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To be proper fascists they should be claiming to be the inheritors of the Black Chamber and The One True Inheritors of Rome and all that jazz, while actually they're just failed artists and businessmen from Syracuse or wherever.
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Mar 11, 2015 20:09
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paragon1 posted:To be proper fascists they should be claiming to be the inheritors of the Black Chamber and The One True Inheritors of Rome and all that jazz, while actually they're just failed artists and businessmen from Syracuse or wherever. This is more the Old Romans, the Komemnians, certain elements of the Milvians and the Black Chamber. Essentially, the inheritors of every political tradition except the New Byzantines and their twisted offshoots.
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Mar 11, 2015 20:17
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Claiming to be the Black Chamber is really not that big of an endorsement. They failed badly in their stated mission.
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Mar 11, 2015 20:50
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Kellanved posted:Claiming to be the Black Chamber is really not that big of an endorsement. They failed badly in their stated mission. Yep, they're still a bunch of sad french losers.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:22
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AJ_Impy posted:This is more the Old Romans, the Komemnians, certain elements of the Milvians and the Black Chamber. Essentially, the inheritors of every political tradition except the New Byzantines and their twisted offshoots. Yeah no, you either don't see what I'm getting at or choosing to ignore it. I was making reference to the fact that most OTL fascist movements tended to be headed up by people who were utter failures outside of politics with massive pretensions of grandeur and historical legitimacy, if that wasn't clear.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:23
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paragon1 posted:Yeah no, you either don't see what I'm getting at or choosing to ignore it. I was making reference to the fact that most OTL fascist movements tended to be headed up by people who were utter failures outside of politics with massive pretensions of grandeur and historical legitimacy, if that wasn't clear. It was clear, hence saying what this version appeared to be. This universe runs the risk of competent fascists. 
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Mar 11, 2015 21:32
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Ah okay then. I would argue that the people who tend to invent and adopt fascism are rarely competent. It's an ideology of losers. 
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Mar 11, 2015 21:36
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I for one hope that slowly everyone just slides relatively quietly into Communism and we end without a great War. Also hoping for China to get broken horribly by 10k different revolts cause that poo poo's unbalanced.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:46
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Rodyle posted:I for one hope that slowly everyone just slides relatively quietly into Communism and we end without a great War. Welcome to China in Victoria 2.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:46
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NewMars posted:Yep, they're still a bunch of sad french losers. I'm insulted, not all of us are French.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:52
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theblastizard posted:Welcome to China in Victoria 2. Eh, vanilla and pdm tend just result in the Qing being endlessly kicked around by civ countries and broken by revolts. I have never seen them climb higher than civilized.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:56
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Rodyle posted:Eh, vanilla and pdm tend just result in the Qing being endlessly kicked around by civ countries and broken by revolts. I have never seen them climb higher than civilized. In my disastrous NNM game as Austria, China became civilized in, I don't know, the 1860s or '70s or so, but instantly became a Great Power and sucked up so many resources everyone lower than them didn't have the prestige left to buy anything. I spent decades trying to build a few infantry regiments (as a civilized nation, since I had been bumped out of the GPs, and then out of the SPs, because I couldn't build an army to defend myself) but there were no small arms or ammunition to be had on the market.
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Mar 11, 2015 22:08
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Rodyle posted:Eh, vanilla and pdm tend just result in the Qing being endlessly kicked around by civ countries and broken by revolts. I have never seen them climb higher than civilized.
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Mar 11, 2015 22:15
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In pretty much every Paradox game if you wonder why there's a seemingly out-of-place gameplay decision that grossly favors one side over the other, it's probably to make China work at all. It's very hard to accurately model, in the framework of the rest of the world, the combination of factors that kept China from being the dominant world power for the entirety of history.
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Mar 11, 2015 22:19
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Redeye Flight posted:In pretty much every Paradox game if you wonder why there's a seemingly out-of-place gameplay decision that grossly favors one side over the other, it's probably to make China work at all. It's very hard to accurately model, in the framework of the rest of the world, the combination of factors that kept China from being the dominant world power for the entirety of history. What were these factors, anyway?
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Mar 11, 2015 23:21
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Complanceny due to regional hegemony, a massively decentralized nation which, at peak decentralization, would be overthrown by one force or another and reorganized, geography, lots of reasons.
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Mar 11, 2015 23:24
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It's a similar situation with France: yeah, in the basest of terms, France in Paradox Games should be powerful: large population for a potentially large army and tax base. But we know from history that France has always been a bit weaker than is advertised due to gross inefficiencies in governance. But that can be hard to simulate.
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Mar 11, 2015 23:56
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Skyfinder posted:It's a similar situation with France: yeah, in the basest of terms, France in Paradox Games should be powerful: large population for a potentially large army and tax base. But we know from history that France has always been a bit weaker than is advertised due to gross inefficiencies in governance. But that can be hard to simulate. France should have Inward Perfection in EU4, I agree.
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Mar 11, 2015 23:57
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I'm excited to see this world's version of fascism after that post.
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Mar 13, 2015 01:04
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 PART SEVENTY: A War with China, to Mixed Results (January 1st, 1905 - November 15, 1906) The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Let's Play! > Mings and Things: Let's Play War in the East Rincewind Feb 19, 2001  No reason to make an effort to empathize if doing so comes at the price of oblivion. WAR IN THE EAST: GENERAL'S EDITION "Europe was still, in many ways, recovering from decades of war— the Wars of the Victorian League, the proxy struggles of the Great Game, the Containment War, German attacks on France and Poland, French attacks on Lai Ang, civil wars, and revolutions. Nobody wanted to fight another war. Or, at least, not until the arsenals of the future were assembled." —The Collected Diaries of Meryem Terzioğlu Introduction I really appreciated how much everyone enjoyed and got involved with my last LP, Blood in the Bosphorus: A Sultanate of Rum Paradox Mega-Campaign, even though it didn't last that long, since I managed to get annexed by the Byzantines in AD 1075. (In my defense, CK2 gave Alexios I Komnenos really good stats, and Project Balance gave him lots of bullshit event troops to retake the Anatolian coast with. Also, I'm horrible at CK2. Also, horrible at video games.) Maybe it was for the best, since in the Shura votes towards the ends goons were edging dangerously close to inventing fascism in the 11th century. Like, yeah, it's called the sultanate of Rum, but a few of you were taking the whole "Rome" thing a bit too literally. Like, did you expect me to write a whole bunch of posts roleplaying as some kind of, I don't know, Turkish Empress Valeria II? That'd be in pretty poor taste. What is it with Rome, anyway? You don't see people trying to argue that the Ming and Yuan empires were a single continuous polity, even though they both ruled China. Aside from that whole creepiness, though, LPing was a lot of fun so I thought I'd just jump right into another one, like some kind of majestic phoenix that is bad at video games. I thought of a few other CK2 starts-- maybe Odo de Conteville, to see if I could steer my dynasty towards not destroying the entire kingdom of England and fatally weakening the HRE on the eve of the invasion of Chang Yuchun? Or just go, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em and play as the Byzantines. But then I looked into other games that deal with Byzantine history (things got a bit Roman for a while there in medieval Byzantium, you know?) and I discovered Matrix Games' War in the East. War in the East Now, I'm sure a lot of you have heard of War in the West, Matrix Games' brilliant, incredibly detailed, grognardy game about the Great War. If you haven't, you really should check out Grey Hunter's day-by-day LP of it. WitE jumps a few years before the Great War, but it's the same formula— in-depth strategy and granular detail, practically down to the buttons on the Red Guards' coats and the rivets on the hulls of the Ostia Home Fleet. WitE makes a few changes to the old WitW formula, though— for starters, it brings in a lot more political mechanics and adds a lot of prewar turns, to model the ambivalence around the war seen in, say, the Ekklesia or among a Chinese bourgeoise divided over the benefits of new territories and the drawbacks of a war between great powers disrupting the flow of trade between China and the Occident. More importantly, instead of just having one player or computer for each side (as in WitW where all the forces of each bloc are under that bloc's players control as soon as they're built or appear from off the map), each major belligerent is controlled separately, with its own war priorities, internal politics, personality, etc. So it means that as the Byzantines, I'll have to bail out my dumb allies instead of just controlling their forces. Knowing me, the AI will probably do a better job controlling our allied forces than I did. Anyway! Another blathering on! Time to try to arrange things so we don't get blown up! WitE models a lot of what's going on 'off-the-map'. Things mostly just follow their historical trajectory, though, unless you intervene specifically.  You can conduct diplomacy with the other Great Powers, and supposedly they can help you out in war if they like you enough by sending forces into relevant theaters. Anacaona likes us, but not that much (they are bourgeois swine, and still in a personal union with the Ayiti Federation, even if they aren't a dominion anymore).  I vaguely remembered that the Byzantines of the early 19th century were known as a leading innovator in the field of radio, and I remembered how useful radio could be in WitW-- but no dice. Don't have the tech yet.  The AI keeps on countering my diplomatic efforts.   Really, though, in this period Bogomil Milenov made a lot of savvy political moves-- like encouraging Chinese communists to protest against the bourgeois conservatives in power at the time-- so I often found myself just following history's blueprints.  My knowledge of the era's pretty patchy. Like, I could go on-and-on about the differences between the socialist realism of Müller's North German Federation and the more avant-garde movements like constructivism that the older communist regime in Byzantion favored.    I thought of keeping my troops stationed in Marathas right from the start (the game starts just after the Marathi-Byzantine victory over Pangalist Hindustan), but it was hard to keep them supplied out there in peacetime, and anyway with elections (another thing Müllerists had no use for ) looming, I didn't have the political points to spare to keep my forces abroad. I'm feeling a bit railroaded by these election events, to be frank.  Like if I were playing Victoria 2 I'd probably write reams of in-character stuff about how grateful the Byzantine peoples are for Milenov's healthcare reform but now I'm just like, holy poo poo, all that silver could have bought a lot of artillery shells.  And since all of my attention was focused on making sure things went like they did in OTL instead of worse, somehow, the Ming just happily followed their historical trajectory, and all my efforts to foment labor strife slid off Wu Daoming like water off a duck's back.  Okay, so the war started like it did in actual history, basically. In my defense, apparently if you gently caress things up Da Qin joins on the Ming Empire's side.  (Also, hilariously, apparently if you're playing as Marathas and Byzantium is an AI, they can just loving refuse to join the war and let the Ming burn down your entire country while they're busy, I don't know, trying to figure out how to manufacture radios or huffing cement fumes.)  (And then you miss out on the whole clowncar of allies Byzantium brings-- remember, 1905 was like the height of the Byzantine Commune's "Pax Europaea" alliance.  Oh, hey, I forgot about the Ming offensive through the Caucasus. Haha, probably a good thing I pulled my troops out of Marathas...   It's not exactly the Containment War, though, since the Mings' main objectives are in India, and the AI knows it. So I need to break out of the caucasus and pronto before that big Marathas offensive you see here collapses.  I figure, if we can just get all our forces into the Indian theater, our chances are looking pretty good.  Oh, that's lucky! The Ming couldn't decide whether to try to occupy Azerbaijan, or press on straight into Anatolia, so they just kind of half-assedly split the difference.  The information you get about casualities on other sides in WitE is notoriously sketchy and inaccurate, but I think we won the Battle of Agdam. Just a hunch!  In the African theater, Da Qin and Tripoli are doing their damnedest to keep Somalia off my back. If their soldiers can't hold on, I'm hoping the huge, empty deserts of Da Qin will slow them down. If I get attacked by Somalia in the rear, I'm pretty sure I'm hosed.   Still steadily pressing the Ming back in the western front, but I'm worried I'm not making the best time.  Things aren't going well in Marathas-- the offensive has lost most of its momentum, and for some reason some militant socialists revolted in the rear, disrupting the Marathi supply lines. What the gently caress? I thought we were comrades! You're out of the International!!  The price of ammunition is steadily increasing, and my factories can't fully meet our need for it. Fortunately, we still have plenty of cash so our soliders won't be trying to shoot rocks out of their fancy rifles for a while yet.  The Ming just aren't willing to commit the sorts of troops they'd need to outnumber the Azeri-Byzantine armies. But I guess the AI knows it just needs to slow me down. (I'm probably anthropomorhpizing the AI a bit here, I'll admit)  What? Oh, come the gently caress on, we were winning! We were driving them back! Nooooooooo   lmao now i get radios  At least Milesov and his pro-military Labour party stayed in power. If the war goes badly, the Irenicists or Athens Commune can come in and force you to the negotiating table.  Since there's still Marathas armies in the field, it's not too late to relieve them. I refuse the Ming peace overtures.  Maputo shows up to help the Da Qin keep Somalia busy, which is nice of them.  I'm starting to see the limits of the Pax Europaea alliance beyond its stated intention of preventing a war between the European Great Powers. Even though in the WitE period, France was ruled by helpful Jacobins, they still understandably didn't want to let hordes of Müllerist Germans march through their country. They did let the British through, one liberal democratic monarchy tipping its hat to another, so Queen Vicky 5, in her infinite wisdom, has decided to walk all the way down France and then across the entire Byzantine Commune to get to the war.  and here i thought we were still decades off from guerre éclair being invented. vroooooooom.  I'm still loving pissed Azerbaijan left me hanging, but I'm starting to regain the ground I lost in the Caucasus, at least.   But, I mean, tick tock, tick tock.  Time is money. And dead Marathas armies.  Britain's reinforced Da Qin against Somalia, though, so that's one less front to worry about. If this were a Paradox game you'd see like three paragraphs by some communist PoV character about how all the British really wanted was a slice of Somalia's gross colonial empire added to their own, but right now I'm just glad to see hexes with friends in them instead of enemies.  I finally get a few Red Guards through the Ming lines and into India. The Army of Trebizond is the first of many, hopefully.  (Around this time, while communists, socialists, liberal monarchs, and ok I guess Somalia was still an authoritarian dictatorship were all slaughtering one another in India, the Caucasus, northern Africa, and the Levant, a Bavarian author writing under the name Valeria put out a book you might have heard of. Although I guess within the timeframe of WitE, everyone important just wrote it off as a turgid and unreadable science fiction book about a utopian world where Rome never fell and everyone was living on the moon and wearing matching uniforms by the year 1906, for some reason.)  "Let me just click this button and get a game over," said nobody ever.  Just one more Ming army left in the Caucasus, and I can send Athena's Own Red Guards and all the rest after the Army of Trebizond and hopefully turn the tide in India.  It'd be nice if I could just sail through the Suez Canal and get to India like that, but even if we held Suez, in 1906 the canal hadn't been reconstructed to allow modern dreadnoughts through yet. Maputo's expeditionary force got wiped out, unfortunately, but the British and survivors from Da Qin's defense forces are holding things down in Africa. I've sent a small force to help them out, but most of the Red Guards will be needed in India. If they ever get there.  omg plucky little maputo raised fresh troops to attack aceh's colonies   Hey, I wonder why Somalia hasn't sent more troops in for a counterattack against the Da Qin-British armies in the north? Oh. Because they're busy occupying all of British Africa.  oh noooooooooooo kenya  YESSSSSSSSS  With the last Ming armies retreating from the Caucasus, I can send more forces to the Indian theater. If I can just hold it together long enough to retool my factories to start manufacturing landships...  Fortunately, as a communist country, I can just start building landship factories immediately in the name of, I don't know, reducing unemployment or whatever.  Because holy poo poo could I use some mobile armor. Like, we won this battle, but look how short we're running on artillery. The Marathas army must be mostly mobilized conscripts at this point. Most of the cream of the Marathi crop was being casually slaughtered while I was trying to reoccupy all of the trenchworks and fortifications the Azerbaijanis just abandoned.  The Ming are still a lot stronger in the east, but if we can just reoccupy what they've occupied already, we'll take a lot of the wind out of their sails.  poo poo, they intercepted the Army of Trebizond as it was on its way north to link up with the Marathis. poo poo poo poo poo poo.  HOLY poo poo I CAN'T BELIEVE I WON THAT BATTLE AAAA    We're getting pretty well dug-in in Sukkur. The downside is that the AI realizes that too, so in their third attempt to retake it the Ming retire after just a few casualties. Still, a victory's a victory.  A diplomatic breakthrough for Müller! The Tsar has given the German permission to cross Russia! They should arrive in theater in, oh, another few years or so. I guess this answers why the gently caress Russia is on the WitE map to begin with.  I think I might have left too many of my forces guarding the Caucasus, waiting for a second Chinese offensive that never came. Maybe the Germans can take over so I can send all those armies (and their artillery!) to India?  The Army of Trebizond, Athena's Own Red Guards, and their Marathi pals are proving hard to dislodge as-is. But I'm bottomed out on artillery and heavy munitions, and I'm starting to take more casualties than they are.  Maybe more MilenovCare™ will convince the Byzantine peoples to have a bit more fighting spirit? Thanks, Milenov.  Hey look, a battle where all three Pax Europaea members participated! They did a pretty good job, too. Glad General Regina Maxwell is kicking as much rear end in digital form as she did in OTL. Whoever picked her as their lucky general had the right idea.  Okay, so by the June 29 turn, I have a bit of momentum, but the Ming still hold 100% of their war objective points in Punjab. Not good.  Whoops, good thing I left those troops in the Caucasus, since somehow I don't think 7,000 British Regulars are up to fighting off 60,000 Ming soldiers.  The Byzantine-Marathas lines in India are getting pushed to the north and west in a way I don't like. There's a big Ming push at Bahawalpur, so I send what's left of Athena's Own in. Hopefully, I can leave those Marathis on their own for a bit.  Okay, well, I guess it's less the Byzantine-Marathas lines at Bahawalpur than the Byzantine-Marathas salient at Bahawalpur. Looks like I still have a corridor through Iran and then along the Marathi coast I can send reinforcements through. Maybe my tank factories will finish getting built, or something? I don't know. I'm sure I can peel some forces off from the Caucasus...  ...or... maybe not...  The Germans seem to be in charge of the join Pax Europaea force in Egypt, and have apparently decided that they absolutely need to control the (militarily useless, since this is the loving year 1906) Suez instead of relieving me against the Ming, like, anywhere, anywhere at all, holy poo poo use your 300,000 strong army for something, I'm begging you, von Halkett.  I mean, I'm really impressed with how well they're doing— better than any other theater in the war, really. Especially considering most of my artillery is either guarding the Caucasus or limbered and slowly making its way to Bahawalpur.  At least Maputo just single-handedly knocked Aceh out of the war.   Let's check on how my attempts to relieve the salient at Bahawalpur are going! That bad, huh?  holy toledo that's a lot of ming  whoops i just went a few turns without issuing new orders to the caucasus theater, that's probably pretty bad  I mean, everything the Ming are doing up there was just a feint, so it was pretty easy to get it under control, but it's pretty embarrassing.  The Bahawalpur salient becomes the Bahawalpur pocket.  Can I just start a fresh offensive with troops from the Caucasus and work my way east from Iran? Oh. No.       We try to do something nice for a bunch of bourgeois liberals and look what happens.   "The most important reality of international relations is that China can instantly destroy us whenever they want to." —Bogomil Milenov, Tribune of the Byzantine Commune Well, darn, I guess I didn't manage to do any better than the OTL Byzantines. I mean, it's not like I expected to actually win against China, right? But maybe I was hoping to hold out a little longer. Or at least reinforce the Bahawalpur salient, maybe? Maybe I should have played a practice game before I started this LP.Anyway! See you in a few weeks for my next LP, where I'll play as Dawit II Gideon, the Jewish Duke of Axum in CK2's 1066 start! I think it'll last a bit longer than my last two. WORLD MAP, 1906  (OOC: OOTP is still in the middle of simming the last few years of baseball, and I'd rather not delay the update for that. Baseball stats next time!) Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Mar 14, 2015 |
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Mar 14, 2015 04:51
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Oh god we've fallen down the rabbit hole. Also, with the rise of fascism comes the rise of the best flags in the game.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:02
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You're no Grey Hunter 
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Mar 14, 2015 05:11
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Sindai posted:You're no Grey Hunter I know. He probably would have found some way to win by killing all the British, somehow. 
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Mar 14, 2015 05:14
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so when do we wrap around to meta level three
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Mar 14, 2015 05:24
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And after all that all the Chinese get is one measley state.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:27
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IXIX posted:And after all that all the Chinese get is one measley state. Yeah, at least I was able to peace out before they added another wargoal. It was still enough to probably send Marathas into a death spiral, though.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:29
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That was wonderfully meta, Rince. 
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Mar 14, 2015 05:42
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Rincewind posted:What is it with Rome, anyway? You don't see people trying to argue that the Ming and Yuan empires were a single continuous polity, even though they both ruled China.
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Mar 14, 2015 05:44
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I'd like to recommend ByzRincewind try a Yuan mega-lp next. The only fitting followup to the failed Rum one.
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Mar 14, 2015 07:23
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GSD posted:I'd like to recommend ByzRincewind try a Yuan mega-lp next. The only fitting followup to the failed Rum one. Even in ByzWorld there's still no Crusader Mings. EDIT: You could play as Genchou in EU4, though!
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Mar 14, 2015 07:30
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Rincewind posted:Even in ByzWorld there's still no Crusader Mings. I like to imagine the map awkwardly ending in Hungary instead of awkwardly ending at Tibet. Then people can call for map expansions so that the Ming Expeditionary Force can be properly detailed.
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Mar 14, 2015 07:33
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Coming this Spring, Kings of Iberia, the latest expansion to Frontier Mings!
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Mar 14, 2015 07:47
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Man, the Chinese Empire can pretty well punch above their weight class. Even in battles where they're totally outnumbered they're managing insane casualty ratios. Add to that they're probably endless manpower pool and you've pretty much got an unstoppable killing machine. We're pretty lucky that the AI for China is at least so chill as to not start adding war goals when it's at +50% victory rating. Also... how much militancy did you get from not accepting Peace Deals? I don't feel like that's going to end up being a good thing.
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Mar 14, 2015 08:54
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Coming this Spring, Kings of Iberia, the latest expansion to Frontier Mings! Bah, Iberia won't interact with the rest of the map and it'll just slow down everyone's CPU. My Windows 95 won't be able to handle it. Paradox has signed its own death warrant with their newest cash grab.
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Mar 14, 2015 09:06
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I'm assuming that in this timeline, Paradox games still started with the most important country in the world in Svea Rike, and then gradually radiated outwards.  EDIT: Although maybe the Svea Rike series is about scrambling to reunite Sweden before Denmark shows up and unites it for you.
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Mar 14, 2015 09:40
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Skyfinder posted:Man, the Chinese Empire can pretty well punch above their weight class. Even in battles where they're totally outnumbered they're managing insane casualty ratios. Add to that they're probably endless manpower pool and you've pretty much got an unstoppable killing machine. We're pretty lucky that the AI for China is at least so chill as to not start adding war goals when it's at +50% victory rating. China probably lacked the jingoism to add more wargoals, which has certainly saved the Maratha from becoming a rump state.
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Mar 14, 2015 12:46
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I love this. Fantastic writing. Do a Grigsby game LP sometime. That'd be like wringing water from a stone.
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Mar 14, 2015 14:33
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Rincewind posted:Anyway! See you in a few weeks for my next LP, where I'll play as Dawit II Gideon, the Jewish Duke of Axum in CK2's 1066 start! I think it'll last a bit longer than my last two. No but seriously I'd read this
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Mar 14, 2015 14:46
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It can't be any more of a running disaster than the Khazar lp, home of the 49 years and counting Crusade
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Mar 14, 2015 15:18
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 PART SEVENTY-ONE: Pax Europaea (November 15, 1906 - December 7, 1907) Excerpts from Dreams of Utopia, Nightmares of Armageddon: The Failure of Global Diplomacy in the 20th Century by Professor Hu Ping (Shanghai: Shanghai University Press, 2004) The fact that the so-called Pax Europaea alliance was not only defeated by China and its allies in the Sino-Marathi War, but was altogether unable to prevent the the nigh-destruction of Marathas, was a humiliating setback to the alliance's proponents in Byzantion and Edinburgh. Yet Tribune Milenov and Prime Minister MacDouglas were able to see some silver linings to the storm clouds that had descended over the Near West. First: the fighting, for the most place, too place far from the industrial and population centers of Europe. Furthermore, the Chinese-Somalian strategy of tying down Byzantine, British, and German forces in other theaters meant that, while the Byzantine expeditionary forces sent to India suffered appalling casualties alongside their Marathi comrades, the bulk of Pax forces were deployed in less lethal theaters— the Caucasus, North Africa, the Levant, etc.— and so survived the war intact. Furthermore, Milenov and MacDouglas were able to successfully portray the defeat as emphasizing the importance of something like Pax Europaea— both the necessity of banding together to stand up to Chinese interference and, more ominously, the absolute destruction wrought by a war between Great Powers.  MacDouglas had particular success conveying this message to his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, to the extent that— before the war with China had even ended— he convinced his counterpart in Paris, Cornélie Haussmann, to agree to an alliance between Britain and France. (OOC: I can't loving believe I missed screenshotting (or lost the screenshot for anyway) something that important but just take my word for it, okay?) Even occurring on the eve of capitulation to China, this was a significant victory for Pax Europaea— it wasn't simply the 20th century incarnation of the old Victorian Leagues of the early 19th century, but a genuine Concert of Europe in which old rivals forged new bonds of amity. MacDouglas drafted the Declaration of Pax Europaea, which was quickly ratified by the British Parliament, French Estates General, Byzantine Ekklesia, and North German Staatsrat. The Declaration of PAX EUROPAEA posted:[...]UNDERSTANDING the ruinous effects of GREAT WAR & the desire of FOREIGN EMPIRES to exercise dominion over the NEAR WEST in general and EUROPE in particular, we pledge to the following unalterable principles: Noble sentiments, perhaps, but the alliance had several structural flaws. Rather than all being allied to one another, Byzantium was allied with Britain and North Germany, Great Britain was allied with Byzantium and France, and North Germany and France were allied only with Byzantium and Britain, respectively. This doomed the Germans and French to a peripheral role in an alliance clearly led by Byzantion and Edinburgh. The first test of the newly-enlarged Pax Europaea pact came when Lai Ang— with backing from the Haida— declared war on France to regain some of French Iberia, conquered by the ancien-regime but still eagerly governed by the new liberal government in Paris.  Great Britain leapt to France's defense.  Byzantium had no obligation to France, but prioritized harmony between Pax Europaea— and discouraging the powers of Avalon from interfering on the Continent— and so canceled a prior alliance they had concluded with Lai Ang.  Even with the support of the Haida, Lai Ang was unable to defend its European possessions from the combined forces of the French and British, and quickly turned over a portion of their African colonies to Great Britain in exchange for peace.  The Haida set about bolstering their ability to project force abroad.  Relations between the Byzantine Commune and the capitalist powers of Avalon swiftly deteriorated.   This, in turn, complicated Byzantine diplomatic efforts to foster good relations with the communist states of the Far West.  Meanwhile, Staatsrat Müller had more pressing concerns.  The Ostia Home Fleet put in at Stade and landed a detachment of Red Guards to help the beleaguered Staatsrat maintain his grip on power.  The Red Guards— all veterans of the war with China— were more than a match for the German rebels. This, in itself, was suspicious, since Müller had made great efforts to paint the insurgency as a conspiracy of secret Schwarzwasser paid from seemingly limitless coffers of Krupp, Goethe-Spalding, et al.  The Byzantines also endeavored to show how beneficial communist government could be for the common people. Müller's personal unpopularity among the German people was quickly becoming intractable, however.  Intervention in the German Civil War also provided fertile ground for putting into practice the harsh lessons of the Chinese War.  In April, 1907, a dispute broke out between the Aztec Empire— which had recently established itself as a modern nation-state with regular diplomatic relations— and the Haida, which had conquered much of the Empire when it had yet to gain recognition as a legitimate government by foreign powers.   Emperor Ohimalpopoca II of the Aztecs  The British— the Haida's failed intervention in Iberia looming large in their minds— recognized the Aztecs' ancestral claims on Durango.  There had been many such crises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they all followed the same pattern— some region on the periphery of a multinational empire is disputed, a handful of Great Powers declare their interest in the situation, and then everyone looks at one another's fleets-in-being, decides the war is too high to pay, and diplomacy prevails. The Byzantines, preoccupied with their attempts to prop up a rapidly failing Müllerist NGF, saw little reason to believe that the Spring Crisis would be any different.  They were perhaps justified in their concerns. While the Red Guards were able to defeat any rebel army they encountered, they were unable to maintain order in the sprawling NGF as a whole. On May 29, 1907, the Byzantines abruptly lost contact with the surviving elements of the Volksarmee they had been coordinating their efforts with.  By June, it was clear that the Müller regime had fallen and been replaced with a new liberal government. Many local communist leaders and officials fled to Byzantium, but Müller himself apparently vanished, eventually resurfacing some months later in an ignominious exile in Jan Mayen.   Wilhelmina Weierstrass, Chancellor of the North German Federation  Although the new German government was republican, they took pains to avoid the traditional accoutrements of liberal republicanism— the tricolor, the hiratine, etc.,— as they were seen as being too tainted by their association with Goethe's anarcho-capitalist regime. Instead, Chancellor Weierstrass leaned heavily on the legacy of the old Habsburg monarchy— still seen as synonymous with German liberal democracy— in both symbolism (e.g., in restoring the old Habsburg flag, coat of arms, etc.) and form (the constitution of the new republic was nearly identical to the old Habsburg Monarchy constitution, except with references to the Kaiserin changed to "the President"). This was a humiliating setback to the Byzantine Commune, and meant that Great Britain was now firmly in charge of Pax Europaea. Nonetheless, the British requested Byzantine diplomatic aid in the Durango Crisis. The Ayiti Federation had elected to back the Haida, and the British felt that if the Byzantines— with their powerful navy— intervened, rationality would once again prevail and war could be avoided.  Negotiations continued into December before finally breaking down.  On December 7, the British declared war on the Haida. The Ayiti Federation declared war on the British. The Byzantines declared war on Ayiti and the Haida. Other allies of Great Britain followed— Ghana, Holland, Mauritania, Great Zimbabwe, and many others. (France, embarrassingly, refrained from participating)  Pax Europaea had achieved its most important goal: It had prevented a Great War from breaking out between the Near Western Great Powers.  The Great War would be fought between the Near West and Avalon.  Blackadder Goes Forth, Episode 6: Goodbyeee posted:Edmund: But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war. WORLD MAP, 1907  BASEBALL, 1905-1907  (No League Evolution changes took place) Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Mar 20, 2015 |
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Mar 19, 2015 22:17
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