Anyhow, let's develop a theory of how this all could go down. It is a theory of Japanese Victory, I am curious whether there can be a Theory of Mede Victory.
First Contact Phase
Right after our ISOT event, both sides need to notice it happened and get in touch with each other. We can expect the noticing to happen within a few days at most on both sides, since presumably there exists regular contact.
The main obstacle we care about is establishing diplomatic contact, and getting intel on each other. This might take a few months - long enough for linguistically gifted people to learn each other's language to at least learn it to
B1 proficiency, ideally B2. Magic might speed this up, but at this point contact would be neutral-wary at worst, so it'd benefit both sides.
We can allow both sides to learn about their general military capabilities and systems of government here, though I would add caveats to that. The Japanese are more likely to treat their military capabilities as secret, while the Mede are more likely to treat theirs as a deterrent, due to their cultural attitudes. The Japanese are also better equipped to understand the system of government the Mede have (they are familiar with it from history), while the Mede have no frame of reference for the Japanese system of government and are likely to misunderstand it (especially when told through initially rough translations).
We can throw in some TES Adventurers travelling Japan here, learning specific information for later purposes if you really want to.
The information we care about the most for stage 2 is whether the Japanese learn where the Imperial City is, which should be trivial - it isn't secret information, it's on all maps, it's necessary just for sending ambassadors.
Gunboat Diplomacy
At this point the Japanese are likely clamouring for a replacement of the resources they lost access to from their territories and the world market, Cyrodiil is their only way of doing so. They also know they have utterly overwhelming military might that they can bring to bear. Culturally, this suggests doing the very thing that was done to them not that long prior:
they'll send gunboats up the Mede River, straight to the Imperial City, and compel the Mede Empire to surrender by force.
Now
this post by
@Night explores that quite nicely already. Personally, I'd say just from Oblivion screenshots the Mede looks to have enough drought to accompany
Kongo, though at the end of the day it doesn't matter, it'll fit some big, armored boat with guns, the exact size doesn't matter since it'll be unprecedent to the Mede Empire at any rate.
Here, the Japanese deliver an ultimatum to the Mede Empire: become a subject Empire, or the Emperor will be destroyed.
The firepower of the battleships can be handily demonstrated by just blowing up some random stuff in the landscape, or perhaps more aggressively by sinking some TES ships anchored nearby.
Our scenario now splits into three roads:
- the Mede Emperor accepts. He gets to stay on the throne, but from here on out he is a puppet, with the Japanese having the run of his Empire to develop and exploit resources. For the purpose of this VS, they have won, and are unlikely to face significant resistance. They can integrate magical resources into their own military and society, and are likely to prioritize doing so. This is a realistic possibility since not doing so would be clearly suicide for the Mede Emperor (any fleet of Japanese Battleships could level the Imperial City).
- the Mede Emperor refuses. His palace gets shelled immediately, and this is followed by a ground assault of IJN ground troops. Most likely, he and all his heirs die, and the throne stands empty for the taking. The Japanese do so, and co-opt the existing administrative apparatus of the Mede Empire. If the Emperor or any heirs manage to flee somehow, they lack legitimacy due to their clear military loss and the Japanese trivially beating any Legion they manage to muster, and they can still co-opt the Mede Empire. To TES minds, this is just a coup of an Empire that does not have a long history of legitimacy, and it is unlikely to face major resistance by the populace. Notably, the Japanese have no reason to resort to major atrocities that'd spur such on.
- the Mede Emperor refuses and escapes and the Japanese are unabel to co-opt the Mede Empires administrative apparatus. We'd need a reason why that is, but let's assume it for the sake of argument here. In this case, the administrative apparatus that holds the Mede Empire together collapses, and the Japanese can still go where they will to exploit resources. For the purpose of this VS, they have defeated the Mede Empire - we are now dealing with the long-term troubles they may face, but they have won the VS as stated.
For the last however many pages, we've essentially been debating the third bullet point.
Guerillia Resistance by Individual Mages? only relevant if the Mede Empire is already fallen and Japan has won the VS.
Disease? only relevant if the Mede Empire is already fallen and Japan has won the VS. (and is for some reason unable to compell the aid of the apparently-common magical healers by force, even if we take the disease burden for granted).
Intervention by Third Polities? only relevant if the Mede Empire is already fallen and Japan has won the VS, and those third polities would hardly be interested in re-instating the Mede Empire even if they beat Japan.
And so on.
As of right now I see nothing that
- allows the Mede Empire to resist the above Gunboat Strategy
- allows the Mede Empire to pre-empt the above Gunboat Strategy (with a first strike that takes Japan out of the game)
Oblivion makes it pretty clear that an Emperor, when threatened in his own palace, can not just teleport to a third location to safety, so teleportation is out.
No magic that TES can bring to bear has the range to contest a Battleship, or even machine guns. You can have 100 flying Mages with mind control spells, they'll just get shot out of the sky. You can have those same Mages teleport onto the battleship, they'll get shot by armed sailors sooner or later. (Also no you can't actually have either because that's not a thing in the Mede Empire).
And obviously Disease won't matter at this point, and nor will Third Polities.
I suppose literal divine intervention might work, but at that point you're literally doing a Deus Ex Machina.
So, people arguing in favor of TES - what do you propose here?
Anything unrealistic or unlikely about this? How can the Mede Empire resist here? Got something to add?
Edit: what I'd actually be curious about is a firm size estimate for the Niben. The upper ends I could find are utterly ludicrous (basically putting it at an inland sea that you could never, ever build a bridge across), the reasonable size estimates still put it at a major river like the Amazon, Yangtze, or Nile.
And all three of the latter are deep enough to accompany
Kongo and her three sister ships (all of which were completed at this time), which can lob sixteen 670 kilogram high explosive shells per minute at a range of 35 kilometers, in addition to a substantial secondary battery, and come with anti-air guns even as-built (firing 6 kg HE airburst shells which are gonna rip any infantry- or small-boat based approach to pieces).
If there's substantial evidence that the Niben is clearly to small for that, it'd be interesting to see, I can't find any (other than possibly taking the sizes in Oblivion literally, but in that case the Imperial City is also tiny etc.)
I'm going to ignore for a moment that the scenario you posit with regards to initial first contact and exchange of information seems to automatically assume that the Empire will be idiots while Japan won't.
Ok, the Kongo sails up the river to do some gunboat diplomacy. The emperor learns of this a bit before the vessel actually nears, because it's huge and no shit, the imperial sentries anywhere along the River will see the giant warship and send warning. The Emperor shits bricks because what looks suspiciously like some sort of giant dwemer vessel is sailing toward his capital.
He gathers together his most elite forces, his mages, calls up whatever powerful adventurers and mercenaries happen to be in the city at the time. He dusts off his most impressive enchanted equipment. Then the vessel arrives, demands he swear fealty to some upstart empire from across the sea, and to show they mean business, lobs explosive shells into the city. The emperor, not being an idiot, sends them a message that he will swear fealty, to stall for time, and possibly invites part of the Japanese officer cadre there to hammer out a deal. Internally the Emperor is alternating between fuming and cursing and rubbing his hands together while eyeing the Kongo with a sly look on his face.
That night, the best forces the imperial city has available launch a surprise boarding operation under cover of darkness. water-breathing argonians exit the water and begin climbing the hull. Short ranged teleportation takes mages onto the deck, who proceed to turn invisible or summon atronachs. Pockets of Japanese soldiers find themselves unable to fire upon the boarders thanks to illusion magic. Spellblades dash around the deck, their skin hardened to steel with alteration or potions, darting into melee where their speed, armor, and training can be used to full effect and the advantages of Japanese gunfire are negated. Members of the blades with full enchanted gear and potions galore. As these forces clear the deck and the gun batteries, other boarding teams clamber aboard, fighting moves into the cramped confines bellow deck. The Japanese forces fight fiercely, but without their usual range advantage and facing foes with magic and enchanted equipment, they die all the same.
The Kongo is now in the hand's of the empire, and the emperor immediately sets his best people to work on both figuring out how it works, with mages using illusion magic to force captured Japanese soldiers to explain how the guns are fired and the ship is piloted. If there are any engineers or people with technical expertise among those captured, then that process speeds up further, and the empire starts the process of creating its own bolt action rifles and big naval guns.
At this point, the Emperor, realizing that Japan has more boats were this came from, has two options. The first, is he basically tries diplomacy again, this time from a less disadvantaged position. This probably won't work, because he just stole the Kongo, but if it does (or a deal is somehow worked out in which the Emperor returns the Kongo to Japan in exchange for something), a peace treaty is signed, in which the emperor basically tells Japan "hey, I can give you partially discounted prices on the raw material my empire produces which you happen to need, you can go do colonialism to some other polity, and my empire can trade you health potions, enchanted gear, etc."
The second option is war breaking out, this time with the Empire much more aware of Japan's capabilities, and beginning the process of developing countermeasures and figuring out how to make their own guns. They may not have mass production, so they can't make guns for their entire legions, but ordinary legionaries armed with bolt-action rifles with bayonets are actually worth something in a more conventional battle against the Japanese, so every bit helps. The Kongo itself is left at anchor by the imperial city, ready to bring its guns to bear on any Japanese ships sailing up river.
Meanwhile, the emperor starts proactively sending reconnaissance into Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Given that for the initial scenario you suggested, there must have already been attempts at learning the other's language, and the Empire will likely have at least a few captured Japanese soldiers from the Kongo, these scouts are able to gather information and, if they are very lucky, observe the fact that Korea and Taiwan are not in fact particularly happy about their current situation under the Japanese, and themselves are culturally distinct from their Japanese rulers. If they learn of this, Empire spy's attempt to reach out to resistance groups in Taiwan and Korea to gauge the situation further, and lay the groundwork for potential cooperation with or otherwise aiding these resistance groups.
Even as this is happening, Japan's economic position is precarious, and famine is potentially imminent. Epidemics of native diseases begin to break out in Japan, and cause large amounts of death. Saboteurs are poised to cause yet more damage. Sure, we'll even say they can't just kill the imperial family and all the top military officials, but they can set fires in mostly-wooden cities, map out the Japanese coast and its defenses, cause havoc in factories or sabotage the products of said factory, and sabotage communications infrastructure or rail lines.
The Empire still cannot win outright through warfare within the time frame specified by this scenario, I think. They probably couldn't win outright through conventional warfare even if they had another decade or two. But they can ensure the Japanese don't win outright either. Japan may make gains later on, even large ones, because they have a lot of soldiers with machine guns and artillery, but without the element of surprise their OCP nature gave them, and with the empire wise to their capabilities and developing methods of countering them and possibly using some of these new capabilities themselves, they won't necessarily be able take out the empire entirely. The empire is now on war footing, dusting off any weird McGuffins they might have had laying around that could help them, recruiting more mages, probably bringing in the mages guild to help, and using the threat of Japanese invasion to secure alliances with smaller neighbors like the city-states and kingdoms in Hammerfell.
And then there are the other big variables. If Arteum and the Psijic stronghold was outside of reality when Japan replaced Summerset, there is a good chance a bunch of very confused, very worried Psijic mages will freak out because their homeland is gone, and start trying to figure out how to reverse this overlay. If they do figure this out, oops, scenario over. If they can't, and see Japan as the ones to blame (or see Japan as an extraplanar threat that needs to be dealt, especially in conjunction with the fact that the Crystalline Tower will have just vanished, then it's not crazy to think that some of them might show up at the imperial city to offer their aid against Japan. And whatever people want to claim about the capabilities of the average mage in TES, the Psijic are not anywhere close to average.
They are known for wielding magic on a massive scale (including large-scale weather manipulation and mass scale long range telepathy, and various forms of remote viewing, scrying, clairvoyance, divination/future sight, and astral projection, moving their island around like it's a boat, making it vanish from Nirn,
Time Magic,
Mind Magic,
Tonal Architecture,
Transportation Magic (i.e. portals), and more. They are noted to use AOE time stop effects to halt enemies in their tracks, or just straight up throw around insta-kill effects. Most of the stuff people in this thread complained that mages couldn't do, these guys can. And unlike the Empire, you can't really claim these guys would have lost the knowledge of the magic they had in the second era, because not only do they have members who are themselves millenia old, they also are one of the greatest repositories of knowledge in Nirn, and have been since their inception. They are an old organization, one of the oldest in Tamriel. They were already an established order in 1E 20. There is no solid reason to believe their magic knowledge has diminished.
Even if they don't support the war against Japan, one
of the Psijic's favored roles is as diplomats, negotiators, and keepers/enforcers of peace. They may very well just decide that the current situation won't lead anywhere good, and force both sides to make peace and stop fighting (which they can probably do). Which again, basically ends the scenario because now neither side can really win.
As I have said before, the other variable is the Sload and Sea Sload. The Sea Sload are more or less beyond japan's reach, being that they live at the bottom of the ocean, have lots of mind magic, necromancy, shadow magic, alchemy, giant sea monsters, and various artificial slave races which worship them as gods, such as the
Yaghra. They are extremely reclusive, and their underwater kingdom of Ul'vor Kus is close to Summerset. While their society is not really unified for them to engage in total war, at least a few cabals and covens of them will likely see the replacement of Summerset by Japan as an opportunity to do some coastal raiding.
The Sload of the Coral Kingdom of Thras, I have already discussed, but suffice to say, if they do decide to get involved, this involvement will almost certainly involve engineered magical plagues, maybe attacking undefended Japanese villages on the coastline for slaves and corpses. They could do some nasty damage to even a Japanese naval vessel if they put their minds to it, but frankly, direct conflict with someone who can fight back is not exactly their go-to strategy, they are cautious by nature, and they have little reason to engage the Japanese navy unless forced to, when they can just use their plagues to weaken the enemy to the point that they can't really fight back. For them, their ideal scenario is one in which both the Empire and Japan weaken each other fighting for a long while, enough that the Empire is left unable to oppose the Sload, and Japan, Taiwan, and Korea are all ripe for the taking, with entire cities of corpses and civilians to enslave or reanimate and take back to Thras. In this scenario, neither Japan or the Empire really win, and everyone but the Sload lose.
