The Great Game: Two or Three Gathered

In times of trouble, people turn to religion; that is universal. Sometimes they find comfort in it. Sometimes not.

The Great Game: The Voice of Norway

The invasion of Scandinavia was a very near-run thing, with something like the Marne battles of OTL 1914 being fought along the eastern river valleys of Norway. I had fantastic good luck with partisans, however, who appeared in exactly the single province in which they would cut off supply to the invaders; a fairly decisive stroke in the combat model of Hearts of Iron. The details of that will follow next week. This week, a speech by my head of government, promising to fight on at all costs. A Churchill moment with Hitler overtones, as it were. I amused myself by echoing, here and there, other famous speeches, and giving them that little twist that makes them fascist mockeries of the original cleanly-democratic phrases.

The Great Game: The Beacons Blaze

Actual fighting began in 1938. It didn’t go well for Norway, but it did make for exciting AAR-writing, with famous last stands, partisan risings in strategic bottlenecks, militias holding mountain defense lines against tanks, and dramatic swings of fortune.

The Great Game: Yngling Parties

Some chitchat with prospective players and responses to questions before the AAR proper starts; I’ve left it in because it does contain some bits of game information. ‘Skar’ is the Byzantine player.

The Great Game: Teaching the Horse

An introductory post, exploring some of the consequences of running a straightforwardly imperialist empire with a relatively small ethnicity. Balancing the economy and the military has been the bane of the Yngling empire since the EU2 period, but in these industrial times, when wealth depends on an educated workforce with access to all kinds of opportunities for sabotage, it has become a fatal weakness. The Ynglings of 1933 stare death in the face. Everyone can see that their empire cannot last as it is, but neither can they let go, because the subject races will rise in bloody revolt the moment the reins are loosened. And even if that were not so, the Ynglings are not the only imperialist ruling class in the world; they have to maintain their industrial strength and the empire that feeds it raw materials, or they themselves will become another oppressed subject race. Like Austria-Hungary in our timeline, keeping the Ynglinga Rike together is an insoluble problem; but with their best effort the pencil can be kept standing on its tip for another dozen years. And what else can a man do, when the fall will bring Chaos and Old Night to his homeland? So the Ynglings rush about looking for expedients, and their empire totters but it does not fall. Not yet.

The Great Game: Hearts of Iron Begins

The HoI section of the Great Game was where the Ynglings really acquired their reputation for treachery. Because we had trouble finding players, we had a good mix of to-the-death human/AI fights and diplomatically resolved human/human fights, making a dramatic end to our world history.

The Great Game: Discussion

I respond to comments about the previous post, giving more detail about the internal organisation of Yngling Norway.

The Great Game: Imperial Administration

Returning to the first Yngling timeline, I respond to questions about the administration of the Yngling state.

The End Is Not Yet: Mei Xian in the Second Chinese War

As requested, the literacy plot:

The main point of interest is Finland. Everyone else appears to be funding education as much as possible, with some exceptions for wars.

As for screenies of Chinese human-wave attacks, I’ve got plenty. These battles of Mei Xian were fought from March 1882 to March 1885, almost the entire duration of the war. During that time the Chinese war exhaustion rose from 30 to 60 percent. Pay particular attention to the last two, taken two weeks apart during the same battle. In a tactical sense these enormous collisions of masses of maneouvre accomplished nothing: In 1885 the coalition forces were just as firmly lodged in their beachhead as three years earlier. But strategically they achieved their purpose of locking down the coalition forces, keeping them in place and attriting, not the expeditionary forces, but the will to fight of the coalition governments. Any time we tried to move out of Mei Xian, those hundred divisions would come down like the hammer of God and force us right back.

The End Is Not Yet: 1880 Maps

Maps, ok. First North America:

Fully colonised, we’re just waiting for the prestige events from Nationalism and Imperialism – at least that’s why I’m waiting. Once that hits, there’s a partition plan – I get most of the land, Varyar gets most of the prestige.

South America:

Varyar’s in no hurry here, obviously.

Africa:

Probably being delayed by life-rating issues?

Australia:

Split between Georgia and Malacca. Japan was there before, but seems to have been persuaded to go elsewhere.

So that’s the colonisation, now the war! Here’s Europe:

Notice the Norwegian landings along the Baltic coast of Finland, where I’m rapidly defeating most of the Finnish regular army. A closer look at some of the previous fighting:

So, three Norwegian divisions, twenty Finnish divisions; a month later:

50% Finnish casualties, 10% Norwegian casualties, while outnumbered 6 to 1! It’s no joke to fight in Norway in winter! Then, too, mountain/forest provinces with level-2 forts, troops with dug-in level of 60, and heavy shore bombardments; and I also have much superior army techs. In short, just about everything that possibly can go wrong for the Finns, has indeed gone wrong, and the Ynglinga Hird is showing them the meaning of modern war. The agreed-upon peace, however, is lenient so that I can go after China; only the cession of Mariehamn – the islands between Sweden and Finland.

Finally, the fighting front in China:

The stacks vary in size between 10 and 20 divisions. The Georgian attack seems to have bogged down, but the French are still gathering steam with little to oppose them.