GuardianSing

Sorry it's been a while but I've beaten chapter 24. I'll give the sweet sweet details tomorrow.

So apparently after completing all of these missions you get a new set of them, one of which centers around abolishing surfdom. But in order to get Great Imperial Ambitions I have to complete absolute autocracy which I don't even know how possible that is as a republic. Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette I guess Russia along with other Eastern Slavic nations gets Veche republic and "Great" Veche republic which is interesting

Wait...I can just do this?! The requirements to do this are astonishingly simple for something that would probably be damn near impossible to do for most empires in the 14th century. My Tsar just got blasted drunk on Vodka, spent all night reading about Athens, and the next day decided "You know what, I'm going to dramatically shift the power dynamics in Eastern Europe" There, it's done. The Tsardom just barely lasted 100 years. Victoria 3 is going to be so fucking funny

Look who's here, Khmer! Wait I already made that joke ages ago

What an interesting and diverse topic this show decided to tackle, I sure hope the skulls don't indicate a hyper focus on misinformed pop-culture elements that are barely relevant to the people that still live and breathe today. What we should be doing is going back in time to stop southern reconstruction from finishing too early.

...Uh Put 'em on Automatic siege mode and they somehow got in Algeria

That's actually terrifying. But it is done

So apparently, this specific Polish regiment when defeated decided to go all the way to uncolonized land in the Steppe to regroup That's actually hilarious, imagine being in that regiment and being told that you have to go the several mile march across Russia just to set up camp in Siberia

Oh sorry, were we not conquered enough to count? Also I totally didn't save scum and leave Moldavia to die just to avoid fighting the Ottomans. I may avenge them some day! ...Just in a war where I can call in other allies. Well maybe, but it's theorized that the Romans totally had the technology to make a similar voyage, they just didn't, and this is further supported by the fact that Lief Erikson and his men reached Newfoundland 500 years before Colombus from Scandinavia. Fun fact, Norse people and Native Americans did meet and traded goods for a good few years so that's neat. It's a mix of the two for me. Combined with the fact that my brain just doesn't produce enough dopamine to fully enjoy even things I enjoy

This game is going to give me a goddamn heart attack Old Paradox used to just do shit, huh? I'll return to it eventually, I promise. In fact I'm making a promise to myself to not start any new games until I'll clear all the ones I have going already.

Having runs in all of these games but lacking the energy to do any of them is peak neurodivergence.

All this talk of hypothetical American alt-history really makes me excited for a future America playthrough in EU4. I don't want to start any new games though since I still have so many unfinished playthroughs.

Yeah if you include historical strategy games into the mix then there are plenty of games with that setting but I was thinking 3D move around character games.

Wonder what he was thinking about those last few days, if he was ready to go. It's an unimaginable feeling. A loss like that is never easy to go through, best wishes to your family ❤️ What's funny is that the game would honestly just need to be "okay" for me to buy it because to my knowledge no other game exists with this setting. The reason is because the way big diseases show up is through major cities, most plagues start in livestock which are brought to big cities which are a breeding ground for diseases to endlessly spread through thousands of hosts Pre-colombian America had cities but they were few and far between, as well as being pretty clean like you said compared to Europe's cities at the time. I think a more likely answer is that if Spain didn't find it, China might have, the Ming Dynasty is already theorized to have discovered the continent before Colombus, they just didn't do anything. So in this hypothetical, lets say after around a hundred years of Empires growing and developing on the Americas, China manages to discover them on the California cost. And this is a big if but lets say that since China was already pretty large and had shit to deal with they decided to just not go through the effort of conquering them and traded with them instead. This exchange of goods eventually leads to gunpower and modern military being traded which will cause some border gore through wars but also make them more of a threat in the eyes of the rest of the world. So by the time small but ambitious empires learn of this "new world" the native empires are well able to defend themselves against European weaponry. I wonder if Buddhism would become popular there... That's also a possibility, Natives discovering Europe. I don't even think I could give an educated guess on how that would turn out Though it does get me wondering how a Native American ocean viable vessel would look like, how different it might be from ones in Europe and Asia at the time.

Indeed Europeans reached that extend, but ever since the Roman Empire, European countries haven't been able expand their historical borders within Europe to a huge extent, in part because the military and institutional technology was very evenly matched throughout the Early Modern, and Industrial periods, so they fucked off to places in the world that didn't have the technological ability to resist them. So here's what I'm thinking, had Europeans just never found the Americas, the Aztec Empire reaches to an extend and then collapses under it's own weight spawning in new independent empires. A few tribes in North America were already well on their way to becoming empires so they reach that conclusion without European interference, and eventually most North and South American land are under imperial rule from one of the many states that now exist. Wars happen, people are killed, and atrocities are committed, all especially being hard on the peoples that remained in tribes and never engaged in imperialism which there no doubt would be plenty of just as there are in Europe, but since all the powers there are largely on the same level strength wise, no one nation would be able to pull of a hegemony and so a lot more of our history, culture, and maybe even livelyhood would stay much more intact. Still you are right, It is an evil, I personally believe that we as humans should've never "progressed" beyond the Neolithic period and if we did, it should've been without our ingrained Human Tribalism, something that only ever made since in the Neolithic period and even then only barely. Maybe a better hypothetical would be "What if people were nice to each other"

It's not about whether it's bad so much as if it's a lesser evil. The Aztec invasions were brutal but in truth weren't very different from city state wars that had been happening since classical Mesoamerica. Remember, the majority of Tlaxcalan people were also Nahua, spoke Nahuatl, and came with the same people who would form the Aztec empire in the migration from the north into lake Texcoco. The Spanish invasions of the Americas wasn't just a conquering of Empires, it was a conquering of people, as unlike the Aztec empire, New Spain regularly burnt down cities and documents of indigenous history within the empire, which is why we have so little of it today. The temples that live to today are the ones New Spain never found and were long forgotten or left behind by Americans when Europeans arrived, not to mention the small pox killing 80% of Americans, a fact that the Spanish abused constantly to kill populations of cities or even just villages in an early form of biological warfare (Something that later French, US, and British colonizers would use) It was a cultural and ethnic genocide, something on a scale not just unknown to Americans but also Europeans as Catholic missionaries were horrified of what was happening, with many preaching against it. And the scars of that genocide continue to affect us to this very day. As recently as the 1970s, Guatemala had declared indigenous people as an enemy of the state and would bomb local communities and villages. So that's what the inquiry is about, is a world in which the old world left us alone in our little squabbles better than our world where their invasion nearly caused our extinction? Obviously this is more of a wishful thinking "what if?" scenario. The past is the past and we'd do better planning for the future than lamenting about the past, but I still find it an interesting question.

Now to be fair, Tlaxcalans did enjoy a certain amount of autonomy and freedom after the conquests, even under Spanish rule they had right to bare arms, own land and not be thrown into slavery, thought even still it doesn't last in the long run

If memory serves me, I believe Cortez brought only a few hundred men with him, the majority of the force that fought against Tenochtitlan were soldiers from Tlaxcala and other city states under Aztec rule Remember, most of Mesoamerican history before Colombus revolves around city states so the cities underneath the Aztec empire saw it as a very temporary thing. So here's a question, would the blatant imperialism of the Aztec and Inca Empires justify avoiding a future where 80% of Native Americans were killed and only 2% of all our pre-colombian sources survived to the present day. To put it simply, if the empires of North and South America had the military technology to resist European Invasion for good, even if that meant them committing their own set of atrocities, would that be better than the history we ended up with? Basically would this meme be a better alternative

Given that the release date is planned for 2025 It shouldn't be surprising that the game looks rather unfinished now, they still have lots of work to do. Tenochtitlan is way too bleak for a city that was incredibly colorful in it's day which I'm hoping is something they'll fix in the future, as well as the fact that the fall of the Aztecs could be more easily attributed towards other Mexica empires that they had been at war with for decades rather than Cortez and his men As far as being flat out offensive, the worst they can do is be too obsessed about Aztec human sacrifice or try and two-side a genocide, there might be some inaccuracies that portray a certain western bias but like Ratonhnhaké:ton in Assassin's Creed 3 it would not be nearly as bad as saying that the colonization of indigenous people is an inevitability and they should just suck it up and move on. It's honestly quite tragic how subjects of the Aztecs saw Cortez as this liberator who would help free them from the empire but then ended up being conquered just the same. There, it's all good now.

I lower my army maintenance for 5 seconds Yep it's pretty huge among Paradox titles though I'm only just now getting into it so to speak. If you do get it I also recommend paying 5 dollars for a monthly trial that gives all the DLCs that make the game a significantly better experience without having to pay almost 400 hundreds dollars for all of them. Subscription services are lame and all but eh, what can you do.

It's the next Fire Emblem game that Kaga himself personally gave me early access to. ...Also known as Europa Universalis IV

But here's the question, does the chocolate come from child slave labor?