We all know the upcoming 3K DLC isn’t what was expected, so there still is a big lack of campaigns in East Asia, chief of it being China, THE big regional hegemon (until the Japanese got a massive tech buff in the late 1800s).
So the question is : which campaign to give them, ignoring the 3 Kingdoms. I think I have the perfect candidate : the An Lushan rebellion.
A civil war in the mid 700s that devastated the Tang dynasty (census indicate it may have caused more victims than WW1 while China only had around 50M inhabitants at the time, though some part is just some escaping taxation), led by An Lushan who by all accounts can be summed up as a troll. The revolt notably includes a siege in which much of the civilian population was eaten (that’s a new type of huntable animal I guess).
It would make a very colourful and memorable campaign, while being centered on something else than the Mongol conquests.
Huang Chao Rebellion - Wikipedia is also famous. Huáng Cháo also has an anti-hero feel on the Chinese Internet, while Ān Lùshān does not. However, Ān Lùshān had fought against Khitan, Xī people (Xianbei descendants), and Turkic people, but Huáng Cháo had never fought against so many different forces (except Lǐ Kèyòng himself was of Shātuó (a Turkic tribe)), so the civs that could participate in the scenes would be relatively simple.
I guess it’s because of how much a figure An Lushan was, hard to dislike him.
Kept failing upward, morbidely obese (to the point of crushing a horse when trying to ride it), somehow had an affair with the emperor’s favourite concubine, the rebellion started with a big misunderstanding and was somewhat justified as the new emperor murdered An Lushan’s family, and even his death wasn’t ordinary (he was so fat the assassin had difficulties cutting through).
The entire campaign can be written as a dark comedy. And I think it should.
Nice. I think this is exactly what can help to satisfy the single player community with the new dlc.
Maybe devs find a way to at least add one, better 2 campaigns in the vicinity outside of the 3K campaigns.
Before any other consideration, the golden rule is to make it not boring. The potential is so high for An Lushan, especially with a good writer, and it shows how crazy chinese history can be.
“The emperor let his jelly toast fall from the table on the jelly side. A sign he lost the Mandate of Heaven, millions died as a result”
However, An Lushan was not Han Chinese but a Sogdian. But if AOE2 were to create an An Lushan campaign, they could introduce the Sogdians as a new ciV.
I didn’t say otherwise, but except some early scenarios in which An Lushan controlled some small forces (still it depends if it’s some foreign auxiliary forces or chinese forces), he’d quickly switch to the chinese civ the moment he starts revolting, controlling chinese provinces.
Similar to El Cid switching to saracens when the king kicked him out.
I used to propose a Sogdian civ in my concepts, while at the time there was not many people interested in the Sogdians in the forum.
I’d be happy if you are interested in this.
There, my suggestion to the campaign of the Sogdians was based on their city-states’ resistance to the Muslim invasion, and my suggestion to the campaign of the Chinese was based on the story of Yue Fei. I tried to present the tragic feeling of the Sogdians and Yue Fei in their battles against the invaders through the campaigns.
As for the An Lushan Rebellion, I had also proposed it in this another topic of mine. But, it is a historical scenario named to “Chang’an” rather than a full campaign, and the player is going to act Li Heng, prince of Tang, who gonna suppress the Rebellion instead.
If An Lushan become the campaign, I agree it could also be fun.
I think theres berter candidates. China’s history of dealing with outsiders gives us a lot of options
Imo best time period are either the wars during the early Tang dynasty with the Gokturks, Tibetans and Koreans. The Song also had a lot of interesting conflicts with the Tanguts, Liao and Jin
Imo Taizong of Tang is probably the best option. He backstabbed and was backstabbed a few times, and had a very imteresting people around him all the time. He also fought Korea, Tibet, united China and defeated the Western and Eastern Turkic Khanates
If you want a more personal story (at the cost of civ variety) you can use Dou Jiande.
I have 2 campaign ideas for the Chinese (or potentially a new civ in South China), both of which were relatively unknown even to the Chinese themselves, yet I feel that they fit perfectly as campaigns of AoE 2.
The first was the Xiyuan rebellion in Guangxi against the Tang led by the Huang clan, which was a prominent tribal clan among the Zhuang/Dong peoples. It lasted from 756 to 879 AD, with chiefs Huang Qianyao, Huang Shaodu, Huang Shaoqing, and many other Zhuang chiefs involved in the rebellion. They were able to defeat the Tang armies and carve out a vast territory in Guangxi and Guangdong, though eventually got defeated due to being less organized and less disciplined. Moreover in the early 800’s the Huang chiefs even tried to ally with Nanzhao and Champa to fight against the Tang, and in 824 AD the Champa king Harivarman the First sent a relief force to help them, though that force was crushed by the Tang somewhere in North Vietnam.
The second was the Pang Xun rebellion in 869 AD. Pang Xun was from the Central Plains and was a low ranking Tang soldier who got sent to Guangxi to fight off the native rebels and the Nanzhao armies. At first his commander promised him and his comrades that they would be able to return back home if they completed a 3 year military service in Guangxi. However when the time came the commander broke his promise and asked them to serve 3 more years, and when the 6 year mark came the commander broke the promise again and asked them to serve 1 year more. Realizing that he was being fooled, he rebelled against the Tang and led an army from Guangxi and fought all the way back to the Central Plains, nearly toppled the Tang regime. In the end he was defeated by the Shatuo Turks who were hired by the Tang court to quench the rebellion. Although the Pang Xun rebellion got crushed, it paved the way for an even bigger rebellion the Huang Chao rebellion.
Harivarman the First was really brave and chivalrous.
His decision to help the native rebels and the Nanzhao angered the Tang court, and they sent an envoy to Champa to reprimand his actions. Harivarman didn’t kneel down and instead replied to the Tang envoy: “your kingdom is shrouded in darkness and I sent my righteous army to save the inhabitants of the lands that you rule, like a ray of sunlight piercing into the darkness”.
Oh my god this reply was so poetic yet so valiant and so firm, even though it was said more than a thousand years ago in 824 AD it still touches my heart every time I read it. Look chivalry didn’t only exist in medieval Europe, it existed in medieval SE Asia as well.
The Tang did many bad things to the native inhabitants of South China. At that time in South China there was a group of people who were relatively short and dark and looked very different from the Chinese. The Tang court sent armies deep into the forests of South China to capture those natives, and once captured they were sent back to the Tang capital Chang’an to serve as slaves and were kept in cages and were forced to dress up like monkeys or wild animals.
By the way, according to recent genetic tests on the skeletal remains of medieval Guangxi people, it was found that they carried a rather high frequency of Y-haplogroup C1b. This haplogroup was also detected on the Paleolithic European Kostenki hunter-gatherer as well as the Early Neolithic Hoabinhian hunter-gatherer from SE Asia. So indeed they probably looked rather different from modern Chinese/Japanese/Koreans.
Facial reconstruction of Kostenki 14 for reference, he carried the same haplogroup as medieval Guangxi natives (Kostenki 14 carried a more upstream branch of C1b-F1370, whereas medieval Guangxi natives were on a more downstream branch C1b1a2-F725, but still you can say that they belonged to the same or similar lineage)
Yes, I would watch some Chinese campaigns between the Tang and Ming dynasties… An Lushan (755-763) is good, the Jin-Song wars (1115-1234) are good (and you use the new civs) and the rise of the Ming with Hongwu (1368-1398) are also good…
We could have a haplogroup civ, I mean nothing stops that from happening, giving that we already have polities as civs.
Imagine a Y-haplogroup C1b civ where you can train Kostenki hunter-gatherers, Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers, and medieval Guangxi rebels, it would be fun.
And a Y-haplogroup D-M174 civ which includes Japanese, Tibetan, and Andamanese units.
