scholar
Banned
I wish to do something close to impossible: A One World Empire. Under most conditions this would readily be seen as ASB. Even all encompassing religions and ideologies are destined to fracture, any government (certainly in modern times) would be almost uselessly decentralized to even control the better part of a continent, let alone six.
And yet some of my earliest ideas revolved around PODs before Christ showed up. One of them involved a continually expanding Persian empire, with periods of retraction and growth leading to a net growth until the empire evolves to the point where the Persian culture and identity consumes surrounding cultures, creating hybrid spin-off cultures even where Persia never reached simply through the sheer mass and wealth of its presence. Each part of the empire would essentially operate independently from one another except in the area of taxes. The situation would degrade and civil wars and rebellions would be common in the beginning, but as rebellions continually get put down and a number of different administrative capitals show up scattered where they are needed to be throughout that the empire is kept together. This largely also comes through its sheer weight, size, and cultural similarities.
Persia could get, realistically, about as large as France/Spain to Eastern India, with tributary states surrounding it. It is just that the larger it became, and more decentralized it became, the less I felt they could realistically expand and maintain cohesion. Then again, I am talking about realism when the empire might as well be Rome at its height combined with Alexander's empire and the Mauryan Empire, plus a tremendous amount of client states surrounding it. Now this is possible, and can be done reasonably without ASB, but it just seemed silly and ultimately never accomplished what I wanted.
Other candidates that I've now more or less dismissed:
Rome
Hellenistic Civilization
Habsburgs
Caliphate
Spain
Great Britain
International Socialism
Each of them had the potential to do what I wanted, but either ran into similar problems or ultimately stretched plausibility too much that it broke.
So now I'm down to three that I'm looking into:
Mongol Empire
Russian Empire
China
On their own, any one of those would probably not be fantastic candidates. China had strong cultural cohesion, but its expansionism was all what we would consider somewhat localized and every mitigating factor cemented it where it was, but that is also why it has an important part of what I'm looking for. No matter how much it was torn apart, by itself or by others, it pulled itself together again. The Mongols could conquer, but not hold forever. In many ways the Mongols were akin to Alexander, and suffer from similar problems. The Russian Empire was one of the better candidates for my objective, similar to the Habsburgs or the British, but ultimately they did not advance socially and industrially alongside western europe and fell behind. Solving that may help expand their position considerably, bbut they seem much more like a Eurasian Empire than anything else.
So why not combine the three of them?
And yet some of my earliest ideas revolved around PODs before Christ showed up. One of them involved a continually expanding Persian empire, with periods of retraction and growth leading to a net growth until the empire evolves to the point where the Persian culture and identity consumes surrounding cultures, creating hybrid spin-off cultures even where Persia never reached simply through the sheer mass and wealth of its presence. Each part of the empire would essentially operate independently from one another except in the area of taxes. The situation would degrade and civil wars and rebellions would be common in the beginning, but as rebellions continually get put down and a number of different administrative capitals show up scattered where they are needed to be throughout that the empire is kept together. This largely also comes through its sheer weight, size, and cultural similarities.
Persia could get, realistically, about as large as France/Spain to Eastern India, with tributary states surrounding it. It is just that the larger it became, and more decentralized it became, the less I felt they could realistically expand and maintain cohesion. Then again, I am talking about realism when the empire might as well be Rome at its height combined with Alexander's empire and the Mauryan Empire, plus a tremendous amount of client states surrounding it. Now this is possible, and can be done reasonably without ASB, but it just seemed silly and ultimately never accomplished what I wanted.
Other candidates that I've now more or less dismissed:
Rome
Hellenistic Civilization
Habsburgs
Caliphate
Spain
Great Britain
International Socialism
Each of them had the potential to do what I wanted, but either ran into similar problems or ultimately stretched plausibility too much that it broke.
So now I'm down to three that I'm looking into:
Mongol Empire
Russian Empire
China
On their own, any one of those would probably not be fantastic candidates. China had strong cultural cohesion, but its expansionism was all what we would consider somewhat localized and every mitigating factor cemented it where it was, but that is also why it has an important part of what I'm looking for. No matter how much it was torn apart, by itself or by others, it pulled itself together again. The Mongols could conquer, but not hold forever. In many ways the Mongols were akin to Alexander, and suffer from similar problems. The Russian Empire was one of the better candidates for my objective, similar to the Habsburgs or the British, but ultimately they did not advance socially and industrially alongside western europe and fell behind. Solving that may help expand their position considerably, bbut they seem much more like a Eurasian Empire than anything else.
So why not combine the three of them?
