What would even be the point of having a China only game when you can just add China to IR and have the entire Eurasian landmass interacting with each other? Isn't that basically the Paradox dream game?
The Case for, Eventually, China
- Thread starter icedt729
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What I would love to see are some China-related events, e.g. Chinese merchant/explorer/scholar appearing in a country giving some interesting bonuses/increases. Ancient Rome and China were aware of each other, however, interactions between them were very limited, pretty much non-existent for most of the time. To add such a complex country to this game would completely change a balance and game mechanics would need to be significantly redone. I understand that to have an ancient Rome & China PDX supergame is everyone's dream (at least mine as well) but it would be really difficult to implement it in this upcoming IR game. To make ancient China as complex as ancient Rome would require to add whole Asian region and also to make a gameplay much longer (one more century would be a must).
I mean... Not really.
China in this age wasn't behaving particularly different from anyone else, I can see the validity of this argument for most of the Medieval age (when Europe was Feudal and decentralized as opposed to the much more centralized and bureaucratic way of rule in China) and the Early Modern Age somewhat (when China was a huge, static, isolationist blob first ruled by the Ming and then the Qing, and that thing is somewhat hard to balance and represent well in a EU game), but in Roman times China was just a bunch of local dynasties in competition with each others to rule the whole thing. The Chinese states wouldn't behave much differently from the Diadochi, the Indian states or even Rome itself.
The biggest factor is trade and, as we've seen with the developer clash, that's the main interaction with states that are not your immediate neighbors. Players are very regularly buying iron, elephants, and steppe horses to field their associated units well across continents. Germanics are buying elephants from Carthage, Iberians are buying steppe horses from Saxonia (who've migrated to the area North of the Black sea).
So adding China to the game would add a lot of depth to India, Tibet, and very large empires in Europe as they'd inevitably establish large trading relationships with Chinese states. A unified Chinese empire would have a much larger diplo range and would trade even more.
And the OTL result of two empires in the Mediterranean and China without a bunch of states between them isn't guaranteed to happen in I:R. If say, the Seleucids conquer the eastern Mediterranean while keeping Persia, than there is a much closer link between China and the Mediterranean world.
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I think one very good reason to add China and the rest of Asia to the game is that it completes the ecosystem in which India exists. Otherwise, you get a truncated Indian political/economic game dynamic in the same way that the Seleucids would be truncated if we leave out India.
East Asia makes for a natural geographical boundary, of course. But more importantly, it forms a natural political boundary for the game; we can safely leave out the new world without compromising the political/economic dynamics of any nation in East Asia in this time period. A map including all of Eurasia would ensure that almost no nation in the game gets artificially truncated from interacting with historical neighbors by the edge of the map.
I wouldn't mind seeing Chinese support for certain Persian/Indian pretenders. Especially once it is united.
Having played the game for about seven hours now - I really do think a China expansion makes a lot of sense. All the little flavour pieces of the game - the advisor titles; the way manpower, POPs, and culture works; the hideous borders and huge reconquering of land in a few years; all of it screams Imperial China. I used to think the region would need separate mechanics, but except for some military traditions and some tweaks to flavour text, I think this game could basically have a China expansion in no time at all.
IF AND ONLY IF!...
The performance problem is solved, because the last thing the game needs is more stuttering with a map that's larger than the engine can handle. Even if the stutter goes away, they'll have to polish up the performance. I don't have the stutter but the game does go pretty slowly (on a 2700X CPU and 970 GTX GPU) on speed five. Nowhere near HOI4 during Barbarossa slow, but it's not great.
IF AND ONLY IF!...
The performance problem is solved, because the last thing the game needs is more stuttering with a map that's larger than the engine can handle. Even if the stutter goes away, they'll have to polish up the performance. I don't have the stutter but the game does go pretty slowly (on a 2700X CPU and 970 GTX GPU) on speed five. Nowhere near HOI4 during Barbarossa slow, but it's not great.
tbh I'd rather see a three kingdoms mod that focuses totally on china than an official expansion to the region.
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How are they going to add China when the game runs like such crap?
It's post-RoI levels of bad. Maybe even worse.
It's post-RoI levels of bad. Maybe even worse.
So, as we did see, the game mechanics are perfect for china. Wether you add it or not, i shall mention something, that everyone of us thought;
J A P A N
Add it or not? Well, as many youtubers have shown pkaying the game, starting as a migratory tribe and making a brand new empire out of it is very fun, so, japan, specifically for this time period, is perfect. By this time the yayoi were hangin around japan, making tribal wars and stuff.
We have at least several ethnic groups to add to the islands: Hayato, Kumaso, Emishi, Ainu and Yamadai/yamato (Tho you can represent them simply as "yayoi")
According to the nihonshoki, the first Japanese emperor jimmu, founded Japan (Yamato) by the 7th century bce
You don't need to add the whole island, just everything south modern day Nara
Also, you can pull out an Ireland and add only one confederate tribe (Yamato or Yayoi) to the islands
J A P A N
Add it or not? Well, as many youtubers have shown pkaying the game, starting as a migratory tribe and making a brand new empire out of it is very fun, so, japan, specifically for this time period, is perfect. By this time the yayoi were hangin around japan, making tribal wars and stuff.
We have at least several ethnic groups to add to the islands: Hayato, Kumaso, Emishi, Ainu and Yamadai/yamato (Tho you can represent them simply as "yayoi")
According to the nihonshoki, the first Japanese emperor jimmu, founded Japan (Yamato) by the 7th century bce
You don't need to add the whole island, just everything south modern day Nara
Also, you can pull out an Ireland and add only one confederate tribe (Yamato or Yayoi) to the islands
Emperor Jimmu, together with most of the early emperors, were almost certainly legendary characters either grossly exaggerated of totally invented to fit Imperial propaganda in the 8th century CE. In the 7th century BCE the Jomon people should still be dominating Japan (even if they were just seminomadic hunter gatherers) and the Yayoi people (which are basically the main ancestors of modern Japanese people) were either still on the Asian mainland or were already in Japan but limited to few communities in the South.
The game should start around the beginning of the Yayoi period in 300 BCE so it could be interesting to depict how the new people ended up absorbing the Jomon to build the foundations of modern Japan, however the country was extremely backward at the time (think Scandinavia with better soil and weather), and even culturally it was probably quite different since the cultural influences from China and Korea arrived in Japan only centuries after the end date for the game.
Of course! I highly doubt that jinmu founded the yamato in that era. At most, he was just a dude who founded a tribe that laterly became the yamato. As you say, the yayoi by the 7th bce didn't even exist.
But, by the time the game takes place, there were already jomon clan or ethnic groups worth mentioning (All the groups i marked in violet are from austronesian/jomon origin)
Also. You can restrict the island in a similar way they did with scandinavia, and add thr yamato where i painted in green.
Izumo and chikushi were yayoi kingdoms that laterly surrended to yamato, tho i highly doubt they were around by this moment
And, if anything of this sounds cool, you can just add the yamato where i added them and no more
This peripd of time of japanese history is the most fascinating to me. There are archeological records that there were wars, the chinese said that "there were hundred of kingoms fighting each other". The islands were pretty active
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Let's pick this idea back up in a couple years when the game is fully developed, with a superior interface, more flavor, improved performance, improved AI, etc. Just continually adding more features and more map areas takes precious development time which means core systems don't get improved and bugs persist. Would much rather have an excellent game in a smaller area than a pretty good one over a very wide area. Considering the many obvious issues right now (still enjoying the game, don't get me wrong)... I think we are way too early for anything like what's being proposed here.
I just want to throw my voice in that a China DLC would be awesome! With caveat that it is done well of course, I'd buy it with near certainty.
I agree that this would be best as a mid- or late-lifecycle DLC, after the game has had a few years to flesh out the current content and to straighten out performance issues. Even more so now that a lot of players are reporting stability problems and bugs early on.
My strategy is just to start the discussion early on, and get part of the community and hopefully the devs thinking about this as a future project.
It actually seems shortsighted to me that the devs didn't include China in this first build. I'm assuming they ran the numbers from EU4 usage and found most players were playing in Europe anyway, but the comment from the dev earlier in this thread saying future DLC like this hasn't been considered yet, kind of surprises me. This game really feels like the design was set by Johan in EU:Rome and never questioned since, which is a shame. Did China not come up at all in the meeting where the limits of the map were set? Was the "Rome" in the title meant to be a hard limit all along?
The biggest issue with this now is you're going to have a lot of players with inertia fighting against the inclusion of China, just as we saw in CK2 and India (the implementation of which didn't help anyone who thought a larger map was a good idea). Not sure how much Reddit/forum/social media feedback informs future DLC decisions, but I'm sure you're going to see a lot more players saying things like those above: "Fix the rest of the game before you expand it." When in reality I don't think it's an either/or. Assuming the engine and player computers can handle the larger map (which may or may not be the case), a China on the map may take limited resources away from developing a Democracy system for Athens, or Fall of the Republic DLC for Rome, or an incest-generator for the Egyptians. It's mostly graphic/artistic resources (map, terrain, character DNA system, naming, etc.) that would be required to build China in the current game. Not the same resources (programmers and designers) likely being used to develop all the other systems people are clamouring for after the first few days of gameplay.
I agree though, it'll probably be a few years down the road, and as long as the devs keep it in mind, I'll be happy. It's just disappointing it wasn't included in the base game.
China can certainly be done in I:R's mechanics, but they do need some adaptation (some sort of fief mechanic for example), and the team had a lot to do (some might say too much) as is. Perfect recipe for expansion content.
I think a map expansion to include China would by definition require a huge update that greatly expands (if not overhauls) trade (the silk road) and diplomacy (especially vassal interactions, which currently feel almost non existent, especially while playing a vassal state).
However, such improvements are needed sometime down the line anyways and it'd be a perfect opportunity to make playing "tall" empires (as in, non-expansionist, inward-focused) more interesting. And China is.. well, exactly that kind of empire once it is united. Worthless lands all around, huge territory that couldn't feasibly be expanded further without more modern means of transport and communication. Such an update would also pave the way towards an imperial era Rome timeline extension.
One good thing that's already confirmed is that they're adding navigable rivers in 1.1, and that could create some very interesting, unique, nowhere else seen gameplay situations for those playing in China. Like land invasions pretty much requiring that you beat the enemy fleet because you can't cross the huge river that separates your states otherwise.