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Enlil

WTWSMS - Lead Designer
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Oct 8, 2013
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Greetings, it is me, Enlil, founder and commander of the mod, and I am coming today with the topic of brainstorming. With the Sassanids and the Eastern Romans now outfitted with their own governments and flavor, the time has come to look at some of the other major states at this time, and try to expand on their depth. With all the work going on with new start dates and maps, it is crucial to not loose focus on ensuring that when playing the Eastern Romans, Sassanids, or the Gupta, one truly feels like they are playing radically different civilizations, rather than a series of bland, flavorless Empires. With that in mind, the first nation on the table is the Gupta Empire, a declining but still potent Indian Empire.

This thread is for brainstorming and collecting ideas, and an excellent opportunity for those who would love to contribute to the mod, but lack the modding skills, to make their contribution.
 
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I actually did a search here on the forums to see if anyone else had worked on the Guptas, and found only these two messages with concrete interesting mentions:

The most interesting thing is - Guptas. The Gupta Empire was, alongside Mauryan and Mughal Empire, the best Indian Empire in history. Their empire was richer than Roman Empire and Sassanid Persia combined, they had the largest navy and army on earth by 350 AD, and de-facto unified all of India. A true golden age. Their prestige was immense and they were well known from Rome to Luoyang.
Still, they had great amount of rights compared to the rest of the world as long as Gupta Empire's legal system remained in place, and 769 falls into that timeframe.

Not much to go with, so any work on this empire will be distinct for WtWSMS.
 
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The Gupta empire was in a slight decline before the Hunas invasion, but the decline could be argued as them rather passing the prime of their golden age, and was anyway due mostly to upper-level instability (driven strongly by Hephthalite pressure) so there could be a definite turnaround under better political circumstances. Even past its prime, it was still a major center of Indian art and culture, so there's definitely a rich history to inform flavor events.

For example, the Mahabharata and Ramayana were both approaching their modern forms (ie, having most of their most recent verses added, and turning more and more from fluid oral retellings to less-fluid written epics) in the 400s CE; and while those milestones don't particularly change what contemporary people think of them, I think it does help indicate their cultural importance at that time.

And while this isn't particularly something that would make the character of the Gupta Empire very different from other Indian states, one of the things that always kept me from playing much in vanilla India was the fact that there's little in terms of flavor events to differentiate how political and cultural thought in India was different from that in, say, France.
  • We could have childhood education events based on fables in the Panchatantra, for example (since that was its overt purpose).
  • A travelling poet performing the Baghavad Gita in your court might inspire you to greater ambition, for example; and perhaps set off an event chain where you face the same internal struggles as Arjuna, where maybe you eventually see the Gita as allegory for internal struggles of the soul, and dedicate your life to contemplation; or perhaps you come to the conclusion that dharma is self-sacrifice on the world stage, working tirelessly to bring greatness to your people (and coincidentally, to yourself).
 
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The Gupta empire was in a slight decline before the Hunas invasion, but the decline could be argued as them rather passing the prime of their golden age, and was anyway due mostly to upper-level instability (driven strongly by Hephthalite pressure) so there could be a definite turnaround under better political circumstances. Even past its prime, it was still a major center of Indian art and culture, so there's definitely a rich history to inform flavor events.

For example, the Mahabharata and Ramayana were both approaching their modern forms (ie, having most of their most recent verses added, and turning more and more from fluid oral retellings to less-fluid written epics) in the 400s CE; and while those milestones don't particularly change what contemporary people think of them, I think it does help indicate their cultural importance at that time.

And while this isn't particularly something that would make the character of the Gupta Empire very different from other Indian states, one of the things that always kept me from playing much in vanilla India was the fact that there's little in terms of flavor events to differentiate how political and cultural thought in India was different from that in, say, France.
  • We could have childhood education events based on fables in the Panchatantra, for example (since that was its overt purpose).
  • A travelling poet performing the Baghavad Gita in your court might inspire you to greater ambition, for example; and perhaps set off an event chain where you face the same internal struggles as Arjuna, where maybe you eventually see the Gita as allegory for internal struggles of the soul, and dedicate your life to contemplation; or perhaps you come to the conclusion that dharma is self-sacrifice on the world stage, working tirelessly to bring greatness to your people (and coincidentally, to yourself).

This is good, playing an Indian feudal lord should definitely demonstrate some serious differences in philosophy and culture than in Western, Catholic feudalism. What we really need to look at is how these philosophies translated into the actual running of the realm. In the end, the most important aspect of flavor is the permanent flavor. What will playing as a Gupta entail. What struggles, limitations, and advantages do the Gupta have in their government. How powerful are the nobles? What say do they have in the countries affairs? Do they command armies independently of the Samrat like the Seven Parthians do? How does Gupta government operate?
 
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Thanks to the heavy cost of quashing the Pushyamitra rebellion and the continuing invasion attempts of the Hunas, the empire decentralized greatly at the upper levels (declining imperial revenues due to instability led to raises in taxes, which led to petty revolts, further instability, and decentralization) under and after Skandagupta. This, of course, started in the 450s, so the imperial treasury was already much diminished by 476, and none of the rulers succeeding Skandagupta were able to build up enough internal strength to re-centralize.

So, politically then, the Gupta empire of the game period should probably have a large amount of council power and the powerful vassals should generally be discontent. I took a look at how the Guptas play right now, and they at least have many powerful discontent vassals.

Most of what I've found on Gupta administration deals with the early to middle Gupta empire, and even then the Gupta empire tended towards decentralization, even in the direct imperial fiefs (the majority of the empire being held by feudal lords) -- they had a smaller bureaucracy than the Mauryas, got most of their taxes from land rather than trade, had landlords with feudal obligations rather than tax obligations (though I'm not sure what the ratio of these feudal to non-feudal landlords was; it definitely aided the rampant decentralization of the late Gupta empire), and tended to combine multiple responsibilities (eg, tax, land development, defence) under the purview of one administrator, which also led to decentralization. Villages and cities alike seem to have had a lot of leeway for self-government, too.

And remember, everything in the above paragraph applies solely to the territory under direct imperial governance, which corresponds roughly to the Gupta territory in the kingdoms of Delhi, Kosala, Bihar, and Bengal; everything else was under feudal vassals even at the height of Gupta power, and I have no clue as to their internal organization.

Of course, the fact that you have large vassals in even those areas shows that you've done more research than me to figure out who took over what parts of the imperial fiefs as central authority waned.
 
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So what I am thinking, is at this time the Gupta will have very levy focused feudal obligations, which diminishes their income, and with discontent vassals, they'll be getting less troops anyway. A good ruler would have to pass a variety of shifts in that law in order to make the empire profitable again, giving a more concrete way to help restore the Empire's power instead of a vague and arbitrary decision or event. The lower vassals seem to be in some ways more effective and in some ways worse than the Gupta. The rulers held absolute authority, and the only vassals in their realms were other family members, which often led to conflict. Various of these rulers though had competent scholar-based administrations, and the Maitraka for example had its education center in Vallabhi, and graduates of Vallabhi were given higher executive posts than even nobles. I'm not sure how to make the AI or player only give land to dynasty members, or represent this scholar-led bureaucracy though.
 
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I'm no expert on Indian history or Gupta history, but reading this thread makes me wonder about some possibilities.
It's likely that the Gupta empire would require it's own government type, with it's own scripted events.

I am also curious about whether it would be possible to have two types of "feudal" vassals, one type would be those with traditionally military obligations and one would be those with traditionally fiscal/bureaucratic obligations.

There could possibly a law type called imperial integrity which might do two things, 1. at high imperial integrity the military vassals give high levies and the fiscal vassals give high taxes, at low imperial integrity they both give the same percentage of taxes and levies but at an overall lower amount than it would be if it was high imperial integrity. at the the absolute lowest level of imperial integrity, the empire title ceases to exist and all current vassals of the emperor become tributaries of the former emperor.

Potentially a strong king with many tributaries could reforge the empire (maybe owning several kingdom titles and/or several kingdom tier tributes). Upon reforging the empire all tributaries become vassals of the emperor with a decent opinion buff for perhaps a decade or so.

reforging the empire might require high learning/ high piety. also increasing imperial integrity might also require high learning/ high piety.

The emperor and strong vassals of the emperor might get opportunities to send family members/courtiers to civil education centers to increase learning and potentially these rulers get events with scholars of high learning coming from these school desiring to join their courts.

I don't know how much of this could be implemented and it certainly would take a lot of scripting, I'm also not sure if any of my suggestions are historically correct.
 
An important and distinctive part of the Gupta were the Sreni which were semi-autonomous democratic trade and craft guilds/unions that exercised great economic and political power within the Gupta Empire. They even had their own laws independent of the laws of the Gupta Empire, which were typically respected by the government. Here's a great page that goes into more depth on the Sreni. Not sure how you would work in the Sreni system, but economically powerful "republics" within the the Gupta Empire would certainly be an obstruction for any emperor that tried to place more authority behind the imperial throne.
 
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