I don't know how that happened, but it's kind of funny and ironic.
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How much longer is Angelos going to be regent? Many of his actions have been in direct contradiction of the Augustinian Code, so I can't imagine he'll be very popular in the future.
On an unrelated note, what is the religious makeup of the Ghaznavid Khaganate? I can imagine Zunists, Tengrists, Slavic pagans, and some Hindus and Zoroastrians (maybe Sikhs?).
On an unrelated note, what is the religious makeup of the Ghaznavid Khaganate? I can imagine Zunists, Tengrists, Slavic pagans, and some Hindus and Zoroastrians (maybe Sikhs?).
Angelos will be regent as long as Hindenburg and Ludendorff are stuck overseas, because he's technically the "regent of the regents." He also has the backing of a substantial part of the army, the Diet (in the Angeloi faction), and the dynatoi (in the Angeloi family), and any attempts to unseat him at this time would cause a civil war.
The Ghaznavids have Slavic state religion (from CKII Mongol shenanigans), which is followed by most of their subjects. I haven't checked recently, but in the last years of EU4 there were a few Zunists and Tengriists in the north of what is now Ghaznavid territory. I would assume there are Zoroastrians in the west in the provinces taken from Persia and a lot of Hindus left over from the Indian settlers. Sikhism never really took off as it did in real life (holding only one coastal province in the south), but it's still there. It's a really complicated religious situation, one for which I have already written a post-war event for.
why lenin have goulags? stalin was the creator of the goulags, and now he is ecumenical petroarch
Oh lord, we are going to have so many fascist revanchists attacking everyone everywhere, this next half century is going to be a mess to say the least.
Actually, gulags existed before Stalin came around. Labor camps that eventually evolved into gulags were around before the Russian Revolution, and forced labor as a way to reeducate dissidents was first proposed in the 1920s based on Trotsky's advice. They just weren't officially named "gulag" and took the form we know today until 1930.
How else am I going to have a challenge for HOI and NWO? Besides the Soviets, of course.
No problem! I didn't really know that myself either until I started doing a little research.thanks for the response, i fell a little dull now
Ouch, bad time for Persia and India. Persia is brutalized and now we have the Indian Republic. We're going to have an interesting political setup by the end of this war.
I feel like Angelos is digging his own grave, because when Otto's regency ends, the young Kaiser would be able to boost his popularity with most of the Reich by punishing him.
I feel like Angelos is digging his own grave, because when Otto's regency ends, the young Kaiser would be able to boost his popularity with most of the Reich by punishing him.
That's not saying what we'll get by 1936...
On the contrary, Angelos has also ample time to build up a large power base so that when Otto inevitably comes to dispose of him, he'll make sure to cause as much damage as possible and take down the Kaiser with him. Not saying that that will happen, but still...
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I think,that in HOI update Tsarist Russia will be renamed into Ukraine,and that if it will be ally of Reich,in last part of AAR (NWO) we will have "imperial" orthodox Ukraine with ukrainian culture (made in this universe with butterfly effect from mix of Russian and Norse cultures + christianity) .
P.S.:We have now Comintern,Roman Axis,but who will be Allies leader?
P.S.:We have now Comintern,Roman Axis,but who will be Allies leader?
It seems like the Reich is losing its allies one by one. I'm also surprised that China can keep settling peaces like that with almost their entire Asian territories occupied. You would think their people would be forcing them to end the war.
Chapter 271: The World at War, Part 21 - Offensive in Spring
"Okay, who's bright idea was it to name it the 'Hundred Days Offensive'? Because everybody's expecting me now to go and conquer all of China and Fox within a hundred days!"
-Erich Ludendorff
After India's capitulation, only five nations remained in the war, albeit the most significant ones. The Reich and Yavdi faced off against China, Fox, and Mayapan. Yavdi was busy dealing with the rebel Onggirats and with the Soviets. China was busy trying to retake the land Yavdi had occupied. Fox threw thousands and thousands of men in the general direction of Michigan City, where Lettow-Vorbeck's had dug extensive trench fortifications in the fields around the capital. And Mayapan just sat around doing absolutely nothing because of a convenient Roman blockade. It seemed Mayapan was best off.
Despite Yavdi having a whole lot of problems, the Reich still could easily take on all three of the remaining Federation and Allied powers on its own. Unfortunately, it seemed like most of the battles in spring of 1918 were against rebels in Kanata. What the Reich needed was a decisive offensive which would convince the peoples of China and Fox that they could not continue the war at the current casualty rate. The General Staff, luckily without interference from Angelos, thus drew up plans for a "hundred-day" offensive, which guarantee capitulation within about three months. The plan called for the remnants of the Expeditionary Force, with the exception of the legion stationed in Markland, to break out of their positions and fight their way through the rebels to the Fox front, where the extra manpower would be enough to counter the waves of reinforcements Dohumme threw northwards. After the capture of all important cities in the north and east, the legions would sweep westwards and take the Chinese cities of Hongzhou and Jinshan, which should be enough to force China's capitulation. And just in case they didn't, Ludendorff's legions were to march south, towards Indochina, and eliminate the Chinese armies there, take Hue, Hanoi, and Saigon, and restore the Central Powers occupation zones over the region. And just in case that still didn't force a capitulation, the Legion von Mittagsland was loaded on a ship bound for the Penglai mainland, where it would launch an amphibious assault against the former Song capital, Aojing. There were no plans for Mayapan, as the General Staff considered that it hadn't significantly resisted the Reich and thus did not deserve an invasion.
On the 7th of April, the Spring Offensive began. The legions of the Expeditionary Force banded together into groups of four to five legions east and marched south, easily obliterating any rebel armies they encountered. It helped that barrels from Europe had arrived in Kanata in large numbers.
An imperial barrel and some Roman soldiers rolling down a deserted street in Toronto
At the same time the Expeditionary Force struck south from Kanata, Ludendorff struck south from his bases in northern China, effortlessly overrunning the small scout parties sent to survey the extent of the Roman occupation. The Mexica and Persians took one look at the chaos engulfing the Fox and Indochinese fronts (the latter of which a Lithuanian army had idiotically thrown itself into) and were both glad that they weren't a part of it. While most of China's mainland territories were left to the mercy of the Reich, in the Eimericas Fox had no shortage of men; the Athanatoi reported that over a hundred thousand new conscripts were on their way to the front, marching up the coast to the bloody battles in the Five Nations.
It seemed like numerical superiority was unnecessary when confronting either the rebels or China, because the enemy was obliterated almost instantly. Ironically, the rebels were the more dangerous enemy. They at least made up for being obliterated instantly by rising up again in larger numbers elsewhere. Ludendorff was disappointed he didn't get a repeat of Krasnoyar, where he claimed that the Borjigins had taken too much credit for breaking the Siberian front.
The Expeditionary Force hit the first wave of Fox reinforcements at the city of Ishpiming, where seven legions engaged one hundred and forty thousand Fox soldiers. In the end, the Reich claimed "victory," but like all other victories of 1918, it was Pyrrhic. Twenty thousand Meskwaki died in the trenches, while two entire legions were destroyed, significantly reducing the momentum of the offensive. The only thing accomplished besides the routing of Fox's armies, which opened a corridor to Michigan, was the temporary abatement of anti-war protests as citizens realized that such battles would only grow more common as the war progressed.
Battle of Ishpiming
May rolled around, and with it India slid further into anarchy. Peshwa Bose's authority, from the start mostly held up by bayonets, had collapsed outside of the cities of the northeast. Bandits and criminals roamed the countryside without worry. Murders and robberies were common. Law and order had completely disintegrated, with the helpless Indian civilians forced to fend for themselves. Just buying basic life needs was impossible. In order to pay his war reparations on time, Bose ordered his treasuries to print money in large quantities, resulting in rampant hyperinflation. By 1924, one would need to be a trillionaire in Indian rupees just to have the equivalent of one Reichsmark. Local economies broke down. People turned to robbery and shoplifting to get by, further worsening the economic crisis. While Indian Africa, long autonomous from the mainland and dominated by a pro-royalist meritocratic bureaucracy, got off lightly, Indian Indonesia was hard hit due to its remote location and mountainous island terrain. While anarchy engulfed the mainland, the Indian colonists in Indonesia banded together and drove out the troops loyal to Bose. In the city of Palembang, an Indian noble descended from the former sultans of Malacca proclaimed an independent Kingdom of Srivijaya, with himself as king. However, the authority of the newly established kingdom rapidly disintegrated, and to prevent anarchy from returning to Indian Indonesia, the provisional government sent a message to Singapura, pleading for a Roman intervention in the region and asking to be annexed into the Reich. Angelos accepted the deal. He then sent in legions to restore order and impose effective military rule over the region. Bose protested this violation of Indian sovereignty, but nobody cared, least of all Angelos himself.
Back in Kanata, the Spring Offensive had lost its momentum. Wave after wave of rebels had been crushed, but Kanata didn't retake territory as fast as the rebels were being cut down. With most of the smallest armies crushed, the Expeditionary Force ran into increasingly large rebel hordes.
Expeditionary Force and Royal Army soldiers entrenched in the ruins of a Norse temple, outside Toronto
The Chinese continued to resist in Asia, but here Ludendorff had the numerical advantage. Before the Chinese could attack, four legions assaulted the trenches of twenty thousand men at Jingzhou, killing half of them at the cost of one legion. The survivors fled south. to where what remained of the Imperial Chinese Army had entrenched itself in Indochina.
More rebellions broke out in cities across Kanata, including Markland, though because only a few thousand rebels participated all of the rebel armies were quckly destroyed with minimal casualties.
Lettow-Vorbeck's main legions had broken out from Michigan City in the meantime and assaulted a large Fox army at Grand Rapids. It was one of the largest armies the Federation had thrown at the Reich since the start of the war, and its destruction would open up the rest of the country for an invasion and a potential capitulation. As some other Fox armies had meanwhile broken through his defenses and had begun besieging occupied Michigan City, he had to finish the battle quickly. In late May, he authorized the mass use of Greek fire on the battlefield. While Greek fire had been used in small amounts on the Tawantinsuyuan front in 1916 and 1917, such large scale use hadn't been seen since the days of Saint Wilhelmina. The result was that thousands of Fox soldiers were quickly incinerated, allowing for a kataphraktoi charge to break the enemy lines and rout the survivors.
The same day that the Battle of Grand Rapids concluded, Aojing fell to the Reich, putting the last of China's capitals outside of the Eimericas under Roman occupation.
Expeditionary Force soldiers firing Greek fire from flamethrowers
Elsewhere, though, other legions of the Expeditionary Force did not enjoy Lettow-Vorbeck's success and instead engaged the enemy in trench warfare, with horrifying results. At Paxtang, in southern Five Nations, twenty legions fought almost three hundred thousand Fox soldiers for weeks, with tens of thousands of men on both sides dying from artillery bombardments, Greek fire attacks, chemical weapons use, and machine gun fire for little gain for either side. While Fox's armies eventually retreated from the battlefield first, eight legions had been destroyed in the process. As such, Paxtang was probably the fifth bloodiest battle in the entire war. Other groups of legions had it worse: at Shackamaxon, when four legions were attacked by seventy-five thousand Fox troops, the legions managed to repel the attack but lost almost two legions in the process.
As the spring of 1918 gave way to the summer, the people of India briefly forgot their current state of misery and realized that the war was over for them. While the entire country was in a state of anarchy, at least things were slightly better than in North Eimerica.
The victories of Grand Rapids and Paxtang allowed the Reich to punch holes in the Fox lines, something which the General Staff took advantage of. The Expeditionary Force pushed south, occupying as much land as possible in a short period of time. Fox attempted counterattacks everywhere along the front, but it only succeeded in losing tens of thousands of soldiers in battle. The Roman offensive was, for the first time in the war, actually getting somewhere. They just had to consolidate their gains before enemy reinforcements arrived; the Athanatoi reported that a hundred thousand men were on their way north and would arrive in the Five Nations in a week.
Back in Asia, the Chinese Army continued to crumble, but its soldiers refused to give up. Although the Reich's legions had numerical superiority on every battlefield and quickly crushed the enemy, the Chinese fought to the death, taking down thousands of Romans with them.
In Central Asia, Perm had and everything west of it had fallen to the Soviets. The Commune's troops had overrun the Roman border, and the Caspian Sea and former Timurid provinces were hanging on by a thread. The only Yavdi forces in the area consisted of nine thousand hastily trained conscripts who had entrenched themselves just outside Perm, east of the Urals. The rest of the Yavdi army was still stuck in Mongolia or Siberia and would take weeks to return home, ironically because they had sabotaged all of the local transportation networks when they invaded China.
The legions' Greek fire flamethrowers were extremely effective - too effective, actually. When two legions faced off against a Fox army comparable in size, use of Greek fire resulted in the enemy army fleeing the battlefield within days. Only five thousand men on either side died. It was a bit disappointing for the General Staff. At least the Kanatan rebels died in large numbers for similar friendly casualty rates.
Faced with growing fascist unrest throughout what remained of Persia, the Majli sought to emulate the Reich's Indonesian intervention by launching its own "intervention" in India. Claiming that it had to protect oppressed Persian and Zoroastrian minorities in the Punjab (as everything west of it was under Ghaznavid control), elements of the Persian Army marched through harsh deserts and forbidding mountain ranges into the valleys of the Punjab, only to be instantly destroyed by Bose's troops. All that the adventure caused was even more public unrest, as the people started to question the competence of the Majli.
Around mid-June, the Athanatoi reported that there appeared to be a large insurrection going on in mainland India. The one thing that set this apart from the rest of the anarchy engulfing India was that it was organized, had a coherent goal, and had one leader. Prince Fakirbhai Paramara, one of Purandaradasa's sons, had attempted a royalist coup against Bose, calling on the royalist generals in the army to join his revolution to reinstall his father on the throne (with the implied goal of gaining enough trust from Purandaradasa to be appointed as crown prince). When Bose's troops crushed the coup after the generals refused to offer their support, Prince Fakirbhai turned to his backup plan and called for the common people to rise up. Almost two hundred thousand Indians across the subcontinent simultaneously took up arms against the military junta, most of them concentrated in the farmland outside of Delhi. In response to this "treachery," Bose declared the entire Paramara dynasty as "outlaws" and ordered his troops to hunt them down and exterminate all of them. Fakirbhai himself was killed in battle a few days after his revolution began, and several dozen Paramaras were hunted down in Malwa and killed. Purandaradasa and his immediate family, though, managed to escape Bose's army for now.
Greek fire continued to win battles against Fox and China, though with disappointing results as the enemy always fled before more of them died. Even Lettow-Vorbeck, whose legions killed thirteen thousand men at Saginaw, reportedly complained that the "Meskwaki are cowards." His "complaint" was soon published in all major newspapers and through them reached all one billion citizens in the Reich, including Angelos himself, who was reportedly not amused by Lettow-Vorbeck's "unmanly conduct."
Ten days after word reached the Reich that the Paramaras had launched a royalist revolution, Purandaradasa and his court resurfaced. They had been found in Malwa, hiding in temples that had been abandoned due to Bose's extreme secularization policies. Bose immediately ordered in the army, armed with enough artillery and machine guns to level China twice, to surround the region. The Paramaras were a threat to his rule and had to be destroyed before they escaped. While Angelos was just content with watching the former Samrat Chakravartin and his family be shot like dogs, the Athanatoi weren't and sent agents to help them. Royalist rebels assaulted the regime troops stationed around Purandaradasa's hiding place while the Athanatoi sabotaged the army's organization and planning, allowing for Purandaradasa and his court to escape. While the coast of Malwa was heavily guarded by regime forces, some cities and ports in Orissa, on the east coast of India, had been taken by royalist forces. So Purandaradasa and his court fled across India to Orissa, with Athanatoi and rebel help. But where could he go once he reached Orissa? After Fakirbhai's death he resolved to go down fighting, to make his last stand against Bose in Orissa, to show the world that he would resist the military dictator to the end. But his wife Lakshmi had other plans. She convinced her husband to call to the Reich itself for help, to get the Kaiserliche Marine to evacuate him, his court and family, and his supporters from India to a safer location, preferably to Indian Africa and its dominantly royalist population. With the Reich's backing, he could always return to India later to reclaim his rightful throne. But now was not the time. Purandaradasa agreed, but he knew that Angelos on his own wouldn't help him out, considering him not so important to send an entire fleet to rescue.
So he drew on his extensive knowledge of German and began writing an editorial, to be published in all major Roman newspapers...
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I'm not sure about renaming Tsarist Russia to Ukraine, seeing as it doesn't control any of the actual Ukraine region. It will be an ally of the Reich, though it will have Slavic pagan religion. As for Ukrainian culture, I might considered renaming it to "Russian exile" culture and add in Belorussian as "Nordic-Russian" culture.
End the war...by taking everybody else down with it, you mean.
Looks like Yavdi having some problems with the Soviets there. The Reich may lose its last ally soon.
Clearly the one nation coming out of this war in the best shape is Mayapan. Have they even been touched yet?
Clearly the one nation coming out of this war in the best shape is Mayapan. Have they even been touched yet?
Other than a few troops they sent to reinforce Fox (which got subsequently destroyed), no. But they won't be spared by my post-war events...Looks like Yavdi having some problems with the Soviets there. The Reich may lose its last ally soon.
Clearly the one nation coming out of this war in the best shape is Mayapan. Have they even been touched yet?
The Indian royal family calling upon the Reich's help might see another nation be born in India's African territory, much as what happened with Russia (assuming Angelos doesn't screw them over).
Man, this is giving Kaiserreich a run for its money in terms of exiled monarchies.
