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Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread

Horologer said:
Speaking of the Mongols, I think alt-history has a tendency to assume that the Mongol Empire was inevitable. Crusader Kings 3 is a good example of this: by default, Temüjin always spawns and then gets a whole boatload of bonuses that essentially railroad the Mongol Empire into happening. In other timelines, even if Temüjin gets butterflied away or never becomes Genghis Khan, there's still some nomad leader that conquers enormous swathes of Eurasia.

But it seems to me the Mongol Empire was actually incredibly unlikely. First, Temüjin was a peerless general and leader, and I don't think anyone else could have unified and reorganized the Mongols like he did. Second, political circumstances around Genghis kicked up a perfect storm that enabled several rapid wars of conquest. The Khwarezmian leadership in particular bungled their response to him so badly they might as well have rolled out a red carpet for him. And third, his family managed several successions in a row without a serious civil war, which was itself an incredible feat.

My hot take is that if you change or remove any of those factors, the Mongol Empire is never born.
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A large part of why the game has the Mongols always spawn is to provide a late game challenge. It provides you something you have to spend the game preparing for. Ok, for MOST characters on the eastern edge of the map, it is something you spend your time preping for. There is actually a big expection. You can actually force Genghis Khan to spawn as an Adult Tengri Mongolian Culture Tribal Emperor with at least 100 realm size, a capital in the Steppe, and is Exalted Among Men.

And by force, what I actually mean is said character declares themselves Genghis Khan. A far more terrifying Genghis Khan than in OTL because this can be easily done within a century of game start and will likely stop because they conquer the entire map.

CK2 has as requirements for becomin Genghis Khan being an emperor, mongol culture, and having either 35 nomadic counties in the realm with horse lords on or 35 counties as a tribal without. This is actually harder than it appears. Ck2 has all of one lord in most pre-OTL mongol invasion of Mongolian culture on the map. He is almost always surrounded by stronger enemies. As a tribal without horse lords, you basically have no chance of being an emperor if you dont conquer basically the needed number of counties anyways. As a Nomad? All independent Nomads are automatically Emperors...but instead you have to deal with wars on the steppe being a very Win or Die situation. If you are lucky, you might be merely forced to bend the knee to a neighbor. More likely its a restart. Surviving long enough to have a chance at 35 nomadic counties is not easy.
 
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Mongols and their predecessors the Turks, Magyars and Huns would struggle heavily against Rifled-Muskets

Robert E Lee would have a field day massacring Genghis's Horde
 
Horologer said:
But it seems to me the Mongol Empire was actually incredibly unlikely. First, Temüjin was a peerless general and leader, and I don't think anyone else could have unified and reorganized the Mongols like he did. Second, political circumstances around Genghis kicked up a perfect storm that enabled several rapid wars of conquest. The Khwarezmian leadership in particular bungled their response to him so badly they might as well have rolled out a red carpet for him. And third, his family managed several successions in a row without a serious civil war, which was itself an incredible feat.

My hot take is that if you change or remove any of those factors, the Mongol Empire is never born.
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I'm willing to disagree to an extent, you could probably get an organized Mongol polity no matter but the exact size of this Mongol state would vary It is possible they could have taken the Xi Xia and Jurchen Jin. But I wouldn't factor in the Khwarezmians as being some key part of the Mongol claims of empire, they we more a a gateway that allowed to establish one of the more volatile Mongol realms which might be saying something. But sort of like Oda Nobunaga they did rise in a vacuum and get lucky.
 
Shadow007 said:
Mongols and their predecessors the Turks, Magyars and Huns would struggle heavily against Rifled-Muskets

Robert E Lee would have a field day massacring Genghis's Horde
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What do rifled-muskets and Robert E Lee have to do with the rise of the Mongol Empire 500 years prior?
 
Axslashel said:
I have serious doubts about that honestly. Nothing stops cavalry to carry gunpowder weapons of their own and they would still have better mobility.
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Urban based cavalry. Nomadic cavalry ain't making gunpowder and its weapons

Napoleon's mostly infantry army decimated the Mamluke Egyptian cavalry despite being outnumbered 4 to 1
 
CastIron said:
I admit it is funny imagining a bunch of yurts outside Rome and the new Holy Roman Emperor being descended from a people who had literally no contact with Rome. Not Holy, most definitely not Roman, and given how the Golden Horde governed the Rus' OTL, still not an empire, because the Mongols would prefer the steppe and probably the Hungarian Plain, leaving the rest of the HRE with a lot more autonomy outside of sending tribute and paying homage.
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I'd imagine it would likely have quite a knock-on effect on European politics given that the HRE was actually an extremely powerful state in the early and high Middle Ages as long as there was a strong emperor and now all the regular politics would be upended.

As I recall Fredrick the Second was Holy Roman Emperor, last emperor before the great interregnum though he never really personally responded to the Mongol invasion of Europe because he was in a mist of a fight with the Pope at the time.

Shadow007 said:
Nomadic hordes wouldn't exist had Gunpowder weapons exist back then

Gunpowder warfare made Infantry superior over cavalry
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It was the Mongols that introduced Gunpowder to the west in the first place, and it had existed in China for centuries before that happened.

It's existence and introduction didn't made things like light, heavy cavalry and horse archers obsolete just as it didn't make armor, castles and fortified cities obsolete at least not without centuries more of advancements.
 
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It's true that as gunpowder weaponry improves cavalry forces eventually start to shift in role and eventually phase out in the 20th century, but the introduction of guns didn't mean the immediate end of cavalry's relevance, nor that of Eurasian steppe peoples as a military force. Napoleonic France and both sides of the American Civil War did use cavalry to great effect, to use the examples provided.
 
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Shadow007 said:
Nomadic hordes wouldn't exist had Gunpowder weapons exist back then

Gunpowder warfare made Infantry superior over cavalry
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Yes and no, technology is not a magical cure-all. Gunpower weapons were slow, prone to exploding, and required resources to maintain them, and depending on the period weren't that effective outside shock and couldn't be fired while wet. The technology one has is only as good as the circumstances one can use it in.
 
Mass production of muskets and logistical support for musket armies are what lead to the ultimate death of the steppe empires in real life in the late 17th century. I do think Mongolia's unification was far from inevitable, and it is questionable whether the conquest of the Jin would have been possible without uniting Mongolia first.
 
As I recall it was the 18th century when the last nomadic empires fell, and they seemed to have come from as much from costly conflicts over succession as from costly conflicts with Russia and Qing China.
 
Idea:

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexes most of Northern Mexico down to Tampico and San Luis Potosi. Most of Mexico's heavy mining and textile industries is lost and the remaining land under Mexico City is hamstrung economcally.

The southern US states begin implementing industrial slavery in the new territories for the mines. The plantation aristocracy gains new rivals in the form of a bourgeoisie industrialist class. Meanwhile, the abolitionist movement is far weaker since Southern slaves are being redirected towards the new lands. Lincoln never becomes president, and the Civil War is held off until the 1880s.

Even with the South's new industrial centers, could the CSA force the USA into a negotiated peace?
 
Southern states wouldn't be able to afford to secede as federal military help is needed to fight against banditry and indigenous uprisings. The industrial class in the South that uses slaves would not see the planters as rivals, but allies against the North that threatens the economic basis of both sides.
 
Eeeeh, the 19th century American military was an engineering and surveying school with a small officers corps attached. The federal arsenals and extended posts and forts would be just as easily stormed as the Fire-Eater militias stormed them OTL, and any long term military operations would be dependent on the cooperation and support of state militias and like one-year volunteer regiments providing most of the manpower.

The problem isn't the viability of secession politics getting off the ground in a 1880s super-South, the problem is that here the All-Mexico movement to just take everything that can be taken has to not only duck and weave through a House that the mid-terms gave a bare majority to hostile and often war skeptical Whigs and even a sizable portion of dissenting Democrats, all of whom fear too many brown people in their white man's republic and some also genuinely taking a principled stand out of fear of the federal government's power with imperialistic military rule over occupied Mexico. But, in addition to all that, the fact remains that the central apparatus of the Mexican state was self-destructing in the failure to prosecute the war and like six different prospective regimes rose and fell during it and during the negotiations, as no one wanted to submit to the Yankee invaders. The more these negotiations tighten up around a serious plan to eat that much more of Mexico all the way into the northern part of its heartland, the more and more the still very much ongoing unconventional guerilla war would step up, and the less and less the American dilomats will be able to keep a hold of anyone with a half-credible claim to the authority to sign the dotted line and get the treaty 'officially' approved.
 
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Mazeka said:
Idea:

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexes most of Northern Mexico down to Tampico and San Luis Potosi. Most of Mexico's heavy mining and textile industries is lost and the remaining land under Mexico City is hamstrung economcally.

The southern US states begin implementing industrial slavery in the new territories for the mines. The plantation aristocracy gains new rivals in the form of a bourgeoisie industrialist class. Meanwhile, the abolitionist movement is far weaker since Southern slaves are being redirected towards the new lands. Lincoln never becomes president, and the Civil War is held off until the 1880s.

Even with the South's new industrial centers, could the CSA force the USA into a negotiated peace?
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Slaves in factories? That seems like a financial and maybe literally suicidal idea

Paying workers a wage is much better than having them revolt and accidentally burn down said factory and a quarter of the entire city, killing tens of thousands and displacing many times that number

Rebuilding a factory and entire city blocks is beyond expensive. Also paying compensation to all the familes of people killed.
 
Hmm, generally from what I've could find on southern industry from before the civil war, which was mostly in regard to Virginia the only industrial state in the south, slave labor tended to be more dominate in rural industries especially the more dangerous industries like Turpentine production, Lumber, Cypress Singles production and such.

Nonrural industries tended to have more whites quite often immigrants as many locally born Virginians tended to have a distain for nonrural work while other immigrants were recruited for specialty skills like machinery and iron production not that it prevented them from being looked down for not being of the 'proper stock'.

Free blacks were also apparently heavily involved in nonrural southern Industry as the cities tended to be where free black populations tended to live though pretty much almost all of the free black population in the south were found in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and to a far lesser extent Louisiana as far as I can tell.
 
Louisiana pretty much had an entirely separate legal system of slavery and perception of race from their neighbours at the time, as it kept a lot of French colonial ways of thinking about those institutions. Slaves working in factories and mines tended to die at much faster rates than those that worked fields. They also tended to be owned by companies, which was on average an even more abusive relationship than being the chattel of an individual.
 
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As I recall southerners tended to not like the idea of free blacks interacting with slaves in the first place, its why they tended to be encouraged to move away from the countryside and in the deep south state free blacks tended to be targeted by laws to drive them out completely from what I gathered.

Its statically notable that apparently in 1860 just before the civil war the free black population numbered 83,942 in Maryland, 58,042 in Virginia, 30,463 in North Carolina, and 18,647 in Louisiana.

Meanwhile deep south states tended to have far smaller free black populations, Arkansas only had 144 free blacks, in Mississippi, the number was around 773 while in Florida there was 932 but free blacks in that state to both go before a probate judge and have a white guardian.
 
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How about instead, the South keeps the black people in the fields and puts the poor Latinos to work in the factories. Would that work?
 
Mazeka said:
How about instead, the South keeps the black people in the fields and puts the poor Latinos to work in the factories. Would that work?
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I don't think so. It would be incredibly politically volatile, even by the dismal standards of the antebellum US, and I don't think there's any way the US survives intact to the 1880s.

Northern industrial labor would see this as an attempt to supplant them, and that would push a whole bunch of people over the fence on the "slave issue". So the North would be probably be fully abolitionist. Which is good, morally speaking, but that's just going to push the Civil War forward, not back.

But it's really the South that's the powder keg here. The problem, which even some Southern leaders recognized at the time, was that the South didn't really have any way to integrate the people of northern Mexico into their system. If the ex-Mexicans were given any meaningful political autonomy, they wouldn't be slave states. They probably wouldn't be states at all; they'll just leave the Union and oops now the secession question gets popped while the shoe's on the other foot. If the ex-Mexicans don't get any meaningful political autonomy, you just get a rebellion. So again, early civil war, even if it's not the Civil War.
 
PT12 said:
Actually has anyone ever tried to do a timeline in the vein of The Great Martian War and War of the World's Goliath on this site?
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Ribbon881 got about one chapter before the TL died. Plus, there's some threads in Fiction Discussions about different scenarios.

As for sequels to the original, Coiler once recommended Scott Washburn's books on his blog.
 
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