Seeing the latest HOI4 DD, where the devs have clearly put a lot of attention into reworking China, it got me thinking about how they would do it in Vicky 3. I think we can all agree the way they did it in Vicky 2 was pretty... suboptimal. Here's what I see as the biggest issues:
-Lack of historical events/decisions. There are no Opium Wars, no Muslim rebellions in the Northwest, no court struggle between reformers and reactionaries, and no Xinhai Revolution. Boxers and Taiping are in, but don't have the impact they should (the Taiping rebellion was the bloodiest war of the 19th century and maybe the bloodiest civil war in history). This ties in with the next point.
-Political stability. China almost always stays an Empire. This seems to be a pretty consistent problem across uncivs so I suspect POPs in unwesternized countries are just very unlikely to become Liberals or Socialists or whichever. But this really ought to be addressed because liberal agitation played an important part leading up to the Xinhai revolution.
-Substates are ahistorical. They take their names from post-1911 warlords, and their territories are basically fictional. So they don't pass for "reasonable alt-history" states because of their bizarre borders, names and ethnic identities, and they don't pass for the actual warlords for the mostly the same reasons.
-Substates are poorly-balanced. One apparent goal of the substate system was to make it possible to sphere parts of China but not the whole. This really only worked out in Manchuria (intended to become a Russian, and later Japanese, sphereling). For basically everywhere else that historically saw Western or Japanese influence, it's still impossible to sphere them because of how large the "Chinese Empire" and "Guangxi" populations are. So instead we get bizarre outcomes like Shanghai being totally free of foreign influence while the Americans meddle in Yunnanese affairs. Another goal was probably to slow down the unification of China, but the Empire controls by far the wealthiest and most populous parts of the country (their nearest rival is Guangxi, with half as many POPs) so this isn't achieved in any meaningful way. The third actually seems to have been to try and make westernization a little smoother for China, since fewer states for the Empire means it's quicker to get to important milestones like 2% clergy, but this is only an issue because of the following point;
-The Japan-China disparity (or, the Japan-every other unciv disparity). So, Japan is the only unciv that's intended to consistently become a legitimate GP, and naturally it's going to need some distinctive advantage in order for that to happen. But the dev's solution has been to make the Japanese something like 8 times as well-educated as the rest of East Asia in 1836 (and to give them a number of starting reforms, and give them additional RP and prestige on westernization). The Japanese are even about four times as literate as the Irish or most Austro-Hungarian ethnicities. This is a little ludicrous considering the Japanese education system was just Chinese education filtered through hereditary feudalism until after the Meiji restoration. So the problem is- westernization is depicted as primarily a technological process, buying reforms through research, when in both China and Japan westernization was a political process that happened through armed revolt. So Japan's earlier and more-successful revolution is produced through *ludicrously high* literacy and a beneficial event, relative to other uncivs that are expected to make the transition much later or not at all. This will require a major politics rework to fix so that reforms become more like laws in CK2- something you have to push through against opposition, and while research might be prerequisite for some of them the ultimate effort to put them into effect is going to be a political one. Then you could have something like the Self-Strengthening Movement or the Hundred Days' Reform, which failed because of political opposition and not any lack of technical know-how. Japan will benefit from its political and cultural solidarity, not from exaggerated intellectual prowess.
-Westernized China immediately becomes a GP. China's massive, backwards armies are often useless in actual fighting but are still enough to keep China ranked #1 in military. And when you have 100 million POPs, you can subsidize enough industry to be a major Industrial contender no matter how backwards and noncompetitive your factories are. So in a situation where China still has really no ability to project power or to compete with rival GPs, it's always going to be put into that position just by virtue of sheer size. To resolve this, the score calculations will have to be refined to weigh quality more heavily than quantity, since the most influential countries of this time were not the most populous ones but the ones with the best institutions, technology and infrastructure.
-GP China tanks the global economy. Because of how buying order works, and how obscenely large some Chinese POPs are, China climbing the buying order can lead to massive shortages in every country lower than them. To resolve this problem there would have to be some pretty fundamental changes to the nature of buying order, price flexibility, and how good producers are at responding to changes in demand, as well as a smoother transition for China from very low to very high buying order.
Lastly, this is extremely nitpicky, but "Beifaren" and "Nanfaren" are typos. You want "fang," not "fa." But considering how big of an improvement EU4's culture map of China is over previous PDS games, I'm pretty confident they'll do a good job with cultures this time around.
Anyway, tl;dr- China lacks flavor and realism, and the game's overall mechanics aren't well-suited for dealing with such a large country.
What changes would y'all want to see made?
-Lack of historical events/decisions. There are no Opium Wars, no Muslim rebellions in the Northwest, no court struggle between reformers and reactionaries, and no Xinhai Revolution. Boxers and Taiping are in, but don't have the impact they should (the Taiping rebellion was the bloodiest war of the 19th century and maybe the bloodiest civil war in history). This ties in with the next point.
-Political stability. China almost always stays an Empire. This seems to be a pretty consistent problem across uncivs so I suspect POPs in unwesternized countries are just very unlikely to become Liberals or Socialists or whichever. But this really ought to be addressed because liberal agitation played an important part leading up to the Xinhai revolution.
-Substates are ahistorical. They take their names from post-1911 warlords, and their territories are basically fictional. So they don't pass for "reasonable alt-history" states because of their bizarre borders, names and ethnic identities, and they don't pass for the actual warlords for the mostly the same reasons.
-Substates are poorly-balanced. One apparent goal of the substate system was to make it possible to sphere parts of China but not the whole. This really only worked out in Manchuria (intended to become a Russian, and later Japanese, sphereling). For basically everywhere else that historically saw Western or Japanese influence, it's still impossible to sphere them because of how large the "Chinese Empire" and "Guangxi" populations are. So instead we get bizarre outcomes like Shanghai being totally free of foreign influence while the Americans meddle in Yunnanese affairs. Another goal was probably to slow down the unification of China, but the Empire controls by far the wealthiest and most populous parts of the country (their nearest rival is Guangxi, with half as many POPs) so this isn't achieved in any meaningful way. The third actually seems to have been to try and make westernization a little smoother for China, since fewer states for the Empire means it's quicker to get to important milestones like 2% clergy, but this is only an issue because of the following point;
-The Japan-China disparity (or, the Japan-every other unciv disparity). So, Japan is the only unciv that's intended to consistently become a legitimate GP, and naturally it's going to need some distinctive advantage in order for that to happen. But the dev's solution has been to make the Japanese something like 8 times as well-educated as the rest of East Asia in 1836 (and to give them a number of starting reforms, and give them additional RP and prestige on westernization). The Japanese are even about four times as literate as the Irish or most Austro-Hungarian ethnicities. This is a little ludicrous considering the Japanese education system was just Chinese education filtered through hereditary feudalism until after the Meiji restoration. So the problem is- westernization is depicted as primarily a technological process, buying reforms through research, when in both China and Japan westernization was a political process that happened through armed revolt. So Japan's earlier and more-successful revolution is produced through *ludicrously high* literacy and a beneficial event, relative to other uncivs that are expected to make the transition much later or not at all. This will require a major politics rework to fix so that reforms become more like laws in CK2- something you have to push through against opposition, and while research might be prerequisite for some of them the ultimate effort to put them into effect is going to be a political one. Then you could have something like the Self-Strengthening Movement or the Hundred Days' Reform, which failed because of political opposition and not any lack of technical know-how. Japan will benefit from its political and cultural solidarity, not from exaggerated intellectual prowess.
-Westernized China immediately becomes a GP. China's massive, backwards armies are often useless in actual fighting but are still enough to keep China ranked #1 in military. And when you have 100 million POPs, you can subsidize enough industry to be a major Industrial contender no matter how backwards and noncompetitive your factories are. So in a situation where China still has really no ability to project power or to compete with rival GPs, it's always going to be put into that position just by virtue of sheer size. To resolve this, the score calculations will have to be refined to weigh quality more heavily than quantity, since the most influential countries of this time were not the most populous ones but the ones with the best institutions, technology and infrastructure.
-GP China tanks the global economy. Because of how buying order works, and how obscenely large some Chinese POPs are, China climbing the buying order can lead to massive shortages in every country lower than them. To resolve this problem there would have to be some pretty fundamental changes to the nature of buying order, price flexibility, and how good producers are at responding to changes in demand, as well as a smoother transition for China from very low to very high buying order.
Lastly, this is extremely nitpicky, but "Beifaren" and "Nanfaren" are typos. You want "fang," not "fa." But considering how big of an improvement EU4's culture map of China is over previous PDS games, I'm pretty confident they'll do a good job with cultures this time around.
Anyway, tl;dr- China lacks flavor and realism, and the game's overall mechanics aren't well-suited for dealing with such a large country.
What changes would y'all want to see made?
- 5
- 4
