The Chinese Civil War had been a side-plot I'd been toying with on and off since the quest's conception. It was always going to happen in some for or another. Exactly what would set it off, what the alignment of the world powers would be, and a lot of other details were fairly vague. I had a cluster of ideas for each one, but... Anyway, I rolled some dice to determine exactly how the Eunuchs were going to react to Tianzi's little act of rebellion. It wasn't good. Effectively house arrest until they could find her a husband with Xingke being on their hit list if he showed up again. Lihua was told that they'd let him live in exile as long as she behaved herself, but that he was a corruptive influence and she certainly wasn't ever going to see him again. I also rolled for LIhua's reaction. It was also very 'not good.' Effectively demanding she throw down some kind of gauntlet.
So, I dusted off the Civil War plans and got excited about it. Because there were some fun things in there.
A real slow boil type conflict with probing shadow strikes, political intrigue, and the occasional big battle. Xingke was out of the picture, too, which meant Lihua could stand on her own and get her own chracterization as a leader. Britannia, Japan, the EU... they'd all send 'official advisors' to one party or another after a year or two. Lelouch could even serve as a middle man for some of the funding and weapons if Britannia sided with Tianzi. Or he could further develop a relationship with Weber if he wanted to sneakily support Tianzi against Britannian wishes by funneling EU weapons and supplies. It was going to be so cool. So many ideas. Hell, there was even this dangling plotline about Nunnally getting loaned out at one point and Suzaku showing up and it would be Code Geass with the epic mech battles and crazy jump-spinning robots. I was hype.
I was. I truly was.
The poor naive fool that I used to be
was hype, before my hopes were dashed.
Then I got out the dice and I started rolling. The High Eunuch's rolled an 08 and Tianzi rolled a Nat. 100.
This set the stage for how things were going to be from that point out.
To follow up from my Part 1 Rant on Turn 10, I rolled a
huge amount of dice to determine how this war would go. There were
monthly matchups between Eunuch and Imperial forces on Martial and Intrigue fronts. I had this entire
system set up to determine which side was getting close to winning by subtracting the loser's monthly rolls (with modifiers) from the winner's monthly rolls (with modifiers). These were 'Victory Points.' To effectively win the war, one side needed to achieve 1000 Victory Points. I wanted this war to
last, at least several turns. I wanted a complicated political narrative spelled out in bloody war that would shake the balance of power the world over. The first six months would be a no-go zone for foreign powers, both the EU and Britannia taking a 'watch and wait' stance. After that point, Tianzi and the Eunuchs would get a Diplomacy roll each month to try to coax some bonuses. I had another formula for where those bonuses would come from, too.
It was kind of beautiful in its simplicity.
Roll Dice -> Check Result On Table -> Add Narrative Notes = Complicated War Narrative
Lihua's First 6 Martial Rolls (w/mods): 116, 92, 75, 38, 60, 77
Eunuch's First 6 Martial Rolls (w/mods): 23, 16, 13, 24, 34, 45
Lihua's First 6 Intrigue Rolls (w/mods): 115, 104, 84, 97, 103, 23
Eunuch's First 6 Intrigue Rolls (w/mods): 60, 85, 81, 89, 83, 76
...and, see, the
really crazy thing is that the High Eunuchs had the edge on Intrigue Modifiers! Like, sure, Lihua's Martial is at 16 and the Eunuch's is at 15, but the High Eunuch's Intrigue was 26 to LIhua's (Advisor's) 19.
I'm not going to type out each and every roll I made, but this should illustrate a great deal of the problem I had.
Out of what was probably
seventy-five rolls, the High Eunuchs came out with a sizeable advantage on
maybe a fifth of them. Maybe.
So, yes, the entire war event was
anomalous by virtue of the dice dictating that Lihua reliably wins any clash that happens. The
only rolls they were able to reliably beat Lihua on were foreign political aid and, considering their performance in the war overall, that was going to come at a very high price indeed. I know that a lot of people question exactly how circumstances contrived to give Lelouch the
perfect opportunity to interfere in geopolitics in a way which would yield him maximum rewards and, as mentioned in Part I of this rant, the whole 'artifice' of the situation bugs the living shit out of me, but...
Even if you're like me, take refuge and solace in the fact that, should Lelouch not have decided to intervene, the war would have only dragged on another six months at the rate it was going.
The only wildcard was the Japanese delegation marrying Suzaku to Lihua's cousin and it's...
questionable whether that would have worked out the way they'd wanted it to, even under ideal circumstances. But that's an entirely different rabbit hole to go down and has some Japanese political spoilers stuff.
That's the story of Turn 10 in a nutshell. There were grand plans, but they failed to take into account RNGesus deciding someone was going to
win.
en.wikipedia.org
