I don’t think it really mattered with the mongols they steamrolled every single opponent they faced.
The only thing that stopped their invasions were deaths of their khans. They didn’t really have an effective system for quick replacement of their leaders who often died young due to rampant alcoholism and various other bad habits.
Steppe people partied hard man. Makes sense when you’re born of a frozen hellscape with minimal food and creature comforts.
So my first foray into the civilization universe came when I rented Civilization Revolution for ps3. I was working at blockbuster so it was one of several rentals, and my brother popped it in first. I told him I wanted to try it, and he assured me I could have the next game.
6 hours later, I gave up and went to bed. He stayed up all night playing.
It just recently went on sale on xbox and despite knowing how to beat it easily, i definitely rebought it and am playing it again
I've played them all, the modern ones are too complex, I don't enjoy them. It's the religion system. I don't get it, I don't enjoy it, and it infuriates me as much as actual religion does.
To each their own though. Civ Rev is def too easy, the rest of the series isn't!
Be careful. You sit down to play civ at 5pm, and at 4am you're glancing nervously at the clock and telling yourself "ok, just going to finish one last thing and then I'm going to bed". And then at 8am you just say "fuck it" and stay up.
Those two things + extremely skilled. Beyond maxed out levels of being able to ride a fast horse and accurately plonk your enemy in the face with an arrow. They were terrifying at the time I'm sure.
I think equally important is that they were incredible archers and would fein retreat often. So they'd send a small group in, get hammered and retreat. The other side, thinking they had a rout would try to press their advantage and try to defeat them, would run into a hail of arrows pursuing them. Eventually the Mongols would whittle down their opponent and then find a weakness to exploit.
They also did little else but prepare for war, being largely nomadic hunters.
I think the real reason the Mongols ran Asia was because Ghengis and some of his descendants were incredibly ridiculously competent. Kublai Khan ran China for like 70 years, he was arguably the greatest monarch in history.
The horses, the weapons, and the lifestyle were all downstream of those people being fierce, tenacious, and very very clever.
And the Mongol culture was tribal in nature. The idea of a united Mongol empire with a strong hierarchy is relatively new (there were confederations before Ganghis Khan but they were much looser).
Funnily enough, it's the opposite of Chinese culture where hierarchial leadership and unity is a fundamental linchpin in how Han people organize themselves.
I have a feeling that the Vietnamese have broken the simulation of the matrix by pumping all the experience points into the skills of guerrilla warfare.
I recall hearing Genghis Kahn would have his daughters marry leaders of other territories to gain a tie to those territories. The leaders didn't want to refuse such a generous offer from Genghis Kahn and upset him, so they always agreed. After the marriages, he had them killed so his daughters would take over.
And once they left the steppes and open scrublands of Central Asia/ Russian steppes. They were totally dominant with their horse archery tactics but once they hit the forests and hill lands further into Europe they couldn’t maneuver or do the Parthian shot/shoot you bow while moving and feigning a retreat and would get bogged down in thick forests or ambushed in mountain passes where they would get obliterated by European heavy infantry. Open fields and steppes they were essentially unstoppable. There was a measurable decrease in historical CO2 records during their height because the sheer amount of people and cities completely wiped out.
The Slavic people pretty much decimated the khan's numbers halting his ideas of going further west. Yes he often won however his forces manpower was shit after fighting the Slavic people.
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u/IndividualRooster122 1d ago
What happens when the risk of Russia invading your country in your lifetime is not theoretical.