From what I can tell, Chang Ezhong seems to be the best candidate of the three for long term expansion, at least that's who I would choose 
.
.-
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Kay...
Tomorrow or this evening I'll post an update up to the death of the Emperor, but I'm waiting a little while to do that one, since I want to get more people interested in this AAR, and giving them a choice is a good way to do that ;-)
-Adso
Tomorrow or this evening I'll post an update up to the death of the Emperor, but I'm waiting a little while to do that one, since I want to get more people interested in this AAR, and giving them a choice is a good way to do that ;-)
-Adso
It seems a little silly to gain cores in Japan. I can see gaining cores in Mongolia, Turkestan, and Korea, but gaining cores in Japan seems somewhat farfetched. Gaining cores in Tibet seems a little more likely.
I would go with Li Hongzhang, because I like the idea of a southern-focused China and I think a strong navy is the only way to really model that. Perhaps you could gain cores in the Phillipines?
Well, expansionists in China (especially Mongol ones) liked the idea of invading Japan. But you're right, Tibet is a better idea. It's this sort of input I need, thanks.
I go for Chang Ezhong
Btw, I agree with Tibet, isn't Tibet modeled a little false in Vicky? I mean, they were a Chinese puppet at this time, weren't they? China should at least have cores on it..
Btw, I agree with Tibet, isn't Tibet modeled a little false in Vicky? I mean, they were a Chinese puppet at this time, weren't they? China should at least have cores on it..
Well, like many people here are saying, I agree that you should go with Chang Ezhong. Still, I am reading this AAR and quite a few are aswell.
Anyway, update soon!
Anyway, update soon!
You can't beat a good old fashioned civil war -
go for succession crisis!
I guess that since I haven't played China, I am just not used to seeing such large numbers in manpower, heck even just in 'daily income'.
And don't worry about your apparent readership, or lack of it, they will come!
Heretic
go for succession crisis!
I guess that since I haven't played China, I am just not used to seeing such large numbers in manpower, heck even just in 'daily income'.
And don't worry about your apparent readership, or lack of it, they will come!
Heretic
The Great Western Civil War and the ascenscion of the Honglu Emperor
By 1854, the whole of South Asia was firmly under the control of the Sui Dynasty, the Great Assemblages of Naval Power were established, and the new military academies were granting such brilliant pupils as Chang Ezhong, whose success in putting down the Theravada rebels in the Siamese jungles north of Bangkok netted him a command alongside many of the aging veterans of the Great Dynastic War. The armed forces had been organized into regional militas to deal with peasant rebels, frontier armies to deter barbarians, and the Imperial Guard itself, stationed outside the walls of Nanking.
From 1854-8, in his twilight years, the Emperor slept no more than five hours a night, so constantly was he in conference with economic planners, or drafting the constitution of the new practicum-schools which were to be established alongside traditional exam schools, or organizing the great Board of Commerce which was to continue to oversee economic growth. His skillful handling of government monopolies and funds to build up the rail net of the Empire, and the establishment of Artisan Guildhouses in all trade towns, starting with regional capitals and working down to subsidiary market towns, allowed the easy transport of raw and finished goods across the Yangtse delta and thence, from the ports of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nantong, to the rest of the empire, and the world.
The Dragon awakens…and damn, does his breath stink! My economy in 1854.
In the cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou, foreign engineers were brought in to help in the creation of the grand Imperial Shipyards, and, in a move much protested by France, Spain, and England, made to stay in perpetuity, though in comfort and in their own communities.
Ruthless corveé labor was extracted from unemployed peasants, who found new work as migrant builders on the railroads that were spanning the rivers and valleys or as crews on the Emperor’s new ships, which crowded the drydocks up and down the Jiangsu and Zhenjian coasts.
Hrm. This screenshot is lost, but I have 39 wooden ships of the wall and 20 commerce raiders folating about.
By the time these administrative and economic changes came into place fully, the Imperial government exerted unprecedented control in China. Its tax agents were everywhere, army and navy recruiting teams would pick up the idle who were not sent to the railroads still reaching their rails down into the southeast asian possessions, and the centralized industries, run by independent artisans but taxed, issued permit for shipping, and overseen by the Imperial Yamen of Manufacturing, began providing goods to marketplace towns across China, and, indeed, to the European and American clipper ships flocking into Guangzhou for teas and clothing, or Hangzhou for glasswares, fine liquors which had become all the rage in America, and cheap Chinese steels, which, though of low grade, were easily bought from the Iron Boards who oversaw its distribution.
However, on April 13th, 1858, the great architect of the Sui Dynasty died in his study, poring over the recent tax incongruities from Shaanxi province. Without a son to succeed him, all seemed grim until an official document, stamped and endorsed by the Emperor as well as the High Board of Officials and the Hanlin Compilers, was found which endorsed the meteorically rising young official in the Board of Merchant Supervision, Li Hongzhang, as the next emperor. This gave me 25 RPs, increased consciousness among clerks, and initated an event chain you wil see shortly.
China's standing when Hongzhang becomes emperor.
This came as a severe shock to the earlier mentioned Chang Ezhong, who, through his martial prowess and uniquely unmarried, orphaned status (his parents died in the Dynastic Revolts), and closeness to Yeh Min-Chen, seemed the undisputed candidate for the throne.
However, Hongzhang went to his new post with youthful vigour, wresting several more technological exchange delegations out of the outgoing party in the English Parliament for a few additions to their Burmese holdings, leaving the incoming Tories with a huge scandal on their hands – for several important, indeed, essential ship designs (Dude, I got Iron Steamers out of the English in 1859!!!! Wooooo!) had been handed over to the Chinese delegates by scientists in the delegation, and the land bartered for ended up as nothing but jungle plateaus infested by natives and deadly animals.
Hongzhang’s new policies, however, neglected the army, and his disbandment of dozens of garrison armies was noted with interest by the Russians, flush with victory in the long, hard, Crimean War (see notes below on the Three Stooges Europe). When they began building up their forces in concert with the Manchu in early 1860, Ezhong sent a messenger to court, his first personal one since the death of Yeh Ming-Chen, to ask for reinforcements. Hongzhang sent back that he could have them only if they were raised from the commanderies already under his oversight, and this they were – in numbers so large that the new Hanghuo Emperor was besieged by nervous generals, speaking of a feudal revolt, when the reports were received. Note: This event deployed about a dozen divisions in Gansu, and I disbanded my Tianjin army to represent central neglect.
Indeed, there were well over 200,000 troops in Gansu alone under the personal command of Chang Ezhou, who continued to refuse to answer any letters from court. Finally giving in to his generals, several Imperial armies were marched to the west to ‘keep an eye’ on Chang Ezhong’s troops.
Before the Military Council could make any coherent move to actually curtail Ezhong’s rising power, though, a new crisis arose: the Convention of Scholars. Without precedent in Chinese history, the Confucian beaurocrats had been given great power in this new Sui system, but they were all still subject to the whims of the Imperial person, or any of his advisors. Indeed, the manipulations of several important Advisors to the Shipping Board in 1856 and 59 caused massive upheaval in Chili province when the timber shipments had no buyer arranged, and in Kwangtung province when dozens of top-of-the-line gunships were sold off to a Dutch privateer from Java.
The Convention attempted to fix these by presenting a memorial to the Emperor, signed by all high-ranking officials save his own inner circles, which gave the ministries themselves certain privileges of oversight and coordination, and appointed a whole new 300-member “Board of Virtuous Thinkers” to advise the Emperor, a board composed entirely of scholars and officials chosen by the Convention.
Li Hongzhang, still unused to his office and unsettled by rumors of rebellion from the west, rejected the memorial flat-out, and beheaded several officials he deemed treasonously responsible for its content, letting others off with a strong warning.
This widened discontent among the officals, and their support was the last thing Chang Ezhong had been waiting for. With the cooperation of dozens of high or former high officials, he subverted the command of all the Western Armies, proclaimed the deposing of the false Huangho Emperor, and called himself Son Of Heaven – now the third to bear that title, along with Li Hongzhang and the Manzhou puppet emperor, Qinlin.
The Army of the West at Chengdu, 200,000 of the best trained and equipped soldiers in the Empire, rebelled in January of 1861. By the end of that month, fast messengers and merchants had carried Ezhong’s message to the commanders of the 90,00 strong garrisons at Lanzhou and Ganzhou, and to the Mongolian levies patrolling the steppe borders of the Manchu domains.
In an unexpected turn, Jiang Izing, commander of the Imperial Reserve Army at Xi’an, also sent a messenger to Chang, pledging his nine divisions in return for a metropolitan commandery when “The fawning slave of foreign powers is ripped from his stolen throne.”
The next precious two months were spent consolidating the Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Fujuan garrisons into the Second Great Sword Army, alongside the original First Great Sword, the Imperial Guard itself. All the scattered garrison divisions of Annam and Siam were called to the fortress at Wenshan, to save it from a protracted siege, and the Old City Guards of Beijing were locked in fierce battle with the swift Mongolian border guards who had turned to Ezhong only weeks before.
After weeks of marching, Lu Jiang, the chief general of Li Hongzhang, met the Grand Army of the West on the banks of the Yangtse Valley in southern Nantong. Their battle would decide the fate of the war, and though position went to Lu Jiang, the rebel armies had numbers and maneuverability on their side. Ezhong himself had led a march on Beijing, and his subordinates were in command at Nantong, losing entire regiments in foolish frontal assaults before they moved around the flank of Lü’s forces, only to be caught and crushed by reinforcements arriving from Wenshan, where Imperial dragoons arriving had finally broken the siege.
With the demolishing defeat of the rebel armies at Nantong, only mopping-up engagements remained. Ezhong rallied his forces in the mountains of Gansu, and the battle for Lanzhou cost an estimated 600,000 lives or more, when both sides dead were counted. Similarly, the reclaiming of Mongolia cost valuable time and resources But by spring of 1862, Ezhong was dead on a mountaintop in Gaozhou, and the Imperial armies were being dispatched back to their garrison centers.
Though the war was short, later historians would note that Ezhong, by controlling Xi’an, Lanzhou, Gaozhou, and most of the other major coal mining centers of the Empire, could have strangled the Honglu Emperor’s economy if he had been content to hold a defensive position, and his Mongolian offensives, had they pushed against small outposts instead of the heavily fortified areas around Beijing, could have captured the all important iron mines at Zhejiang.
However, his insistence on an offensive campaign turned a war of attrition into a ferocious campaign of march and counter-march which cost between 25-30 million lives, though only a small minority of these were in battle, or were even soldiers.
Peasant movements had emerged in the Yellow River valley, among the disposed and homeless, calling for the abolition of the Emperor altogether, and rebellions were becoming more and more frequent among the workers in the Imperial Artisan Houses, as the stress of the war made itself felt in both cities and countryside.
The Huanglo Emperor decided on a radical course of action in order to prevent another rebellion on the scale of Chang Ezhongs:
With the establishment of the Administration Of Public Vitality and Health, public hysteria began to ebb, and the change in living conditions was a marvel to be seen. In the great cities, sewers swept away waste and food was distributed to children from huge wagons, and centers for medical practice were added onto most regional and local magistracies, even in the Annamese and Siamese areas of the Empire. Only later would history bring to light the demographic change such changes would cause, as infant death rate and death from disease dropped dramatically. (Note: Think, if you will, about what happens when a 15,000,000 man province gets a .15% growth rate. Yeah. That’s about right.)
As the nation recovered from the chaos of the Western Rebellion, the Honglu Emperor continued to devote most of the nation’s money and energy to the creation of the energy, while the Imperial Yamen for Manugfactures and the Yamen for Commerce continued inexolerably to expand the network of Artisan Houses into new provinces.
Thus, in 1864, the Sui Dynasty stood renewed and powerful, ready to enforce its will on the West.
Note: My industry score had passed 3400 by this point, and was rising unstoppably. I will stop noting this from here on out.
OK, everything that happened in China this update was dead serious. But Europe was a yuk-fest!
To begin with: in 1853, having had his fill of Tibetan Yummies and Mongol Munchies, the Russian Tsar turned his gaze south to the Ottoman’s Balkan possessions. Mmm…Bulgarians.
The Turk, however, had apparently been transformed from a swarthy, degenerate heathen monarch into an adorable puppy with giant saucer eyes, because every nation in Europe, seemingly, came to his defense.
Oh, sweet karmic revenge for my beatings at the hands of the Russians!
Things are looking bad for the Russian bear indeed. But like a bear, he shows indefatigable strength, throwing off his opponents one by one, despite admirable shows of heroism by such tiny nations as Greece:
Go go GREECE!!!
Until it’s down to them and the Ottomans in 1857-8….
Who are beaten to a pulp and raped for their Armenian possessions.
Ouch. Talk about your swift turnarounds. Europe’s bloody comedy of errors continues, when Italian unification threatens the authority of the Pope, causing Spanish Catholics to jump to his defense, dragging them into a war with Napoleon III, who is more than happy to gain some of the Iberian peninsula for himself…
Italy finally unified in 1859-60, and an era of conflict comes to a close in a Europe which seems to have basically spent a decade punching itself in the face repeatedly. Oh well, all the easier for me later…BWHAHAHA!
Later,
-Adso
By 1854, the whole of South Asia was firmly under the control of the Sui Dynasty, the Great Assemblages of Naval Power were established, and the new military academies were granting such brilliant pupils as Chang Ezhong, whose success in putting down the Theravada rebels in the Siamese jungles north of Bangkok netted him a command alongside many of the aging veterans of the Great Dynastic War. The armed forces had been organized into regional militas to deal with peasant rebels, frontier armies to deter barbarians, and the Imperial Guard itself, stationed outside the walls of Nanking.
From 1854-8, in his twilight years, the Emperor slept no more than five hours a night, so constantly was he in conference with economic planners, or drafting the constitution of the new practicum-schools which were to be established alongside traditional exam schools, or organizing the great Board of Commerce which was to continue to oversee economic growth. His skillful handling of government monopolies and funds to build up the rail net of the Empire, and the establishment of Artisan Guildhouses in all trade towns, starting with regional capitals and working down to subsidiary market towns, allowed the easy transport of raw and finished goods across the Yangtse delta and thence, from the ports of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nantong, to the rest of the empire, and the world.
The Dragon awakens…and damn, does his breath stink! My economy in 1854.
In the cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou, foreign engineers were brought in to help in the creation of the grand Imperial Shipyards, and, in a move much protested by France, Spain, and England, made to stay in perpetuity, though in comfort and in their own communities.
Ruthless corveé labor was extracted from unemployed peasants, who found new work as migrant builders on the railroads that were spanning the rivers and valleys or as crews on the Emperor’s new ships, which crowded the drydocks up and down the Jiangsu and Zhenjian coasts.
Hrm. This screenshot is lost, but I have 39 wooden ships of the wall and 20 commerce raiders folating about.
By the time these administrative and economic changes came into place fully, the Imperial government exerted unprecedented control in China. Its tax agents were everywhere, army and navy recruiting teams would pick up the idle who were not sent to the railroads still reaching their rails down into the southeast asian possessions, and the centralized industries, run by independent artisans but taxed, issued permit for shipping, and overseen by the Imperial Yamen of Manufacturing, began providing goods to marketplace towns across China, and, indeed, to the European and American clipper ships flocking into Guangzhou for teas and clothing, or Hangzhou for glasswares, fine liquors which had become all the rage in America, and cheap Chinese steels, which, though of low grade, were easily bought from the Iron Boards who oversaw its distribution.
However, on April 13th, 1858, the great architect of the Sui Dynasty died in his study, poring over the recent tax incongruities from Shaanxi province. Without a son to succeed him, all seemed grim until an official document, stamped and endorsed by the Emperor as well as the High Board of Officials and the Hanlin Compilers, was found which endorsed the meteorically rising young official in the Board of Merchant Supervision, Li Hongzhang, as the next emperor. This gave me 25 RPs, increased consciousness among clerks, and initated an event chain you wil see shortly.
China's standing when Hongzhang becomes emperor.
This came as a severe shock to the earlier mentioned Chang Ezhong, who, through his martial prowess and uniquely unmarried, orphaned status (his parents died in the Dynastic Revolts), and closeness to Yeh Min-Chen, seemed the undisputed candidate for the throne.
However, Hongzhang went to his new post with youthful vigour, wresting several more technological exchange delegations out of the outgoing party in the English Parliament for a few additions to their Burmese holdings, leaving the incoming Tories with a huge scandal on their hands – for several important, indeed, essential ship designs (Dude, I got Iron Steamers out of the English in 1859!!!! Wooooo!) had been handed over to the Chinese delegates by scientists in the delegation, and the land bartered for ended up as nothing but jungle plateaus infested by natives and deadly animals.
Hongzhang’s new policies, however, neglected the army, and his disbandment of dozens of garrison armies was noted with interest by the Russians, flush with victory in the long, hard, Crimean War (see notes below on the Three Stooges Europe). When they began building up their forces in concert with the Manchu in early 1860, Ezhong sent a messenger to court, his first personal one since the death of Yeh Ming-Chen, to ask for reinforcements. Hongzhang sent back that he could have them only if they were raised from the commanderies already under his oversight, and this they were – in numbers so large that the new Hanghuo Emperor was besieged by nervous generals, speaking of a feudal revolt, when the reports were received. Note: This event deployed about a dozen divisions in Gansu, and I disbanded my Tianjin army to represent central neglect.
Indeed, there were well over 200,000 troops in Gansu alone under the personal command of Chang Ezhou, who continued to refuse to answer any letters from court. Finally giving in to his generals, several Imperial armies were marched to the west to ‘keep an eye’ on Chang Ezhong’s troops.
Before the Military Council could make any coherent move to actually curtail Ezhong’s rising power, though, a new crisis arose: the Convention of Scholars. Without precedent in Chinese history, the Confucian beaurocrats had been given great power in this new Sui system, but they were all still subject to the whims of the Imperial person, or any of his advisors. Indeed, the manipulations of several important Advisors to the Shipping Board in 1856 and 59 caused massive upheaval in Chili province when the timber shipments had no buyer arranged, and in Kwangtung province when dozens of top-of-the-line gunships were sold off to a Dutch privateer from Java.
The Convention attempted to fix these by presenting a memorial to the Emperor, signed by all high-ranking officials save his own inner circles, which gave the ministries themselves certain privileges of oversight and coordination, and appointed a whole new 300-member “Board of Virtuous Thinkers” to advise the Emperor, a board composed entirely of scholars and officials chosen by the Convention.
Li Hongzhang, still unused to his office and unsettled by rumors of rebellion from the west, rejected the memorial flat-out, and beheaded several officials he deemed treasonously responsible for its content, letting others off with a strong warning.
This widened discontent among the officals, and their support was the last thing Chang Ezhong had been waiting for. With the cooperation of dozens of high or former high officials, he subverted the command of all the Western Armies, proclaimed the deposing of the false Huangho Emperor, and called himself Son Of Heaven – now the third to bear that title, along with Li Hongzhang and the Manzhou puppet emperor, Qinlin.
The Army of the West at Chengdu, 200,000 of the best trained and equipped soldiers in the Empire, rebelled in January of 1861. By the end of that month, fast messengers and merchants had carried Ezhong’s message to the commanders of the 90,00 strong garrisons at Lanzhou and Ganzhou, and to the Mongolian levies patrolling the steppe borders of the Manchu domains.
In an unexpected turn, Jiang Izing, commander of the Imperial Reserve Army at Xi’an, also sent a messenger to Chang, pledging his nine divisions in return for a metropolitan commandery when “The fawning slave of foreign powers is ripped from his stolen throne.”
The next precious two months were spent consolidating the Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Fujuan garrisons into the Second Great Sword Army, alongside the original First Great Sword, the Imperial Guard itself. All the scattered garrison divisions of Annam and Siam were called to the fortress at Wenshan, to save it from a protracted siege, and the Old City Guards of Beijing were locked in fierce battle with the swift Mongolian border guards who had turned to Ezhong only weeks before.
After weeks of marching, Lu Jiang, the chief general of Li Hongzhang, met the Grand Army of the West on the banks of the Yangtse Valley in southern Nantong. Their battle would decide the fate of the war, and though position went to Lu Jiang, the rebel armies had numbers and maneuverability on their side. Ezhong himself had led a march on Beijing, and his subordinates were in command at Nantong, losing entire regiments in foolish frontal assaults before they moved around the flank of Lü’s forces, only to be caught and crushed by reinforcements arriving from Wenshan, where Imperial dragoons arriving had finally broken the siege.
With the demolishing defeat of the rebel armies at Nantong, only mopping-up engagements remained. Ezhong rallied his forces in the mountains of Gansu, and the battle for Lanzhou cost an estimated 600,000 lives or more, when both sides dead were counted. Similarly, the reclaiming of Mongolia cost valuable time and resources But by spring of 1862, Ezhong was dead on a mountaintop in Gaozhou, and the Imperial armies were being dispatched back to their garrison centers.
Though the war was short, later historians would note that Ezhong, by controlling Xi’an, Lanzhou, Gaozhou, and most of the other major coal mining centers of the Empire, could have strangled the Honglu Emperor’s economy if he had been content to hold a defensive position, and his Mongolian offensives, had they pushed against small outposts instead of the heavily fortified areas around Beijing, could have captured the all important iron mines at Zhejiang.
However, his insistence on an offensive campaign turned a war of attrition into a ferocious campaign of march and counter-march which cost between 25-30 million lives, though only a small minority of these were in battle, or were even soldiers.
Peasant movements had emerged in the Yellow River valley, among the disposed and homeless, calling for the abolition of the Emperor altogether, and rebellions were becoming more and more frequent among the workers in the Imperial Artisan Houses, as the stress of the war made itself felt in both cities and countryside.
The Huanglo Emperor decided on a radical course of action in order to prevent another rebellion on the scale of Chang Ezhongs:
With the establishment of the Administration Of Public Vitality and Health, public hysteria began to ebb, and the change in living conditions was a marvel to be seen. In the great cities, sewers swept away waste and food was distributed to children from huge wagons, and centers for medical practice were added onto most regional and local magistracies, even in the Annamese and Siamese areas of the Empire. Only later would history bring to light the demographic change such changes would cause, as infant death rate and death from disease dropped dramatically. (Note: Think, if you will, about what happens when a 15,000,000 man province gets a .15% growth rate. Yeah. That’s about right.)
As the nation recovered from the chaos of the Western Rebellion, the Honglu Emperor continued to devote most of the nation’s money and energy to the creation of the energy, while the Imperial Yamen for Manugfactures and the Yamen for Commerce continued inexolerably to expand the network of Artisan Houses into new provinces.
Thus, in 1864, the Sui Dynasty stood renewed and powerful, ready to enforce its will on the West.
Note: My industry score had passed 3400 by this point, and was rising unstoppably. I will stop noting this from here on out.
OK, everything that happened in China this update was dead serious. But Europe was a yuk-fest!
To begin with: in 1853, having had his fill of Tibetan Yummies and Mongol Munchies, the Russian Tsar turned his gaze south to the Ottoman’s Balkan possessions. Mmm…Bulgarians.
The Turk, however, had apparently been transformed from a swarthy, degenerate heathen monarch into an adorable puppy with giant saucer eyes, because every nation in Europe, seemingly, came to his defense.
Oh, sweet karmic revenge for my beatings at the hands of the Russians!
Things are looking bad for the Russian bear indeed. But like a bear, he shows indefatigable strength, throwing off his opponents one by one, despite admirable shows of heroism by such tiny nations as Greece:
Go go GREECE!!!
Until it’s down to them and the Ottomans in 1857-8….
Who are beaten to a pulp and raped for their Armenian possessions.
Ouch. Talk about your swift turnarounds. Europe’s bloody comedy of errors continues, when Italian unification threatens the authority of the Pope, causing Spanish Catholics to jump to his defense, dragging them into a war with Napoleon III, who is more than happy to gain some of the Iberian peninsula for himself…
Italy finally unified in 1859-60, and an era of conflict comes to a close in a Europe which seems to have basically spent a decade punching itself in the face repeatedly. Oh well, all the easier for me later…BWHAHAHA!
Later,
-Adso
Last edited:
Aaaaand
For those few of you that care, a fiction update follows. Note that the story has not by far caught up with the AAR, we're still in the Annamese war of the first update. As we open, Tseng Guo-Fan has marched south with his newlt raised forces, stopping in a Pearl River Valley city on the way...
******************************************************
To be in a tea-house again was better than Tseng Guo-Fan could find words to express. The smell of a thousand brewing cups, the lightly scented lanterns, the fresh rain off of the mountains of Lignan, and the murmur of conversation all coalesced into single glowing atmosphere. After weeks on the rocky, muddy roads with his troops, walking or riding through all weather, speaking in coarse dialect and eating coarser food, it was like water on the tongue of a runner, or fire’s warmth on chill mornings.
It was three weeks into spring, and the monsoons were spending the last of their fury outside, battering the roof and cascading down the graceful arcs of the roof, splattering into the muddy street. Down the road, he could hear the soldiers laughing and celebrating in the other common-houses of the town, and sipping his tea, it seemed that all was well and normal. After all, many respectable officials had served in the armies, and if he did well…
Ah, ambition. Confucius was right to warn that the mind must be cultivated to responsibility, perhaps, for ambition had been much in his mind, and it was indeed distracting. He was proud of his men, from rough farmhands and herders to mean-as-dogs soldiers in a few months, if lacking in discipline. He was proud of his own achievements, having studied all the barbarian texts, even learning their language, ‘Cyrillic,’ so he wouldn’t have to deal with translations. Why, excelling in a campaign could bring him even to the Hanlin, provided he could pass the exams this time, which, of course…
Guo-Fan’s reveries was broken by a commotion in the center of the tea-house, benches scraping across the floor and tables being moved, a welter of voices raised from the quiet conversation that was the norm. Craning over his shoulder, he saw a space clearing in around a tall, stately looking gentleman, perhaps forty or fifty years of age, wearing the emblems of a Hanlin Compiler and those of a high banner-commander. He was speaking quietly and intensely to two other officials, paying no attention to the space being cleared around him, until he dismissed them both with a bow and flick of his hand, then turned towards the tea-house. His eyes swept the audience, fast and hard like jade, even as he began speaking respectfully.
“My most honored friends, none of us are where we should be! It is the place of the scholar to cultivate the people and his own mind, and yet we cultivate the art of war, all at the command of the Son of Heaven, in his wisdom.”
Guo-Fan was slowly captivated, under the spell of the powerful words and ideas, like every other man under the roof of that rain-shrouded teahouse. But while they sat and kneeled, rapt, the speakers tone, until then almost mocking, swiftly changed. His bearing went from conspiratorial, leaning out towards Guo-Fan and the others, to scolding, swiftly rising in volume and harshness.
“His wisdom, which sees the barbarians encroaching on us, trying to rule the Middle Kingdom from afar, living off our products and sending us foreign mud (NB: a term for opium) in return. You have been called away from the duties for which you are needed to keep this mud from our cities, and to re-assert the Throne of Heaven over her tributaries. I am not Manzhou, and cannot command you, but I can tell you to muster now and prepare to march, for the barbarian cannot sail without ports. The Annamese intend to give them those ports, and their envoys mock the dignity of the Dragon Throne.”
Ah, so that’s where this went. Not that anyone of such high rank held anti-Manchu sentiments anyway, no matter what it seemed like. The man was winding down now, coming to a close.
“…and though the Manchu Zhang will command the Banners, it will be I who coordinate with your Banner Militas. And together, with your men and valor, we can destroy the outer barbarians until they acknowledge the Emperor again!”
A subtle thing, one only his audience would note. Something only one well-read in the classics, even in poetry and the old histories, could possibly note. Outer barbarians…close to “maritime barbarians”, or “tributary barbarians,” but not quite. And that difference…as the audience moved tables back, the silence was amazing as each man mulled over what he had heard, mentally prepared for requisitioning his supplies the next morning from the barges.
As he left, Guo-Fan finally asked the commander of a the Guangxi militia who the speaker was. His name was Yeh Ming-Chen, apparently. A jinshi scholar chosen for his orthodoxy, or so went the word. But, like every man who had heard that fateful last line, could no longer be so sure of the future as he was ten minutes before. It occupied his mind, heavier than ambition or weariness, as he stepped into the quiet streets, walked slowly to the boarding houses under still-dripping eaves and a waxing moon.
*******************************************************
The south was miserable, Shen had decided long ago, while they were still on the barges going down the Pearl River. Why anyone lived here was beyond him, and why they should want to defend it so badly was even more ridiculous.
Lignan had been miserable, from the rocky Nian passes to their rainy week of rest in Wuzhou while the commander spent all day with other shi officials, and this Red River land was triply so. It was hotter at night than during the day, because you had to cover yourself completely to escape the mosquitoes, and if you didn’t, you were liable to get the shaking disease. The ground was muddy, everything but the hard breads they brought with them and the rice they took from villages was poisonous or spoiled. The roads were impassable, the language incomprehensible, and the people surly when they weren’t busy running at you with spears.
They were marching towards the city of Hue, down the coastal roads, with a train of horses that reached many li behind them. The magistrate had told the men when they passed into Annam, just another stretch of jungle, but slowly differences became apparent. More rice in the fields, no cotton or silk-and-mulberry plantations, and no yams. Darker-skinned folk who not even the Cantonese they’d drafted as replacements in Wuzhou could understand, temples strange in form and Buddahs with weirdly shaped faces and ears.
But Shen was a soldier, and mostly he was glad that these people didn’t appear to have an army. Sure, the last villiage they’d raided, he and twenty other men had to cut down a kind of militia that came out to defend their rice store, but it had been nice to get the kinks out of his sword-arm, at that. He hadn’t fired his musket, of course, and the only man who had was branded on both hands by one of the under-magistratcies for not conserving his powder.
They walked on, all day and into evening, then stopped for the night. The beating sun and drenching humidity had made the men worse than exhausted, like every day of this forsaken march to Hue, and Shen and Xun slumped down together on one of the few rocks to be found, covered themselves in mosquito netting, and were asleep in an instant.
*******************************************************
Whistles shrilled across the early morning the next day, and drum began to rap quickly in all corners of the camp. Xun shook his cousin groggily, rising and staring out at the gray-brown waters of the ocean.
“Shen, come on, awake. Hear the tattoo sounding?”
“Uh. Xun, of course I hear it, it’s louder than the river in spring.”
“So why aren’t you getting up, you old ox?”
“Because, the porters never finish untying the horses until…”
“Shen, the horses have already been moved up, and the other companies are mounting. I don’t think...”
His cousin finally opened his eyes and peered out into the grey morning, soaked in dew and mist from the bay, to see a very different scene than the usual raucous camp before a days march. The magistrate was shouting to the submagistrates, and the were shouting at the third bubing of soldiers. Men with paper were riding up and down the road to the submagistrate, and he yelled at them as they came, too.
Definitely not a normal morning. Within half an hour they were on their mounts and trotting along the coastal roads in a battle formation, and Shen was looking around nervously while Xun laid his musket across his saddle, running his shirt across the barrel, cleaning it repetitively.
The sun was well risen now, coming up over the South Sea in a blaze of glory and throwing off the mists of morning like a fire in a silk-store. It blazed out over the men at the front of the column, singing the racous marching song they had made up in Nantong about a barmaid, and down on the train of extra horses following for miles, and down on the head of the magistrate, who was using a spyglass to look all about him as they marched. While Shen watched, he seemed to give a start, as over the hill two men from the scout company returned, waving a pair of blue-and-red flags, pushing their mounts faster and faster over the crest of a dune-hill.
The magistrate began to shout orders, and before the cousins knew it, they were in a real battle. Two sub-groups had dismounted and were lining up, and Shen and Xun were among these, and three were riding west and east of the road, skirting the marshes to take up positions left and right of Xun and Shen’s group . The magistrate, standing in the back, shouted the order to march forward, which rand out down the lines until Jie Izi, the commander of there area of the line, shouted it out to them, and, feeling like little brown-clad target dummies under the bright, Annamese sun, they began to advance up the road.
The coastal turf was soft and sliding, almost sandy, and in places it became swampy, where Xun and the others had to double-time to even keep pace with the rest of the line. But they crested the small hill in only ten minutes, and below them was spread out an amazing spectacle.
The Annamese army, bright-colored and flashing with metal spear-heads and old muskets, was moving in the plain beyond, the thousands of them hurridly arranging into a battle formation . The cries of their commanders and shrill shrieks of pipers echoed through the morning air, and horses galloped back and forth across the front of their line as they formed up – well, if one could call it that. Compared to Xun’s brigade, which, as drums beat and the magistrate gave hand signals, set up in three parallel lines, and runners mounted up and dashed off to the cavalrymen waiting just past the hill-line.
Minutes passed interminably as the Annamese gathered their advance and moved forward slowly, muskets popping irregularly as soldiers misfired. Sweat dripped down into Xun’s face where he knelt, and he could feel the line tense each time one of those muskets fired. Shen, next to him, was so tense every muscle in his arms, holding his musket up and on his shoulder, looked like a taut hemp-rope, and Xun realized he probably looked the same way.
Moments flowed past, like a stream carrying with it all the horrible possibilities of battle – capture, injury, death, permanent disfigurement. Xun breathed in, and out, and in, and out slowly, just as the monks had taught him on those long summer days when he sat outside the monastery. The moments seemed to pass slower then, but less agonizingly, and then…
“First rank, fire on the center!” came Jie Izhi’s scream, and the sound was deafening as every single musketman in the line with Xun discharged. Dozens of Annamese fell, and they returned fire, a ragged volley throwing up clods of dirt a dozen chin in front of the line.
“Second rank, fire on the center!: was the order as Xun stuffed a cleaning-rag down his barrel, then ripped open a paper cartridge with his teeth and poured the ball and powder down the barrel.
He only saw Jie’s lips move for the third rank, and the cloud of smoke as the fired washed over the first line like an ocean wave, obscuring his sight of the Annamese, still advancing at march towards them. No order to fire came as he set his flint and raised his musket again, and his ears rang as they cleared to hear…
“Hold. Hold, hold…all of you sons of the Han, reload. All ranks…volley center, sling, draw swords, and charge on my mark…”
Far off, someone was shouting, drums were beating. Horns were sounding. In the white-grey mist, though, all Xun could imagine were the shapes of the Annamese soldiers, who would come charging out of the smoke, fierce and barbaric and ready to pierce…
“Mark me!”
He pulled his trigger spasmodically, firing into the cloud, then, without thought or hope, threw his gun on its leather strap back over his shoulder, drew out the sword he had practiced with, and screamed out his father’s family name into the mist. Around him, dozens of other men were screaming as they sprinted forward, dreamlike and sudden and furious and frightened, into the foul powder-smoke of the battlefield…
********************************************************
Comments on my writing by those of you fiction-inclined would be great.
-Adso
For those few of you that care, a fiction update follows. Note that the story has not by far caught up with the AAR, we're still in the Annamese war of the first update. As we open, Tseng Guo-Fan has marched south with his newlt raised forces, stopping in a Pearl River Valley city on the way...
******************************************************
To be in a tea-house again was better than Tseng Guo-Fan could find words to express. The smell of a thousand brewing cups, the lightly scented lanterns, the fresh rain off of the mountains of Lignan, and the murmur of conversation all coalesced into single glowing atmosphere. After weeks on the rocky, muddy roads with his troops, walking or riding through all weather, speaking in coarse dialect and eating coarser food, it was like water on the tongue of a runner, or fire’s warmth on chill mornings.
It was three weeks into spring, and the monsoons were spending the last of their fury outside, battering the roof and cascading down the graceful arcs of the roof, splattering into the muddy street. Down the road, he could hear the soldiers laughing and celebrating in the other common-houses of the town, and sipping his tea, it seemed that all was well and normal. After all, many respectable officials had served in the armies, and if he did well…
Ah, ambition. Confucius was right to warn that the mind must be cultivated to responsibility, perhaps, for ambition had been much in his mind, and it was indeed distracting. He was proud of his men, from rough farmhands and herders to mean-as-dogs soldiers in a few months, if lacking in discipline. He was proud of his own achievements, having studied all the barbarian texts, even learning their language, ‘Cyrillic,’ so he wouldn’t have to deal with translations. Why, excelling in a campaign could bring him even to the Hanlin, provided he could pass the exams this time, which, of course…
Guo-Fan’s reveries was broken by a commotion in the center of the tea-house, benches scraping across the floor and tables being moved, a welter of voices raised from the quiet conversation that was the norm. Craning over his shoulder, he saw a space clearing in around a tall, stately looking gentleman, perhaps forty or fifty years of age, wearing the emblems of a Hanlin Compiler and those of a high banner-commander. He was speaking quietly and intensely to two other officials, paying no attention to the space being cleared around him, until he dismissed them both with a bow and flick of his hand, then turned towards the tea-house. His eyes swept the audience, fast and hard like jade, even as he began speaking respectfully.
“My most honored friends, none of us are where we should be! It is the place of the scholar to cultivate the people and his own mind, and yet we cultivate the art of war, all at the command of the Son of Heaven, in his wisdom.”
Guo-Fan was slowly captivated, under the spell of the powerful words and ideas, like every other man under the roof of that rain-shrouded teahouse. But while they sat and kneeled, rapt, the speakers tone, until then almost mocking, swiftly changed. His bearing went from conspiratorial, leaning out towards Guo-Fan and the others, to scolding, swiftly rising in volume and harshness.
“His wisdom, which sees the barbarians encroaching on us, trying to rule the Middle Kingdom from afar, living off our products and sending us foreign mud (NB: a term for opium) in return. You have been called away from the duties for which you are needed to keep this mud from our cities, and to re-assert the Throne of Heaven over her tributaries. I am not Manzhou, and cannot command you, but I can tell you to muster now and prepare to march, for the barbarian cannot sail without ports. The Annamese intend to give them those ports, and their envoys mock the dignity of the Dragon Throne.”
Ah, so that’s where this went. Not that anyone of such high rank held anti-Manchu sentiments anyway, no matter what it seemed like. The man was winding down now, coming to a close.
“…and though the Manchu Zhang will command the Banners, it will be I who coordinate with your Banner Militas. And together, with your men and valor, we can destroy the outer barbarians until they acknowledge the Emperor again!”
A subtle thing, one only his audience would note. Something only one well-read in the classics, even in poetry and the old histories, could possibly note. Outer barbarians…close to “maritime barbarians”, or “tributary barbarians,” but not quite. And that difference…as the audience moved tables back, the silence was amazing as each man mulled over what he had heard, mentally prepared for requisitioning his supplies the next morning from the barges.
As he left, Guo-Fan finally asked the commander of a the Guangxi militia who the speaker was. His name was Yeh Ming-Chen, apparently. A jinshi scholar chosen for his orthodoxy, or so went the word. But, like every man who had heard that fateful last line, could no longer be so sure of the future as he was ten minutes before. It occupied his mind, heavier than ambition or weariness, as he stepped into the quiet streets, walked slowly to the boarding houses under still-dripping eaves and a waxing moon.
*******************************************************
The south was miserable, Shen had decided long ago, while they were still on the barges going down the Pearl River. Why anyone lived here was beyond him, and why they should want to defend it so badly was even more ridiculous.
Lignan had been miserable, from the rocky Nian passes to their rainy week of rest in Wuzhou while the commander spent all day with other shi officials, and this Red River land was triply so. It was hotter at night than during the day, because you had to cover yourself completely to escape the mosquitoes, and if you didn’t, you were liable to get the shaking disease. The ground was muddy, everything but the hard breads they brought with them and the rice they took from villages was poisonous or spoiled. The roads were impassable, the language incomprehensible, and the people surly when they weren’t busy running at you with spears.
They were marching towards the city of Hue, down the coastal roads, with a train of horses that reached many li behind them. The magistrate had told the men when they passed into Annam, just another stretch of jungle, but slowly differences became apparent. More rice in the fields, no cotton or silk-and-mulberry plantations, and no yams. Darker-skinned folk who not even the Cantonese they’d drafted as replacements in Wuzhou could understand, temples strange in form and Buddahs with weirdly shaped faces and ears.
But Shen was a soldier, and mostly he was glad that these people didn’t appear to have an army. Sure, the last villiage they’d raided, he and twenty other men had to cut down a kind of militia that came out to defend their rice store, but it had been nice to get the kinks out of his sword-arm, at that. He hadn’t fired his musket, of course, and the only man who had was branded on both hands by one of the under-magistratcies for not conserving his powder.
They walked on, all day and into evening, then stopped for the night. The beating sun and drenching humidity had made the men worse than exhausted, like every day of this forsaken march to Hue, and Shen and Xun slumped down together on one of the few rocks to be found, covered themselves in mosquito netting, and were asleep in an instant.
*******************************************************
Whistles shrilled across the early morning the next day, and drum began to rap quickly in all corners of the camp. Xun shook his cousin groggily, rising and staring out at the gray-brown waters of the ocean.
“Shen, come on, awake. Hear the tattoo sounding?”
“Uh. Xun, of course I hear it, it’s louder than the river in spring.”
“So why aren’t you getting up, you old ox?”
“Because, the porters never finish untying the horses until…”
“Shen, the horses have already been moved up, and the other companies are mounting. I don’t think...”
His cousin finally opened his eyes and peered out into the grey morning, soaked in dew and mist from the bay, to see a very different scene than the usual raucous camp before a days march. The magistrate was shouting to the submagistrates, and the were shouting at the third bubing of soldiers. Men with paper were riding up and down the road to the submagistrate, and he yelled at them as they came, too.
Definitely not a normal morning. Within half an hour they were on their mounts and trotting along the coastal roads in a battle formation, and Shen was looking around nervously while Xun laid his musket across his saddle, running his shirt across the barrel, cleaning it repetitively.
The sun was well risen now, coming up over the South Sea in a blaze of glory and throwing off the mists of morning like a fire in a silk-store. It blazed out over the men at the front of the column, singing the racous marching song they had made up in Nantong about a barmaid, and down on the train of extra horses following for miles, and down on the head of the magistrate, who was using a spyglass to look all about him as they marched. While Shen watched, he seemed to give a start, as over the hill two men from the scout company returned, waving a pair of blue-and-red flags, pushing their mounts faster and faster over the crest of a dune-hill.
The magistrate began to shout orders, and before the cousins knew it, they were in a real battle. Two sub-groups had dismounted and were lining up, and Shen and Xun were among these, and three were riding west and east of the road, skirting the marshes to take up positions left and right of Xun and Shen’s group . The magistrate, standing in the back, shouted the order to march forward, which rand out down the lines until Jie Izi, the commander of there area of the line, shouted it out to them, and, feeling like little brown-clad target dummies under the bright, Annamese sun, they began to advance up the road.
The coastal turf was soft and sliding, almost sandy, and in places it became swampy, where Xun and the others had to double-time to even keep pace with the rest of the line. But they crested the small hill in only ten minutes, and below them was spread out an amazing spectacle.
The Annamese army, bright-colored and flashing with metal spear-heads and old muskets, was moving in the plain beyond, the thousands of them hurridly arranging into a battle formation . The cries of their commanders and shrill shrieks of pipers echoed through the morning air, and horses galloped back and forth across the front of their line as they formed up – well, if one could call it that. Compared to Xun’s brigade, which, as drums beat and the magistrate gave hand signals, set up in three parallel lines, and runners mounted up and dashed off to the cavalrymen waiting just past the hill-line.
Minutes passed interminably as the Annamese gathered their advance and moved forward slowly, muskets popping irregularly as soldiers misfired. Sweat dripped down into Xun’s face where he knelt, and he could feel the line tense each time one of those muskets fired. Shen, next to him, was so tense every muscle in his arms, holding his musket up and on his shoulder, looked like a taut hemp-rope, and Xun realized he probably looked the same way.
Moments flowed past, like a stream carrying with it all the horrible possibilities of battle – capture, injury, death, permanent disfigurement. Xun breathed in, and out, and in, and out slowly, just as the monks had taught him on those long summer days when he sat outside the monastery. The moments seemed to pass slower then, but less agonizingly, and then…
“First rank, fire on the center!” came Jie Izhi’s scream, and the sound was deafening as every single musketman in the line with Xun discharged. Dozens of Annamese fell, and they returned fire, a ragged volley throwing up clods of dirt a dozen chin in front of the line.
“Second rank, fire on the center!: was the order as Xun stuffed a cleaning-rag down his barrel, then ripped open a paper cartridge with his teeth and poured the ball and powder down the barrel.
He only saw Jie’s lips move for the third rank, and the cloud of smoke as the fired washed over the first line like an ocean wave, obscuring his sight of the Annamese, still advancing at march towards them. No order to fire came as he set his flint and raised his musket again, and his ears rang as they cleared to hear…
“Hold. Hold, hold…all of you sons of the Han, reload. All ranks…volley center, sling, draw swords, and charge on my mark…”
Far off, someone was shouting, drums were beating. Horns were sounding. In the white-grey mist, though, all Xun could imagine were the shapes of the Annamese soldiers, who would come charging out of the smoke, fierce and barbaric and ready to pierce…
“Mark me!”
He pulled his trigger spasmodically, firing into the cloud, then, without thought or hope, threw his gun on its leather strap back over his shoulder, drew out the sword he had practiced with, and screamed out his father’s family name into the mist. Around him, dozens of other men were screaming as they sprinted forward, dreamlike and sudden and furious and frightened, into the foul powder-smoke of the battlefield…
********************************************************
Comments on my writing by those of you fiction-inclined would be great.
-Adso
Adso,
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the money that China makes is truly amazing, you should try a little harder to spend some, I think. Or are you saving up until next time you have to mobilise and fight a long war?
As for the fiction, a good, descriptive stlye, conveys the atmosphere pretty well. I personally try to keep the game updates and the story close in date, just to they support each other. But use of flashback etc. is fine - maybe just pop a date on the top of each episode (maybe I should do that too!)
And if I'm being really picky, Cyrillic is the script, not the language, but that is not something that affects the story at all
Heretic
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the money that China makes is truly amazing, you should try a little harder to spend some, I think. Or are you saving up until next time you have to mobilise and fight a long war?
As for the fiction, a good, descriptive stlye, conveys the atmosphere pretty well. I personally try to keep the game updates and the story close in date, just to they support each other. But use of flashback etc. is fine - maybe just pop a date on the top of each episode (maybe I should do that too!)
And if I'm being really picky, Cyrillic is the script, not the language, but that is not something that affects the story at all
Heretic
Money...
The money is indeed amazing, but so are the things to spend it on. That medical upgrade cost nearly three million pounds, out of the 4.2 I had in the bank! And building the sheer number factories, railroads, and converting hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of POPs is fairly expensive, too. But don't worry -- that money will be finding its way into good hands soon enough. The poverty of China's POPs is amazing, though -- even with 5-6,000 a day in exports, my huge population means the money is divided up into tiny portions. In turn, this means once I switched over to taxation rather than tariffs in 1849, I make a mere 1100-1400 or so a day, and thats with 75% poor, 49% rich and middle, and due to the 1200-day I have to pay for my one reform, even that fluctuates.
Also, rebuilding my army is a monumental and expensive task -- the rebellions whittled me down to less than 60 divisions in 1862. However, the Imperial Army will be rebuilt bigger and better than before.
So, with these vast resources at my disposal -- including the New Grand Fleet, whose ironclads outnumber any other navy in the world, save the English wooden fleet -- which nation should feel the wrath of the Honglu Emperor? The Russians, who still hold Yumen and the East? The English holdings in Asia -- after all, if I could take India, thus owning th two most heavily populated areas in the world, I would be unstoppable.
-Adso
The money is indeed amazing, but so are the things to spend it on. That medical upgrade cost nearly three million pounds, out of the 4.2 I had in the bank! And building the sheer number factories, railroads, and converting hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of POPs is fairly expensive, too. But don't worry -- that money will be finding its way into good hands soon enough. The poverty of China's POPs is amazing, though -- even with 5-6,000 a day in exports, my huge population means the money is divided up into tiny portions. In turn, this means once I switched over to taxation rather than tariffs in 1849, I make a mere 1100-1400 or so a day, and thats with 75% poor, 49% rich and middle, and due to the 1200-day I have to pay for my one reform, even that fluctuates.
Also, rebuilding my army is a monumental and expensive task -- the rebellions whittled me down to less than 60 divisions in 1862. However, the Imperial Army will be rebuilt bigger and better than before.
So, with these vast resources at my disposal -- including the New Grand Fleet, whose ironclads outnumber any other navy in the world, save the English wooden fleet -- which nation should feel the wrath of the Honglu Emperor? The Russians, who still hold Yumen and the East? The English holdings in Asia -- after all, if I could take India, thus owning th two most heavily populated areas in the world, I would be unstoppable.
-Adso
Wow! Great story!
Surely the people of the Middle Kingdom must feel the urge to take revenge for the sorrow inflicted upon them by the barbarians from the northeast (i.e. the Russians)!
Surely the people of the Middle Kingdom must feel the urge to take revenge for the sorrow inflicted upon them by the barbarians from the northeast (i.e. the Russians)!
This is a great AAR. Please keep up the good work and the screenshots (I love screenshots).
As for what's next, I'd go for Manchuria and Russia. There's no reason why Russia should hold the biggest percentage of the Asian continent - China must obviously supplant them and take Siberia for itself.
As for what's next, I'd go for Manchuria and Russia. There's no reason why Russia should hold the biggest percentage of the Asian continent - China must obviously supplant them and take Siberia for itself.
I'm going to be a dissenter and say go for England while you have the advantage in ironclads. Take back what's rightfully yours and then take what isn't really rightfully yours at all.
After India, then you can think about the dirty comm-- I mean imperialist Russians.
After India, then you can think about the dirty comm-- I mean imperialist Russians.
War war war war war (lovely war, wonderful...)
WAR!
Well, sort of.
I ran tests to see how war would work out circa 1865, without mobilizing my 1.1 million man reserves.
I can beat Russia, but it gets nasty once they send in 45+ reinforcements from wherever they're hanging out, maybe the Turkish border. Plus, the Manchu have a TON of manpower and the same techs as I had in 1842, so they can and have built normal infantry units in large numbers. These factors, combined with the natural bottlenecks and mountainous terrain of South Turkestan, make me NEED my 3-5:1 odds to pull off a win.
If terrain is bad in the north, you should have seen the horror that ensued when I tried to invade Burma. The Brits, armed with breech loading rifles vs my just-recently-aquired from Prussia muzzle-loaders and dug in like maniacs in the mountains of burma (anyone else listen to Midnight Oil?) can inflict massive casualties even when I'm invading from all sides. Virtually impossible til I have more artillery, better org, my own breech loaders, and/or I am willing to call out the reserves.
Finally, I learned something fascinating: war exhaustion is almost directly linked to population density. Thus, after only 8-12 months at war, revoltrisk in all major Chinese provinces in at or above .9-1.25%. Owch. However, lightly populated SE Asia is way less discontented....hrm. History on its head much?
There ya go!
-Adso
WAR!
Well, sort of.
I ran tests to see how war would work out circa 1865, without mobilizing my 1.1 million man reserves.
I can beat Russia, but it gets nasty once they send in 45+ reinforcements from wherever they're hanging out, maybe the Turkish border. Plus, the Manchu have a TON of manpower and the same techs as I had in 1842, so they can and have built normal infantry units in large numbers. These factors, combined with the natural bottlenecks and mountainous terrain of South Turkestan, make me NEED my 3-5:1 odds to pull off a win.
If terrain is bad in the north, you should have seen the horror that ensued when I tried to invade Burma. The Brits, armed with breech loading rifles vs my just-recently-aquired from Prussia muzzle-loaders and dug in like maniacs in the mountains of burma (anyone else listen to Midnight Oil?) can inflict massive casualties even when I'm invading from all sides. Virtually impossible til I have more artillery, better org, my own breech loaders, and/or I am willing to call out the reserves.
Finally, I learned something fascinating: war exhaustion is almost directly linked to population density. Thus, after only 8-12 months at war, revoltrisk in all major Chinese provinces in at or above .9-1.25%. Owch. However, lightly populated SE Asia is way less discontented....hrm. History on its head much?
There ya go!
-Adso
Given these results, any thoughts on my course? The Huanglo Emperor knows that now that China dominates the commerce of the west, she must humble the barbarians militarily and diplomatically, as well, to reduce them to their place. But they are still dangerous, and choosing where to strike is hard.
Should I do something crazy? Like invade France, or sieze California from the civil-war-weakened Americans?
I'm leaning towards brief war with russia for my cores, then massive one with England to sieze India and its millions of potential workers and soldiers (and some fellow Buddhists!).
-Adso
Should I do something crazy? Like invade France, or sieze California from the civil-war-weakened Americans?
I'm leaning towards brief war with russia for my cores, then massive one with England to sieze India and its millions of potential workers and soldiers (and some fellow Buddhists!).
-Adso
BrotherAdso said:
I think that a declaring a Colonial war upon Spain to free the Philippines (and the many Chinese immigrants that historically lived there) would be a good way for you to bide your time until you have the military superiority necessary to defeat Russia and/or the UK.
Very good! I also support either revenge against Russia or Philippines. There is also Korea to consider.
Finally, an update!
The Fourth Western War and the Assamesse Incident
Yumen: the Great City of the East, the last outpost of civilization, the silent guard of the Tarim passes. Since the T’ang dynasty, the city of Yumen had been the cosmopolitan meeting place of trade routes, the bastion where the Great Wall died out, And since the Second Western War, it had been in the hands of those steppe-nomad barbarians calling themselves Russians, garrisoned by Mongolian and Turkic troops for the first time since Mongolian rule, and deying access to the strategic Tarim passes.
Those same barbarians who backed the Manchu claim to the throne of China, who had conspired in the greatest military uprising in Chinese history only four years hence, who had humiliated and destroyed the ancient city of Constantinople in 1859.
The Huanglo Emperor, with the military newly rebuilt and under the overall command of the aging General-Magistrate Tseng Guo-Fan, who was a close friend of Li Hongzhang, who had been the Emperor’s mentor during the dark days of the Western Rebellion and his commanding officer in the Second Western War. For the past year, the Prussians, in dire financial straits and threatened by the revitalized Habsburgs in the south, had been sending handsomely paid missions of advisors and new-model rifles…
And the Russians, with all their neighbors embroiled in rivalry and a new monarch in power, were critically under funding their Far East Military Command…
And so the decision was quite easy for the Emperor, in the end. 1865 was spend moving forces from Shaanxi and Sichuan and Anhui into the west across new-cut rail lines, and then marching them under cover of darkness to the borders and passes where Russian border guards snoozed only kilometers distant. The disposition of forces when the order to advance seen above was given:
And the beginning of what soldiers would call the Great Bloody Crawl across the mountains:
During the preceeding months, fleets had been dispatched to the North Sea and Black Sea, the first time Chinese crews had ever tested these forbidding and foreign waters. When war broke out, they met and destroyed Russian patrol fleets with ease, and the Red Maiden Fleet under Admiral Han tore the main Imperial Russian battlefleet into shreds in the Baltic Sea, using the superior firepower and armor of his ships to his decisive advantage by forcing the swifter Russian raider-cruisers into a full-scale fleet engagement off of the Koingsberg shallows.
In the meantime, the newly formed Imperial Marine Corps prepared for their first field test. After months of intensive training on the Yangtse and the many lakes of South China, they boarded the Grand Flotilla, and began their voyage around the world, dacing only minor opposition…
While the bloody crawl continued into the summer months,
The Grand Flotilla sailed unopposed into the Baltic, and, save a desultory attempt by the Finns to intercept it, put into practice the doctrine, Zeng Guo-Fan’s brainchild, of “landing-in-force.”
Under the command of a bright young general named Lim Tang-an,
who had grown up a fisherman on the Fujian coast, the Marines landed under cover of naval gunnery, set up light-caliber artillery guns, and advanced on the skeleton guard of St. Petersburg. Quickly they seized the city, and the massacre of each and every captured soldier on the steps of the Imperial Tsars Palace quickly whipped the population into line. The Tsar himself escaped to Novgorod, but he lacked the administrative capacity and coordination to run his military or state from there.
This could not have come at a more opportune time – on the northwest front, the Manchu were holding out tenaciously
And the bloody crawl had halted where the Russian Far East Contingent dug in around the passes of Dikhua, leaving a strongpoint too dangerous to bypass and impossible to assault. The battle of Dikhua was a great mouth, consuming the men and resources of the army at a fantastic rate
All my forces are rushing to relieve the huge Dikhua army (see the screenshot a little ways up...)
The Tsar refused to give in, listening to optimistic reports from his eastern commanders, and indeed, the Dikhua pocket could have held out for upwards of seven months more of constant attack. Fortunately, in early April, the Manchu dynasty collapsed like a rotten house of cards along with its last defense lines in Jilin, and they were forced to renounce their claim to the throne and pledge to never bear arms again against the Celestial Kingdom. After all, their barbaric lands and populace could not serve the Empire any better than their ferocity as servants, reasoned the Honglu emperor.
With the imminent transfer of upwards of forty divisions from Manchuria, the Tsar was forced to the table. On the icy shores of the Baltic, before the ravaged fortresses of Sankt Petersburg, he signed away the great city of Yumen, the Qinghai passes, and officially removed all recognition of the Manchu claim over the Chinese throne. Tang, the former fisherman from Fujian, who received the treaty as highest ranking officer, forced Alexander to kowtow three times before the I Zhou, flagship of the Grand Flotilla, to represent his submission to the Dragon Throne.
Thus, General-Magistrate Tang of the Imperial Marine Corps began his meteoric rise to high command, the Western Wars were concluded, and the West, even through the haze of their own bloodshed
Sat up and took notice of the rising force in the East.
Finally, as December settled on Burma and Siam, several adventurous parties of Chinese merchants and settlers journeyed over the mountains in search of fresh land and opportunities, coming down into the Assam Valley, and founding the small town of Guanximin. Though to look for new land, to settle and to farm, is of course the natural thing for those marginalized peasants of the world, this small migration would quickly become the crux of world politics…
-Adso
UP NEXT: A tour of Chinese cities in 1869, before the Great War of Foreign Limitation.
The Fourth Western War and the Assamesse Incident
Yumen: the Great City of the East, the last outpost of civilization, the silent guard of the Tarim passes. Since the T’ang dynasty, the city of Yumen had been the cosmopolitan meeting place of trade routes, the bastion where the Great Wall died out, And since the Second Western War, it had been in the hands of those steppe-nomad barbarians calling themselves Russians, garrisoned by Mongolian and Turkic troops for the first time since Mongolian rule, and deying access to the strategic Tarim passes.
Those same barbarians who backed the Manchu claim to the throne of China, who had conspired in the greatest military uprising in Chinese history only four years hence, who had humiliated and destroyed the ancient city of Constantinople in 1859.
The Huanglo Emperor, with the military newly rebuilt and under the overall command of the aging General-Magistrate Tseng Guo-Fan, who was a close friend of Li Hongzhang, who had been the Emperor’s mentor during the dark days of the Western Rebellion and his commanding officer in the Second Western War. For the past year, the Prussians, in dire financial straits and threatened by the revitalized Habsburgs in the south, had been sending handsomely paid missions of advisors and new-model rifles…
And the Russians, with all their neighbors embroiled in rivalry and a new monarch in power, were critically under funding their Far East Military Command…
And so the decision was quite easy for the Emperor, in the end. 1865 was spend moving forces from Shaanxi and Sichuan and Anhui into the west across new-cut rail lines, and then marching them under cover of darkness to the borders and passes where Russian border guards snoozed only kilometers distant. The disposition of forces when the order to advance seen above was given:
And the beginning of what soldiers would call the Great Bloody Crawl across the mountains:
During the preceeding months, fleets had been dispatched to the North Sea and Black Sea, the first time Chinese crews had ever tested these forbidding and foreign waters. When war broke out, they met and destroyed Russian patrol fleets with ease, and the Red Maiden Fleet under Admiral Han tore the main Imperial Russian battlefleet into shreds in the Baltic Sea, using the superior firepower and armor of his ships to his decisive advantage by forcing the swifter Russian raider-cruisers into a full-scale fleet engagement off of the Koingsberg shallows.
In the meantime, the newly formed Imperial Marine Corps prepared for their first field test. After months of intensive training on the Yangtse and the many lakes of South China, they boarded the Grand Flotilla, and began their voyage around the world, dacing only minor opposition…
While the bloody crawl continued into the summer months,
The Grand Flotilla sailed unopposed into the Baltic, and, save a desultory attempt by the Finns to intercept it, put into practice the doctrine, Zeng Guo-Fan’s brainchild, of “landing-in-force.”
Under the command of a bright young general named Lim Tang-an,
who had grown up a fisherman on the Fujian coast, the Marines landed under cover of naval gunnery, set up light-caliber artillery guns, and advanced on the skeleton guard of St. Petersburg. Quickly they seized the city, and the massacre of each and every captured soldier on the steps of the Imperial Tsars Palace quickly whipped the population into line. The Tsar himself escaped to Novgorod, but he lacked the administrative capacity and coordination to run his military or state from there.
This could not have come at a more opportune time – on the northwest front, the Manchu were holding out tenaciously
And the bloody crawl had halted where the Russian Far East Contingent dug in around the passes of Dikhua, leaving a strongpoint too dangerous to bypass and impossible to assault. The battle of Dikhua was a great mouth, consuming the men and resources of the army at a fantastic rate
All my forces are rushing to relieve the huge Dikhua army (see the screenshot a little ways up...)
The Tsar refused to give in, listening to optimistic reports from his eastern commanders, and indeed, the Dikhua pocket could have held out for upwards of seven months more of constant attack. Fortunately, in early April, the Manchu dynasty collapsed like a rotten house of cards along with its last defense lines in Jilin, and they were forced to renounce their claim to the throne and pledge to never bear arms again against the Celestial Kingdom. After all, their barbaric lands and populace could not serve the Empire any better than their ferocity as servants, reasoned the Honglu emperor.
With the imminent transfer of upwards of forty divisions from Manchuria, the Tsar was forced to the table. On the icy shores of the Baltic, before the ravaged fortresses of Sankt Petersburg, he signed away the great city of Yumen, the Qinghai passes, and officially removed all recognition of the Manchu claim over the Chinese throne. Tang, the former fisherman from Fujian, who received the treaty as highest ranking officer, forced Alexander to kowtow three times before the I Zhou, flagship of the Grand Flotilla, to represent his submission to the Dragon Throne.
Thus, General-Magistrate Tang of the Imperial Marine Corps began his meteoric rise to high command, the Western Wars were concluded, and the West, even through the haze of their own bloodshed
Sat up and took notice of the rising force in the East.
Finally, as December settled on Burma and Siam, several adventurous parties of Chinese merchants and settlers journeyed over the mountains in search of fresh land and opportunities, coming down into the Assam Valley, and founding the small town of Guanximin. Though to look for new land, to settle and to farm, is of course the natural thing for those marginalized peasants of the world, this small migration would quickly become the crux of world politics…
-Adso
UP NEXT: A tour of Chinese cities in 1869, before the Great War of Foreign Limitation.
The Great Metropolitan Regions of China: 1869
A special supplement!
The most important urban area in China is the Suzhou-Nantong-Nanjing triangle in Jiangsu Province,
a manufacturing and shipping center which has grown up around the ports at Suzhou and the labor base and city infrastructure of Nanjing. These three cities are indisputably the largest in the world, and in their streets can be found exotic goods from all over the world, street vendors from Arabia and America, cooks from every province of China hawking food, and Imperial troops patrolling the streets, keeping all peaceful.
First stop: Suzhou!
Suzhou is China’s principle port, next to which both Guangzhou and Tianjin pale in comparison, seeming mere fishing-wharves. A teeming city of perhaps six and a half million, with at least that many living in the surrounding regions as farmers and wage-porters, Suzhou never sleeps, it only quiets down, Before the sun is up, the great harbor-lanes are being marked and moved by Imperial Commerce Board guide-boats and the huge rice barges are already leaving, having unloaded their cargoes in the night to a waiting army of restaurant-workers and government officials. By four or five in the morning, clipper-ships from America and England are moving in from the foreign-anchorage off Shanghai, bearing coffees, dried fruits and all manner of curious for the metropolitan markets, while huge, heavy “Oxen of Commerce,” as the locals call steamers from the southern provinces, grind up to the government docks, full of rice, iron, lumber, and all the other necessities which keep the city going.
The great guns of the Imperial Garrison overlook the harbor, and the dark shapes of Chinese “Iron Dagon” steam junks, which go forth into the Baihui Sea in patrols of two or four every other day remind captains that the eye of the Dragon Throne is never lax, nor are its arms short.
Up the coast from the docks proper lies the great shipyard complex, built so infamously in 1851 with the aid of French and Spanish engineers who to this day live in a special borough off to the north of the city. These works consist of dozens of huge drydocks, where steel armor plates and cannon from the Kaifeng Arsenal are fitted to the steel hulls of new Iron Dragons and Red Maiden steam warships – truly an awe-inspiring sight.
Next: Nanjing-Nantong
You can catch the Imperial Railway – fast, free, and always on time, if you don’t mind standing shoulder to shoulder with stacks of cement-bags, bricks, or groups of surly Vietnamese soldiers – to the great city of Nanjing-Nantong. The first sight of this eight-million person metropolis strikes any westerner into silence, as the sun strikes off the gold-and-white roofs of the Imperial Quarter, and the great Yangtse Bridges stand out like so many great ribs connecting the halves of one entity, visibly swarming with people even from the train. The city of Nanjing itself is best left to a guide all its own, but suffice it to say that it is, and will always be, the greatest city in the world – more cosmopolitan than London, more mysterious than Constantinople, more ancient than Athens, as well-policed as Berlin and as industrious as Boston.
Farther up the river is Anhui province,
prime agricultural land which is farmed intensively for rice and grains, and tea for export. Recently, however, the cities of Anqing and Wuhu have begun to grow beyond the standard central-market-town level of commerce, new shipping offices helping to regulate the flow of merchandise down the Yangtse and the Grand Canal, and in turn workshops locating themselves at these hubs of adminstration. These workshops begin to attract farmers from the countryside, and the various supplemental services of a city grow up alongside the new industry. Not so well planned as the Jiangsu Triangle, these areas of urban growth are poorer and less centrally planned, but far less tightly controlled by the throne’s economic planners.
Going the other direction from Jiangsu province, up the Yellow River, we enter Honan province,
where the primary industries are located in the seventeen-mile complex of foundries and sulfur-pits known as the Kaifeng Arsenal, source of most of China’s cannons and muskets. The ironworks ring the countryside for miles around with hammering day and night, and the rattle of railroad cars full of iton stock and pig-iron from the huge, muddy mining city of Zhengzhou, located to the north, is ceaseless and unearthly.
The Yellow river continues north, bustling with great cargo-barges from the Shaanxi and Xi’an coal mines farther up the river and flat-bottomed junks from the lumber mills of Zhili province, and hemmed in on all sides by the dynasty’s “Great Huang He Control Project”. This river is one of the pulsing artieries of the Empire, but no more great cities of interest lie on its shores.
Returning to the Yangtse valley, we enter the mountainous, lake-filled vastness of Hupeh province, south and west of Anhui, through whose steep valleys and plains the Yangtse river flows endlessly to the sea. As yet mostly untouched by the changes sweeping the coastal cities, most people in the province are still farmers, but recent booms in the business of the Wuchang iron mine, which ships upriver to the shipyards in Suzhou, point towards a change in the future. Indeed, the sleepy market towns of Ezhou and Jingmen, through which the ubiquitous Imperial Rail lines run, show the telltale signs of the Imperial Artisans Guild setting up workshops – great armies of workmen tore in and out, roads were recarved, and the erection of great warehouses to acts as shipping and receiving offices were erected in the month we stayed in Ezhou.
Other than the trading and textiles centers of Guangdong and the newly-reclaimed fortress-city of Yumen, most of the rest of China is still a land of peasant-towns and market cities, though the great Imperial Railroads seem to ensure that will change – indeed, they seem to bring with them common language and new ideas wherever they pass through the great valleys of China’s rivers.
Jinan, cotton producing center of the growing Shandong clothing industry, and the final population of China in 1869, growing by nearly 2% a month since those medical reforms kicked in:
On with the AAR! You say already!
Well OK.
Here's my score in 1869:
And the disposition of my forces:
The army:
Every division here is a regular standing army division with at least one brigade. Groups above seven have at least one Guards, Artillery, and HQ division attatched, and special divisions like the Assamese Expeditionary Force, Imperial Guard, and Imperial Marine Corps, consist only of Guards and Artillery, sometimes with an HQ or two thrown in. I don't have the tech to build engineers yet.
Most of those fleets are ironclads, though I have 17 steamer transports, 4 clipper transports, and roughly twenty or twenty-four clipper warships as backup. My naval org and morale techs are low, though, so I may not be able to field them in large fleets without losing efficiency fast.
Given that conflict over Assam mentioned in the last update and the huge growth of the Imperial Fleet (you can see over 85 ironclads in that picture...), can you guess where I'm going next?
-Adso
A special supplement!
The most important urban area in China is the Suzhou-Nantong-Nanjing triangle in Jiangsu Province,
a manufacturing and shipping center which has grown up around the ports at Suzhou and the labor base and city infrastructure of Nanjing. These three cities are indisputably the largest in the world, and in their streets can be found exotic goods from all over the world, street vendors from Arabia and America, cooks from every province of China hawking food, and Imperial troops patrolling the streets, keeping all peaceful.
First stop: Suzhou!
Suzhou is China’s principle port, next to which both Guangzhou and Tianjin pale in comparison, seeming mere fishing-wharves. A teeming city of perhaps six and a half million, with at least that many living in the surrounding regions as farmers and wage-porters, Suzhou never sleeps, it only quiets down, Before the sun is up, the great harbor-lanes are being marked and moved by Imperial Commerce Board guide-boats and the huge rice barges are already leaving, having unloaded their cargoes in the night to a waiting army of restaurant-workers and government officials. By four or five in the morning, clipper-ships from America and England are moving in from the foreign-anchorage off Shanghai, bearing coffees, dried fruits and all manner of curious for the metropolitan markets, while huge, heavy “Oxen of Commerce,” as the locals call steamers from the southern provinces, grind up to the government docks, full of rice, iron, lumber, and all the other necessities which keep the city going.
The great guns of the Imperial Garrison overlook the harbor, and the dark shapes of Chinese “Iron Dagon” steam junks, which go forth into the Baihui Sea in patrols of two or four every other day remind captains that the eye of the Dragon Throne is never lax, nor are its arms short.
Up the coast from the docks proper lies the great shipyard complex, built so infamously in 1851 with the aid of French and Spanish engineers who to this day live in a special borough off to the north of the city. These works consist of dozens of huge drydocks, where steel armor plates and cannon from the Kaifeng Arsenal are fitted to the steel hulls of new Iron Dragons and Red Maiden steam warships – truly an awe-inspiring sight.
Next: Nanjing-Nantong
You can catch the Imperial Railway – fast, free, and always on time, if you don’t mind standing shoulder to shoulder with stacks of cement-bags, bricks, or groups of surly Vietnamese soldiers – to the great city of Nanjing-Nantong. The first sight of this eight-million person metropolis strikes any westerner into silence, as the sun strikes off the gold-and-white roofs of the Imperial Quarter, and the great Yangtse Bridges stand out like so many great ribs connecting the halves of one entity, visibly swarming with people even from the train. The city of Nanjing itself is best left to a guide all its own, but suffice it to say that it is, and will always be, the greatest city in the world – more cosmopolitan than London, more mysterious than Constantinople, more ancient than Athens, as well-policed as Berlin and as industrious as Boston.
Farther up the river is Anhui province,
prime agricultural land which is farmed intensively for rice and grains, and tea for export. Recently, however, the cities of Anqing and Wuhu have begun to grow beyond the standard central-market-town level of commerce, new shipping offices helping to regulate the flow of merchandise down the Yangtse and the Grand Canal, and in turn workshops locating themselves at these hubs of adminstration. These workshops begin to attract farmers from the countryside, and the various supplemental services of a city grow up alongside the new industry. Not so well planned as the Jiangsu Triangle, these areas of urban growth are poorer and less centrally planned, but far less tightly controlled by the throne’s economic planners.
Going the other direction from Jiangsu province, up the Yellow River, we enter Honan province,
where the primary industries are located in the seventeen-mile complex of foundries and sulfur-pits known as the Kaifeng Arsenal, source of most of China’s cannons and muskets. The ironworks ring the countryside for miles around with hammering day and night, and the rattle of railroad cars full of iton stock and pig-iron from the huge, muddy mining city of Zhengzhou, located to the north, is ceaseless and unearthly.
The Yellow river continues north, bustling with great cargo-barges from the Shaanxi and Xi’an coal mines farther up the river and flat-bottomed junks from the lumber mills of Zhili province, and hemmed in on all sides by the dynasty’s “Great Huang He Control Project”. This river is one of the pulsing artieries of the Empire, but no more great cities of interest lie on its shores.
Returning to the Yangtse valley, we enter the mountainous, lake-filled vastness of Hupeh province, south and west of Anhui, through whose steep valleys and plains the Yangtse river flows endlessly to the sea. As yet mostly untouched by the changes sweeping the coastal cities, most people in the province are still farmers, but recent booms in the business of the Wuchang iron mine, which ships upriver to the shipyards in Suzhou, point towards a change in the future. Indeed, the sleepy market towns of Ezhou and Jingmen, through which the ubiquitous Imperial Rail lines run, show the telltale signs of the Imperial Artisans Guild setting up workshops – great armies of workmen tore in and out, roads were recarved, and the erection of great warehouses to acts as shipping and receiving offices were erected in the month we stayed in Ezhou.
Other than the trading and textiles centers of Guangdong and the newly-reclaimed fortress-city of Yumen, most of the rest of China is still a land of peasant-towns and market cities, though the great Imperial Railroads seem to ensure that will change – indeed, they seem to bring with them common language and new ideas wherever they pass through the great valleys of China’s rivers.
Jinan, cotton producing center of the growing Shandong clothing industry, and the final population of China in 1869, growing by nearly 2% a month since those medical reforms kicked in:
On with the AAR! You say already!
Well OK.
Here's my score in 1869:
And the disposition of my forces:
The army:
Every division here is a regular standing army division with at least one brigade. Groups above seven have at least one Guards, Artillery, and HQ division attatched, and special divisions like the Assamese Expeditionary Force, Imperial Guard, and Imperial Marine Corps, consist only of Guards and Artillery, sometimes with an HQ or two thrown in. I don't have the tech to build engineers yet.
Most of those fleets are ironclads, though I have 17 steamer transports, 4 clipper transports, and roughly twenty or twenty-four clipper warships as backup. My naval org and morale techs are low, though, so I may not be able to field them in large fleets without losing efficiency fast.
Given that conflict over Assam mentioned in the last update and the huge growth of the Imperial Fleet (you can see over 85 ironclads in that picture...), can you guess where I'm going next?
-Adso
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