Catherine, Czarina of all the Africas
(Vanilla, Monarch, Sol III map)

As a child my father used to tell me that our people, the Russians, were an ancient people. But like the phrase "I come from an old family," the notion of any nation of people being older than any other people is, on the face of it, absolutely silly.

No, think about it. All people are ancient, since we are all descendents of Adam and Eve, who were certainly ancient people by any measure. Or--if you prefer--assuming we all descended from apes or monkeys or marmosets, or what have you, you can certainly say that all families, being siblings in the brotherhood of man, are equally old. Or even equally young.

To say that Russians are any older than, say, Aztecs or Zulus or Babylonians, is an absurdity. The claim rests solely on the conceit that our people dwelled first in the cradle of mankind, the grasslands of eastern Africa. But even then all our cousins, the other nations of humanity, are just as old. They just happen to be the offspring of wanderers, while we stayed home and built what my father assures me is the perfect civilization.

Papa is myopic like that.

But I'm not here to tell you about my papa (tho undoubtedly I shall during our studies mention dear Papa a bit). Instead, I'm here to educate you. I'm your tutor, young Alek, and my job is to get you ready for your world history classes this fall. Your mama says you have a sharp wit, but a niggling impatience when it comes to acquiring facts. My task is to get your spongy wit to soak up a few facts before you face the hazards of university scholarship.

So sit up, now, and pay attention. I'm going to give you a few facts. The world is large, little Alek. It is large and 70% of it is covered by water. Yes, 70%. So you see we humans are already a bit less important than we think. The world, according to geologists, is 4 billion years old, and even the oldest of families have only walked upon it, according to anthropologists, for one million years. So now you should feel even less important. Of course theologians will tell you humans have been here a mere 6000 years, and logically speaking that would make us yet even less important than what the anthropologists say.

Do you feel small and insignificant and cowering before the vastness of all creation now, Alek? Good! Then hold onto that feeling and soon you'll be ready to experience life as a university freshman.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/01_start.jpg

Now where was I? Ah, yes, cradle of humanity. Well, long after the nations of the world migrated off--mostly heading north into Eurasia and Oceana and the Americas, our ancestors started to learn tricks to make them mightier than the pumas and elephants and rhinoceri we shared the continent with.

No, lad, not just spears and flint knives. The most powerful weapon of early man was the plow. With that and the calendar to time his harvests, there was no animal that could hope to defeat humans.

Our people's first permanent settlement was in the grasslands known as the Horn of Russia. Where man settled, the wild game often fled to escape his voracious hunger and the hunger of his plentiful children. By the 4th millennium BC, the travelers and seminomadic huntsmen of our nation knew of the mountains along the Great Rift Valley and the coastal savannahs along the equatorial latitudes.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/02.jpg

It was in these last days of prehistory that our people learned the secret of creating incense from the plants of the deserts and began to value ivory and gems in commerce and the arts. We learned of lands far to the south where our excess populations could migrate and settle. Even in these despotic ages, we were gradually shaping our culture into a true civilization.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/03.jpg

The People of the South

It was in the 4th millennium that Russians first met the people of the south--the Iroquois. Where other early hominids had migrated north to the outer continents, the ancestors of the Iroquois (or "Haudenosaunee" as they called themselves) had moved south and found the excellent farmlands of the Subcongo. We greeted them and we spoke as neighbors, cousins. No ill will passed between us in this epoch. We greeted them as brothers and they met us as friends.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/04.jpg

It is said, by anthropologists who study such things, that the earliest religious practices were borrowed from the rich and symbol-laden traditions of the southerners. Perhaps it is true. But truly patriotic historians would also note that the development of bronze tools (and the refinement of bronze metalsmithing) did not emerge in the Subcongo until after contact with Russia and their advances shows the distinct influence of Russian techniques.

So we gave them metals and they gave us gods. You could say (as my father often did) it was a fair trade.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/05.jpg

Sadly, our little Eden of fair trades and kindly neighbors was not to last...

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Anthropology and God + Chapter 2: The People of the South
Ch 3: The Downside of Being Nice to Indians (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3741046&postcount=3)
Ch 4: Incensed! (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3764109&postcount=9)
Ch 5: When in(spired by) Rome... (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3764203&postcount=11)
Ch 6: Let Russia be Russia (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3764582&postcount=12)
Ch 7: Roman Deal Bread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3777812&postcount=13)
Ch 8: WAR! (*huhnh!*) What IS It Good For? Absolutely Nuthin' (Say it again!) (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3777874&postcount=14)
Ch 9: Forgotten Bits of History (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3802231&postcount=25)
Ch 10: The Second Roman Wars (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3802298&postcount=28)
Ch 11: How Old Gandon Could Have Saved Us All a Lot of Trouble (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3809111&postcount=35)
Ch 12: The Brief Times Between the Violence (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3809872&postcount=36)
Ch 13: The Bad News Bearers (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3813254&postcount=39)
Ch 14: Round 2 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3813306&postcount=40)
Ch 15: Catherine's Quick Little War (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3817671&postcount=41)
Ch 16: A Cure for Pride (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3817704&postcount=42)
Ch 17: The Dark Age (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3823562&postcount=47)
Ch 18: Burgundians are Basically Stupid (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3823606&postcount=48)
Ch 19: Renaissance Ideas (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3835595&postcount=54)
Ch 20: Years of Turbulence and Change (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3847871&postcount=58)
Czarina Catherine's 1130 AD World Atlas (http://www.brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/)
Ch 21: Final Musings about the Renaissance (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3866998&postcount=63)
Ch 22: The Final Teuto-Roman War (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3867015&postcount=64)
Ch 23: Balancing Acts (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930174&postcount=76)
Ch 24: Without Honor by Mikhail Herskowitz Preface: Coffeechat (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930283&postcount=77)
Ch 25: Without Honor Chapter Three: Prime Minister at Last (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930333&postcount=78) and Chapter Four: November Ninth (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930333&postcount=78)
Ch 26: Without Honor Chapter Five: The Partition of Englandia (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930368&postcount=79)
Ch 27: Without Honor Chapter Seven: Englandia's Sorriest Hour (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3930392&postcount=80)
Ch 28: Without Honor Chapter Eight: Bloody Faith (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3932816&postcount=86)
Ch 29: Without Honor Chapter Ten: Endgame (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3932868&postcount=87)
Ch 30: A Sunday Stroll (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4258348&postcount=101)
Ch 31: The Glorious Monarch (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4260346&postcount=103)
Ch 32: The Auction (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4266090&postcount=105), or how Kathy got her groove back
Primary source documents for The Auction of 1578 (http://www.brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/auc1.html)
Ch 33: All That Glitters Fades (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4275711&postcount=108)
Ch 34: The Septembrists (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4282446&postcount=112)
A review of Russia's diplomatic relations as of 1630 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4282506&postcount=113)
Ch 35: The Golden Age of Democracy (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4298132&postcount=118)
Ch 36: The Age of Colonization (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4298293&postcount=120)
Ch 37: The Unsteady East (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4312847&postcount=126)
Ch 38: The Franco-Japanese Conflict (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4352583&postcount=127)
Ch 39: Might As Well Jump! (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4353581&postcount=130) The gross chapter about evolution
Ch 40: Give War a Chance (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4358722&postcount=134)
Ch 41: coming in June!

Wow, 3 luxuries so close to each other in the second picture. You gotta grab that spot for sure!

The Downside of Being Nice to Indians

Of course, the Iroquois and we were not the only inhabitants of fair Africa. The Congo Basin and the Great Rift Valley were riddled with violent, barbaric tribes--some so savage and animalistic that they did not even have names. And to befriend the Iroquois, it seems, meant also to acquire their enemies as our own. Unfamiliar with these southern lands, all too often it was the case that chance encounters with the savages of the south would lead to death and tragedy. Our ancestors lived in very dark times.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/06.jpg

By the close of the fourth millennium our horizons spanned the oceanic coast from the eastern Sahara to the wild forests of Iroquoia. Repeated encounters with the savages who hated the Iroquois first, then came to hate us next, taught us, gradually to fight as passionately as we farmed and explored.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/07.jpg

Early in the 3rd millennium bc the village of St Petersburg began to grow in the rich farmlands of the interior. Closer to the desert plants that provided the sources for our people's distinctive incenses, the town of "St Pete" was to grow and prosper, almost as a second capital to our people.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/08.jpg

Almost. Again, the enemies we acquired from befriending the Iroquois brought us years of torment and misery. Attracted by our wealth and success, brutal savages soon descended from the mountains and sought to bring destruction and violence upon the gentle peoples of St Pete. Wave after wave of grunting, drooling cannibals blundered into our refined interior villages. By 2500 the last of the brutes had been driven back. In this time, our peaceful ways had been altered, our culture augmented with the secrets of warcraft and violence. We were stronger and more secure, sure. But we were never again to be quite as innocent as we were in the beginning of our little Eden.

We had learned to do more than just kill. We had learned to enjoy it.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/09.jpg

to be continued, of course

Wow, 3 luxuries so close to each other in the second picture. You gotta grab that spot for sure!

Vini, vidi, vici, baby! That's exactly where we planted St Petes.

Wow fantastic start! looks like a very promising game and story, what difficulty are you playing on?

You put me on my wrong foot. I wondered: "How do the Iroquois (Agri - Commercial) get a scout?? " - then I saw "vanilla".

Nice story ! :)

...what difficulty are you playing on?Either monarch or regent. I forgot to mark it down when I decided to start recording it for a postable story. Sí, señor, estoy el nubio.

And thanks, Rik. I'm still experimenting with the form, so I'm glad to see I can edit this stuff. The stories I've read around here in the past have been a real inspiration to me.

It says monarch on the top of his thred. Good read. :)

Incensed!

Alek, Wake up! Wake up you pampered little twit! I'm not going to waste my valuable tutoring time while some lazy little dilettante sleeps off his hangover. Snap to! Oh spare me the yawns, boy. Let's get to today's lesson.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/09pt5.jpg

By the mid 3rd millennium BC, Russia was unchallenged for power in the middle portion of our continent (and unthreatened by the great southern power of the Iroquois). Instead the tribal matriarch devoted their people's energy toward commerce, religion, and learning. The desert lands west of St Petersburg proved excellent for the cultivation of incense bearing plants. To the east were natural grain farmlands in which the cultivation of creosote into wheat and corn led to a surge in population.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/10.jpg

For several centuries the tempo of life was smooth and unhurried by outside events. Given peace the people concentrated on the arts, learning, the development of domestic crafts. A lust for adventure arose in the menfolk, who often felt they had no central role in the cultivation of communities. Instead, they moved about the Congo basin and the brutal Sahel, seeking adventure and hoping for the glory of discovering the mythical elephant burial ground.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/11.jpg

The location of the elephant burial ground in the 23rd century bc led to a growing interest in the African interior. Modern zoologists tell us that this was merely a neutral gathering spot for herd of the smaller forest elephants of the Congo, but to the ancients the discovery was a gift from the gods and the occasion for creating a great shrine deep in the interior that could spur national development and new outroads to commerce.

Across the Sahara, meanwhile, subsistence living nomads began to tell our folk of the existence of a new northern empire, the dusty-footed Romans, a fierce and haughty people. But the early Russians had more immediate security concerns.

As pilgrims and merchants began to explore the Congo, the local tribes came to resent our incursions into their hunting lands. Occasionally bands of barbarian warrior would rise up and threaten the travelers. By the 21st century tensions had been ramped up to intolerable levels, and in the 2150s a great violence broke out between the leading barbarians and the Russian clubmen protecting the seekers of ivory. Within a decade the overmatched barbarians were crushed and driven deeper into the jungle.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/12.jpg

2b cont'd

Great update. :goodjob:

When in(spired by) Rome...

By the opening of the 2nd millennium bc our ancestors were traveling and trading with surrounding tribes across central and eastern Africa. The distinctive clicks and trills of the native Russian tongue were taking root in our language and our people had begun to learn the secrets of fermenting vodka from yams and peanuts.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/13.jpg

A trickle of trade traveling down the Nile river eventually brought the Russian and Roman empires into contact. The first Russians to entire Roman lands did so in with an act of gallantry, hoping to win Roman favor, as the reputation of the fierce Redmen far preceded them. In the 1700s bc, adventure seeking Russian warriors learned of a devastating barbarian attack on the Roman city of Cumae. Quickly joining the fight, the Russian tribesmen defeated the savage onslaught, probably saving the city from a horrendous sacking.

But rather than reacting with gratitude, the gruff Mediterraneans angrily demanded that their saviors immediately evacuate the land they just saved. They were not, it would seem, the most enlightened of peoples.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/14.jpg

Nonetheless, the peculiar Romans must have seen some value in trading with, rather than fighting against, our mighty warriors. Within a few centuries they were learning to appreciate the superiority of Slavic pottery, and in exchange teaching our people the secrets of their superior weaponry. From the Romans the Russians learned the importance of military discipline in maintaining cohesive fighting units.

That weaponry and discipline was first put to work in the Russian conquest of the Guinean coast. In the early 1700s bc Russian warmen moved to the Atlantic coast of Africa in search of new game and tradable goods. Instead they found the last major barbarian band on the continent--the Etruscans. A new war commenced as the brave Russians applied the tricks and war codes of Roman fighters against these brute savages. Attack and counter attack in the now-fabled Battle of Gabon led to the destruction of the major fighting force of the Etruscan flesheaters. The Etruscan homeland was still far away, but the great barbarian bands would cease to be a threat to Russian traders of the interior.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/15.jpg

With the great military victory entering our people's national psyche, a natural reverence for the fighting mystique of the Romans arose in Russian culture. Our early poets seemed to equally fear and envy the Red-clad warmasters of Rome. Their warcraft, their war codes and awesome discipline had inspired in us a similar desire to meet threats with discipline and vigor as well as our own natural zeal and passion. They taught us well, but we were eager students in the school of war. And yet, our people even then must have suspected that a day would come when Rus warred on Rome and the student would have to surpass the master.

Yes, yes, I know it's a horrid cliché. I still get a kick out of saying it.

Bohemoi! Look at the time, young Alek! Get off your duff and go report to your uncle that you've finished today's lessons. Your fencing instructor is waiting for you and I have to go peel some yams for my supper tonight.

Let Russia be Russia

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/16.jpg Oh, Alek, you govniuk, why do you wake me at this hour? I'm trying to rest so I can be fresh when I go to mop up at the library tomorrow! I'm a tutor, not your damned servant. Ischenzni!!

Fine, fine, I'll continue the story. You picked the stupidest night to turn into a scholar, boy. Where was the story left off? The 1600s BC? Blin! Okay, let me suckle from Mother Vodka and I'll continue the story...

The rest of the Primitive Age is a story of increasing discoveries, growing wealth...

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/17.jpg

...expansion, trade, and learning. The annual tributes from Bulgar tribesmen of the inner Congo began in this age. Our tribes grew to the southern reaches of what we now call the "heartland" of Mother Russia during the second millennium. The earliest spoken legends come from this time of growth--an age of heroes and vicious despots ruling the people and vanquishing our enemies.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/18.jpg

It is in this epoch that our unique Russian sense of humor, what unsophisticated foreigners call "sarcasm," began to emerge.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/20.jpg

Somehow the sincere and earnest Iroquois remained our friends throughout this period--which is quite a testament to their good nature (or perhaps just a testament to their lack of wit). Either way, our empire was growing and we looked eagerly for more opportunities to expand our power and influence.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/21.jpg

Our most far sighted wise men saw the Nile as our destiny. The tumbling desert river was famous for its annual flood cycles, which in turn made the rich silty soil some of the most fertile farmlands on the planet. The despotic matriarchs often referred to it as the "breadbasket of the gods" and the "green band of gold."

So you can imagine the horror our early explorers felt when they scouted out the Nile for future plantation sites at the turn of the first millennium bc, only to find Roman colonists already settling down on what should have been our promised land. Unhappy days were certainly ahead.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/22.jpg

What? Huh? What's with the coat, boy? I just got started in to telling you one of the greatest epics of early history and you start fidgeting and heading out the door? Are you daft? "Got to go" where, young Alek? Fine, fine, get out. Pester a brilliant scholar who's doing your parents a favor, then, why don't you? Manners of an ugly pig. I'll see you for our regular session next week. Just don't come knocking on my door late at night anymore, you!

(You huyesos)

Come, sit down, Alek. You seem a bit hungover, m'lad. Could it be that you went out drinking last night and used your visit to me as an excuse to get out of you mother's house?

What's that? I can't hear you when you're mumbling like that!! Oh, me SHOUTING right NOW?!?! So sorry, no wonder you were cringing. Didn't mean... I say I didn't mean to startle you like that, m'lad. Not when you're hung over and such.

Heh.

Anyway, let us get back to our story. Today's lesson is about the conflicts over money and control of the golden grains harvested in the fertile Nile valley. It's a little chapter in history I like to call...

Roman Deal Bread http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/16.jpg

For many years we traded with those surly and unpredictable Romans. We took their insults and endured their vicious bargaineering in commerce. They were our friends and we believed that good neighbors ought to ignore each others' insatiable lust for gold. In their camps and taverns, they told Russian jokes and we told Roman jokes. But our two peoples never warred. There was business to do. They got masonry; we got slaves. It was all very civilized.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/23.jpg

They made for excellent slaves, by the way, but what really attracted our merchants to their trade was their seeming inexhaustible supply of new technology. We've always been a curious and open people and they kept coming up with new tricks for us to learn--like this writing thing they taught us circa 1000 bc. We thought we were far more advanced than they. So where could they be getting their tricks from?

Well, we had our suspects... http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/24.jpg


Whatever the source of their learning, it was nothing they seemed willing to share with us. Each succeeding matriarch of all the Africas grew increasingly put out at the Caesars' for their insolent and standoffish attitudes. We would ask for contacts beyond our humble continent, but they never offered reasonable prices.

Were it not for their fearsome armies and brutal reputation, we would have demanded better conditions. But as it happened, they were big and scary guys who refused to allow our traders to gain maps and knowledge of their realms and far borders. Since they permitted no curiosity about their lands, we assumed that they had no curiosity about ours.

Thus at the dawn of the new millennium, 1000 bc, we came to see a different side of our erstwhile friends. These same Latin rascals suddenly demanded that we introduce them to our friends, the Iroquois, yet offered no payment in return for this favor. The Czarina Catherine told their swarthy ambassador exactly where he could get off.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/25.jpg

Rome's reaction was not favorable. The fight we had so long dreaded was now going to be a reality.

Gulp.

Absolutely Nuthin' (Say it again!)

118615

Excellent question, Alek! In fact, you are right. We were not dependent solely upon the Romans for trade in ancient times. Nomadic bands of "Americans"--a tribe closely related to the Englishmen of the Asian Steppes, but who came from a much cooler place--were an intriguing source of much learning among our fathers. Around the same time as the wars began against the Romans, about 900 bc, Russian traders encountered American herdsmen in the Himmel-Aeyun Mountain--perhaps driven south from their Arctic homelands by the "Little Ice Age" that occurred 3000 years ago.

Despite a very short period of exposure and what must have been very awkward communication between them, the influence of the Americans on Russian culture was tremendous. The Russians learned of literature and horseback riding from these pale northmen. We learned of trade routes for reaching the English and the Azteki--while they learned of Iroquoia and treacherous Rome, of warrior codes and the mystic reverence for the gods.

But this was not the great concern of the day. Our people were busy villefying the hated Romans.
http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/26.jpg An early attempt at propaganda, probably unsuccessful for its use of sarcasm and anachronistic paraphernalia.

So now let us learn of the war. Yes, boy, "finally the good stuff." Yet believe me, the time of the wars between the Ancient Romans and the early Russians was not a pleasant epoch. But it was certainly an example of how the arrogance of man can lead to senseless slaughter. Your high school textbooks that oversimplify so much do seem to at least have gotten this bit right. Caesar of the Romans indeed did declare war in a snit because our Great Lady, the Matriarch Catherine, refused to introduce him to the Iroquoian ambassador at a cocktail party.

On the other hand, economists will always give you a more complicated--and ultimately more satisfying--answer to any question in history. They will tell you that the clash between Russia and Rome was inevitable: two great warrior powers facing each other over the bare expanse of the Sahara, the Golden Band of the Nile a treasure each desired to control. It was not just our leaders, but our civilizations' fundamental interests that clashed.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/27.jpg

Thus, when the Romans declared war against us on the most trivial of excuses, it may have been as much in jealousy as it was in snittiness. Our troops controlled the vast Sahara. Our ancient ax bearers patrolled the simple fishing villages along the Atlantic coast--villages which the expansive Romans threatened to swallow up--and our able archers held command of the upper Nile Valley. Russia was hardly "destined" to win any war against Roma, but our forces were certainly better positioned to fight it out on their lands.

The great general Igor Plotsky's first order was to drive north down the Nile and capture the southern Roman city of Ravenna.

General Plotsky proceeded to do that, but travel was inordinately slow in those days. Resistance, obstruction and pacifists prevented quick conquests. Generation after generation of warriors grew up and learned to despise the Romans; as I'm sure the reverse was the case among the Romans and how they raised their children to loath us. By 800bc our superior Roman archers commanded the vales upriver from the farm country of Ravenna.
http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/29.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/30.jpg

And yet conquest took another 25 years. Oh, these Romans were determined fighters. At long last the town elders declared their battered capital an open city and our forces marched in to what was now the northern most city of the Russian empire. The central and upper Nile was ours.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/31.jpg

This brought the war to an end, for a while. The people celebrated while the Romans muttered to themselves that they didn't want to bother with the control of a swampy little outpost like Ravenna anyway. But in truth hostilities still brewed between Romans and our people, who now proudly called our royal family the "Roman-offers."

As you must know, the wars did not end there. In the centuries to come our leaders would have cause to earn their name.

But in truth hostilities still brewed between Romans and our people, who now proudly called our royal family the "Roman-offers."

Hahaha :lol:

Nice story! It's hard to post russian words like "Good day" (or is it good morning? I don't know enough Russian to say) without Russian chracters.

I like the joke with Caesar!:lol:

Thanks, guys. The only Russian words I've been able to work into the story are a few gems like huyesos, which is not something I'm inclined to translate on a kid-friendly discussion board.

Updates?

This is a good story. :lol:

Updates?

This is a good story. :lol:

Oh please, BuckyRea just posted his last update less than 2 hours ago, and you want more already?

Patience, young man!

Oh I wasnt there at the time and I wasnt looking at when he posted it. :lol:

Great story BuckyRea!

Great story BuckyRea!
Thanks. It's fun writing it, even if writing kinda detracts from my actually playing the next round (I've only played up to about 1400 AD, so I really don't know how this story turns out).

Rea is actually my last name. So when people call me "BuckyRea" instead of just "Bucky" I kinda feel like that nerd on Stargate whom everyone calls "Daniel Jackson" instead of just Danny or Jack-o. So your lordship should feel free to call this commoner "Bucky." :D

Ok Bucky!
flyingchineseman

this is an excellent story

Forgotten Bits of History

Nothing throws your day off quite like bumbling into a mélange of barbarians. The great Boyer trader-explorer Yevgeny Pizdetski discovered this principle while traveling through the Great Rift Valley. In the years following the First Russian Wars, a band of barbarians had apparently moved into our continent--somewhere between the Iroquois Transvaal and Russian dominated Congo basin.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/32.jpg

They called themselves the Bretons, and it is only a miracle that Pizdetski's party survived. Pizdetski went on to write his World Travels, the earliest book known to survive the ages (almost) fully intact. It is thru Pizdetski that we know of the mysterious Bretons, and of so many other ancient cultures of our continent. Archaeologists and ethno-anthropologists today guess that the Bretons were nomads, an offshoot of the French people (whom of course we'll meet much later in history). But how the Bretons came to Africa all the way across the ocean from French lands will perhaps always be a mystery.

The most plausible, albeit radical, theory is that they migrated by boat across the Eastern Ocean, yet somehow were never detected by our young civilization until they had settled into the mountains around Lake Wictoria. And yet historians for centuries have assured us that no people in the world at that time had the maritime technology to complete such a journey.

Possible sea route of the Bretons http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/3rt700bc.jpg

Of course how the separate continents ever got populated in the first place--all human beings are, genticists assure us, are so many offshoots of the same human species--in the eons before mapmaking made oceanic travel possible is a mystery. The same sort of mystery that used to inspire the kids of my generation to go to church.

I don't suppose you and your carousing buddies do that much, do you? Not unless they start making communion wine as strong as vodka.

Oh, quit blubbering, boy. We have more studying to do.

After the Ancient Russians defeated the Romans, a general hostility continued between those peoples. There was little doubt now, however, which civilization was stronger. Defeat after punishing defeat left the Romans surly, angry, despondent and restive. Any Roman politician could rise to power just by denouncing the impeccable character of our people and organizing an army.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/33.jpg

What so few realized was that in order to hang onto power, the one thing--above all other things--one needs most to do with one's armies is to avoid war with the Russians. I'm not sure why people never figured that out.

http://italvista.com/images/etruscan_soldier.jpg One such fool who raised an army against us was the Consul Slaevius Maximus of Cumae. A brutal propagandist, Slaevius styled himself the "Dagger of Jupiter" and inspired his expert archers to march up the Nile and liberate their "Ravennian cousins."

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/34.jpg

Of course liberators back then rarely asked people if they wanted to be liberated. But Ravenna had been under Russian occupation for only three generations when Slaevius's troops arrived, unexpected, in formations north and west of the city.
A frightful slaughter followed. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/35.jpg

History, my boy, is just choking full of important life lessons. The lesson in the Capture of Ravenna is clear--never turn your back on a Roman. Based on his victory Slaevius rose to rule all the armies of the Roman Empire.

The Romans, however, forgot two important things in the glory of their conquest of Ravenna. First, the Russians, like the mighty elephants of our homeland, never forget a slight. An armed retribution was bound to follow eventually. And second, we had the horse.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/36.jpg
2b cont'd

Eh, the barbarians didn't kill your scout? I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that when there's only one warrior defending the barbarian camp, it won't move out.

What map are you playing on here?

The Second Roman Wars

Slaevius was an old greedy man when he decided he needed to insult Russian honor further by establishing armed camps in the gold mines north of Odessa. This hubris would lead to the Second Roman War.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/37.jpg

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38123000/jpg/_38123661_warlord54av_bbc.jpg Valin of Petersburg in 470 bc launched a crusade to reclaim the central Nile. Slaevius Maximus took to the field himself the following year to lead a new assault across the Amhar Plateau and attempt to intercept Valin's driving force.

The two clashed at al-B'Dǔrnd in the "Battle of Twenty Days." However to the fleeing Romans it must have seemed like twenty years. When the dust settled, Slaevius was dead and his army scattered.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/38.jpg

Valin continued to march his army north down the Nile to re-liberate Ravenna. Again, not that anyone there was asking him to do so.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/39.jpg The son of Slaevius Maximus, Slaevius Tuu, was given--in one of those odd Roman traditions of "reclaiming family honor"--the responsibility of defending the lands his father conquered. Slaevius Tuu fashioned a brilliant defense south of Ravenna, which stopped the Russian advance at a bloody cost to both armies.

While the great Valin assaulted Ravenna, the swordsmen of Odessa, led by Boros Smardinov, moved into the mountains and began to drive out Roman squatters in the gold-rich hills of the Amhar Plateau.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/40.jpg

The Roman usurpers retreated hastily from the hill lands. General Smardinov pursued them onto the savanna and smashed them in the open fields south of the gold mines.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/41.jpg

Back in the Nile Valley, Valin retreated his forces away from Slaevius Tuu's zone of control around Ravenna and established a fortification where his battered troops could recuperate pending the next assault. The next assault never came. His forces too bloodied to continue, Valin died five years later, still encamped and preparing for the attack he would never see.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/42.jpg

Valin's war had been long and arduous. Had he won the siege of Ravenna, he might be a contender for the title Great Hero of Russia. But in the end the second Slaevius stood his ground and the wars against the Romans would continue long past Valin's life time.

Sparse Russian camps of farmers were attracted by the "seller's market" of a large and seemingly permanent military encampment outside the Roman borders. For generations the Russian forces gathered beyond the Romans' lands, training, building, and scouting possible weak spots.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/43.jpg

Soon iron swordsmen and horsemen began to replace the older military formations of bronze swordsmen and archers. By the mid 4th century bc, a mighty force was in place and ready to complete Valin's crusade.

What map are you playing on here?
It's the pre-fabbed Earth map that came with Vanilla civ 1.29

but I suspect that when there's only one warrior defending the barbarian camp, it won't move out.
I'm pretty sure you're right on the money there. It sure surprised me, tho. I took that screenie because I figured the scout was gonna be offed. But then he wasn't.

When I looked at the name of the barbs, it said "Bretons." That struck me as odd since the names of barbs I thought were always based on neighboring cultures to the tribe that discovers them first. Russians tend to find the Bulgars, American find the Illinois, Chinese the Mongols, etc. So it made no sense for a tribe that the Frogs are supposed to discover to show up in the middle of my continent.

From there I riffed a totally pointless historical distraction. After all the Angles and Jutes were still migrating westward well into the 9th century AD in our history. No reason why you can't have migratory barbs on this planet, too.

Well, the English are expansionist (in Vanilla at least). Quite likely they sent their scouts all over the place.

You need to get a leader from those swords. Bad.

Great story. Are you still expanding during these wars?

I sure hope I'm expanding. It's still in the BCs here and 2/3s of Africa is still unclaimed. Plus I'm about to start muscling in on a whole new territory, and one of our rival nations (tho I won't say who yet) will be biting the dust before the Renaissance arrives.

How Old Gandon Could Have Saved Us All a Lot of Trouble

Wars today are not like the wars of the ancient past, young Alek. In our world, war is a sometimes-necessity, a thing nations do if and only if they can't resolve their differences.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/3map400bc.jpg To our ancestors it was a different affair. War was a more or less constant; peace but a momentary respite. At any moment violence could strike from any direction. Today if we war the whole nation, the whole culture goes on an alert footing. Nothing else transpires, nothing else is thought of. The nation is at war and the enemy must be crushed. But to our ancestors violence was just another aspect of life--killing came as naturally to their armies as it does to the hungry lions and tigers of the Ukraine.

And so it was only natural that we would conduct business even during a time of violence. In the fourth century bc the long wars against the Romans soon turned our people to favor local ways and lifestyles that rejected Roman militarism and pragmatism. It was during this era when Russian notions of the gods became systemized. It is no wonder, then, that our divine notions reflected Iroquoian influences, not Roman.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/45.jpg

Indeed, some of the greatest writing of the early Seneca and Mohawk pantheists came from the literary traditions of Russia, borrowing Russian legends and adapting equatorial imagery and holy sites for their folklore. The level of cultural diffusion never made the two peoples one, but the two cultures did grow closer in their shared values and affections.

Yes, yes, be patient lad. I am getting back to the war.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/44.jpg In 350 bc the usual skirmishing between roman warrior and Russia's troop, with their more advanced iron weaponry, escalated into a full conflict. The Russian commander, Prince Perdün Starì, saw an opportunity to end the years-long quest for Ravenna. When a secession of poor harvests weakened the Cumaean-Roman occupiers, our own hungry Ukrainian iron lions pounced upon the Roman gazelle.

The Cumaeans fought more valiantly than Prince Perdün expected. And altho they were a century old, Slaevius Tuu's battlements held firm, proving almost impossible to scale. Almost. Legends say the Nile flowed red after the Bulgarite and Belarusan swordsmen pushed the last Cumaean defenders against the riverdocks and slaughtered them on the piers. The mounted horsemen of Odessa struck the final blow. Ravenna was, at long last, ours.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/47.jpg

Scattered Roman armies threatened from beyond our borders, and perhaps things seems uncertain at first, as the surviving troops recuperated in the militarized city of Ravenna. But a counter attack never came.

There was not much fight left in our people either. Almost 600 years of conflict left them ready to discuss peace. The Romans, however, refused our offers of peace. Death could still come paddling up the Nile at any moment and the matriarchs in Moscow insisted that the people prepare for war.

That third and final Roman war came a hundred years later. The Hereditary Consul of Cumae, Lintel Flatulus, had married the sole surviving great granddaughter of the last Roman governor of Ravenna. When the Russian prince of Ravenna died heirless in 235 bc, Lintel sent a sole company of archers up river to claim his wife's "birthright." A Russian troop rushed to "welcome" the would-be usurpers and killed them before they could reach the city outskirts.

The Russians, under Prince Gandon Starì, the new ruler appointed by the Matriarch, immediately marched north to end the threat from Lintel once and for all. However rash Gandon was to take to the field, however, he was no conqueror. In fact, stories recount how he was in fact a bit of a coward. The early fights south of Cumae went well for the Russian army. The first wave of swordsmen defeated the veteran spearmen defending the lands around Cumae. Then the fearsome Odessan horsemen moved toward the city itself, preparing to take Lintel's capital.

But the riders encountered a new foe as they approach the battlefield. The Romans had, somehow, developed iron weaponry. Assumed for years to be significantly less advanced than our ancestors, the Romans had, somehow, managed to develop their own unique iron weaponry. Our forces were no longer the superior. Iron swords and platewear, coupled with the vaunted Roman military discipline, would certainly give them the edge in a fight.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/48.jpg

Prince Gandon, rather than face a possible loss--or even a particularly blood-soaked victory--called for peace. The Romans, hunkering down in their fortifications and expecting a tremendous Russian onslaught, readily agreed and called back for peace, too.


Gandon was not dismissed as a coward, as you might suspect. Military historians will continue to disagree with Gandon's decision. Some claim that he could have still taken Cumae and withstood the onslaught of these earliest Roman legionnaires. My own father is one such historian and his first published paper as a college professor was to argue that Prince Gandon should have sacked and razed Cumae and then go on to wipe out the Roman empire entirely. Papa later republished his paper as a short book entitled, How Old Gandon Could Have Saved Us All a Lot of Trouble.

Others, like my mentor Professor Halyavshchik Tortelduvsky, suggest that the Romans in this epoch were probably unbeatable. They point out that the Roman legionnaires were more than just a psychological last gasp for the Romans. Tortelduvsky says that any victory by these iron soldiers could have rejuvenated the Roman spirit--perhaps triggering a golden age, not unlike the one they experienced centuries later when those same legionnaires, altho supposedly antiquated, were able to lead Rome to victory against the rampaging Germanics in far Cathay.

They were truly awesome fighters. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/49.jpg

Of course, Tortelduvsky is famous for his wild historical speculations, but he is probably right that a total conquest of Old Romany was at best a vain hope and would have led at worst to a complete exhaustion of our empire. Instead, our people followed the honorable peace the Romans offered us.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/50.jpg

As the third century bc came to a close new technologies, new horizons, and new trading opportunities began to open up. We came to trade and discuss with the advanced Egyptian culture that for centuries had so influenced the sciences of backward Rome. We learned of the reclusive and barbaric Aztlani. Our traders now frequently visited the distant arctic wastelands where the nomadic Ameri had come to settle. And we soon came to hear of the exotic Germans, a warlike, but sensible people.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/51.jpg

Still the jungles of the New World were still unknown to us--for history was still opening up as we grew and discovered the mysteries and dangers of this vast planet. But at least the Romans now knew who was stronger and it would be centuries before they would trouble us again.

As far as fickle history goes, that's about as happy an ending as you're going to get. There will be sequels to this story, of course, because history never ends. But, young Alek, I must warn you that the sequels are rarely as good as the original.

(to be cont'd)

The Brief Times Between the Violence

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/51.jpg

The end of the Classical Era came with a note of sadness for the Russian people.

As our world vista expanded, Russians as a people came to see ourselves as somewhat behind our world rivals. When the world was the Matriarch and her court and all who would aspire to be there, and the only challenge to our supremacy was the laggard-fighting Romans, we could see ourselves as comfortably at the center of the universe.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/52.jpg

When we saw that the world in fact revolved around the Mediterranean Sea (and that we were, in fact, on the less dominant side of that sea), then we have far less reason to feel self assured. The first inkling of this came when we realized that Egyptian sailing technology was far more advanced than ours. Our boats traveled perhaps 75% as fast as theirs. The Red Sea was clearly not as conducive to training sailors and boat builders.

When we looked to the east, we saw the pale Englandians deeply ensconced in their esoteric thoughts and mathematical speculations. We could learn from them, but we could not always fathom their mystic visions--inspired no doubt by the eerie stars twinkling in the black Kazakh nights.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/53.jpg

But if we were primitive compared to Egypt and Englandia, we were veritable rock scientists compared to the Egyptians' northern cousins, the grunting Aztecs. Why Cleopatricians didn't wipe out and colonize those shivering northmen is beyond the understanding of this historian.

Okay, fine. I mean "beyond the understanding of this history tutor." Whatever. At least their backwardness afforded a chance to make money, learn about other cultures, and perhaps bolster an ally who could keep the mighty southern Europeans in check.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/54.jpg

Unfortunately, the Aztlanians were never going to prove willing partners in a war against their mightier neighbor. They made that perfectly clear in numerous diplomatic efforts our ambassadors undertook through the years. Certainly they feared the Egyptians far too much to risk warring on them. Such wisdom may provide a clue as to how the weak, primitive Aztecs survived without succumbing to Egyptian domination.

Determined to not fall behind in the rush for learning--and inspired by our English friends--the Matriarch K'tryn decreed that our people build a fabulous center of learning--a Great Library, centered in Moscow and dedicated to gathering all of the knowledge of the world. If we could not be the first nation to learn every new thing, we could at least be the second or third.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000AAQEOQ.01-A25KCI3KJ0JKBZ._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Diligently our carpenters and mechanics fashioned a great building to house all the scrolls of learning from a hundred different languages. Our scholars set about copying the known works of all the engineers of Egypt, the philosophers of Englandia, the sailors of Germany, the shamans of America, the metalsmiths of Aztlan, and the tacticians of Rome. Our merchants gained commissions from the royal house for bringing back texts from far lands and translators to put them in our alphabet. Our scribes stayed up nights codifying all this learning into catalogues for our students to learn by. This Great Library would be an achievement for the ages.

But, alas, for unknown reasons, at the last minute the plans proved unworkable.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/55.jpg . . . http://www.bbc.co.uk/jersey/entertainment/images/fireworks_gallery/bonfire_puff.jpg

In a fit of anger the Matriarch torched her great library for no reason at all and converted the building into a giant coliseum for popular amusements. No more was ever spoken of this project. But in an odd coincidence, it seems that just one year before a foreign land that we had not even discovered yet built precisely that same sort of learning center. Wiser than we, perhaps, they never converted their center into a rugby field. Only a few surviving texts remained in what became, later than year, a moderately competant local library.

Whatever the cause of the Matriarch's foolish wasting of resources, it still bothered our scholars that we lagged so far behind the Egyptians. Obtaining their learning by gold and trade would be, many decided, the sounder policy.

Unfortunately, the pharaohs proved harder to deal with than even the Caesars had been. They were arrogant, brash, and vain. None of these qualities would have led to war with us, of course. But the pharaohs were also jealous. They resented our economic prosperity and our knowledge of the world. This could and did lead to hostilities. When their matriarch demanded a tribute from our matriarch--an ineffective gambit they should have learned about from their Roman puppets, it led to the obvious response.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/56.jpg

Once again, we were going to war.

(to be continu'd)

Ooo wow. You should really be scared of the Egyptians. :rolleyes:

They are so far a way from you they could never get a sizeable army coming for you.

Yes, but what you fail to take into account is the fact that I stink at Civilization. Cleo gave me (as you'll see) more than her share of trouble. Plus I stink at Civ, or did I mention that already?

The Bad News Bearers

Don't be absurd, Alek, you do not "know just how that feels." Honestly, boy, do you really think that getting piled on in a rugby scrimmage is anything at all like going to war?

Well no, boy, I've never played rugby. But that doesn't mean I wasn't a sportsman in my college days. Don't laugh, you giggling imbecile, I certainly was involved in athletics... of a sort.

Very well, I will tell you what "sort." I was captain of the chess team in both my junior and senior years. Of course we didn't do pile ons. But it was still by any reasonable definition a highly competitive sport. Yes, yes, it was!

Oh for God's sake, lad, get off the floor and compose yourself. We need to move on to today's lesson.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/5map.jpg When the war commenced, Russia's primary concern was that Rome would join in against her old Slavic enemy. Perhaps wizened by experience, perhaps merely scared, perhaps hoping to see her old puppetmaster Egypt take a few hits from the Russian gorilla, Rome chose to stay out of hostilities. That was about the only thing that did not go wrong in these wars.

While a few skirmishes happened between the European power (Egypt) and the African power (Russia), there were no significant battles between them for more than a century. Still, Egypt was by far the more threatening power to the other nations and, frustrated with the progress of the war, exacted an alliance from its far eastern dependent in 50 bc.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/57.jpg

It was almost the sort of thing that could ruin your day--except that Americans lived on the far side of the known world. Still, the signal that Egypt was building alliances was not a welcome sign. Unfortunately the matriarch at that time was not a wise leader. Manda Voshka the Untamable was a fiercely proud woman, determined to bring the long Egyptian conflict to a head. Rather than stand by and wait to repel the inevitable Egyptian onslaught, Manda Voshka chose to bring the war to the enemy.

To her advisors' thinking, there was only one viable attack route along which to meet the Egyptians: across the Levant and thru Asia Minor. The small trading nations of the Levant were too weak and disorganized either to form their own empires or to resist the incursion of other nations' troops--including the Russians, the Romans, and the Egyptians. These were simple trader-tribes--the Phoenicians, the Radhanites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite), the Picts and Ozzies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max_2:_The_Road_Warrior) (these last were mountain and desert people, respectively, related to the English somehow).

In 20 bc Russian and Egyptian forces clashed in the Levant over control of this vital choke point between Asia and Africa. The Egyptian forces proved more maneuverable, while our people were more adept at winning pitched battles.

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For twenty years fight for control of the lands continued. No clear winner seemed to emerge, except for those in the metalsmithing and undertaking business. The chaos seems contagious. That is when more bad news came from the east.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/59.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/60.jpg

The wars and uprisings disrupted the flow of goods between nations and soon far away empires became interested in the outcome of this conflict. American diplomats, seeing an opportunity, recruited more valuable allies in the fight. Egypt would remain the main enemy, but the threat of a wider conflict loomed large on the horizon. It at least felt like the whole world stood against us.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/61.jpg fear of a bleak planet

No great leaders emerged on either side in these wars as the ceaseless fighting slogged on. The upper hand in the war seesawed over the years. In 30 ad Russian swordsmen won a decisive victory in Judea, driving the surviving Egyptians deep into the Sinai Desert. Yet by 50 ad the Egyptians again controlled the Levant and were pushing the surviving Russian garrisons southward.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/62.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/63.jpg

Then the Russians counter attacked and the swift Egyptians again fled. The crafty young Egyptian commander, Horakhty Faiyum, drew his troops away from certain annihilation and ran them into safety among their Roman friends. But Faiyum was too smart for his own good. Having safely escaped, he then turned his tired troops around and attacked the pursuing Russians, hoping to wipe them out. Instead he met the Russian Gorilla. His entire command was lost.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/64.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/65.jpg

After the defeat of Horakhty Faiyum on the Cumae Plain, only one final battle awaited the Egyptians in the First Egyptian War. In the Battle of the Sinai, 90 ad, an exhausted Russian encampment was ambushed by undetected Egyptian charioteers and cut to shreds. However their war chariots proved no match for the superior Russian horsemen. Pursued along the open deserts by the inexhaustible German stallions, the last standing charioteers were hunted down by men, metal, and dehydration. The Russians proved more adept at finding oases in the vast desert--a discovery that would have a huge impact on further development of the Russian empire.

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By 100 ad, Russian troops controlled the Levant. A sobered Rome would not join the world wide alliance against Mother Russia. For a while the Russo-Egyptian rivalry lay dormant. But in truth, both sides were merely gearing up for a new wave of violence to come.

Round 2

The Second Egyptian War was inevitable. The first battles had ended in a draw, a stand off. No nation before had had ever bested the Egyptians, which left these Europeans far too proud to allow an African upstart like Russia to get away with controlling the main trade and travel routes between them.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/67.jpg

That war started in 130 ad with the surprise overrun of the eastern Med lands by a new wave of Egyptian war chariots. Unprepared Russian swordsmen were defeated at two of the four military posts the Russian had placed around the Levant. The two that survived were older outposts controlled the Sinai peninsula--Phoenicia and Judea were lost.

The Russians reacted swiftly to this new challenge. Russian lords from every province began heavily recruiting and training battalions of swordsmen--particularly among the hardy mountain folk of the Amhar Plateau. Veteran horseman fighters from the Horn of Russia and even some Iroquoian volunteers rallied to repel the invaders.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/68.jpg

Despite being a nation emotionally and culturally disposed to creation and innovation, the Russians of this epoch were also becoming experienced men of war.

But as quickly as the defenders rallied and began the long march north, they were too far away to prevent the Egyptians from wiping out the rest of the Russian garrisons. Eventually all that stood between Russia and the Gypsy hordes was a single command of elite sword bearers, the Murmansk Two Hundred. In a miraculous victory they drove two companies of chariots away from the banks of the Red Sea and camped down, readying for the next wave of attacks.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/69.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/70.jpg

Their commanders devised effective trenching techniques for defeating chariot assaults. However the Egyptian invasion force was more diverse than the Two Hundred anticipated. In the months before relief could arrive, they were confronted by a force of Egyptian swordsmen. In the ensuing bloody Battle of the Red Sea, the entire company was lost, altho in their sacrifice they exacted a devastating price on the invaders.

Egyptian forces won the Second Egyptian war and drove Russia from the eastern Med. They were now poised to drive south and harass the Russian homeland, but lacked the manpower to deliver a death blow. A restless, inadvertent peace set in, with neither power holding enough military might to begin hostilities. Instead, they built up their forces and waited for the other side to make a mistake. Egypt, being the larger power, stood to gain more from a waiting game while the Russians resigned themselves to a perpetual state of playing catch up.

By 230 ad, Russia's security stance had reached a nadir. While a large garrison of swordsmen and horsemen stood ready to check further Egyptian advances from the Red Sea, the Egyptian navy now controlled the western coast of the African Bulge and clearly was laying plans to deliver a backdoor invasion on Russia's western provinces along the Gold Coast.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/72.jpg DANGER!!! http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/71.jpg :cry:
Oh my God! Look how close the Egyptians are!!
In 246 ad a new matriarch rose to the throne of state, Cathrine the Great. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/7cat.jpg She was the first matriarch to hold the title Czarina--Russian for "seize her"--and with that militaristic title she signaled her clear intent to win back the lands lost to the Gypsy Hordes... "by wit or by fist" as my father used to say. Given that the Egyptians were neither stupid nor nice, it was clear that the young Czarina would need to use her fists to seize the Levant.

Catherine's Quick Little War

Catherine the Great, the first Czarina, loathed the Egyptians. For over 300 years her ancestors had warred against them. For over 300 years Russian parents had told their children that Europeans were ice-blooded devils. But because since 190 ad they held the vital Levant--and thus controlled the sea and trade route that connected an entire hemisphere--two generations of Russians had been forced to accept their military and political dominance.

Catherine saw a different possibility. War had made her people great in the past, and war would redeem them again.

In 249 ad, just three years after ascending to the throne, the Czarina ordered her troops to occupy disputed lands along the Suez coast. But to one brave unit of horsemen, she sent secret orders, a "suicide reconnaissance" deep into the Sinai, to scout out just how large the Egyptian forces were. The captain of the horsemen reported back that the enemy were strong, but not invincible.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/73.jpg

Sadly, his troop paid for this intelligence with their lives. And with this retaliation, the Third Egyptian War began.

The Battle of the Suez went poorly at first, with the brave Russian swordsmen driven from the disputed territory. An expected alliance with the Iroquois fizzled out as the southern tribesmen faltered in the face of Egyptian might. Russia would stand alone.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/74.jpg

The Egyptian general, Lord Takerekhonshu of Alexandria, abandoned his foot soldiers in the north and confidently pushed his charioteers toward Ravenna.

But of course the Russians were experienced in defending this critical Nile city. A troop of swordsmen ambushed the Egyptians at Big Bend and took revenge for their humiliation at Suez.

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Russian commanders were surprised to find that Lord Takerekhonshu was not among the captured chariotmen. The drive to Ravenna had been a feint. Probably Takerekhonshu had intended to use his chariots to draw the Russian forces away from the main line of march, spreading out the swordsmen in more defensive positions. But Takerekhonshu underestimated the size of the Russian army, which was comprised of ten battalions of swordsmen. His chariots were lost and Russian forces were now free to march north to the Levant.

Catherine fell ill and died before her troops could complete what she called "The Great Drive North." However Russian swordsmen were able to reclaim the Suez coast and fortify it with the largest army known up to then in history. The Egyptians fortified their possessions in the Levant, preparing to repulse any Slavic incursions. But in the sincerest compliment to Catherine's military planning, Lord Takerekhonshu began to steal Russian military tactics and deploy more reliable swordsmen to defend Egypt's empire. The day of the chariot was over.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/76.jpg But darker challenges awaited.

A Cure for Pride

I want to avoid ethnocentrism here. It's form of pride. Scholars today are often accused of maintaining an Afrocentric view of human events. So I should apprise you that world history is not only about Russia events. In this time period the truly resurgent world power was neither Russia nor Egypt. It was Germany in the far Orient that experienced the greatest progress. We traded with them, but hardly appreciated their accumulated wealth nor questioned how these inscrutable German potentates always seemed to get the better half in our deals. Still, they stayed out of our wars with Egypt, and that at least was something to be grateful for.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/77.jpg

In the Far Hemisphere, which our 4th century ancestors knew nothing of, the vast Indian empire was crumbling, falling before the might of the growing Japanese and Zulu nations.

In our own hemisphere, both of our neighbors, the Romans and the Iroquois, were experiencing population spurts which would have a great impact on future events.

Well, that just about covers it for looking at the rest of the world. Now let's get back to talking about our race.

In 350 ad, the 4th and final Egyptian war broke out. Altho the Matriarch Catherine was long deceased, much of the credit for our victory can go to her. It was during her reign that final, lasting peace terms were negotiated with Egypt's main allies, Aztlan and Englandia. The distant Americans could not be swayed to peace, but they lived too far away to be concerned with. But of course Catherine's principal legacy was the vast army she left to her descendents. It was her granddaughter, the Czarina Catrinne, who finally put that vast array of men to good use.

Proclaiming the time had come for the Great Drive North, Catrinne "let her boys out" and took possession of the Levant. Fourteen iron battalions of warriors moved thru Judea and Phoenicia and prepared to drive back the unsteady trickle of Egyptian swordsmen who came to challenge them.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/78.jpg note: Roman settlers moving eastward

To reclaim their lands, the Egyptians marched in a deadly column of swordsmen. The primitive Russian horse fighters were lost in the early stages of the Fourth War and the remainder of the fighting would mostly occur on foot. Upon defeating a large army of Egypt's first wave, however, General Poshyel k'Chyertu didn't press his attack. Instead of pressing further north and risk driving the battle into Roman territory of Pompeii, Poshyel k'Chyertu had his troops dig in during the 360s, building up his reserves to full force and planning to assault the main column of Egyptians as they arrived in the Levant the following year.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/79.jpg

Czarina Catrinne dismissed Poshyel for failing to pursue a weakened enemy, but still benefited from his prudence. Kremlin records from the time indicate that Catrinne had ordered her general to send his troops eastward, around Pompeii, to attack the eastern flank of the Egyptian homeland. It was an audacious plan, but Poshyel refused, fearing that this maneuver would expose the Russian homeland to an invasion straight down the Nile-Red Sea corridor. Poshyel k'Chyertu's wisdom was rewarded with a dismissal from royal service and a retirement into a life of poverty. He did not live to see his strategy validated.

When the new Gypsy Horde charged south into Phoenicia, the Russian swordsmen were ready for them. A two year long battle ensued with the full might of each nation poured into the iron and blood that fought for the eastern Med.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/80.jpg

Tired of enduring decades of playing chessboard to the maneuvers of the pharaohs and czarinas, in 400 ad the people of the Sinai formally joined the Roman empire to seek their protection. The Roman city of Brundisium became the new eastern capital of the empire, effectively cutting off the surviving Russian army from our homeland.

Unable to advance or retreat, and prevented from sending new troops into the war zone across Roman held lands, the mighty Russian army was slowly cut to shreds by a bloody, decades long attrition. They gave as good as they got, but desperately undersupplied, they could not hold out. Meanwhile the Egyptians sent a naval force around the Bulge of Africa, which arrived in 420, threatening the militarily weak western provinces of Yakutsk and Smolensk. Provincial leaders were able to abandon public works and rush some military defenders into the field, but Russia's vulnerability was exposed by this tactic.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/81.jpg

In 421, a last gasp attack on Egyptian forces by the tattered Russian army convinced, finally, both empires of the foolishness of continuing the war. In four hundred years of fighting, the only concrete accomplishment was to push the locals into the arms of Rome. When the unit flags were finally returned to Mother Russia, the total armed forces of the Russian Levant barely numbered enough men to comprise one battalion.

The war, fought ineptly and by half measures, had produced no concrete gains and had cost the motherland dearly. This loss ushered in, for all practical purposes, the Russian Dark Age.

(2b cont'd)

Dang that's alot of action. I'm sure the Romans are really TO'd with all that bloodshed soaring into their lands. :lol:

I'm sure the Romans are really TO'd with all that bloodshed soaring into their lands. Nah, they don't mind. It's good for the cabbage.

Seriously tho, I tried several times to get a RoP deal out of them, but they kept on asking for too much money. I'm a real pennypincher when I play civ (as we'll see in the 16th century in this story). Whatever civ I play always ends up with an additional trait: chinsy. Like when I'm the English, my civ traits are expansionist, militaristic, and chinsy. I don't think the "chinsy" quality gives you any Golden Age, however, coz bein' a cheapskate is really its own reward.

Well you cant really get gpt until your reputation rate goes up. Mine is always low:(

Updates?:)

Oh, btw: Could you throw in your minimap in the next update?

Could you throw in your minimap in the next update?

I'll do something significantly better than a minimap with the next post. I've put an entire atlas online. But it won't take place in the story until the 12th century.

You don't mind waiting 800 years for the next installment, do you?

{spoiler removed in the interests of the "pursuasion of continuity" (cf. Northrup Frye) }

The Dark Age

The time between the Late Classical Period and the Renaissance is a dreary spot in history. Russia descended into a crazy quilt of feudal kingdoms and the power of the Czarinas waned until they could barely control even the neighborhoods of Moscow. Some states of Russia began to experiment with Republican forms of government, but little of greatness was accomplished.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/82.jpg

We learned little new of the world in those years, but the new trade in Burgundian ivories would soon change our ways.

Just as it looked as if our people would degenerate into warring factionalism, perhaps go the way of the chaotic Burgundian nations, the fates delivered to Russia an inspired leader.

"All our people fear going the way of the Burgundians," mused the traveler-merchant Baron Bahl Bering, "I say we should go their way. Go way over there and take their ivory business from them."

Soon after, Russian merchants began to refer to the Burgundian subcontinent by a new name. They called it, "New Africa." A smart Burgundian would have seen this as an ominous sign.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/83.jpg

Burgundians are Basically Stupid

As I was saying at our last session, the only bright spot in the Dark Age was the increasing trade with New Africa. Econo-historians in the past asserted that it was the increased trade with the east that triggered the Renaissance of Russian culture. That viewpoint has come under some critical scrutiny at the university with the works of Ingalls and Marques, but the basic thesis is sound. When Bering and the other merchant-explorers of the Middle Ages began to discover more opportunities in the east, the world view of the whole society was expanded.

Honestly, with the Burgundian subcontinent occupied only by brute savages, it's a surprise that no other world power thought to colonize them before we did.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/8dhow.jpg While Bering himself was off discovering what appeared to be a new land beyond the frozen wastes of America, the first Russian traders began to cross the Araby Sea in crude dhows and bringing back valuable Burgundian ivory.

While it was not the same quality as the African ivory harvested by Russian and Iroquois merchants, the tusks of Burgundia did represent a potential economic competitor to our exports. The wisdom of the medieval tradesmen was that it was better than they control the market than somebody else.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/84.jpg

Somehow, fighting broke out between the natives and the Russian merchants--well technically between the natives and the merchant's armed mercenaries. But whatever. Things didn't go too well for them, as you might expect from any clash between a feudal and a stone age culture. Native uprisings were a constant threat to business and as long as the natives held any power, ivory profits were going to prove negligible at best.

Among the biggest drains on profitability were the constant attacks of Burgundian, Hun, and other barbarian pirates who trolled the Bay of Richmond to prey on our merchants.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/85.jpg

For over a century these high seas brigands harassed honest businessmen--often with the clandestine support and approval from Burgundian potentates and even from the exotic foreigners from the isolated islands far to the south of the Orient.

Who am I talking about? Boy, do you really not know what kingdom lay beyond the Burgundian Ocean? Forget history, you little travka, you need a geography lesson.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/86.jpg

Excelent! :goodjob:

This is one of the best stories since the days of Daft.

Updates? ??? ???

Updates? ??? ???
Dang, Conquerer-Dude, you sure do ask for a lot of updates. I posted 10 chapters in seven days! Now that spring break is over with, the posting rate will slow down just a mite. I'll try to keep the rate at about two postings a week. Any more time spent on this new hobby and I'll have to start taking my kid to McDonalds for dinner instead of cooking a proper dinner.

This is one of the best stories since the days of Daft.
Thanks. But who is Daft? Are there some older stories I orta be reading? I don't recall that name from the sticky'd index of stories, but it's been a while since I looked at that.

But who is Daft? I don't recall that name from the index of stories... Oops. It's the first name on the index page. No wonder I missed it. :rolleyes: For somereason I was reading his name as "draftpanzer".

Don't ask.

Renaissance Ideas

Ah, to live in the Renaissance! That is the age for which my delicate soul was destined. Not this pointless hurly burly of a modern society. Nope, m'boy, of all the time periods one may dwell upon, the Renaissance is the only worthy choice for a true man of learning. After all, whoever goes to an Enlightenment Fair, or a Classical Age of Philosophy festival? 'Tis balderdash! The people know that Renaissance is the granddaddy of historical epochs.

It was an age of literature, discovery, manners, learning, and brand new techniques in engineering. The world's expert engineers, the Romans, built their system of grand canals in this age. Imagine the conviction and vision that it took to design a system of earthworks (http://kyapa.tripod.com/agengineering/canaltechnology/usmoctezumawellfossilcanal.jpg) and canals to bring irrigation waters to the far side of the Atlas mountains and turn the northern Sahara into a green southern Eden!

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/87.jpg

Or think about the innovations in sailing technology that allowed our ancestors to cross the uncrossable Araby, despite the violent monsoons, and plant our first overseas colony on the hilly western coasts of New Africa! Think of how it took an era of geniuses to rethink the boat and turn transport craft into war crafts strong enough to wipe out the last of the Burgundian pirates!

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/88.jpg

The spirit soars! Certainly our people had spiritual visions. How else can you explain the transfiguring beauty of the "separated twins" cathedrals of Moscow and St Petersburg, completed months apart from each other and bringing an unprecedented joy and serenity to the hearts of our people?

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/89.jpg

Oh, other nations had their rebirths in this era, too. The enigmatic oriental potentates of Germany had their own rebirth of thinking, but mostly applied their ideas to the military arts--the great German philosopher Züngentschüh wrote his Art von Krieg in the same year that the great Petrov established his first colony in New Africa. But that is hardly a worthy comparison.

A hundred years later the great Tuscarawa architect, Micah Eagle-O, would design an even greater cathedral in Allegheny, the Sistine Chapel. Twenty years after that the city of Paris saw the flowering of engineering genius of Leonârde d'Avignon, whose famed workshop revolutionized human thinking. This is what the Renaissance was all about. The glory and vision of realizing humanity's greatest gift--the capacity to create art and beauty...

But first we had to get those damned savages in New Africa out of the way.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/90.jpg

Dang, Conquerer-Dude, you sure do ask for a lot of updates.
I know, I'm a hippocrit. I always ask for updates and I never really update my stories that often.:D I admit it. :)

Awesome update, dude!

Updates? Just kiddin.

Do you have a zip of the map you're playing?

Do you have a zip of the map you're playing?

it's the standard Earth map that comes with vanilla civ3. You can probably do much better with the world map downloads here on civfan. For instance the prefabbed Earth game scenario makes Mexico WAY too skinny, omits New Zealand, and totally butchers the shapes of Cuba and the British isles.

If I could download the Civ3 maps from this site, I'd never use this pre-fab again.

Years of Turbulence and Change

For centuries the Levant had been the political, trade, and military focal point of the Near Hemisphere. But with eventual Roman domination of that region and the growing power of far away Germany, the center of conflict, if not the center of gravity, shifted to the east. While Russians came to dominate southern and central Burgundia, the northern portion of the subcontinent was the scene of growing tensions among the other world powers.

"Whoever controls the Himmel Mountains," the military philosopher Hans Züngentschüh wrote in his immortal Art von Krieg, "truly controls the gateway to Heaven." The exact meanings of these arcane Oriental aphorisms escape me, but rest assured that it means in substance that central Asia was going to be the site of some pretty heavy fighting.

More than once in the 11th century any pairing among Rome, Egypt, Germany, and even Englandia--by these times called the "old man of Asia"--threatened to stumble into war. Finally, in 1170, the two strongest powers reached their breaking points. For reasons lost to history, the Germans arrayed their vast armies for the conquest of Rome and unleashed a new age of Renaissance warfare.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/91.jpg

Have you ever noticed how bad things always hit the fan right before your guests show up? Well, the Teuto-Roman War is a good example of this. Even as the two powers squared off for their conflagration in the mountains of Asia, strange visitors came calling upon our hemisphere.

Rumors of other lands beyond the two great oceans had circulated for centuries. But sudden wealth and new technologies coming into the grasp of the backwater Aztecs made it clear that somebody else was out there. Then in the prophetic year of 1111 ad, strange clever men hailing from a swampy jungle named "Japan-quo" sailed into the far western town of Yakutsk.

http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/images/timeline/1500_1600/ship.jpg

In an explosion of new trading opportunities, our scientists and cartographers came to learn that between the two oceans lay not the veil of Heaven, nor the houses of the Sun and Moon, but two brand new continents, teaming with life, new languages, and strange cultures.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/92.jpg (To see a proper atlas of this era, go HERE (http://www.brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/))

And despite the occasional plague or viral pandemic sweeping thru the unprepared populations of both hemispheres, cultural exchange turned out to be a net plus for all parties concerned.

Of course this mattered little to the Romans and Germans who fought valiantly across the open steppes of central Asia, taking, losing, then retaking city after city in a vast bloodbath.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/93.jpg

Vlad Soyuzski's epic poem The Reclamation of New Leipzig is a stirring example of how Renaissance artists embraced the passions and fervor of even these militant times. Despite its obvious sympathies in favor of the German knights riding in to liberate Roman-held Neue Leipzig in 1160, it has become a timeless standard for men of war from all cultures to quote as they struggle to express their love of valor and the honorable hatred for their own profession.

My arms are soaked in the blood of men http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/9knight.jpg
whose countries I'm not welcome in;
and yet, I know, they'll greet me fair
to their Heaven, should ever I travel there.
These valiant Teuton knights bedecked
in oriental splendor, who ride erect,
to free their lost city on the Himmel range
greet Death thus, in these days of turbulence and change.

More than once the Roman monarchs pled with the matriarch and sundry local kings of Rus to join in the war against the Germans. But always the Russians demurred, having other concerns. Among those was the specter of a shrinking culture, as hinted at by the defection of an entire city to the Iroquois alliance in 1150ad.


http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/94.jpg

2 b cont'd

Ooooo that culture flipping sucks I hate that.

I'm not forgetting to play or post, folks. Just danged busy at work and in the so-called personal life. Updates will start to occur this week once I finish editing the text and cutting the screenies down to digestable sizes.

This is a teaser.

Oh wait, before I forget... this reminder: the Atlas of Czarina Catherine's Afro-Rush Earth (http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/) (the world in which I'm playing this story) can be found right here (http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/).

Well, I just took a look at the map on your blog site. Very creative naming scheme! :)

Final Musings about the Renaissance

Home is where you sleep, home is where you drink, home is where you crawl to when you're vomiting...

Ah-ha! That got your attention.

I've been told, you know, that the key to education is relating unfamiliar facts to a student's existing familiarities. You come to know new things based solely on what you already know before. This is why theologians who believe in a benevolent God invariably have kind fathers while theologians who prophesy a wrathful, vengeful God invariably have some deep seated worries haunting them from their past.

But let's relate this to Russia's historical successes, shall we? Our Russian theology was always a mixture, a hybrid between anxious French paranoiacs, who from their desert island reclusion view the divinity as a sly, curly-tongued trickster, and the slothful Iroquois Pantheists to our south. Our Russian Catholic Church knows better than the Pantheists that leading simple lives doesn't mean the Lord won't throw a few disasters your way on a divine whim. But neither are we convinced, like the Franstralian Trinitarians are, that God's entirely out to stick it to us.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/heavenhell.gif Russians reject simple dualistic paradigms; balance heaven and hell

Balance, not excess to either extreme, is the key to happiness, son. In a similar vein, our sciences found a healthy medium between free thinking English aesthetics and nose-to-the-grindstone Roman engineering.

Yes, boy, I'm preparing you to study Renaissance sciences. It was in this age that we, and more sadly the English, discovered just how much nature abhors vacuums. I refer you to our 19th century rocket ship pioneer Govray Husianic, who said:
Ask an English scientist to take you to the moon, and he will try and lasso you a cloud. Ask a Roman scientist, and he'll start to build you a staircase.
There's a reason why Englishmen and Romans haven't walked on the moon. Romans could always turn an honest profit in the Middle Ages thru their hard work. But on the whole, the Roman was a man without vision. He worked hard, he fought hard, but he never came up with too much that was new. Englians, on the other hand, were a mystical people with a surplus of vision, but with damned little time or resources devoted to protecting or projecting their dreams. They designed and rethought everything, but built nothing.

http://www.britainexpress.com/images/history/merchant1475.gif We Russians saw a happy medium. We invented, but we traded what we contrived for profit as soon as we could. We bartered and sold technology around the world, allowing the wealthy plodding Romans to stay up on the latest tech that we gained from hard work or back-engineering Egyptian cleverness. Our businesses also allowed Mother Russia to keep her taxes low--perhaps the lowest in the world.

Our people, though as curious as any other, saw that the greater profit lay not in research alone, but also in the brokering of technology. Romans thought you got wealthy by making a new thing and selling it. Englians didn't worry about getting wealthy at all, but sought only to share their lovely visions.

The Russian Grand Duma--seat of power in our growing (if imperfect) democratic monarchy--oversaw this policy of selling technology and sciences to all nations that had the liquidity to purchase it, thereby giving us the money to buy further technologies from France and Egypt without compromising our own tax bases. Despite continuing budget deficits in the Renaissance, our empire could run huge deficits and never risk running out of money.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/95.jpg

Sound business sense, boy, and let others do the fighting. That was the Russian way in the Renaissance. Eventually, of course, our people would rejoin the world in its violence. But by then, it would be another era. We would join Rome's wars come the Imperial Age.

The Final Teuto-Roman War

My father once told me "Those Romans love nothing better than a good fight." Papa was singular in his views on Romans. There was, in fact, one thing Romans loved more than fighting. They loved ganging up on a weaker enemy for a fight. In their regional prejudices they probably assumed that the Germans would always be pushovers in their centuries of warfare against those exotic Orientals. Rome's other notable trait is their dogged loyalty to even an outmoded idea. The Germans could certainly fight and at times seemed poised to drive the Romans from the field.

Eternally disappointed in their efforts to conquer new lands in far Asia, the Caesars constantly begged their neighbors, Egypt and Russia, to join them in their fights against the Teutons. Some time around 1315ad they finally met our price.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a01.jpg

Russian knights from a generation unfamiliar with war zestfully joined the fight in search of glory and greatness, adventure and immortality. Our young nobles fought valiantly in the best sort of war there is--a victorious one fought far from one's native soil.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a02.jpg

Russian knights were decisive in the capture of New Berlin on the scorching Bavarian Desert in 1325, but the Roman Legionnaires managed to take and hold that city. Our gains were minimal. For another generation dashing young Slavic men sought fame and found bloodshed on the German front. But while Germans, Romans, and Russians fought, it was the diligent, idealist Englandians who ultimately acquired far eastern possessions in Indogermany. Eventually all sides in the conflict tired of a perfectly matched contest and sought a final peace. We'd gained no empire, but we had disproved one myth the world held about the modern Russian man--our people could fight. If any doubt remained, the next war would end it.

http://strategicsimulations.net/catalog/images/SSITL6023.jpg

Major political changes were occurring in Russia in the 14th century, as well. With the growth of the power of the Duma in domestic matters, the Royal Family began to resent the incursion on their traditional power. Each new call for lowering the property requirements or curbing the power of the nobility in voting led to further disaffection between the monarchy and the people's representatives. Two thousand miles away over the ocean, the growing colonies of New Africa blistered at their lack of representation in the Duma and had the appalling corruption rates to show how little they cared for rule from the motherland.

In mid-century the Romanovas determined to remove themselves from the influence of ever-expanding voter rolls. In 1360 they moved the imperial residence to the remaining royalist province of Sevasta, 500 miles to the west of Moscow. The empire now had, essentially, two capitals--two capitals which did not necessarily get along with one another.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a03.jpg

(don't worry; we're getting closer to the next round of violence)

Don't worry, we're getting closer to the next round of violence
:woohoo: Since you are currrently allies you might want to surprise attack the Roman when they least expect it. :evil:

Great story!!!!

I will follow this

Update! Please!!!

Yes, has this been neglected or somethin'?

Ple-he-hease!
*passes out*

Good job. Yet it has been 1 day! *le gasp*

I think I speak for me when I say-- update or die.

Nice chapters Bucky!

Life sometimes, you know, calls and won't hang up. So my story is stalled at 1600 and my game at 1700. But rest assured the game is not abandoned. These words of encouragement are like hot coals beneath my feet--bound to get me going again. Update tonight when I return home. I promise. And if you're not a pretty girl and we're not on a date, you can always believe my promises. :cool:

...Always, eh? ...

And if you're not a pretty girl and we're not on a date, you can always believe my promises.

I'm laughing at this for 2 reasons. Take a guess. :p

Sit down, sit down, Alek. I know I've been away for a while. You're not the only little pampered diletante I'm tutoring you know. Anyway, in order to buy some new books to continue my studies, I had to take a night job at a local restaurant.

No, how could I know if it's any restaurant you and your spoiled rich friends go to? Oh, don't worry, you wouldn't see me there. I'm bussing table at Der Wok von Lintelini, that Egypto-Germo-Roman restaurant in the government district. I doubt your snobby friends would like it unless you're "slumming it" for the night.

Oh quit your blubbering, Alek. I've got more Medieval documents to show you, just so you at least sound like less of an ignorant govnodavy when you get to college next semester. Heh, assuming any university is willing to take you.

What? Moscow Politech- ? How many libraries did your mother have to donate to get you accepted there, boy? Ah, never mind. I'm here to teach you, not marvel at your idiotic luck. Here, read this. It's a lithographed copy of the "Charter of the Rights of the Boyars"--mother Russia's first formal constitution from 1434. By granting a voice to the landed snots like your family, it paved the way for the eventual empowerment of the rest of society, altho the process took centuries to complete. Yes, read it, read it.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a04doc.jpg

This balanced Russian constitution, however difficult it proved for the politician and lords of the early Imperial Age, was a qualified success in building the internal strengths of the empire. The nobility gave the empire reliable, vigorous leadership (something our neighbors the Iroquois lacked), while the firm republican values of the people gave our population a sense of political liberty and entitlement (something the Romans lacked).

So it's not surprising that the 15th century saw the defection of two news provinces to our empire. In the forbidding Sahel, the city of "Caesaraugusta" (modern day Tsaroygusch) left the Roman empire and defected to us in 1430. Then in 1475, the bustling borderlands around Vladivostok returned to the motherland, altho to this day the city still retains much of its Iroquoian influences.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a05.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a06.jpg

But despite our victories, our political problems were holding us back. It was our plodding Roman rivals who created the domineering financial centers in the prosperous Nile Valley. Macroeconomic models today suggest that our own modest financial center in St Petersburg was no more than two generations away from becoming the world's center of financial transactions. But soon economic competition from the bankers and stockjobbers of Cumae seemed to reduce our Russian bankers to second rate money lenders.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a04.jpg

To reformers of the Imperial Age, the source of the problem was too clear. Our form of government encouraged petty corruption and was ultimately holding us back.

A century later, as the First Scientific Revolution was under way, Russia found itself again in a race for innovation. Half a world away, the loathsome French were engaging in a rush for scientific progress in the fields of chemistry, optics, astronomy, and physics. Franstralian spies watched our scientists in their noble pursuits, swiped our Russian inventions, schemed to seduce our brightest students and whisk them away to the colleges of "Le Daune Undeur."

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a07.jpg
http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a08.jpg

The French were never too far behind us in developing the world's leading scientific institutions. With a "brains race" on and fearing that a loss in social stability would endanger our slim lead in scientific progress, popular leaders in the Duma shamefully conspired with corrupt nobles to stall the process of democratization of Russian society. Political liberation stalled while a culture of privilege (and accomplishment) flourished.

Perhaps it was all for the best that our era democratic reforms was put off for the time. Democracies are good at many things. But among those things is not the ability to fight a long distant war. The world was about to become a dangerous place in the bloody 16th century and reforms would only have been a distraction. So we continued along, half monarchial, half democratic, and fully poised for the dangers of the Imperial Age.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a09.jpg

Now I've got a real special book to show you--perhaps the first real work of literary journalism in the history of Russian literature. It's a book well ahead of its time, trust me.

What do you mean, 'What is it?' It's a book, you opezdol. I'm sure you've seen one before. You just peel it open from the edges and read the words you find on the pages inside it.

Oh quit pouting. You rich kids are all so damned lazy. I'm only kidding. I'm giving you this book to read. (you opezdol) So read!

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a09.jpg

Because, you numbskull, you learn better by reading than by listening. That's why. Do you complain about everything? Open it up. Yes, now, Alek.

*sigh*, Of course from the first chapter. You know just when I think you're about to run out of stupid questions... Hang on. I'll go get that. You start reading.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk.jpg

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Preface: Coffeechat

"The thing to being a great leader," Dolboyob Kustik said to me in our most famous conversation (unofficially speaking), "the key to it is, you've got to have a war."

"A war?" I asked. "Surely there are other ways to accomplish great things in life..."

He paused.

"No." He nodded his head, as if just now settling the matter in his mind. "It takes a war. Nothing else will do."

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a11sam.jpg Normally I wouldn't have paid much attention to such a simplistic and thoughtless assertion. It was just us there, two Congorusan cattlemen, sitting in a coffeeshop in Kharkov and "whistling for wind," as we Southerners like to say. But then again, it wasn't "just us." We didn't know it then, but destiny was sitting with us in that room, too. And, of course, we weren't just two cattlemen, altho sometimes we liked to fool ourselves into believing that we were.

I was a writer, a tutor at the local library, a young, but semi-retired man of means who chose to move to this out of the way province in search of a fortune that could be made without too much of an effort. I had had two novels published, which made me a minor celebrity among the local bigwigs, which in turn got me invited to some exclusive clubs and meetings. And my drinking companion was no ordinary hide-puncher, either. He was a politician with more ambition than brains and, due to his late father's fame, more public name recognition than ambition.

In the year before our little coffeechat, rumor had it that Squire Kustik had gotten it into his skull that he deserved to become prime minister of all the Africas, just like his dear ol' papa. So when I asked him out for our informal visit that day, there was really more going on than two leather merchants "straining the beans," as we Southerners like to say. He knew I was a writer looking for a story and I knew he was a politician looking to be a story. This is what the English philosophers of old called a symbiosis.

I drained a refill into my samovar and wondered why he thought greatness required other men to bleed and die. "Squire Kustik," I inquired, "we are at peace and no great power threatens us. Are you saying Russia and all the Africas are incapable of greatness in this generation?"

"Please, Miksha, call me Dolboyob." My turn to nod with certainly. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a11cafe.jpg "And that's not what I'm saying at all. But look at the Romans. They have a wealth of great men. Titanicus, Berlosconius, Benitocus, Garibaldio. And why do they--a weaker, poorer, less accomplished empire than ours--produce so many more great men?"

"But those are only their military men, Squi... Dolboyob. What about their great engineers, their explorers, their musicians?"

"That is nothing without leadership from a man of vision, a man on a horse who knows how to rally a nation's hearts to pull together for one cause. That is greatness. An engineer never does that."

"An engineer doesn't have vision? What about the great irrigation canals of the Sahara? That's not a great thing, sir?"

"A great thing? Sure, it's a great thing. But that doesn't make a great man. That's just a thing that a man of skills gave to the people of Rome and Antium. A gift. But those engineers don't have greatness to them. Greatness is when you ask something from the people, when you inspire them to accomplish grand deeds and wonders, not when you simply give to them grand things you've made yourself."

Now I saw where he was going with this. "So greatness inspires sacrifice?"

http://www.ignatiushistory.info/00161s.jpg "Sometimes, if things go rough. But I'm not big on sacrifice. That's for losers. Greatness should inspire reverence. That's the problem with this country today. The people do not revere their leaders, those of us who were born to the responsibilities of leadership. They want low taxes and straight roads and funny books and clean shipping ports and a fresh import of leather every winter to keep them warm and stylish."

He sipped his bitter coffee and continued, "But they don't--and this is where my vision for our future greatness comes from--they fail to revere their leaders. This is why greatness requires war. The people must be shown, every generation or so, truly shown who their betters are and why they should follow us."

"Us?"

"Or whoever takes over after these damned Reformers are driven from office. The point is, Russia's greatness needs a war and until we have one, we will always be less than what our fathers dreamed of."

http://www.ignatiushistory.info/00160s.jpg Three years later Squire Dolboyob Kustik married Princessa Zelda Romonova, third daughter of Czarina Kathiya IVth, and two years after that, "by soap or by rope," as we Southerners like to say, he was appointed leader of the Progress party, then only a minority faction in the Duma. He didn't talk about war when he was schmoozing with the squires and barons who selected the party's leaders (for they had no formal party officers or partisan conventions back then and most political matters were settled in parlors or the Matriarch's dining room). He talked about destiny and how great the Russian people were, and how his faith in God and Our Savior were the only political theory he needed to govern justly.

I was a young novelist then and had become bored with politics. Nothing much happened around the turn of the century in Moscow except bourgeois plays, pedantic operas, and debates in the Duma about taxation rates and corruption in the colonies. So I didn't tell anybody about a five year old discussion I had with the new minority leader. No one expected much would happen from the Progressives' platform anyway.

Then the scandals began...

Keep reading, you brat. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk2.jpg I can't do all the talking.

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Three: Prime Minister at Last

...When two elderly Dukes died in the winter of 1523, two more young men of the "Iron Generation" were elevated to the peerage. Following the gains and defections in the Duma over the Corn Reform party's Welinsky Scandals, the Progressives under young Count Dolboyob Kustik were poised to outvote the Corn Reform party and take control of the Duma. When the peers and deputies met the following spring Kustik's lieutenant, the copper merchant Zalupo Krashkartski, rose in the Duma and called for a vote of confidence against the Corn party's embattled first minister, Duke Robhihm of Kiev. Watching his own friends turn on him, Robhihm announced he would resign his office before the vote was finished.

That same afternoon, the Czarina approached her son-in-law, Count Kustik of Maslagorod, and offered him the First Ministership. Reputedly Count Kustik blurted out "Yes, I'll take it!" before the Grand Matriarch could finish her ceremonial offertory speech...

http://www.ignatiushistory.info/00162s.jpg "The point is, Russia's greatness needs a war and until we have one, we will always be less than what our fathers dreamed of."

Chapter Four: November Ninth

...The horror of the young Englishmen's action took a while to settle into the city's psyche. Moscow's hospitals were full with the dying and the dead. At first city officials blamed "bad airs" and then "rats" for the pandemic--they knew nothing of medical sciences and epidemiology. One deranged physic of the town even proposed it was not the rats but tiny gnits on the rats who carried the disease from town to town. Soon, however the Prime Minister Kustik came to blame the wretched English sailors with their poisoned apples for the diseases that ravaged Moscow. The city sheriff stormed down to the port and seized the entire crew of the ESS Luym where it was anchored in the city port.

"These vile Engle-men must be punished," he pronounced within days of the discovery of the true cause of the pandemic--the apples.

http://www.prosser.wsu.edu/Images/basket-apples.gif

Some writers today propose that Englandia was destined for conquest. For a century now the world's statesmen have privately dismissed decrepit Englandia, with its ancient culture and corrupt leaders, as the "old man of Asia." Unable to hold its lands and sundry vassal states, the Engle Empire was ripe for the picking. But with the Great Game of Asia still afoot, with Romans and Germans glaring across the steppes at one another with deep suspicion, no great empire dared to start the carving.

But clever and ambitious generals lurked in every great army--Rome's, Germany's, America's, but especially Egypt's--and they dreamed of bringing grand Englandia under their flag.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a12.jpg

This is why they called it the Great Game. Central Asia was the hub of the Near World and yet tottered under the weak rule of the English. Count Kustik was quick to send his strongest armies north from Ravenna, Araby, and the Hindi Rus. But swift as the young knights rode to avenge the Plague of Moscow on the apple-peddling Engli, wiser heads in Moscow feared what would happen if the other Eurasian powers decided to come to old Engle's aid.

Kustik's wily foreign minister, Prince Zhopu Risi, traveled to Europe, bearing horrendous stories--some even true--of English barbarism. In the court of ruling Cleopatrician of Egypt, Minister Risi denounced English perfidy, won the enlightened Egyptians to Russia's cause, and secured an alliance against Englandia. Once the war commenced, two great powers would stand in partnership, not competition. His mission was completed none too soon, for within a week of the treaty signing in Thebes, word arrived that Russian swordsmen had crossed the Kazak desert and were besieging Reading in central Englandia.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a13.jpg

Just as swift and certain was the coming vengeance of the first major battle in the war. Duke Mudak the Elder of Mikshagrad brought his disciplined Chernozem Knights across the plains east of the Caspian Sea and surrounded the venerated fortress city of Oxford. With tremendous violence they ravaged the lands--some of Englandia's most cultivated farmlands. Roman troops, who for years had plotted to wrest Oxfordia's farmlands for their own empire could only sit by helplessly, knowing any move might threaten their nation with war against the Russo-Egyptian alliance.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a14trus.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a14.jpg
the fabled city of Oxford-on-the-Caspian

When Mudak of Mikshagrad rode into Oxford he wisely restrained his men from plundering the city. His orders from Minister of War Prince Vodkapolya were, as Count Kustik promised, to "conquer with compassion." Kustik and Vodkapolya wanted to ensure that other cities would resist Russian swords and muskets less. But their policy was also designed to give the surrounding empires less cause to ride to Englandia's rescue. But it was Foreign Minister Risi in his travels to Rome City who would ensure that the Roman armies did not turn on Russia.

Ah, I see you're getting to the good part. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk2.jpg

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Five: The Partition of Englandia

"The Vengeance Spring" of 1525 saw the birth of a new generation of heroes for the Russian empire. In the Charge at Oxford and the Battle of Southern Road, the young nobles of the "Iron Generation" proved their mettle and brought acclaim to their families and heritage. But the acknowledged leader of the Russian knights, Duke Mudak of Mikshagrad also noticed something less heroic--or perhaps more heroic but less modern--in the casualty rolls from his two great battles.

The troops handling the crude early firearms of the day suffered greater casualties than their sword wielding comrades, even tho the early military doctrines of the day dictated that the sword was the more dangerous weapon to hold in combat. In the camps surrounding conquered Oxford, Mikshagrad began to formulate his new theories of mounted warfare.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a15.jpg

The mounted gunman had been intended for defense purposes, like the infantry musketman, while the attack, coming in close to the enemy, was still considered the gloryright of noble chevaliers. Exactly reverse, reasoned the Duke. Ill-educated commoners were more clumsy with the mechanics of firearms, already an awkward match for horsemen. Most of the mounted casualties came from misfired muskets and blunderbusses. A new breed of professional soldiers would have to be trained in mounted gunfire and used not as defenders--a waste of their shock value in combat--but as attackers. The Iron Generation would have to set aside their old fashioned ideas of gallantry and become masters of modern warfare.

Mikshagrad took his ablest officers off of the eastern and northern perimeters and spent the winter of '25-26 training them and their troops for a new style of war.

Meanwhile, to the north and east of Oxford, the English prepared for the following year's combat. The Duke of Bennyhill mounted a large and surprisingly swift police force to guard York, while the Earl of Bean prepared a massive counterassault to ride in from Newcastle.

But the most novel development of that quiet Autumn--the coldest in the memory of the tropic-loving Russians--was Foreign Minister Risi's journey to Rome City in the Sahara. There Risi entered into tough negotiations with the Romans, eventually cutting a surprise deal to bring the vaunted Red Army into the war on Russia's side.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a17.jpg

At the same time, Risi's personal secretary had crossed the Arctic circle and arrived in the frozen Tundra of Cincinnati and drew the obstinate Ameri into yet a third alliance against the English by exploiting the centuries long animosity between the two Asio-Saxon kingdoms.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a17cin.jpg

Now, utterly surrounded by enemies, the English finally began to see their years of decay and decadence catch up to them. All Englandia's enemies were arrayed in an unprecedented league of blood. Just like the ancient Ukrainian proverb from the savannahs, four mighty jackals surrounded the one limping and ancient gazelle.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a16.jpg

Finish these next two chapters, young Alek. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk2.jpg
I've planned for something a little bit different for tomorrow's session

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Seven: Englandia's Sorriest Hour

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a16a.jpg

With his new Cossacks still untested in major combat, the Duke of Mikshagrad allowed his old style knights one last hurrah, the march on Newcastle.

Mudok of Mikshagrad was aware that his knights were in a race against Roman and Egyptian forces for the conquest of Englandia. And so he spared them no support in unleashing the Iron Fury of the Russian noblemen out to avenge the apple attack on Moscow.

Baron Kolvitz, general of the march to Newcastle, knew he had scant months to capture this prized English town before swarms of Roman troops came galloping north up the Caviar Trade Road from Caesera and Byzantium to capture some of Englandia before all the good lands were taken.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a18.jpg

Kolvitz marched two corps of chevaliers into the ranks of Englandia's vaunted longbowmen and captured the counties west of Newcastle. But as weakened as they were, the Earl of Bean's army held back the charging Russians and saved the city from a plundering attack.

However new mounted drives the following two years drove the last of Bean's forces from the field and left Newcastle surrounded and under imminent attack from Kolvitz's force. That same year Mikshagrad in Oxford--now a pacified if not wholly content corner of the Russian empire--launched surprise, devastating raids into the counties lying between Oxford and York. With the core of Englandia's military strength now centered at York under Duke Bennyhill, Mikshagrad moved to destroy the farmlands and roads to slow down any attacks coming down from the north.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a19.jpg . . http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a20.jpg

The English, reeling from assaults on all fronts sent ambassadors to the capitals of the Russian League, but no nation on earth would grant them peace. In 1535 daring Russian raiders began to harass the areas south of York as Egyptian forces pressed in on the English Empire's second city from the west. That year Newcastle finally fell to the harried, and by now outmoded, Russian knights. Along the coast of the Southern Ocean, the Englian colony of Richmond fell to the Romans. These losses were catastrophic, too much for the ruling elite to bear. In 1537 a palace coup replaced the old monarch and council with a new, militaristic English dynasty under Winston the Bullish. The new king sought a quick and easy victory by ordering a counterassault on occupied Richmond. This would not prove to be the hour for their empire to rally, however, and the Romans slaughtered the underequipped English in the rice paddies of the Ganges Valley.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a21.jpg
. . . . http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a22.jpg

Perhaps cognizant of the changing nature of warfare in the world, perhaps sobered by partition of Englandia, the two leading Vespuccian nations in 1635--Babylonia and Persia--signed a new kind of military alliance. This would promise to be both a stabilizing and devastating model for international diplomacy in the years to come, but for the moment the mutual protection pact of the Perso-Babylonian bloc was the first and most startling "permanent" alliance known to the nations of the world.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a23.jpg

The world was modernizing, thanks in large part to the dangerous events unfolding across the Englandian Steppes, and despite the Prime Minister's assurances, not all progress was good.

Big props to all yall egging me on to getting this part of the story rolling. Between the radical change in tone, and having to totally refurbish my blog (http://brownbagblog.com) due to a software glunch (yes, dammit, I said glunch), and dealing with a buttload of new duties at work, mostly related to the dreaded standardized tests that they measure all us teachers by these days, I've been in over my head. So I'm using this 3-day weekend to play ketchup. That is, it'll come out slowly and in clumps, but only if you keep beatin it.

Threats of violence have been greatly appreciated, guys.

Great story, it seems to get better and better every time! The way your write makes it seem like an actual world, not just a game..keep it up!

Heheh, Yu-Kahn.

I'm honoured.

Nice chapters.

Heheh, Yu-Kahn. I'm honoured.

Unfortunately with me in Africa & India and Yu-Khan way on the other side of the world, I don't think we'll see much action over there. But then, I've only played up to about 1700ad so far. In your honor I'll see if I can't at some point send an armada over to your homeland in the next couple of centuries and slaughter thousands of innocent civilians in your province. I mean, what the hey, it's Easter, right?

The way your write makes it seem like an actual world, not just a game Thanks. I'm a history teacher, so my brain just works out the story that way. I'm trying to capture why I love this game; it's fractile so that the closer you look at any single move the more details there are to discover in what it might represent.

Thanks. I'm a history teacher, so my brain just works out the story that way. I'm trying to capture why I love this game; it's fractile so that the closer you look at any single move the more details there are to discover in what it might represent.

I think that also excuses you from the fact that "fractal" is the word you are looking for. But yes, I'm in total agreement with the readers before me, keep it up! I'm really enjoying this.

Read, read! Why haven't you finished that book yet?. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk2.jpg
Yes, I know tomorrow is Easter Sunday. And I've got a trip planned for you. Just hush up and read, boy

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Eight: Bloody Faith

With Egyptian troops driving into Englandia from the west, Minister of War Prince Vodkapolya again pressed Lord Mikshagrad to press onto York. But Mudok of Mikshagrad was a cautious man and preferred drilling his troops, including the untested Cossack units, to avoid disaster. In frustration, the war minister went to the Prime Minister and demanded Mudok's head.

"Taking York should be easy, your excellency," he argued. "It's like sending Kolvitz to Newcastle." Altho militaristic in policy, both men were sorely lacking in actual combat experience--a trait that perhaps made their love of war understandable. In fact, the campaign to take Newcastle was a hard three year slog thru mud and snow and the success came in a heavy cost of blood and treasure. But having not seen the blood and having never known for a want of treasure, Prime Minister Kustik was all too ready to order a new campaign.

"We need more successes," he ordered his deputy, "Fire Mikshagrad and promote Kolvitz to Field Marshall. Send our knights and Cossacks into the steppes and let no man come back without glory or gore."

The mighty Iron Generation, now a decade older and hardened by war grabbed their lances and swords and blunderbusses and rode into the fury under their gallant new general. However the aging and ruthless Lord Bennyhill was ready for Kolvitz's foolhardy charge. Bennyhill's forces, altho outnumbered, took the high ground at Faith Hill and waited for the Russian charge. Kolvitz, less an advocate of the new Cossack units, had Lord Mikshagrad's best troops arrayed in the rear of his column to serve as defenders in case of a retreat. When the English knights routed Kolvitz's vanguard, the Cossack guard, with their superior firepower, saved the regiment from decimation, but the failure to place them up front cost the Russians a needed victory.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a24a.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a24b.jpg

As Kolvitz rested beyond Faith Hill, Bennyhill readied a finishing blow, a full on charge on the Russian camp. But fortune favored the undeserving Russian army that afternoon. Egyptian knight armies under Lord Duwai Haphtu charged in from the west, meeting Bennyhill's knights and musketmen before they could finish off the Slavic army. Lord Haphtu's army took York the following month.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a24.jpg

Despite the last minute rescue from the Gypsy golden knights, losses to the Russian army were devastating. The heaviest losses fell on the elite Slavic knight units--the ones whose ranks typically attracted the best of the young nobles of the Iron Generation. Kolvitz's army would go on to greater glories in the east, but the lessons of the Battle of Faith Hill lingered. The knights of old could not sustain warfare in the bloody 16th century. Many a young baron saw the best and bravest of his comrades slain that day and his bones left to bleach in the harsh English sun. New tactics were needed and a renewed attachment to use of the mounted Cossacks swept thru the Russian officer corps.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a24knt.jpg

Finished that last chapter yet? http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a10bk2.jpg My lands, you're a slowpoke.

Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Ten: Endgame

In Moscow, the Duma railed against Prime Minister Kustik's interference in the conduct of the war. Sacking a popular general and replacing him with a "rust-shirt" leader like Kolvitz was the height of arrogance, the nadir of statesmanship, the opposition Corn Reform party leaders started to mumble. But before the Corn party could work up their whiggish nerves to challenge the Prime Minister's government, Minister of Law and Government Zalupo Krashkartski, Kustik's more capable lieutenant announced that an English spy ring had been discovered in Moscow. In a swift crack down, all suspected traitors and conspirators were rounded up and opposition newspapers shut down. When the emergency passed, Minister Krashkartski revealed that this time the nefarious Engli were plotting to poison the Russians' beloved yams and a second scheme to poison the empire's mango harvest was also afoot.

http://historyonthenet.com/Civil_War/images/dismiss.jpg In this environment, no one felt right challenging the Prime Minister on his authority to safeguard the people, no matter how inept he sometimes seemed. The Corn party quieted down and no one stood up for Mudok the Elder of Mishkagrad when he lost his pension.

After the Egyptians took the old capital of London, Prince Vodkapolya ordered Kolvitz to push onto Hastings, where the young King Winston was now personally rallying the troops. The English had upgraded most of their defenders in the motherland to musketry, so Kolvitz wisely chose to send in Cossacks in force this time.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a26.jpg

There they met with and attempted to coordinate with the Egyptian knights rushing from the north and the advanced Roman mounted muskets riding from the south. With his Cossacks and elite knights checked from taking the fortified city of Hastings outright by Winston's formidable defenses, General Kolvitz camped early and made the cold calculation to let the isolated and less numerous Roman and Egyptian allies exhaust themselves in assaults on Hastings first.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a27.jpg

The gambit worked. After the Egyptians wiped out the strongest English defenders and both sides exhausted their limited gunpowder supplies, Kolvitz felt confident about sending in his refreshed Cossack units to capture Hastings and then push north past Roman occupied Warwick toward King Winston's "temporary" capital of Nottingham.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a28.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a28a.jpg

The English empire was wounded severely and her enemies were circling like whales about a sinking galley.* Kolvitz pushed north toward Nottingham and the endgame. He now placed full confidence in his Cossacks (one company led surprisingly by a 19 year old prince named Mudok the Younger of Mikshagrad).

"Kustik's Panthers" swiftly consumed the distance between occupied Warwick and fortified Nottland. Their speed was aided greatly by the decision of many Cossack officers to unburden themselves of the heavy armor of traditional Russian knights. With increasingly accurate and powerful firearms coming into circulation at this time, the more foresighted of the cavalrymen was that chestplates were only cumbersome, not useful, a vestige of the past when loyal Russians should be looking to the future.

Expecting a battle as hot as Faith Hill before them, the Cossacks were surprised to find Nottingham only barely defended, reeling in chaos, and the king dead at the hands of his own war council. In their darkest hours, the English apparently turned on one another, lacking the character of pulling together in times of struggle that is the hallmark of any great people. The city fell after a few brief scuffles with local resistors, the newly crowned monarch resigned, abdicated, and was put to death. Altho scattered splinter princedoms and resistance movements among the Engli would continue for two generations, the war against Englandia was over and the once great empire was no more.

A victorious and ebullient Russian nation celebrated their great victory and the people prepared to enter what many believed to be a coming Golden Age.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a29.jpg

The year after the war ended, Prime Minister Kustik retired back to his ranch in Congorus, older but no wiser, and convinced he had done an honorable thing in prosecuting a war against weaker enemy. In the years since, we have come to learn that the plague that attacked Moscow in 1525 was not caused by poisoned apples--the entire claim was, as we southerners like to say, "a nag with no shoes."

The plague were carried by rodents and the germs that they carry. Traders were circling the globe for the first time and strange diseases were traveling toward unprepared populations with the cargoes they brought. We may never know for certain, but there are those of us who knew Count Kustik who will continue to believe he knew his accusation against Englandia was false. Yet Kustik remained a hero to many people--those who believed in the upward progress of the Russian nation and those who saw the sword as man's purest invention. But they were wrong. Honor is man's greatest invention, even if it was the one form of Russian progress that Dolboyob Kustik never believed in.

But he won a war. http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a29a.jpg So he got a monument.

* It was commonly believed when Herskowitz wrote this in the 1580s that whales were vicious maneaters who would attack ships. A better anology today would be of sharks circling a prey, but medieval Russians knew little of such things.

Very good! :goodjob:

Unfortunately with me in Africa & India and Yu-Khan way on the other side of the world, I don't think we'll see much action over there. But then, I've only played up to about 1700ad so far. In your honor I'll see if I can't at some point send an armada over to your homeland in the next couple of centuries and slaughter thousands of innocent civilians in your province. I mean, what the hey, it's Easter, right?

Well, technically it's a territory. :p

Once again, nice updates.

Good update

I like how you make take it from the perspective of a student learning the history of his country in the future. That it is very creative and I have not seen another story like this one. Keep up the good work on future updates!

OT: Why is your avatar a tiger barb Farow?

Not a tiger barb, a clown loach. I don't know why I just like loaches
I keep a fish called a kuhli loach. Very cool fish and the closet avatar I could find to them is the clown loach.

Nice story, I like the names. :thumbsup:

Nice story, I like the names.

Thanks. I'm sick right now, but still stubbornly going to work b/c we're doing standardized testing for the kids and the principal announced "no staff sick days" because of this. I'm not gonna be able to take time to post again until I'm not sick and able to type without convulsing into coughing caniption fits.

Gah! Standardized testing!!!

No, it's OK actually, but all of my finals this year are Standardized, while I'd normally be exempted from the for good marks.

Anyway, get well soon!

When is the next part of the story?

A little bird emailed me (thanks, bird) and told me to update. I'm working on it now.

Let me repeat my apologies from my previous lapse in updates. Between being a dad, planning for finals at skool, and all other usual excuses, I'm short on time for my hobbies--writing about histories that didn't happen.

This weekend was the first in a while in which I can work on new chapters. Once the summer lands on us, I should be able to pick up the pace a bit. Of course that'll also involve me getting my Civ3 disk out of my daughter's computer and back into mine if I plan to carry this story past the year 1700. Not an easy task, I assure you.

If you buy her Conquests you can get the vanilla disc for yourself. ;)

Well, well, well, looks like I will have to follow through on my threats..:hammer:

*Cough*

It's too damn interesting to desert!

*Cough*

Cover your mouth when you cough, boy (http://theryman.dmusic.net/pictures). I'm sure you've heard of germs. Now let's get on with our lesson.

A Sunday Stroll

My father told me stories of Russia's Golden Age as we strolled along these avenues, young Alek. He was a great story teller, even if sometimes he didn't bother to get the facts quite right. I think sometimes his love of a good yarn is what inspired me to study history.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a30.jpg Oh cut that out, you mangy pup. You always start yawning whenever I mention my dad. You think I don't notice? And quit slouching, too. Great men who served their whole lives for Mother Russia have walked along these same paths. Giants and geniuses have fed squirrels in this same park, so walk like you deserve their sacrifices, you spoiled knucklehead.

We're in the Old City here. When I was in college the People's Historical Society started renovating it to look just like it did in the 1570s--the old classical architecture, sidewalk artists' kiosks... See, there? That's where they're going to refurbish the old Onion Dome Cathedral of Saint Vlad. They'll even restore the secret tunnel that Czarina Ekatarina IV used to visit the Royal Zoo at night.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a31.jpg Originally, they even wanted to have the http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a31hlb.jpg local ivans dress in period uniform, big furry caps and all, and carry halberds instead of their department issued machine pistols. Of course the Policemen's Guild put a stop to that--no ivan wants to chase down a dope-addled street mugger in puffy pantaloons armed only with a halberd. This avenue up here leads to the Meditation Garden where Bishop Medrikov in the early 1800s used to talk to God himself--so they say--while plotting to depose the Romanova Dynasty.

You walk these sidewalks, and you can almost feel what it must've been like to live back in the Golden Age. Exotic Egyptian and Brazulian merchants traveling up from the harbor, Secretive Franstralian spies lurking behind every corner of our New University and trying to kidnap or seduce our best scientists. Mighty knights would go "sporting" in the North Country, hunting down bears or the last of the Englians rebels in their grand noble costumes, and then return to Moscow to sell their slaves and show off their ostentatious wealth.

For the nobility the Golden Age was a return to greatness, or to feudalism rather, http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a31slv.jpg for the new Russian subjects in the North didn't have the rights of Russian citizens. Not yet. Our Golden ancestors could establish a Rus in the Englian wilds of the north, but they could not make the people there Russians in their hearts. So of course giving them the traditional rights of Russians would have been useless. Those Englandians were always mad with their philosophies and, like all Asians, with their mystic perceptions of the world. Superstitious folk don't need the vote; they need the whip.

When Russia forgot that... well, I guess that's why they don't call our century a Golden Age.

Across the wadi there is the Pilgrims' Walk. No, no, Alek, that's a common misperception. They didn't name it after our Pilgrims. They referred that that pathway to the original Pilgrims. Throughout the 1500s and 1600s there was a steady migration of Iroquois from the south of Africa toward the jungles of Indogermany. The Orientals never settled their southern peninsula in force, and so the weak natives of that jungle were ripe for settlement from an advanced nation like the Iroquois. They were Seneca, Mokawk, Cayuga, or Tuscarora when they left southern Africa. But by the time they settled the far east, they were simply Mingo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingo_%28tribe%29).

Those pilgrims traveled by wagon, by ferry, sometimes by foot even, from Iroquoia, up thru the Rift Valley, across the sandy deserts of the Roman Levant, across the Burgundian Plain. It was an epic journey and many--most, really--didn't survive the trip. But land was scarce in Africa and the east seemed unsettled and abundant to them... and so they went.

IROQUOIS MIGRATION
http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a33.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a32.jpg Russians span the hemisphere

Yes, yes, it's much like the Russian conquest of Burgundia. Of course, our people were a little more successful in our settlement of the New Africa. We Russians are an expansive people and it was in the Golden Age that our great settlers spread out across the face of the hemisphere. When the Iroquoians marched thru our lands on their Grand Trek, perhaps it inspired our ancestors to speed up our own colonization efforts. But no one in the Golden Age would admit that.

Well no one should be proud of it, but our forebears were somewhat prejudiced against the Iroquoian Pilgrims. That's why they made the "Haudies" (as they called them) walk on the far side of the wadi from the Old City--didn't want them stinking up the Palace Grounds or tracking mud into our New University. Many great Russian families of today built their wealth off of those migrants, too. They charged them exorbitant rents and internal "road tariffs" at the start of the Grand Trek and the clueless settlers paid because they had no choice. Sadly, it was often a lack of funds that drove those early Iroquoian settlements in Indogermany into bankruptcy.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a34.jpg

But I guess we've already learned that history is full of little human tragedies, haven't we? And by "we" I mean you. Wait, no maybe I don't mean that "you" have learned something, but it's not for a lack of me trying. Oh quit smirking you imbecile. My point is that we may be a wealthy people, but we still are cheapskates. And the wealthiest among us are the worst.

Oh that got your attention, did it? You doubt me? Well then, let me tell you another story from our "Golden Age." I think it might better illustrate my point.

Continued Tomorrow (in what could technically be called Chapter 31)

Yea! Alright Bucky, you're back! More story, too!:goodjob:

The Glorious Monarch

It was not really our cossacks' victories in the conquest of Englandia that launched our Golden Age. That idea is just malarkey for poets and filmmakers to spiel. No, and I tell you this authoritatively, the development of steam power as a production tool in the 1560s is what signaled the beginning of Russia's greatest years of advance. This was also the age when famed Russian scientist, Yitzak Niutonski developed his laws of global cylindrical physics and revolutionized the work of the "New University"--which today is named in his honor. The colonies in New Africa also began to become more independent and self sustaining, vastly increasing the wealth and power of the Matriarch's empire.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/catbar.jpg But all this advancement and development doesn't just happen by fluke. This Age of Gold was very much the gift of a wise and visionary ruler, the "Glorious Monarch," Czarina Katrinne IInd. Ascending to the Onion Throne in 1559, Katrinne saw her traditional role as patroness of the arts in a broader light than most of her ancestors had. She wanted to promote the "useful arts," as she called them--industry, invention, horticulture, science, and the law. A recent graduate from university studies herself (which took place in the Forbidden Palace in Sevastopol, as no women were allowed into the public universities in that century), she was filled with the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and completely unfettered by the wisdom that years and failure can bring.

Still, as a visionary and would be political patron, she needed more money than even her royal allowance provided. She wanted title and control of all the new provinces in conquered Englandia. Whatever her army conquered, she believed, should belong personally to her. Of course the Duma would not normally go along with this. But the leading political factions were evenly divided in these years and Katrinne cleverly played the two sides against each other throughout her reign. She moved her residence to Moscow to celebrate the opening of the New University, stayed on to "help out the governors," and became the leading figure in the politics of the day. Her intrusions into the government of empire were unwelcomed by the boyars, generals, and great merchants who ran the Duma. But being the matriarch, she didn't really give them much choice in the matter.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a35pm.jpg All appointments of state offices had to go thru the czarina--even if prior matriarchs had simply rubber stamped their ministers' choices. From her first months on the throne Katrinne grilled Premier Prince Ully Laszlov and Government Minister Marchion Dzergeroff mercilessly on each appointment, dismissing many candidates for being merely "friends of the men in government." Often she would suggest her own candidates, which infuriated Prince Lazslov to no end. Yet she silenced her ministers, saying, "what matters in awarding offices is not what young nobleman needs the job, but what each job needs in a officer."

It seems logical to us today, but in the 1500s that was a radical idea. Of course the very idea of a "meritocracy" would ultimately undermine the monarchy itself. But that's a story for another century.

The only thing Prince Lazslov was worse at than getting his cronies into office was getting himself out of it. On several occasions he offered his resignation to the czarina, but on each occasion she refused his letters, tish-toshed his objections, or simply told him, "Sleep on it, my dear Ully. Mother Russia still needs you, but she can wait until the morning."

The czarina's biggest problem, however, would not be Mother Russia, but Cousin England.

Controlling politics in a representative government is a tricky matter. Leadership requires patronage and patronage requires cash and having cash requires having offices to dispense. But corruption was so rampant in the far Englian conquests that few office holders of merit could be found to take the jobs of running those far communities.

By the 1570s, the cost of operating the colonies in north Asia became prohibitive. Police went unsupervised; taxes went uncollected, contraband made up the bulk of the economy. Constantly Egyptian and Roman agents plotted to sway the conquered people's loyalty over to their empires. The Duma built libraries and churches in the towns to make the people happy, but that hardly ensured that the far flung subjects would contribute much energy, industry, or revenues to the motherland. One Boyar general expressed the feelings of the occupying Army of Asia: "No matter how hard we flog these Engli, they won't be grateful for our protections."

The Capture of Brighton
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In 1575 the situation got worse. The Army of Asia conquered Brighton, a remote Englian iron-mining enclave in the Himmel mountains. Rather than endure the cost of occupying yet one more corrupt, rebellious province, the Premier, Prince Ully Laszlov, acceded to the Czarina's demands and promptly turned the new troublesome province over to her personal administration. He wrote in his diary,
With this gesture I hope both to rid our government of managing the pink pigs (the Englians) for a while and to show that troublesome woman--whose only claim to rule is having the good luck to have been born the first daughter of our late beloved Lady--that government of a modern empire in the modern day is properly and solely within the sphere of men. The sooner our new Lady learns this, the smoother her empire shall run.

The Czarina jumped on the opportunity, dispatching her Prince-Consort Arkady Edilvas of Romanov to personally institute reforms in the backwards mountain community of Brighton to make of it a showcase of modern government. In Prince Arkady's five year "exile of service" he turned devastated Brighton into a clean, beautiful city--even if it ultimately remained one utterly corrupt for the entirety of his wife's reign. Still, the people of Brighton, altho among the last holdouts in resisting Russian conquest, became fervent royalists and intensely loyal Russian due to their Czarina and her consort's caring government.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a36.jpg

For the Duma, Katrinne's surprising success in Brighton had other, less pleasing consequences. Having established the precedent that newly conquered lands belonged personally to the Czarina, and the Czarina having failed to fail in governing her first acquisition, Prince Lazslov was in an awkward position when more "good" news arrived in 1577.

After a harrowing march thru the snowy steppes and tundra, a new Englian outpost, the provisional capital at Norwich, had been captured far far to the north.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a37.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a38.jpg


to be continued

Nice return. :)

The Auction

After the collapse of their monarchy, the crumbling Englian society divided into half a dozen petty baronies. In what today would be termed a "mopping up operation" the Russian army spent the next two generations after the conquest of Englandia continuing to conquer Englandia.

Well, think of it like eating a cake, son. When you first get your hands on a slice, you devour it. Crumbs fly everywhere. After you've finished eating your slice, your plate will be littered with crumbs. I've seen you eat, Alek; this is a very good metaphor. So what do you do after your eat your cake? You still have to spend almost as much time now eating all the little crumbs.

Well, yes, I guess you could just ignore all the crumbs if you're not hungry. But what do you get when you leave a lot of crumbs lying around?

Oh don't be dense, boy, we don't all have servants to clean up after our sloppy messes. Govno! If you don't clean up all the crumbs you get roaches, vermin. Perhaps that would have meant an Englian nationalistic uprising in the next generation, perhaps it would have been an invigorated Germany or America charging down out of Asia at us, maybe even a resurgence of barbarianism. Whatever it was, we needed to avoid it and that required wiping out the rest of the English, no matter the cost.

Now where was I? Ah yes, the new conquest. This one was a doozy. The strongest Englian barony was in the arctic wastelands far far from Russia: The Grand Duchy of Norwich. These people were fanatical chauvinists. The Russian general in charge should have torched the town, but this was the age of enlightenment. Generals didn't do that any more--or didn't do that yet. So again the premier handed over what appeared to be a useless, rebellious province over to his monarch. Katrinne knew that this was not going to be like Brighton.

Indeed, from the moment of conquest the town seemed utterly destined to rebel. The Czarina called upon her personal diplomacy advisor, Boris Pievloluykhmy, to review her options amid the tangle of post-partition alliances and treaties. After seeing that nothing could be made of her latest territory, the Czarina struck upon a cunning plan (http://www.brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/auc1.html).

(aka: a get rich quick scheme (http://www.brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/atlas/auc1.html) best viewed in 1024x768 resolution)

Welcome back Bucky!

Thanks (and mega-hat-tips to) Thery, Marsden, MRTN and Iggy. It's good to be back.

All That Glitters Fades

The rest of Katrinne IInd's reign was peaceful. Altho the Glorious Monarch foresaw an eventual conflict with the remote villainous Franstralians to the far southeast of the Near Hemisphere (and their Frandonesian puppets), no great wars arose in her tenure. As always the Romans remained a pesky nuisance to our north, but in 1581 the czarina neutralized that threat with her "Roman Sandwich" treaty with Egypt.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a39.jpg

Katrinne always feared that Mother Russia would come to war with the fanatical French alliánce. But she also knew that their radical democratic government gave their people enough strength and efficiency that they would always remain powerful and threatening. In her last years the czarina began instituting government reforms, expanding the franchise, and pressing for liberation of the "unpropertied classes"--that rising middle class of artisans and professionals who earned enough money to pay taxes, but never owned enough property to gain the vote.

Always her leading conservative ministers opposed or obstructed her reforms, first Prince Ully Lazslov, then in her later reign the conniving premier, Baron Uzhekhan Voltek. Politicians of the 1580s often wondered why the matriarch would keep Voltek in offie when he labored so hard and so subtly to undermine all of her reforms. The French ambassador even ungallantly suggested that she only pretended to favor democratic reforms to stay popular with her subjects while using Voltek to keep the aristocrats in power. The Iroquois ambassador, future Iroquois Speaker-General Teskwahote, offered a more philosophical theory, that the czarina believed in balance and thus placed as First Minister a young nobleman who would provide a constant yang against her ongoing yen to reform her government.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a40.jpg

Psychohistorians today speculate that she simply loved political conflict and, tired with politically jousting against the conservative but plodding Prince Ully Laszlov, eventually replaced him with a more worthy opponent. But my own view is this: that no matter what she did, Katrinne knew that she would have the ambitious, young Baron Voltek opposing her policies. In the crude words of Lyndon Ivanovich, "it was better to have Voltek inside the tent spitting out than on the outside spitting in." Of course Lyndon Ivanovich didn't use the word spitting (http://www.bartleby.com/63/17/4617.html).

In any event, in 1588 the Glorious Monarch died, ten years to the day after her celebrated auction, and it is from this event that historians date the end of Russia's Imperial Golden Age. Oh, there would be another Golden Age, after the Constitution of 1614--but without the Great Dame there, it wouldn't quite seem so golden. The Grand Lady's heir was her daughter, Kitsie the Short. Inspired by her mother's ideals, but intellectually incapable of controlling the politics of the age as Katrinne II did, Kitsie soon found herself outclassed and outmaneuvered by Baron Voltek and unable to continue the reforms.

In 1595 she dismissed Voltek, who abruptly joined the "loyal" opposition and continued to defeat every reform attempted by the monarch whom he derisively called the "Pyrite Princess." Just as Ivanovich predicted, Voltek caused far more mischief from outside the tent, as Liberals and the professional classes became increasingly impatient with the lack of reform.

By 1600, whispers of revolution were in the air. The landed classes, led by Voltek, seemed to oppose every sane reform. Czarina Kitsie seemed helpless to stop them. Polarized politics soon descended into anarchy and in 1601 the reformer Mikhail Aleksandrev led a mass march on the Dry Season Palace demanding the abdication of the czarina. After having Aleksandrev shot, the Duma (under Baron Voltek) decided to take full charge of the government and forced Kitsie's abdication in 1602.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a41.jpg

Baron Voltek claimed at first that he would administer the sovereignty of the matriarchy only until disputes over Kitsie's legal successor could be resolved. But it quickly became apparent that the "acting Patriarch" had little motive or interest in resolving the conflict and ending his effective reign over Russia.

Perhaps the better phrase would be "ineffective reign over Russia" as the populace generally did not support his government and riots were frequent and violent. Voltek, of course, proved incapable of running the country without either the guidance of the matriarch or the support of the people. Particularly those whose friends had been shot during the suppression of the riots. Russia descended into anarchy for a dozen years.

Cover your mouth when you cough, boy (http://theryman.dmusic.net/pictures). I'm sure you've heard of germs. Now let's get on with our lesson.

It's odd. Everyone throws that picture at me, but I have no clue who he is. The bastard stole my name, though.

Also, I have no idea how to make music.

Great update!

Welcome Back Bucky Rea!!!

Welcome back and your story is good as ever.

It's odd. Everyone throws that picture at me, but I have no clue who he is. The bastard stole my name, though.

Oops, and here I was all proud of my cybersleuthing abilities (read "Google search"). You can see now why I washed out of stalker's school.

The Septembrists

The Duma's rule over the empire weakened the political cohesion of the far-flung Russes. By 1610 New Africa was forming its own state and politie and making plans to formally secede from the empire. West Africa and the Englian Russes in central Asia were sending almost no tax incomes to Moscow and local leaders were refusing to enforce the Duma's laws. The so-called government of Baron Uzhekhan Voltek and his finance minister Knyaz Nikita Ronov was powerless in domestic affairs.

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At first they commanded the army and managed to keep Rome and Franstralia from attacking during these years of trouble. The military castes were only too happy to be rid of reform-minded monarchs. And a strong economy kept the people from resisting the Voltek-Ronov regime too much. Soon rumors circulated that Voltek was delaying resolution of the question of imperial secession long enough for his own daughter, Sophia, to reach the age of majority and be elevated to the throne of the Matriarch. But soon even the conservative minded militarists began to grumble that the "Volt-Ron Interregnum" was lasting too long.

In 1613 Baron Voltek attempted to elevate himself in the hereditary peerage from the rank of Baron to the rank of Knyaz, again a move that would ease the ascension of his own daughter to the throne and launch a new dynasty. The peerage was, of course, entirely a royal prerogative. The idea that the Duma could elevate its own membership was a deep violation of the unwritten constitution that ran back over 2000 years.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a44.jpg The young officer corps acted quickly before the Duma could vote or debate on the matter, led by the moderate "Septembrists" faction. Elite cavalry officers raided the Duma building and the Cathedral of St Pavel where the pro-Voltron Arch-Cardinal Viktor Patriarch Viyashchevsky of Moscow was issuing Edicts of Sanctification upon each of the Volt-Ron Laws. Led by Knyaz Nicholai Edilvas (nephew of the Glorious Matriach Katrinne II and her Prince-consort) the Septembrists dissolved the Duma, deposed the Arch-Cardinal, and swore loyalty to the leading conservative claimant to the throne, Catria-Beatriz of Romanova.

The Septembrists publicly executed Ronov for embezzling imperial funds, while Baron Voltek himself fled into the jungles of Congo-Rus, then eventually to the sanctuary city of Nicomedia. The baron's entire family, including his daughter, would-be-Czarina Sophia died in the flight from Moscow, only adding to the Baron's tragedy and the sense of pity that the people came to associate with the Volt-Ron Interregnum.

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Although the traditionalists loved her, Catria-Beatriz had a rather weak claim to the throne. To make matters worse, there was no Arch-Cardinal of the St Pavel Diocese to sanctify the new Czarina's elevation. Her first coronation was carried out by a lesser bishop (which was certainly traditional), but most of the witnesses were members of the lesser ranked nobles or second sons forced by primogeniture to settle on army careers.

The elevation of Catria-Beatriz occurred under a cloud of possible illegitimacy. Given the explosion of liberal French and constitutionalist Egyptian ideals of that age, the notion of absolute monarchs was already questionable. To consolidate her power (and to hold onto wayward provinces in Burgundia and Englandia) the new czarina was forced to call for a new, formal, and written constitution in 1614. Delegates and lawyers from across the empire came to Moscow that summer to debate the new codification of state and produced a document that would last the test of time.

Empowered by rationalist and enlightenment ideals, the Constitution of 1614 preserved the monarchy, but created a second house of the Duma, expanded the vote to virtually all property owners (including unremarried widows!), liberated the upper castes of serfs (so long as they were Orthodox Christians), and reduced the privileges of the boyars to holding only two votes in local elections (the infamous "one vote for the man; one vote for the tradition" formula). It was at long last a true democracy.

Ratified on September 24th, the effects of the Constitution of 1614 were almost immediate. Imperial revenues resumed from around the empire and dramatically increased from the traditionally corrupt New African provinces. Businessmen and artists began to gain a new interest in the exotic cultures of the Far Hemisphere, particularly the radical economics and populism of the Greeks. There was an explosion in renewed interest in the sciences that rivaled that of the Golden Age. In fact historians today generally regard the two time periods, the Golden Age of Czarina Katrinne IInd and the "Golden Age of Democracy" under her grandniece Czarina Catria-Beatriz as a single epoch of unique growth in our civilization--just one that was unwisely interrupted by a brief period of anarchy and really bad decisions.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a46.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a48.jpg

In the end, the 17th century proved to be a unique and happy time in our history--a time of hope, political progress, and relatively stable international relations. It was not to last.

132770 Czarina Catria-Beatriz discusses stuff with her advisor, Boris Pretie-Gudinov
CLICK, OF COURSE,
TO ENLARGE

"The North Vespuccians" heh. :cool:

It took me quite a while to realize that you were revolting into a Democracy.

Anyways, sell the Iriquois those coal! The 22 gpt will help minimally, but the railroads in their land will increase their revenue, making them more lucrative trade partners.

If you plan on taking them out soon, though...


While 'Cbyer Sluething,' you no doubt determined my forum of choice, huh? Here's a hint-- it's where all those damned avatars linked to.

I just noticed this story...:hmm:...and its awesome!
keep it up! :thumbsup: :bounce: :cooool:

BTW, what program do you use to edit the pictures, they are awesome! :)

BTW, what program do you use to edit the pictures, they are awesome! :)

Thanx, yr maj'

I use plain ol' MS Paint for 90% of what I do. Sometimes, when I want to shrink or enlarge the pictures w/o pixelating the images, I use Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which came embedded with my Dell Windows XP package. It's all pretty low tech, but it sorta looks alright--so long as you don't have your monitor on an 800 wide resolution. Those tend to crap up my jpegs--particularly around the "text" images.

The Golden Age of Democracy

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a49.jpg With public enthusiasm over the Septembrian reforms and the proclamation of the First Republic, the first half of the 1600s were a time of great prosperity. Regional rail systems increased food production and commerce and allowed more people to move to the great urban areas to work as specialists. In the outer provinces the number of serfs began to decrease and twice in this period the Duma (with the elective lower House of Deputies pushing the more aristocratic House of Nobles) expanded the franchise to include unpropertied professionals (mostly lawyers and bankers).

But alas, all Golden Eras end.

133185 clik 2 open

In 1655 the failure of several planned colonization movements in the sparsely settled jungles of Indogermany led to a collapse in several financial institutions that were funding the colonization schemes. The banks, which were mostly unregulated by the radical Septembrists then ruling the Duma, tried to recoup their losses by raising interest rates, triggering first a stock panic and then an increasing cycle of inflation throughout the 1650s and 60s. The Septembrist's major opposition party at the time, the Agriculturalists (forebears of today's Agros), unfortunately sought to return the economy to its traditional stability by re-impressing the serfs and promising to demote to serfdom any debtors who couldn't arrange payments to their creditors. With such a radical program on their platform, the Agriculturalists lost elections to the liberal Septembrists for the decade following the Panic of 1655.

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If the Septembrists didn't know how to manage the economy, they did know at least that Russia's future lay in developing overseas colonies. In 1664 the Duma chartered the first overseas colonization society, the Indogerman Silk Export Company, whose charter authorized shareholders to establish a colony in the Annam Peninsula. For the next ten years Franstralian, German, Brazuluan, and Russian agents competed to establish successful colonies that could control the local silk and bamboo markets of southern Annam. A successful Chinese colony thrived to the west of the prime silk farms, but never managed to achieve economic dominance of the region. Duma agents in this time work feverishly to harass and obstruct Iroquois migration headed toward southeast Asia to protect Russian interests in colonizing that area.

Despite constant harassment by Franstralian agents, in 1675 the nascent colony of Vologda managed to establish a foothold in Indogermany with the construction of the Harbor of Vologda, assuring a permanent commerce connecting the colony to the empire. Other colonies attempted in the dwindling unclaimed lands of the Malay peninsula failed at the cost of much blood and gold. No one who undertook to settle this hostile region did so unaware of the grave risks involved.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a53.jpg

tbc'd, o.c.

You really spent the 640 gold? I'd have waited a turn (to halve the price) and reduce it a small amount more. But that's just me. Other than that, the story still looks great.

The Age of Colonization

From its earliest inception, the southeast Asian silk trade was subject to constant intrigue from Franstralian agents. Paris-based spies--posing as merchants, tourists, journalists, or diplomats--visited the young colony in the Mekong delta, bribing the Mekong natives and underpaid colonial officials for information and sabotage. Franstralian writers circulated extremist "democratic" propaganda to undermine solid Russian whiggish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiggishness) values. In the 1683 Vologda Incident, the radical Frandonesian government of Clytemnester Marât used not only gold, but also the Franstralian navy to intimidate, the colonial Russian government at Vologda into defecting to Frandonesian control. At the height of tensions, the shadow of war loomed over Indogermany; indeed, elements in the Franstralian navy were actively trying to provoke war. But eventually the two powers avoided conflict, as they reluctantly and diplomatically agreed to withdraw their navy from around the Russian colonies.

Still, the spectre of competition threatened constantly to drag the colonial powers into bloody conflict. As the early colonists said, "the Frannies will return." Throughout the colonial era, Frandonesia and Franstralia sought to establish their hegemony over the undeveloped Asian southeast.

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Now, Alek, I'm about to tell you why I don't like modern times. I know your high school teachers all told you to revere the Constitution of 1614 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4282446&postcount=112) and applaud the rise of The Common Man. There were even comments in my college textbooks celebrating the "progress" Mother Russia went thru when she evolved from a constitutional monarchy in the 1500s to an almost-democratic republic (albeit retaining our matriarchal figureheads) in the 1600s. In fact, you, my frivolous lad, are an excellent example of why we need a strong monarch.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, we led the world. Then we got a constitution to hamstring our leaders. For a while our democracy gave us some strength, but a people in a republic are only busier than the people under a divinely directed matriarch--and perhaps they have more material wealth. But they lack discipline. They want for direction. If you want a team of horses to pull a cart, you don't just tie eight ropes to your cart. No, that's preposterous! You line them up, shackle 'em together, and give one big smart guy a whip to drive them in the direction that he decides on. Are the horses happier? Hell no! But they get to the feedlot faster and the cartload of goods will be delivered on time.

And that, my truculent child, is why democracies are inferior to monarchies. You individualists my say "Oh, but it feels better on my unshod hooves to run free thru the pastures and graze up as much grass as I can stomach." Bah! Well, maybe it feels better, but happy feelings don't drive the cart to market. An empire is like a household and a household needs a head. Or, as our Ukrainganikian friends say, the tail doesn't wag the hyena. Except, of course, in a democracy, it does.

EPICURIAN DEMOCRACY: http://www.earthlydelights.com.au/Images/colourpics/pepyn1_small1.jpg
THE PEOPLE FORGET THEIR PLACE

My point? What's my point? Are you even listening? Govno! Look at history, you squawking frog! What your textbooks call the "Age of Colonization" really ought to be called the Age of Decline. By the late 17th century the Motherland had fallen behind the Franstralians and possibly even the Egyptians in technology. We had more colonies; we had more goodies, but were we stronger for it all? No!

Instead, less money went to bolstering our armies and navy while more resources were spent on consumer trinkets and exporting the luxuries of home to the southern orient. Meanwhile, back in north Asia, the Englian and Scotlian ethnic minorities began to agitate for equal rights--often inflamed by the sinister Franstralian ideologies--liberté, égalité, fraternité!--and other such dreadful nonsense. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b3/Phrygian_cap.jpg/41px-Phrygian_cap.jpg

What? No, you knucklehead, fraternité has nothing to do with college fraternities. Oy! If those radical Frannies had their way everyone would go to college and no one would get to join fraternities because they're elitist and bourgeois. These are the dangerous ideas unleashed in the industrial age by radical democratism and its franophile adherents.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Near Hemisphere world stage was the scene of a great ideological and geographic power struggle between radical Franstralian-style "universalistic democracy" on one hand and the socially stable (or what the rads call "conservative") Russian, Egyptian, and Roman-style democratic republicanism. The Franstralian upstarts continued to challenge the power of the colonial moderates like ourselves, the Egyptians, and the Romans. The stand off over our colony at Vologda was only the beginning.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a55.jpg In the wake of the Vologda Incident, the first World Security Alliance System evolved to prevent future wars between the great powers and to keep the subversive Franstralians in check. Both the Babylon-Athens bloc and the Thebes-Moscow bloc kept the leading powers secure. Germany and the Franstralia-Frandonesia bloc were the only powers not somehow affiliated with protective alliances--and Germany paid dearly for its unaffiliation thru a number of bloody wars that left the Teutons without a viable colonial policy in these years--a time when other nations were building colonies right in Germany's backyard.

In 1695, the Septembrists were able to bring Germany and the Iroquois into our network of alliances, but by then it was too late to prevent war.

133187 <== A SCENE OF TRAGIC COMPROMISE

The Frannies were a growing world power, and by 1700 the leading world power. And while they were isolated diplomatically, they were also well positioned militarily--and thus fully prepared to use their positioning to undertake their "Risk: the World Domination Game" strategy (http://blog.pegasusnews.com/2005/05/sunday_morning_.html). That is, they planned to start off by dominating their small continent and from there branch out to conquer one continent at a time until they controlled the world. As we were the leading colonial power in Indogermany, it fell to Russia to restrain these Franstralians.

And that is where the tragedy began.

You really spent the 640 gold? I'd have waited a turn (to halve the price) and reduce it a small amount more. But that's just me.

The colony was so far from my capital that it was only going to produce one shield per turn. So waiting one turn wouldn't have halved the price of harbor, only reduced the cost by about 4 gold. On the other hand I really needed that silk resource (look underneath the settler's feet) and I didn't want to risk losing the settlement by cultureflip to the Germans or French whose cultural centers are very very close by. In this scenario I really hate the French.

So yeh, it cost me a bundle. But I was already running a nice fat budget surplus (cause I'm not a Republican :D ) and having that colony shipping silk into my big cities really happied up my citizens.

Nice chapter Bucky!

No really, waiting a turn does halve the price. And it's just like whipping, if you don't have any shields in the box, it costs extra citizens to whip.

The harbors in your game are 80 shields, right? Well, normally gold rushing costs 4x the shields, 320. 640/80 is 8. Meaning you paid double per shield.

I eagerly await the revelation of the 'tragedy'. It's got to be a world war.

Everyone loves a good world war. :p

It's gotta be a world war of some sort, with all the mp pacts floating around. It's only a question of who betrays who first.

Keep an eye on the french BuckyRea, they're looking like this a game i played once on this map. By the end of the game (2050 score time out) my mayan empire of australia had captured all of asia, europe, the mid east, africa and most of south america. Be very scared if they turn Fascist.

And love the story :D

The Unsteady East

My lad, we weren't just fumbling toward ecstasy (http://www.lyrics007.com/Sarah%20McLachlan%20Lyrics/Fumbling%20Towards%20Ecstasy%20Lyrics.html); we were fumbling toward war. Preparing for war is an ugly prospect and sometimes requires that you cut deals with people that you might just as soon not cut deals with. As I said yesterday, our widening technology gap obliged Mother Russia to follow the Franstralians' lead in military innovation--often taking the short end of the stick in our deals.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a57.jpg


But if we lacked technological innovation, these were still years of...

industrial might... http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a58.jpg
colonial expansion... http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a59.jpg
and financial wizardry... http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a60.jpg

...along with some minor scientific progress. So cutting a few technology deals with the soulless Franstralians seems like a minor concession, a necessary evil that might encourage the Franstralians to view us more favorably. But it did us no good in terms of appeasing their voracious appetites. The Frannies still lusted after our colonies and, flush from their victories against the Germans, were still spoiling for a fight.

Try as we might, the Franstralians still remained ahead of us and maintained a bigger military than we could sustain. More importantly, they had a bigger navy. How could they do this with a democracy when our own democracy seemed to keep the size of our military relatively small? I do not claim to understand this. Normal political philosophy shows that countries with democracy have to spend a lot more resources to maintain an army and are radically disinclined to fight wars. But the Frannies of daune undaire are not like other people.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a61.jpg

They were radical, belligerent, cocky--they seemed inclined by geography to see everything upside-down. Their navy bounced around the Pacific like their native kangaroos, creating havoc and fear wherever they sailed. Their radical democratic tyrant, Boney L'Apart, constantly pestered our Indogerman colonies with his navy, first in 1720, then again in 1742. The mad Franstralian crowds ate up his belligerence and he thrived on their adulation. He even granted votes to the common laborers and peasants of his upside-down island, an absurdity that he called "universal sufferage." Our own political progressives were working on less radical plans to expand the voting franchise at that time, but when Boney L'Apart acted in such a dangerous and radical fashion, it immediately discredited any attempts at political reform in the civilized world.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a62.jpg

Perhaps Franstalia was going thru a Golden Age of its own in these years. It is hard to explain how Monsieur Boney could muster so many political feats in his reign. But while M. Boney was spoiling for a fight, it apparently didn't matter too much to him whom he fought. Perhaps antagonized by the single Japanese colony on the northern Frandonesian coast, in 1752 he sent his elite Fuschia Musketeers into Japan's Sapporo colony and refused to leave, forcing the Japanese to retaliate and initiate the bloody First Pacific War.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a63.jpg

Some in our empire chomped at the bit, demanding that we jump into the war and aid these exotic westerners, these "Ja-pon-ese", if only because they were the enemies of our enemies. But cooler heads prevailed. Wait for the right moment, our elder statemen counseled, wait for the right moment.

Franco-Japanese Conflict

With the outbreak of the First Pacific War between Franstralia and Japan in 1752, tensions notably eased on the Russian garrisons around our Gulf of Siam colonies.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a64.jpg

But not for long. With the war raging in the Sapporo colony, the Tyrant Boney L'Apart still managed to send envoys to Moscow in 1756 to extort finances and military intelligence out of us. The Russian premier at the time, Count Petr Villaginninov, of course refused these demands. Boney backed down from his threats, unwilling to fight a two-front war. From this point relations between the two empires began to sour.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a65.jpg

Russian colonists in Indogermany armed themselves and began to loudly denounce Boney's expansionism and military build ups. Franstralian propagandists responded, publicizing the fact that the Russian empire had, on paper, a larger military than the Franstralian-Frandonesian Bloc. Count Villaginninov responded that we had to maintain defenses across the Asian steppes, throughout the Burgundian subcontinent, and all along the Indogerman colonies. Defending Mother Russia required a large military. In contrast, Franstralia, with its back safely up against the Antarctic, could concentrate almost its entire military on its northern frontier and place the balance of their might in their ironclad warships.

Here, look at this, Alek. I've photocopied a mathematical analysis of military strength from the college textbook you'll be using this fall to show you the scale of the problem. As you can see, Franstralia had the second largest army (and the largest navy) in the world during the Franco-Japanese War. While we had the largest army, if war broke out between us, the scattered Ruses could place no more than a third of our military might in the Frandonesian front, while the monolithic Parisian regime could place as much as two thirds of the military in Frandonesia and would require far far shorter supply lines.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a66.jpg

Sentimentally, of course, many Russians wanted to go to war to aid Japan in its struggle against world Universalist domination. But realistically, both Septembrist and Agriculturalist political parties knew the Russias were not ready for war. The best we could do is offer technological support to help Japan upgrade its antiquated navy at ridiculously below market prices.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a67.jpg

And of course, we could wait to see if the Frannies exhausted themselves with their war. In 1760 Franstralian forces overran the Sapporo colony. This effort did not exhaust them. From 1762-1767 Franstralian frigates and ironclads ruthlessly shelled the Shimonoseki island fortress off the coast of Germany. This effort did not exhaust them. In 1771, a massive Franstralian Armada landed at Matsuyama and conquered Japan's sole Sandwichian colony. This didn't seem to exhaust them either.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a68.jpg

In 1775, with the Franstralian fleet anchored off the eastern Pacific coast, Japan signed the humiliating Berlin Peace Treaty, ceding all of her conquered colonies to Franstralia, which remained singularly unexhausted by the war.

There was no disputing now who the rising world power was now. And there was no disputing who the Franstralians now saw as their greatest rival for world domination.

TBC

Damn, the accursed 'TBC.'

Screw the frenchies, conquer Rome! Those bastards have had it coming since the first war.

Damn, the accursed 'TBC.' Good news bad news. Good: that TBC happens in just a few minutes. Bad: It's yet another diversion before we get to the big war. :p

Screw the frenchies, conquer Rome! Those bastards have had it coming since the first war. But the Romans are our friends! (Plus their border towns occasionally flip to me).

Now on with the show.

Might As Well Jump! Go ahead and jump!

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a72.jpg dammit, scooped again

Modern poets and radicals blame simple colonialism for the 18th and 19th centuries wars and intrigues fought over the Bengal and Indogerman colonies. Evil, greedy industrialized powers like Russia, Egypt, Brazulu, Rome, and Franstralia came along and took the lands that once belonged to the southeast Asians, and then bickered among themselves for the spoils. You can agree with this if you live by a philosophy that sees human beings as basically good at heart and think that only greed and distorted aggression cause us to fight. But that view of humanity is naive, if not hopelessly warped.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a69.jpg
Southeast Asia, 1780

There's a better and more accurate view of both strains of humanity that evolved in this world. The Franstralian fauno-botanist who first developed this theory only sought--at first--to apply his discoveries and theories to how different species evolved. But the insights that Charles D'Aruinne of Lyon, Franstralia, gained from the study of how plants and animals compete and adapt over time eventually came to change the way all humanity thought about life, nature, nations, and war. He didn't just come up with a new idea for science; D'Aruinnism changed the entire paradigm thru which humanity understood the world.

And because Franstralians came to embrace their countryman's theories and insights before the more conservative scientists of the rest of the world, they gained a huge leap forward in understanding the hows and whys of science... far far in advance of the rest of the world. So to understand why the Frandonesian War went the way it did, it's important to first understand D'Aruinnism.

http://www.thenextleft.com/blogatory/archives/images/darwin.gif Charles D'Aruinne started with a basic premise, one which had evolved over many years of the early Scientific Revolution, that animals adapted to their environments and that those best fitted for a given environment would be the ones most likely to survive. But the question that D'Aruinne tackled had been considered theologically taboo for Christians in the Near Hemisphere and Muslims in the Far Hemisphere. He asked first, why did unpouched mammals predominate on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Vespuccias, but pouched mammals predominate in nature in his native Franstralia?

Up until then, theology taught us that, although all mankind were of one species, sons and daughters of Adam--only Franstralians and their Frandonesian cousins were the descendents of Lilith (http://www.unicorngarden.com/bkshe4.htm) and everyone else came thru the line of Eve. The pouch, obviously, was the sign of Lilith's rebellion in the Garden of Eden. Eve, coming from Adam's rib, had no pouch.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70ma.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70dip.jpg

At first it seemed heretical, but D'Aruinne asked his second question anyway: why, then, did most of the non-human mammals of Franstralia have pouches, just like the children of Lilith? Were these beasts marked by God for the sins of Lilith too? Or instead, he argued, were pouches a preferred adaptation for mammalian life forms in the Franstralian environment? To this day, of course, no one has successfully argued how it is that a pouch is an evolutionary improvement in Franstralia while giving life birth at full gestation is a more fit adaptation on the rest of the continents. After all, true mammals introduced into the Franstralian ecosystem in the modern age have thrived quite well without adapting pouches.

Meanwhile, D'Aruinne himself continued his groundbreaking studies. After studying the fossil records for how "pouched mammals" evolved to fill in ecological niches over the millennia (particularly the evolution of the snout on kangaroos between the Tertiary and Quaternary Epochs), Charles D'Aruinne came up with a better, but obviously shocking, conclusion.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70evo.jpg ==> http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70j.jpg

Franstralians were not only a different species from the rest of homo sapiens; they and all of the other pouched mammals were from an entirely different evolutionary line from the rest of the mammals. He called this new order of animal "marsupials" and Franstralians in particular were in fact not sapiens but homo gaulus. It is now well proved that we descend from a common ancestor with the great apes. But Franstralians, Frandonesians, the mysterious Bretons of our own African continent, and the protoBurgundians of New Africa descend from primate-like marsupials who evolved only on their remote continent. This, rather than the so-called "curse of Lilith" is why Franstralians are not interfertile with the rest of mankind.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/3rt700bc.jpg You remember the Bretons (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=3802231&postcount=25) don't you?

What? That's actually a good question, Alek. Frankly I'm surprised. But before I tell you why Franstralians look so much like homo sapiens, can you tell me why sharks look so much like dolphins? They have the same build, same coloration, identical mating habits, and live mostly off of the same prey--yet obviously come from different phyla in the animal kingdom. One's a mammal and one's a fish. Or look at the similarities between mammalian wolves and marsupial thylocines. Or bears and diplodons. Or anteaters and numbats. Time and again, by a combination of adaptation and mutational accident, nature seems to shape its animals to fit the niches available in each ecosystem. D'Aruinne called this "convergent evolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution)."

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70evol.jpg or http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70marsup.gif or http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a70antnumb.gif

His theories of course shook the world. Churchmen on six continents denounced him. Our politicians decried yet another evil coming out of that strange and wicked "upside down" continent. Scientists shook their heads in bafflement.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a71.jpg Great scientific advances don't occur in a vacuum, of course. Many Russian biologists were working on similar ideas at the same time--particularly at the University of Sevastopol. Some say our scientists were only a few years away from the same discovery. But news in the 1770s, as the hated Franstralians began to publicize D'Aruinne's work, only increased our xenophobic mistrust of these peculiar people. Rather than embrace evolutionary theory, many Russian intellectuals called for tightening up social controls of these dangerously irreligious ideas. For a generation, scientists who embraced D'Aruinnism were often accused of pro-Franstralian sympathies and reported to the National Knowledge Verification Directorate (NKVD).

Most scientists didn't surrender to his logic until the end of the 19th century, as fossil records soon began to confirm his theories. But the classes of people who came to embrace his ideas and adapt them to their own work were neither men of God nor men of Science. Social reformers, eugenicists, and most importantly the business tycoons came to embrace an ancillary to his radical ideas, calling it "social D'Aruinnism."

Their idea was that if "survival of the fittest" applied to competition between species, then it should also apply to competition within each species. To social workers it meant you could strengthen your society by not getting too worked up about beggars and misfits. To businessmen, it meant that anything you did to undermine your rivals was justified, if not divinely sanctioned. To colonialists, it meant that oppressing local tribesmen and supplanting them with more technologically advanced settlers was part of the natural order of things.

http://www.idyllopuspress.com/meanwhile/images/indianmassacre.jpg

But it was the military theorists and the university intellectuals who took social D'Aruinnism to the extreme. War, according to this view of the world, was not a human tragedy. It was nature's way of cleaning out the underbrush, wiping out the unfit. Humans--both sapiens and gaulus--cannot stand to see other humans starve to death. If we could, it would weaken us as species. Yet as we sit atop the food chain, we have no natural competitors. Thus nature invented warfare as the best way to thin out the herd.

It sounds silly to us today. But to the 18th century generations who witnessed the brutal Franstralian conquest of the Japanese colonies, war was social D'Aruinnism in action. And the view was exciting. Russians of all the Africas concluded in 1775 that the marsupial humans of Franstralia were more evolutionarily fit than the Japanese of South Vespuccia. The next question was, obviously, were Russians more fit than the Franstralians.

TBC

Woah. So what you are saying is that Franstralians have pouches? That is... odd. To say the least.

BURN THE DEMONS!
*Cough*

Nice with the Lilith- I'd never heard of her before.

Gaulus, gaulus. Obviously Latin, but what word it means, I do not know. Google shows it as also being Italian- not surprising. But no site will translate it!

Gaulus shouldn't be a real word, but I believe that Gauls refer to the French. Or at least the medieval French.

As for the pouches, yuck.

Woah. So what you are saying is that Franstralians have pouches? That is... odd. To say the least.

BURN THE DEMONS!
*Cough*
and
Gaulus shouldn't be a real word, but I believe that Gauls refer to the French. Or at least the medieval French.

As for the pouches, yuck.

Sad, so sad. Such horrid ethnocentrism... and on CivFanatics, no less. :lol:

But yes, Trib, homo gaulus was just my goofy way of saying the French aren't like normal people. Anyway, I was having fun with the idea of why a "Franstralian" would unlock the mystery of evolution before us Russians did. Plus I'm aggravated that the French keep beating me to tech advances by just a turn or two. :cry:

Smug little cheese eaters. That was when I decided they had to die...

Give War a Chance

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a73.jpg http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a73a.jpg

With the Scientific Revolution in full swing in the late 1700s, a new sort of competition opened up among the countries of the world: the Technology Race. After their Golden Age and their successful prosecution of the Frano-Japanese War, the Franstralians were clearly in the lead in this race. And yet it was the Russians who by far had the greater influence on world development. In 1767 a new Septembrist government came into power under Knyaz Arkady Sobaka determined to prepare Russia for war. The rest of the world feared the Franstralians and their exotic Universalistic ideas. Russian diplomats exploited that fear and spent the years following the war developing a network of defense pacts meant to contain the "Magenta Menace."

This Third World Security Alliance System was largely the brainchild of Russian Foreign Minister Pavl Suluvich and Iroquoian President Olan Chayengeh. Suluvich was convinced that world tensions would lead to another war within a few years and convinced the Duma to grant extensive, budget-breaking aid to several world nations in exchange for mutual protection pacts to ensure that Russia, unlike Japan, would not have to fight alone.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a74.jpg

The Egyptians, having the third largest military in the world, knew they were indispensable to any efforts to contain Universalist world domination and thus exploited Russian vigilance against Franstralia to exact exorbitant demands. The disastrous Egyptian Treaty of 1779 was an embarrassment to the government and opposition politicians began to denounce Suluvich.

The besieged minister might have held onto his job, but he made a further fatal error the following year. Along with several other Septembrist cabinet ministers, Suluvich believed that the party's and the empire's salvation lay in provoking a war with Franstralia. In 1780 a Franstralian warship illegally entered Russian waters and boarded a civilian merchant ship in search of contraband bound for Revolutionary Frandonesia. Suluvich deliberately sought to instigate war, sending a bluntly worded message to the ambassador in Paris demanding exorbitant reparations.

Franstralian Popular Tyrant Paul Lumiere-Pansette, unwilling to be goaded into war, responded with a smarter tactic. He immediately paid the indemnity in full and then published Suluvich's insulting private message in the world press. The Russians seemed to be the aggressors and the Franstralians suddenly had the upper hand in diplomatic negotiations. Lumiere-Pansette understood that the world had entered an age in which public opinion mattered more than law in diplomacy.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a76.jpg

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a75.jpg

Suluvich resigned in disgrace, while the Franstralian propaganda mill churned out accusations or bribery and corruption in Russia's acquisition of the Brazulu colony of New Zimbabwe in 1767. nothing could be further from the truth--Suluvich's annexation of New Zimbabwe had been a masterstroke of true diplomacy, both acquiring a new colony and somehow avoiding conflict with the Brazulians over the whole matter. But now even that triumph was being recast as Russian deception. The world anti-Franstralian alliance seemed on the verge of crumbling. Stung by scandal, Prime Minister Knyaz Arkady Sobaka reshuffled his cabinet and defeated a no confidence vote in the Duma. However his new minister of war, Prince Rudin Romanov, was a young protégé of Baron Suluvich and was determined to exact revenge on the Franstralian tyrant.

In 1782 Prince Romanov was able to provoke another international incident, again in the hopes of initiating war. Russian scientists insisted that Franstralian advances in theoretical physics had been obtained by acts of espionage in Niutonski University and demanded the right to inspect all the secret facilities and files that the Franstralian scientists were using. For a paranoic, closed society like Franstralia, the suggestion was preposterous. At the highest levels of government, Lumiere-Pansette's regime told Prince Romanov to get lost.

Evidence today suggests that Romanov's claims of espionage were bogus, but the continued crisis over Paris's secrecy was a debate that finally cast the Septembrist government in a more favorable light than their opponents. Still, under Sobaka's leadership, the Septembrist Party was gaining a reputation as war-mongers who were sacrificing national progress for the sake of their war machine. Unrest grew.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a77.jpg

Political tensions between Franstralia and Russia spiraled ever upward. Troops along the Frano-Russian border between the colonies of Nieu Chartres and Murmansk began to have regular skirmishes beginning in 1782. The following year the Russian commander crossed the Franstralian border in pursuit of suspected spies and, when ordered to leave by the Niew Chartresan governor, defiantly refused to depart Franny soil.

By now, Popular Tyrant Lumiere-Pansette had been provoked too many times. It was time for war. But still, Lumiere-Pansette never lost sight of his goal of winning over world opinion. Rather than formally declaring war, Franstalian ambassadors issued declarations to all the world's newspapers that the Russians, by violating his colony's borders, had de facto declared war on Franstralia.

http://brownbagblog.com/civ3/rusafr/a78.jpg

The pretext worked. Russia, not Franstralia, was invoked as the aggressor, as ally after ally that year openly declared that they were under no obligation to come to Russia's aid. To no one's surprise, Franstralia did invoke its long-standing alliance with Frandonesia. That summer the war commenced in earnest as the world's titans squared off for what each declared to be a struggle to end world aggression.

War at last, war at last! Praise Sid almighty, it's war at last!!

Pah, you've got everyone on your side. And nice mustache. Eh heh.

I am working on a story with the Ottomans and I came accross some great war art images I thought you might like. Or not. They're fun regardless.

http://erastimes.8m.net/gambit_b3.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/V/vereshchagin/vereshchagin.html

This one is a classic from the India Mutiny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vereshchagin-Blowing_from_Guns_in_British_India.jpg

Enjoy.:king:

Excellent source for images. Yes, I'll definitely be scouring those to illustrate my upcoming war w/ Ms Joanie D'Arc... Thanks

Another source that I'm using for lots of my images is a museum's online collection of color photos from Czarist Russia (mostly taken between 1909 and 1915). Unfortunately most of the terrains those serfs and Czarist officers are posing on don't look like they come from Africa or Indonesia, where most of my story is taking place.

Ah well.

Told you you should have killed Rome. Insolent bastards.

Woot! War at last!

You gonna dissect some Franstralians to look for their pouches? :D

Toilets? You got toilets?

Best. Quote. Ever.

DEATH TO THE FRENCH!!! good story man

Bump. No pressure...

No pressue ;)

Heh. No, no pressure. With school starting and me teaching the AP US History courses this year, I'm a little time-gorged with history of the actual earth. (I've never taught US history before, let alone the college-credit version). It'll be about a week before I can settle in to translating my screen saves into a narrative of needless death and mayhem.

Worse than that, however, I'm falling behind in reading some of the other excellent tales in the forum. That's probably what I'm missing most. See yall in seven (give or take a day)

:eek: Egads, Im taking that in 2 years. Maybe you could help me? :religion: ;) :p

I know what AP feels like, Im currently taking AP Human Geography (as a freshman).

Heh. No, no pressure. With school starting and me teaching the AP US History courses this year, I'm a little time-gorged with history of the actual earth. (I've never taught US history before, let alone the college-credit version). It'll be about a week before I can settle in to translating my screen saves into a narrative of needless death and mayhem.

Worse than that, however, I'm falling behind in reading some of the other excellent tales in the forum. That's probably what I'm missing most. See yall in seven (give or take a day)
I am taking AP US History this year. Wanna slip me some 'study sheets?'

Woah, stellar idea here. Install Civ on your computers at school, and let your students watch you play by means of a projector!

To hell with real history, yours is more fun!

COUGH COUGH

Stupid, unhelpful teachers.

Bucky, I swear to God I will hunt you down and kill you.

Just so you don't have to make a quintuple post Thery.

Where is that Bucky fellah anyway?

(That's your cue)

Just started reading this story. Its fantasical. I wuvs it. Keep up the good work:worship: :bowdown: :spear:

Just started reading this story. Its fantasical. I wuvs it. Keep up the good work:worship: :bowdown: :spear:
We all wish that he would.

Where is he........

Oh please update! I'm in school, and I update.... :lol:

Oh please update! I'm in school, and I update.... :lol:

Me too. :p ;) :D :lol:

Must..Have..UPDATE!!!
Hehe bump.
EDIT: I know you have other things to do. Sorry for the pressure

Just read through the eight pages (well, seven, really :p ) -- great read. :D Color me "subscribed".

Is there a tiny chance that you could post a save from the most recent time you've saved? Just wondering....

Bumpalumpafrumpalunkachunkamunka.

@Theryman:Oooookkkk....then......:shifty:
This is a highly descriptive narrative, one that ties historical narrative with humorous commentary.
Smilies!
:) ;) :borg: :sleep: :egypt: :smoke: :nuke: :sad: :scan: :rolleyes: :cool: :D

Bump.... pause... bump... pause... bump... pause... bump... pause... bump... pause... bump... pause... bump... pause...
So let me get this straight. You're wanting me to continue the story? :lol:

Okay, yes, I'm a little off my schedule. When I started this Civ Tale in February, little did I realize it would take me a whole year to finish it. But if we're gonna be realistic that's probably a realistic completion date. Just remember that for every one paper you write in school, I have to read, correct, grade, and possibly read a revision of about 90 papers. So nanny nanny boo boo.

I actually got around to playing the game I'm storying here last weekend, but honestly, I haven't even come by to read other people's stories in at least six weeks (the little log-on counter dealy saying "you last visited on Sep 04, 2006"). I'll try and whip out a chapter or two this coming weekend. Just to keep you mooks happy.

Ah, and here's a little tiny google map to tide you over. 140642

I'll try and whip out a chapter or two this coming weekend. Just to keep you mooks happy.
:cry:

For a teacher, you are not so good with words, and keeping them.

Err... I dunno what that means.

Just be patient. I'm only in high school, and I having troube making time to work on my story. I can't imagine what it'd be like for a teacher.

/me weeps for the loss of the great russian empire

The great Russians have been resurrected in my story. (That sucks. ;))

And now, a haiku from Theryman:

Oh poor BuckyRea,
Where are you right this second?
Quit work, play Civ now.

Nothing from Bucky in over a month. Where is he? The world wonders.

He was killed when he guided a Russian army against rebellion in former Rome. :cry: :cry: Or he was drafted. :mad:

Everybody hurts!
Everybody cries!
sometimes...

You made me sad, bucky.

I hope nothing really did happen to him. If someone got in a wreck on the way home from work how would we the other posters ever learn of it?
Let's all pray for Bucky's saftey.

agreed. Lock and Load

I hope nothing really did happen to him. If someone got in a wreck on the way home from work how would we the other posters ever learn of it?
Let's all pray for Bucky's saftey.
I have had this happen to me before. It is very, very sad whenever you lose someone, even online.

But it is not likely- much more, though, he simply gives too many essays. LAY OFF THE PAPERS, TEACH!

Good Story! It motivated me!! Such passion!!

Great story! I've been reading for quite a while as a lurker here on the forums, so I decided to officially formalise my reading by subscribing! Looking forward to updates. ^_^

Alright, time to start spamming his email box again...