{"id":3269,"date":"2011-07-30T12:09:58","date_gmt":"2011-07-30T17:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=3269"},"modified":"2011-08-01T11:11:20","modified_gmt":"2011-08-01T16:11:20","slug":"the-mongol-national-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/30\/the-mongol-national-character\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mongol National Character"},"content":{"rendered":"

What this is about, including full list.<\/a><\/p>\n

Genghis Khan was dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who, we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Oshman’s Sporting Goods<\/a>. So Sid Meier had to make him and his furry hat one of the iconic Civs in his classic game. <\/p>\n

The Mongols did, after all, conquer half the known world and throw the other half into a righteous panic. Genghis was an illiterate military genius with great political savvy, who didn’t believe in the glory of a heroic resistance. If you surrendered your city, you were rewarded and treated well. If you were a patriot who fought to be free, you and your fellow citizens would be collected into a mountain of skulls outside what was left of your city walls within a few weeks. A master of open field warfare who once did a flanking maneuver over hundreds of miles, he soon picked up siege warfare like a natural. His dominant legacy is still a matter of great debate – bloodthirsty conqueror who retarded Asian progress or effective ruler who ensured the security of the Silk Road? Sure, it all ended up with the sacking of the libraries of Baghdad, and eventually the pointless destruction of Timur, who claimed descent from the Great Khan. I suppose you could see the Mughals as an extension of Mongol rule, but they pretty much settled down once Babur took Delhi.<\/p>\n

For game designers, the Mongols are the conquerors on horseback. Horse archers and other mounted warriors are the key things that strategy games take away from Mongol history. After all, there’s really not a lot else that holds them together, right? Their horsemen are to be feared in Civilization 3, 4,<\/em> and 5<\/em> and in Age of Empires 2<\/em> and in Rise of Nations<\/em>. Other traits that are ascribed are designed to make them speedy conquerors and little else. The Aggressive trait in Civ 4<\/em> means an instant promotion for melee units. In Civ 5<\/em>, city-states fall faster and the great generals are stronger. Age of Empires 2<\/em> has faster siege units. The Mongols in Rise of Nations<\/em> suffer less attrition in enemy territory.<\/p>\n

The horse power is universal. Though other nations have had great horseback cultures (France and Russia especially), it is the light Mongol archer that has survived as a unique national emblem. The horse archer is not how we are generally raised to see cavalry power. The charge of the armored knight or the companion at Alexander’s side is how horses are epitomized in the west, and charges are more dramatic than the advance and retreat of the horseborne archer. Yes, the addition of the Keshik unit (these were bodyguard lancers for the Khan) muddles things a bit but Mongol mounted warfare was largely a matter of hit and run – well over half of the Mongol army were horse archers, and AoE2 and RoN reflect this very well. But all these games emphasize mobility and speed. In a turn based game, power is power more often than not, but in an RTS the difference between a mounted archer and a lancer is the difference between life and death.<\/p>\n

And with this speed and the expansion power, you go out and kill everything.<\/p>\n

So, in games where Mongols are just another faction, it is so simple. They are the fast moving, mobile assault team that can reduce your cities to rubble and ride circles around you. In an historical RTS, playing the Mongols well take a bit of art as you dance your archers in and out of range, taking advantage of their speed and power while still moving your siege engines forward.<\/p>\n

There’s something archetypal about this, of course. The Mongols weren’t the first mounted invaders to threaten “civilization”. They are a stand in for the Scythians and the Alans and the Huns and the Parthians and pretty much any culture that rode in and destroyed less mobile armies and either settled down, moved on, or exacted tribute. They aren’t quite noble savages, and they aren’t quite barbarians. They are the whirlwind, I guess.<\/p>\n

It is in other more historically centered strategy games that the Mongols become something truly meaningful, even from a design perspective. The Mongols are, of course, the destroyers of civilization, and you see this best in games like Medieval: Total War<\/em> and Crusader Kings<\/em>. Remember that, for medieval Europeans, the advance of the Mongols was like the End Times. Say what you will about God saving Christendom from the Ottomans at the Gates of Vienna in 1529, he did a damned better trick turning Batu around in 1241 for a funeral after the general scattered European armies in Hungary. Before that time, the Mongols represented something like Communism, Satan, Hitler, and the Spice Girls – no property will be respected, God will be defiled, the Khan will have control over your life, and there will be no culture worth saving.<\/p>\n

The Mongols in many strategy games are a force of nature, and as a force of nature cannot be controlled. Crusader Kings<\/em> won’t let you play any non-Christian state, so this is not necessarily a big deal, but in Medieval: Total War 2<\/em>, neither the Mongols nor the Timurids can be played in the campaign. In both of these games, the Mongol nations just show up and proceed to wreck everything. The clock strikes midnight, thousands and thousands of horsemen arrive from the east, provinces begin to fall and, if you are anywhere nearby, you begin to panic. All of your opponents are blobs and markers, but the Mongols in Russia and Iran are different. They appear in numbers that dwarf anything you have ever seen before, appear to ignore any rules about attrition or supply, come fully stocked with good leaders and cavalry and even strong AI states will fail to be an adequate buffer zone.<\/p>\n

It’s telling that official guides on how to deal with the Mongols in both of these games often recommend assassination. If you can decapitate their generals and best leaders, you have a chance of crippling them before they start carving out a real empire. Maybe (in Crusader Kings<\/em>) you can start getting vassals fighting lieges. Still, the assumption is that the Mongols are just too big to take on in a fair fight. They may exhaust themselves or fight among themselves. But they will kill you with numbers and mobility if you try to be a hero.<\/p>\n

But it’s not just that the Mongol hordes is large and invincible, both Crusader Kings<\/em> and Medieval: Total War<\/em> accept the incursions as inevitable. Both as historical sandboxes that give you a wide playground, but require the Mongol invasion to make the Middle Ages feel right. And, since you as the monarch have this basic historical knowledge, there comes a point in the game where your strategy and planning takes a turn and is no longer about doing what is best for your empire at the moment, but how you will prepare for the storm that is two decades away.<\/p>\n

The Mongol inevitability epitomizes the great challenge for historical game designers. You can’t ignore the invasions, since they transformed Eastern Europe and the Near East in very important ways. But the player knows they are on the way. If they are too powerful, then the fun might stop and you will discourage anyone from playing Novgorod, Ryazan, Georgia or Trebizond. But the threat has to be real in order to really capture the fear. And how regular should these invasions be? If you stop one, do you stop them all? A player’s foreknowledge of Mongol power means that they can prepare to fight a mass mobile platform or let it exhaust itself. This doesn’t remove the threat, but it tames it. Gamer precognition tames the horde as effectively as Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome.<\/p>\n

Next up, the Romans<\/a>. I promise to not go on too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What this is about, including full list. Genghis Khan was dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who, we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Oshman’s Sporting Goods. So Sid Meier had to make him and his furry hat one of the iconic Civs in his classic game. The Mongols did, after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[138,10],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-QJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3269"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3278,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3269\/revisions\/3278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}