crushing it.
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Dec 20, 2019 11:33
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sebzilla posted:Some of those battles are bonkers. Outnumbered and mostly running light foot, absolutelty crushing it. I barely understand this game but it seems likely that we only won any of that because of the daughter of the devil's insanely high martial scores (plus a little help from that +morale event)
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Dec 20, 2019 11:43
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Akratic Method posted:I barely understand this game but it seems likely that we only won any of that because of the daughter of the devil's insanely high martial scores (plus a little help from that +morale event) High martial scores on your commanders are essential to winning, as martial acts as a multiplier to all your traits' battle effects. You can make brutal space marine armies that take 90+% less morale damage while dishing out 100+% more morale damage if you get the right traits on your commanders with high enough martial. I once had a game going where I reformed Hellenism. Their warrior lodge has a special trait that increases morale damage dealt, reduces morale damage taken and increases movement speed. Combine that with Inspiring leader and the trait for leading the centre, get 30+ martial (which is easy with the warrior lodges) and put all your troops in the centre coloumn and watch one army obliterate everyone.
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Dec 20, 2019 13:42
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Plus the Chinese armies not having leaders on their wings, compared to 20+ martial folks for Tibet. Also LOL @ Tse coming back as part of the Evil One's schemes. I was right all along!
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Dec 20, 2019 14:06
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habeasdorkus posted:Also LOL @ Tse coming back as part of the Evil One's schemes. I was right all along! Was wondering about that but putting a secret Buddhist on the Chinese throne makes sense for her given...
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Dec 20, 2019 14:56
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The Four Noble Truths cannot be suppressed: they are woven into our every experience, and will always return. In other words:
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Dec 20, 2019 17:02
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Honestly, I was not expecting the war to be over this quickly. I also did not expect the twist at the end; she probably converted during the war. A reason we won was that the Chinese made too many mistakes - they attacked in bad terrain, they did not use commanders for all their armies, and part of their army hosed off to the Tarim Basin for some reason? I will probably play through to 1400 at least, and then finish up the conversion for EU4. Edit: I ran an observer game for fun and the war was a decades long slog that ended when the claimant died of old age. Kangxi fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Dec 21, 2019 |
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Dec 21, 2019 01:09
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Love how Asia is rapidly dividing into megablobs, China/Mongolia/Tibet + Timor Did we finally find out what flavor of Judaism is the right one?
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Dec 21, 2019 02:19
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i81icu812 posted:Love how Asia is rapidly dividing into megablobs, China/Mongolia/Tibet + Timor The China-Tibet Megablob will be something, but I'd wager the space unseen on the CK2 map is either a mess or more blobs courtesy of the preoccupation of the Chinese with Tibet and the Mongols.
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Dec 21, 2019 03:24
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i81icu812 posted:Love how Asia is rapidly dividing into megablobs, China/Mongolia/Tibet + Timor A post or two ago, there was an announcement that the Karaites had become the majority sect and rabbinical Judaism is now the heresy. So, I'm assuming they won.
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Dec 21, 2019 04:07
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Xelkelvos posted:The China-Tibet Megablob will be something, but I'd wager the space unseen on the CK2 map is either a mess or more blobs courtesy of the preoccupation of the Chinese with Tibet and the Mongols. I imagine that there will be two "core" empires with a bunch of tributaries and vassals. Possibly allied, definitely of the same dynasty.
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Dec 21, 2019 04:31
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Seems like getting her or her children properly converted back will be a necessary step.
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Dec 21, 2019 04:59
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the Americas are gonna be wild though. I hope Australia is already colonized by the Inca or Maya or something or they were invaded by some Polynesian group who also decided to follow the Sun
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Dec 21, 2019 05:09
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Go full lands of red and gold with Australia.
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Dec 21, 2019 06:11
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Forget about Judaism, I wanna know what the latest flavor of cannibal Christianity is.
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Dec 21, 2019 06:30
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What a glorious mess.
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Dec 21, 2019 11:06
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Magnificent. Soon, it will be time to worldbuild more. 
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Dec 21, 2019 12:07
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