Islam is the Light: Azerbaijan Paradox Mega-LP

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kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Ras Het posted:

PUs aren't that bad in Europe usually, but they create completely stupid and unrealistic "Yemen has inherited Brunei" kinda situations in the Muslim world all the time. That irks me a lot more.

If you inherit as a Britannic culture outside of, er, Scotland/England, you may as well have conquered it outright. Unsurprisingly, Europe is modeled very finely grained culturally, and that means you saved yourself a war of conquest (maybe -- these "authentic" documents have required more than a few complete national occupations the very hard way) but not the ensuring period of strife and poverty of having your new territory stripped of all that was useful when you inherited.

Hell, if you released Cornwall as a vassal, let your core elapse, and inherited afterwards, all those buildings you built as Britain are now magically gone, because the Cornish aren't English and also they hate you now. You can form Ireland as a monoculture with Wales, Cornwall, the four counties of Eire, and Brittany though :haw:

# ¿ Nov 6, 2011 05:12

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:40

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Pakled posted:

I see that not many people want to be rivals with the guy who conquered the entire known world.

And of course, it's the same portrait as his wife. You may feel free to insert your own marital joke here.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2011 02:23

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

BklynBruzer posted:

Put a few hundred provinces on Great Britain, though, and come up with a crazy restrictive system for Parliament.

London is its own province, and in 1399 you fight the English Civil War with the forces of the Parliamentarians fighting the Cavaliers with the dreaded Welsh rebels of William Wallace in Cornwall forming the balance that could be decisive. The Parliamentarians under Cromwell can't take much land, however, because then Brittany will intervene since it guaranteed the independence of the province of East Vale of Glamorgan as part of their shared cultural heritage. Sweden will somehow inherit the English throne though.

This was all thoroughly researched, I assure you.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2011 21:55

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

I don't think it's the simplicity of the system that slams the non-European nations, it's that the system makes too many assumptions about the nature of history and society. You can play a full and productive game as most any European nation because the framework explores the choices such a polity makes in the very specific historic period of the late Middle Ages into the early Modern Era. So a European nation, regardless of who you pick, is set on rails to basically undergo a technological and societal revolution which ensures that continent's dominance in the world. Events are largely additional flavor to set an England apart from a Portugal, but otherwise you can play the two almost identically.

The problem becomes then that this same system isn't applied evenly to non-European nations so in turn they are railroaded into becoming shark bait. This is done in the name of "historicity" but the whole point of the game is that it's supposed to simulate what happens when ypu are intelligent about historical choices.

kw0134 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Nov 17, 2011

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 20:44

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Jazerus posted:

Eastern Religions: Buddhism split with meticulous detail into at least 4 different religions in one religious group.

The irony is that to be accurate, you'll get these four branches and then they'll all meld into a syncretic mess that defies the traditional Abrahamic religions' understanding of a "One True Faith." Buddhists will also be Taoists who will study Confucian texts to enter the Chinese imperial bureaucracy. You'll have Japan events where you sponsor festivals at Shinto shrines but have to find a Buddhist monk to hold funeral rites for an important official. So you can have all these fine delineations but then you'll have to shove them all into the background because the European/Islamic monomaniacal focus on religious unity is not something that's really shared in East Asia.

To be really accurate, all religions originating west of the Indus River will be labeled "Trouble," their missionaries are "Troublemakers" and you get an event to kill them in any province sharing your culture group. :v:

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 23:16

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Pakled posted:

This was actually a big debate in early Christianity. Some said that in order to be a Christian, you had to adopt all the laws of the Old Testament, including being circumcised and following Jewish dietary restrictions, while others said that those laws only applied to the Jewish people. The latter eventually won out, in no small part due to Gentile converts having no desire to get circumcised.

Paul specifically called his adherence to the Jewish laws a "loss" (Philippians 3:1-15). Hebrews chapters 8-9 is the Pauline doctrine of a "new [Christian] covenant" that sweeps away the old one -- including dietary restrictions -- with one that requires only faith. Acts 5:9-16 describes a vision where God commanded Peter to kill and eat, because "God had made clean" all animals. That the canonical books didn't portray a debate so much as a one-sided argument against continuance of the Jewish laws would indicate how decisively it fell in that direction.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2011 19:32

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Patter Song posted:

Yeah, the dietary rules quoted above were part of God's compact with the Israelites. Christians, being a Gentile faith, were not part of that compact and aren't part of it's rules. St. James in the Book of Acts lays down Christianity's relationship to dietary rules pretty well.

For a while though, it was eminently possible that Christianity would become no more than a weird Jewish sect (or cult, if you're uncharitable) because you could still take a lot of what Jesus had done and place it within a purely Jewish framework; the books of Matthew and Mark tend to emphasize this continuity. Indeed, a running theme in Acts is the justification in expanding the post-Jesus ministry to anyone with a pulse, and only in the Pauline epistles do we get a full theological basis for establishing Christianity as a wholly different religion that, while acknowledging Jewish roots, takes a complete break from it. Things could have happened very, very differently if the early church became insular instead of expansionary.

And this is a really weird derail, even for this thread. :ohdear:

# ¿ Dec 10, 2011 20:51

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Virginia is named after Elizabeth, not the virgin mother. The English were very fond of naming things after patrons: New York, Maryland (of Mary Henrietta, consort to Charles I), Pennsylvania, Georgia, the Carolinas (after Charles). All are royalty, save Penn of course.

Where there isn't an obvious Old World connection, it's not as if the native names didn't hang around: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, even if they happen to be filtered through a few other European languages first.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 01:31

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

I've never, ever, gotten three monarchs with 8 of any stat in a row. Hell, there've been full games where I don't get a single monarch with an 8 in a stat. That's some crazy luck there, unless there's some subtle monarch stat tweaking going on in the mod.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2012 01:59

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

That brings up another point, in that promotion, migration, and employment are wrapped up in one big ball such that the engine models nearly a hundred different calculations per population group per day to see what they will do. The game abstracts a bunch of stuff so it can also provide impetus for the enormous immigration waves of the period to the New World. Whether or not that's the right way of doing things I will not say but as it is the game tries to factor so much into what the populations does, and the game already drags when the numbers of pops start splintering into thousands of discrete groups in the late game.

Even leaving aside play balance concerns, I am just not sure how much complexity the game can handle before it simply implodes.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2012 21:09

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Tsar of the Comintern, Autocrat of the Proletariat.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2012 23:46

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

"As a Bulgarian state" implies that other nations too can become Bulgarian. Therefore all rebels have a chance to spawn as Radical Bulgarianists to convert their nation into a Bulgarian state. The full glory of being a Bulgarian state shall not be limited to Bulgaria!

Bulgaria.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2012 01:07

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 13:40

kw0134: Apr 19, 2003; I buy feet pics🍆

Depends on the state. In NY, secondary education is a year of "world history" which in practice means bouncing around in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient China and then a cursory view of everything else. This is followed by a year of European History which goes from Ancient Greece to present day from a Eurocentric perspective. Finally, we have a year of American History which is exactly what you think it is. If you started all that in the ninth grade, you have an extra year, into which I got Intro Economics and Basic Civics as one semester courses. In four years I had essentially nothing that was east of the Urals, and what was of the native American civilizations only came into focus when Pizarro/Cortez bumped into them bearing malice.

To be fair, in my school we had electives for the senior year that was college level "Culture of Mesoamerican Peoples While Being Subjugated" and such, but the core curriculum was parochial to say the least.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2012 23:49

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