Kolchak's Warlord Atlas

I am curious, what on earth was Kumul?

 

These guys, apparently.

 

Weird to think a remnant of the Chagtai khaganate survived into the 20th century.

 

Is the Soviet overthrow of the Mongolian khan why the borders between Russia and Mongolia vanish in the last map or is that an oversight?

 

I noticed that I forgot to remove those borders. The colour had been removed because different factions of Russians remained in effective control from Mongolia from 1921. So I decided that the formal removal of the Bogd Kaan, formally still a Chinese local leader, would be appropriate to show Mongolia's final separation from China. Although it was mainly an excuse to remove the borders

 

Okay, wait, I noticed that I also show other non-Chinese political borders, so I guess I'll add them back in. Stupid me.

 

Yeah, glad you keep those borders. It gives context.

 

14 MINUTES OF AWESOMENESS

Yeees it's finally done!

 

VERY awesome!

 

Who exactly controlled Aksai Chin during this period? It's normally shown as part of India on maps of the British Raj, but these maps seem to show it as part of Tibet or Xinjiang.

 

Good question.

From the wiki article on it:

The bit about the British abandoning the Johnson Line in favour of a line along the Karakoram range further south would seem to suggest actual control along a line running as a combination of the Macartney-MacDonald line and the Foreign Office line of 1873 running to Lanak La in the second map in the quote above (as can be seen from the second map in this article):

 

I would suggest that the following two maps I did modifying the second one from the wikipedia quote in my previous post would be the most reasonably accurate reading of the situation:

(Pink is British/Indian control, Light Green is Chinese control, Grey is no-man's land):

1899-1927:



1927-1945:

 

I showed Aksai Chin as part of Tibet on my maps since from my research it was not under the control of either China or the Raj, and comparable areas were inhabited primarily by tribesmen or isolated communities with affiliations to the Tibetan Army. Omniatlas, which draws from a lot of sources, also shows it as part of Tibet, although you'll notice that my work contrasts with Omniatlas frequently. @Chris S's research is convincing, though.

 

So I've done some more work on that HoI4 mod. There are still some cliques I could add in that existed historically (Song Zheyuan's faction, splitting the Ma Clique, etc.), but I feel that this layout is pretty sufficient for now.



Currently I'm coding a focus tree for Shanxi, and I have a draft for a Kwangtung focus tree. Eventually I plan to add focus trees and unique events and decisions for almost every nation, and possibly overhaul Nationalist or Communist China. That's just an eventually at this point though.

 

There are also a few issues. The main one is that, with the way HoI4 currently works, I don't think there is a way to have a nation be a puppet of two different nations depending on which start date it is. There's probably an obvious fix I'm missing here, but that's what you get for being a self-taught modder. So for now I can't accurately represent Mengkiang's convoluted history of allegiances, so I'll have to compensate with decision trees for Shanxi and Japan.

I also can't get the Warlord Focus Tree from WtT to work for the new tags, which is frustrating because I have no idea why this happens and said focus tree is a useful placeholder for those warlords until I can make them unique focus trees. So for now they're stuck with the generic focus tree. Even worse the OOBs for Hsikang and Tunganistan just won't load, which is inconvenient, although in Tunganistan's case they begin 1936 in a war with Sinkiang the AI will lose 99% of the time even with a division. Although when I get to that I'll probably make that war focus-triggered since that's the only way to get it to occur in the proper timeframe.

I also find it kind of weird how some of the Centre's generals are actually commanders who served in warlord militaries. So for this mod I'm "repatriating" them to their proper tags.

Another thing about HoI4 is that it seems to suggest that the Centre had virtually no control over the warlords in 1936, which is inaccurate and can lead to some serious memes (like foreign powers boosting XSM's communism or random warlords joining the Axis). So in my mod the small apparent size of Nationalist China is an illusion: their collection of puppets is actually larger than the territory of vanilla Nationalist China.

I also find it a shame that Waking the Tiger turned out to be such a disappointment. It arguably adds just as much content to Germany, and for a DLC that's all about East Asia that's a shame. That's pretty unfortunate because WtT actually introduced some really innovative mechanics. The political power struggle mechanic was really interesting and actually has some basis in reality (Li Zongren's overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 can be interpreted as the Guangxi Clique winning its power struggle against Nationalist China).

What I'm trying to do here is build off WtT to make a truly realistic and interesting HoI4 China. Essentially, my mod is what Waking the Tiger should have been, and the Eight Years' War of Resistance mod is basically Road to '56 but for China.

Footnote: I'm not sure if I want to turn this into a dev diary for a HoI4 mod, but here we are I suppose. I'll still keep making Atlas maps, regardless.