Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg
- Thread starter RiverDelta
- Start date
Well, there are many people like Tang Jiyao and Chen Jiongming who died in the 1920s, but are still alive in 1936.
Also, the mod makers were extremely lazy and did not bother to fix the province boundaries. This is something that definitely annoys me more than other people since I'm a mapmaker, but it's an issue.
Furthermore, the factions that exist have illogical borders in places. The Kumul Khanate has the wrong border, and in general control of provinces is awkwardly split in many places (Shandong, Guizhou, Suiyuan. Shanxi, etc.) which is something that doesn't make sense at all since the country is supposedly united under the Qing at start, even if ostensibly, all of the provinces recognise the same government and are allies, so it makes no sense that this would be so. And the way some provinces are split (like Shanxi) makes no sense from a geographical perspective.
Some of the design choices like Mongolia controlling Xilingol and Tibet having its 1911 borders (+Chamdo) are odd but I suppose justifiable.
The most glaring issue, however, is that there is absolutely no way this China has persisted as a unified entity for a decade. It is an unstable catastrophe, and I cannot bring myself to believe that a China with an unstable League of Five Provinces, a pseudo-Nationalist Shanxi-Guominjun, and a divided Sichuan, would stay at peace for more than a few months.
I haven't even played or really looked into the lore of this mod aside from a play through as Shanxi once, so these are just the errors I notice from a cursory overview.
Deleted member 107125
With Tang and Chen, they’re alive because no Sun Yat-Sen.
Otherwise I guess you have a valid point. I think the India rework has, as an Indian, made me feel the same way the China rework made so many in the Chinese community feel!
Another complaint a Chinese friend of mine had was about the Federalists. Chen and the federalists were, according to them, primarily a movement of the Teochewese landed elite, and primarily were against the land reforms carried out by the KMT. Chen was not a democrat or a freedom fighter but another warlord, no different from Zhang Zuolin or Wu Peifu. What’s your opinion on this?
Mind you, this was in the before before-times. Before we (yours truly) rewrote the RoC to include Madame Sun, so it was really a Wild West kinda situation vis-a-vis plausibility. Still, one of the biggest draws I have regarding buying HoI4 is to get to play with the new (although that’s a stretch at this point) China tags. I have tremendous respect for the devs for putting such amazing content together.
One can debate plausibility ad nauseam, but at the end of the day, I still think KR China stands as one the crowning achievements of the mod.
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It's not really considerate to dismiss a whole rework as awful when you say that you only have a cursory overview and half of your issues are just borders not being right, but to each their own.
Wait, how does that make any sense? Tang Jiyao and Chen Jiongming did not die because Sun Yat-sen or even people associated with Sun Yat-sen killed them. You could easily have, say, Hu Ruoyu as leader of Yunnan and it would work fine. But the developers just didn't care or something.
I am not the most qualified person to explain Chen Jiongming's ideology, but from my experience it was based mostly around what would benefit the territory he ruled while still allowing him to be in power as a warlord. Which places him into a similar category as Yan Xishan, although it would be vastly inaccurate to characterise them as having the same ideology.
I mean, if the rework is bad on a fundamental level I don't think it can easily make up for that on a specific level. I did provide criticism beyond "the borders are bad": the scenario itself is untenable. There's no way this China exists in 1936 if the lore we've been given is even remotely true. It might make sense for a 1926 China, but that's not when the mod starts.
In all fairness, KR is not centred around plausibility, so you have a point. The scenario is definitely well-fleshed out. It's just that it doesn't make any sense, but it's hard to point to anything in KR that does make sense, and it's still an amazing and popular mod in spite of that.
Update on the KX situation:
TW: This links to a transphobic post
Also one of the KX ex-devs is part of a notoriously transphobic Communist party in England that likes to compete with the likes of JK Rowling to see who can cancel trans people the fastest. And said transphobic party seems to have been infiltrated by neo-fascists and literal nazbols if the below incident is any indication.
So Xorn said KRDX was being "funny" or excessively edgy and they got hate mail from the KRDX devs. They're working on their own British civil war mod. The dev that belongs to the transphobic communist organization decided to rip off Xorn's civil war mod.....and made a shitton of breakaways in the ripoff fascist, national bolshevik, or some varient of white supramacist.
And suprise, suprise. He's a fucking nazbol, meaning these routes are supposed to be edgy shock value or blessed. I've heard evidence that said developer of the ripoff mod not only believes that INGSOC is an ideal form of government, he also denies the number of Jews that were killed in the holocaust.
Also the people that are attracted to the meme mods seems to be unable to interpret syndies as anything other than "hurr durr le ebil Stalin"
TW: This links to a transphobic post
Also one of the KX ex-devs is part of a notoriously transphobic Communist party in England that likes to compete with the likes of JK Rowling to see who can cancel trans people the fastest. And said transphobic party seems to have been infiltrated by neo-fascists and literal nazbols if the below incident is any indication.
So Xorn said KRDX was being "funny" or excessively edgy and they got hate mail from the KRDX devs. They're working on their own British civil war mod. The dev that belongs to the transphobic communist organization decided to rip off Xorn's civil war mod.....and made a shitton of breakaways in the ripoff fascist, national bolshevik, or some varient of white supramacist.
And suprise, suprise. He's a fucking nazbol, meaning these routes are supposed to be edgy shock value or blessed. I've heard evidence that said developer of the ripoff mod not only believes that INGSOC is an ideal form of government, he also denies the number of Jews that were killed in the holocaust.
Also the people that are attracted to the meme mods seems to be unable to interpret syndies as anything other than "hurr durr le ebil Stalin"
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Then the wording is what threw me off, 'cause it sounded to me like you meant the whole rework is trash rather than just the AH scenario in particular...
For somesthing like this is the "photos of the Kaiserreich" thread.
I'm going to assume you don't actually mean that. The China rework is something myself and others put our free time into for over three years.
I'd encourage you to check out our timeline and our writeup of events from the Northern Expedition to 1936:
China Timeline
Northern Expedition
If you really want me to go through, bit by bit, and explain why things are the way they are, I can do so. Is the situation plausible to the utmost? No, but I think it's about as plausible as we can be while keeping KR staples like Qing, which was our stated goal.
Shanxi isn't really the best tag to play to get an idea of the scenario either, honestly, since it went through about four developers before limping into the final release thanks to a hasty intervention. We intend to rework it pretty thoroughly in the future.
Your province boundary complaints are somewhat legitimate, but we had to make accommodations to adapt the DH map and maintain balance. Most of the borders were actually set up by a former member of our team from China.
The Chinese community has actually been really supportive from the get-go. The original outline for the scenario was put together by a pair of Chinese, and we've had two Chinese coders directly involved in the rework. The team that translates KR into Simplified Chinese also provided us with regular advice and translations of sources we couldn't otherwise access. There are definitely a few who don't like the direction we've taken things, but they tend to be Han chauvinists who think China should be stronger, or that the various regionalist movements we have shouldn't exist.
If you can read Chinese I'd suggest checking out our presence on Zhihu:
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/Kaiserreich
That's the position put forward by the official KMT and CCP histories, which make sense when you consider that both hated him, but if you read more closely the situation is more complicated. Our developer for Liangguang went out of his way to read Chen's autobiography, so I'd like to think we gave a pretty balanced look at him when pairing that with less flattering documents.
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It's not a good sign when you ignore objective historical facts but to be fair it's clear that a lot of effort was put into this.
So I read it, and it's actually very impressive how much work was put in, and how accurate the description of the events that parallel OTL are, but there are some issues. It's implausible that Sternberg could wrest Inner Mongolia even from a retreating Guominjun, as even if they were severely defeated, they would still have probably around 50k troops to his small army which would be unlikely to number more than 10k. It's also hard to see how the KMT could have gotten as far as they did here with no Russian support. Chen Jiongming would probably have been able to defeat them on his own. I do not think a German military intervention was necessary to bring down the KMT here. A great example of what the KMT was capable of without foreign support can be found in their First Northern Expedition, where they were unable to take any of their objectives, were halted around 100 km from their starting point, and were unable to suppress Chen Jiongming without assistance from Yunnan. French advisors and some Bolshevik exiles would simply not be sufficient. The KMT OTL was unable to break out of this without Russian help because most of their money was used trying to bribe their warlord allies from attacking them.
There is no reason why the KMT being defeated would lead to the Sichuan Unification Conference actually amounting to anything more than it did OTL. I also don't see why Chen Jiongming would want to "restore" Lu Rongting, who was finished as a political force. He might have been able to defeat the New Guangxi Clique, but if he did, he would probably just annex Guangxi, rather than restoring an old enemy to power there who had nothing to offer or threaten him with.
The biggest issue I have is that American mediation would probably not lead to a ceasefire on all fronts across China, and even if it did, it would not last long. Sun Chuanfang's provinces would reject rule by a Qing government in the north. Also, Zhang Zongchang joining Yiguandao, and actually letting them take over parts of his administration in Shandong, is unrealistic. He might join them as a hollow gesture, but I doubt that. But in general, China remaining united peacefully for 7 years is absurd. There are many large factions that have no reason to trust each other, and their territories are not secure either, especially Shanxi. OTL, a united China that quite closely resembled this one lasted for about 8 months before the first major conflict started. It would be impossible for Wu Peifu to balance out all of his allies successfully for such a prolonged period of time. To be fair, Wu might want to limit his interference in his allies territories, which Chiang Kai-shek did not do, but this would not solve the underlying problem, that these factions are not dependent on the Qing government for anything, and war would start again soon.
Personally I don't think that your portrayal of Chen is bad, I don't know much about his ideology, I've only studied what he was actually doing in Fujian in the late 1920s when he occupied the Zhangzhou region. His activities there suggest that he was a genuinely capable administrator and was able to restore prosperity to the area in spite of being a warlord. Note that I am not saying that all warlords did not care about their peoples, but that the fact that they were running local military regimes forced them to devote most of their attention to extracting money from their territory to maintain their armies. The KMT and CCP, which began their administrative histories as warlord regimes, also did so.