Annexing China in Victoria Revolutions

[unmerged(50268)]

My friend and I are playing as Germany and UK. The year is 1871 and I intend to annex China, but he objects saying it's 'gamey' and that I can't do it.

He says it's gamey because he considers it totally unrealistic that a small island state in Europe can annex an enormous country, populated by hundreds of millions of people, thousands of miles away in Asia.

My response was simple: what about British India, where the UK did almost exactly what he's objecting to me doing?

We agreed we'd refer this issue to the forum. Looking forward to hearing your opinions on this.

 

[Kyoumen]

"India" wasn't a unified country and the British didn't take over it by sheer force of arms, but rather played divide-and-conquer and used local princes against each other over a long period of time, swallowing up chunks along the way. So there's really no comparison between that and Germany just straight-up invading and annexing China. Of course that conquest ought to be impossible, so from that sense it's gamey, but it'll be incredibly annoying to do due to the rebel system in Victoria, and the badboy you get from it will make every other country in the world loathe Germany and attack them at every opportunity, which any sensible UK player would happily help out with, so I don't see why it's unbalanced per se. If you can hold on to your conquest and fend off attacks for the rest of the game you'll probably win, but that's probably harder than winning a more "normal" German way of hyperindustrialising, smashing and devouring the tastiest chunks of France, Russia, and Austria.

 

[Talquin]

Getting China and annexing it is one thing , but as the poster above has stated , holding onto it will be almost impossible. Add some colonial wars and some BB wars that are bound to happen and you may have a tough time. Keep in mind what is to stop your Friend from sinking your Navy to the bottom of the ocean?

 

[unmerged(50268)]

Kyoumen - I take your point about there being significant differences between the subtle and gradual annexation of India by the UK, and my proposed conquest of China, but the important point is: the result will be exactly the same, i.e. the annexation by a European power of a large, populous, Asian territory.

Furthermore, the British did effectively force India to accept British sovereignty by force of arms after the 1858 mutiny.

As to the impossibility of annexing China in real life in the manner which I propose: was not annexation by the Great Powers touted as a real possibility around 1900, when the whole discussion about an open door trade policy, etc. was going on? I would suggest that if UK, France, Russia, Germany, USA, and Japan had agreed to this, and partitioned China, then the annexation of China would have occurred. The Japanese did manage to annex large parts of China in the lead up to the Second World War.

I'm more than ready for the BB and if I take China I will definitely hold it.

By the way, I'm the UK, and my friend is Germany; and of course if he tried to annex China his navy would end up at the bottom of the ocean. Kyoumen rightly points out that Germany can win by hyperindustrialisation (cool word) and conquering valuable parts of Russia, Austria and France.

The UK can't do that, it seems, and the last game we played (me as UK and him as Germany) he did exactly that and no matter what I did I still came a sorry 2nd! Annexation of China is my only hope, and with my invincible navy in the way, there's nothing he can do to stop me.

Even after all this, his industry may still win the game for him! Any tips on how to improve UK industry?