A tale of noun, noun, and possibly a third noun, this AAR follows the rise and/or fall of the Later Song Dynasty as it does this thing, that thing, and a third thing. This paragraph may or may not be a work in progress. But basically, I'm writing a narrative/history AAR in MEIOU starting from the Red Turban Rebellion. Stick around!
Table of Contents
Prologue
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Han Lin'er
1351 - 1365
The Road to War (Jan - Sep 1356)
Bamboo (Sep 1356 - Jul 1357)
Right Action (Sep 1357 - Jul 1358)
Right Intention (Jul 1358 - Oct 1359)
We Four Rebels (Oct 1359 - Nov 1361)
Mindfulness (Nov - Dec 1361)
Just Cause (Dec 1361 - Oct 1363)
Black and White (Oct 1363 - Jan 1364)
Elegy (Jan 1364 - Sep 1365)
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State of the World - 1365
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Regency Council
(Wangdue Sengge)
1365 - 1372
Machinations (Sep 1365)
Apostasy (Sep - Nov 1365)
Maneuvers (Nov 1365 - Jun 1372)
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Han Kaiwang
1372
The Gathering Storm (Jun - Jul 1372)
Thunder (Jul - Dec 1372)
Cloudburst (Jan 1373)
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Zhao Wangyi
1373 - 1428
Repose (Jan 1373 - Sep 1374)
Foreign Developments (Sep 1374 - Jun 1379)
Conversations (Jun - Dec 1379)
Kids (Dec 1379 - Jul 1382)
Loss (Jul 1382 - Nov 1387)
State of the World (Nov 1387 - Jan 1406)
War (Jan - Mar 1406)
Peace (Mar 1406 - Feb 1414)
Final Years (Feb 1414 - Feb 1432)
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Zhao Wongwai
1432 - 1447
Marching Onward (Feb 1432 - Jul 1436)
Crumbling Defenses (Jul 1436 - Nov 1437)
New Beginnings (Nov 1437 - Jul 1447)
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Zhao Dewang
1447 - 1468
State of the World (Jul 1447 - Oct 1468)
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Zhao Mei
1468 -
Plum (Oct 1468 - Aug 1470)
New Horizons (Aug 1470 - Dec 1482)
[URL="http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?568032-Pine-Bamboo-and-Plum-A-Song-AAR-(MEIOU)&p=14451948#post14451948"]Uncharted Waters (Dec 1482 - Oct 1497)[/URL]
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Yiqi and Fei 1 (1475 - 1491)
Yiqi and Fei 2 (1491 - 1504)
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First Steps (Oct 1497 - Dec 1511)
Fire and Fury (Dec 1511 - Oct 1512)
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Appendices
Dialects of Chinese (1365)
Dialects of Chinese (1836)
(Original rambling intro):
Hi all, and welcome to my (first!) AAR. I've wanted to write an AAR for some time, and after a few false starts and not much progress, my most recent game is becoming (what I, modestly, think will be) a good story. So here I am. I'll be playing Song, a Chinese rebel faction from the MEIOU mod's 1356 campaign. I'm mostly concerned with plot and plausibility, so no “Song owns half the world” type stuff... but that doesn't necessarily mean I can't have an empire on which the sun never sets.
House rules: No cheating, no save-reloading, all settings normal except lucky nations off (the mod uses modifiers and improved AI to handle this.) That said, I'll probably (read: definitely) mod in more events/decisions/etc as the game progresses, but I'll do my best to ensure my flavor mods don't make the game easier, and in fact may make it harder. Plausibility is the goal, and just as I won't scramble across the world for a Mali province bordering one of Portugal's and westernize three times in five years, I won't mod in “Your people think you're totally awesome!! -50% stab cost, +10% legit, -5 badboy” either.
(Also I promise I don't abuse parentheses/slashes like this in the AAR proper.)
Just want to lay out a few quick things about MEIOU so those unfamiliar with it can follow the action easier. At game start, all the Chinese rebel nations get huge buffs to manpower/income while Yuan gets a big debuff and added revoltrisk. MEIOU added this to properly simulate the civil war (otherwise Yuan would conquer all the revolters in Year 1 and then promptly blob across Eurasia), and the buffs eventually go away. If a Chinese nation occupies/controls a same culture group province owned by Yuan or another Chinese nation, after a mttt it will get a timer to defect to its occupier. The timer goes away if the owner initiates a siege on it, and if it's defected already, winning a siege within a year or two will revert it to the previous owner. Also all the Chinese nations periodically get cores on adjacent Chinese provinces, and since the Chinese cultures all share the same group, the cores never fade. (Certain Chinese nations also got -10 bb/year, but I removed this.)
And finally, EU3 can't handle Chinese naming conventions. Ingame, everyone is Firstname # Lastname. In reality, family names precede surnames, rulers governed under an era name (Hongwu) they chose upon ascension, family (Zhu) and dynasty (Ming) names were different, and on death they were awarded temple (Ming Taizu) and posthumous (his was 11 words) names. There were no regnal numbers because names were never repeated. Also, the map is at times anachronistic (e.g. Shanghai wasn't a city, Beijing wasn't “Beijing.”) I'll do my best to follow naming conventions for characters but please don't hate me if/when I mess up. Locations will be referred to exclusively by their ingame names for clarity's (and my sanity's) sake.
Sorry to talk your ears off before I even start, but I'm done now. I'll probably edit this post into a table of contents when it becomes useful. Prologue will be up once I format it. Thank you for reading, and hope you enjoy!
Edit1: I'll make this post more coherent when the ToC becomes necessary, but just to explain the title: Pine, bamboo, and plum are the Three Friends of Winter, so-named because they can flourish in that season. "Bamboo [...] is a symbol of survival in adversity. Pine [...] symbolizes survival through difficult circumstances. Plum [...] stands for both the purity of the scholar as well as beauty amid harsh conditions. Plum, bamboo, and pine taken together evoke the Confucian virtue of maintaining one's integrity even in the most adverse conditions."
House rules: No cheating, no save-reloading, all settings normal except lucky nations off (the mod uses modifiers and improved AI to handle this.) That said, I'll probably (read: definitely) mod in more events/decisions/etc as the game progresses, but I'll do my best to ensure my flavor mods don't make the game easier, and in fact may make it harder. Plausibility is the goal, and just as I won't scramble across the world for a Mali province bordering one of Portugal's and westernize three times in five years, I won't mod in “Your people think you're totally awesome!! -50% stab cost, +10% legit, -5 badboy” either.
(Also I promise I don't abuse parentheses/slashes like this in the AAR proper.)
Just want to lay out a few quick things about MEIOU so those unfamiliar with it can follow the action easier. At game start, all the Chinese rebel nations get huge buffs to manpower/income while Yuan gets a big debuff and added revoltrisk. MEIOU added this to properly simulate the civil war (otherwise Yuan would conquer all the revolters in Year 1 and then promptly blob across Eurasia), and the buffs eventually go away. If a Chinese nation occupies/controls a same culture group province owned by Yuan or another Chinese nation, after a mttt it will get a timer to defect to its occupier. The timer goes away if the owner initiates a siege on it, and if it's defected already, winning a siege within a year or two will revert it to the previous owner. Also all the Chinese nations periodically get cores on adjacent Chinese provinces, and since the Chinese cultures all share the same group, the cores never fade. (Certain Chinese nations also got -10 bb/year, but I removed this.)
And finally, EU3 can't handle Chinese naming conventions. Ingame, everyone is Firstname # Lastname. In reality, family names precede surnames, rulers governed under an era name (Hongwu) they chose upon ascension, family (Zhu) and dynasty (Ming) names were different, and on death they were awarded temple (Ming Taizu) and posthumous (his was 11 words) names. There were no regnal numbers because names were never repeated. Also, the map is at times anachronistic (e.g. Shanghai wasn't a city, Beijing wasn't “Beijing.”) I'll do my best to follow naming conventions for characters but please don't hate me if/when I mess up. Locations will be referred to exclusively by their ingame names for clarity's (and my sanity's) sake.
Sorry to talk your ears off before I even start, but I'm done now. I'll probably edit this post into a table of contents when it becomes useful. Prologue will be up once I format it. Thank you for reading, and hope you enjoy!
Edit1: I'll make this post more coherent when the ToC becomes necessary, but just to explain the title: Pine, bamboo, and plum are the Three Friends of Winter, so-named because they can flourish in that season. "Bamboo [...] is a symbol of survival in adversity. Pine [...] symbolizes survival through difficult circumstances. Plum [...] stands for both the purity of the scholar as well as beauty amid harsh conditions. Plum, bamboo, and pine taken together evoke the Confucian virtue of maintaining one's integrity even in the most adverse conditions."
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