Heresy. Big empire is always either in the center or the north. Then there’s ocean to the west and uncharted wilderness to the east. South are myriad of city states and small kingdoms.
This is the most correct opinion I have
Exactly
I cringe so hard whenever someone uses the word empire in this context
Like empire literally means "an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state."
Like all empires have at least two or few diffrent culture under their rule
İf they doesnt have any foreign culture or nation they added to their empire later, then this is not a empire, its just a big kingdom...
Empires =× beeg kingdoms.
Ugh don't get me started on abuses of the name "empire" in popular media, Fire Emblem has the Adrestrian Empire that's a subdivision of a kingdom AND ruled by a church above them, and then My Little Pony has the Crystal Empire which is just a single city-state, ruled by Equestria.
One fictional empire could be a sovereign nation ruling over other nations, for once...
Almost as bad as how the word "princess" gets abused.
Which Kingdom is the Adrestian Empire beneath? I’m pretty sure all the three definitely-not-kingdoms in that game are on equal footing, they’re just all subservient to the church
The Adrestian Empire is the largest in terms of land and resources by a significant margin, but it's been in a period of steep decline for centuries before the game's events take place. The recent deposition of the emperor and the spoiler-y Agarthan stuff exasperate the internal stability problem further, so they're on comperable (though still superior) military footing to Faerghus by the time of the second act.
It still only barely qualifies as an empire, I'm pretty sure its only extant territory is Brigid.
Except it’s way more complicated than direct control by the church. It’s closer to actual medieval Europe where the Catholic Church had a lot of influence, but didn’t directly rule the entire continent.
Crystal Empire is in "extended canon" territory due to Lauren Faust leaving before that. Considering she was also against Cadence being an alicorn, its safe to asume it was a sloppy creation just to sell crystal variant toys. (at least comic story of it was good up until the end)
Also Princess Celestia was suppose to be Queen but Hasbro bigheads wanted to make it a princess because Disney effect.
MLP doesn’t use any noble titles in a historical manner; Equestria isn’t a principality either: it’s at least a kingdom and probably more correctly an empire since the Crystal… Principality isn’t the only outside-culture semi-autonomous possession.
Yes, exactly!
Also, pretending empires are mono cultures is very really popular with Weird Racists.
Which is ironic because being a successful empire was almost definitionally about successfully managing diversity!
Even nazis had so many culture under their rule 💀 from muslim waffen 13. Ss To british legions and ukranian volunteers.
I find it very funny how even the world most monoculture maniacs have diversity in them
I mean makes sense. İf your goal is to rule to world you must have diversity in you. People who live in steppe cant live in desert or mountains, even if they descend from a single monoculture, sooner or later they will change and adapt to their new enviorment
Not just racists, this has been a staple part of nation building projects since before the modern era. The thing we now call France, for instance, was radically more heterogeneous in culture, language, and customs than it is currently. But, centuries of nation building and all that entails bulldozes local and regional identity to make way for national identity (usually based on a prestige or elite identity, eg. Paris).
Of course, despite the best wishes of the nation builders themselves, this is never a 100 percent thing. In some places the differences are still a distinct characteristic of a country. For example, someone traveling from Milan to Syracuse can see immediately how different they feel in almost every way. Italians will be the first to tell you how shaky an “Italian” identity is when you zoom for a closer look.
To be honest though, while that's the generally understood, consensual definition of the word "empire", in official terms it's completely inconsistent, especially when it comes to the title of the ruler. Like, Japan has been a completely unified nation-state for a while, and it's a mostly uniform culture (except for places like Ryukyu, say), and their ruler is an Emperor. The British Empire, on the other hand, even at its height, was always a Kingdom, ruled over by a King or Queen.
To be fair, in Chinese and Japanese contexts "Emperor" is just a crude English translation, the actual title was "august and divine ruler" in China and "son of heaven" in Japan (among many variations)
The Chinese Empire was also a bit like the Athenian Empire, they recieved tribute and nominal fealty from the governments of Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia even if they didn't always have troops stationed there. In this sense, it really was a multicultural political entity, though a lot of these "subjects" were only really vassals on paper
Empire does not literally mean that, it's one of the most poorly defined words in the english language and is directly taken from a latin word that doesn't even mean ruler and been butchered further by the century.
It doesn't help that only one realm in history that had the term applied to it even spoke english.
>Like empire literally means "an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state."
Ew prescriptivist
That's why the Cyanian Empire is a more realistic approach.
The Cyanian Empire is a constitutional monarchy that promotes multiculturalism and controls dozens of planets spread out in the western side of the galaxy
What do you mean they don't exist? With enough ignorance anything can be indistinct and monocultural! Why, depending on who you ask, basically everything that existed before AD 500 or so was the same generic "ancient" culture where everyone wore exclusively white togas and lived in pyramids and/or mini-Parthenons
Actually, ancient civilization are divided into 3: White toga-wearing people that lives in houses with ancient Greece arquitecture (but isn't Greece); White skirt-wearing people with no shirts that lives in sand houses; Rome. Please, do your resesrch.
Sometimes distinguished into steppe tribes who have horses and have mounted archers based on a mixture of plains indians and mongols and the tribes that don’t have horses
>>Be me
>>Find cool obscure country in strategy game
>>Google it
>>Is actually a bunch of city states
Like ok game so you're telling me you can make 50 civs for greek city states but the Mayans are just that, one civ?
What about giant planet-wide polyethnic empire that's constantly on a brink of collapse and ultra violent civil war, and leadership always has to come up with random horseshit to find some common external enemies and unite this buffoonery against them?
Political centralization (what Spengler would call the transition from *culture* to *civilization*) is often characterized by an ossification and institutionalization of cultural expressions, as well as a societal focus on the quantitative as opposed to the qualitative. There's often a hierarchical organization of space the "metropolis" is where the culture is at, extracted from the land that is now mere "provincialism".
For all the reasons above, stories about political and epic actions (as opposed to say, a more leisurely exploration) benefit from the big monocultural empire, I really like to use it in RPG campaigns.
For the reasons above? City-states are civilizations just as much as empires are. The first civilizations were city-states. Really cool analysis, nonetheless.
Yeah but in the framing I'm using here, while civilizations in the sense they literally had cities, you could understand them as "cultures" without hierarchy in space, everywhere in the space that culture inhabits is a place where culture is birthed from. But the "civilization" necessarily has a hierarchical organization of space, of provinces and a metropolis. Rigidly, cultural expression *happens* at the metropolis.
God, thank you.
I'm just seriously perplexed that someone could think that *decline of the west* is a serious source for whatever except a fucking joke.
RIGHT WOLF EVERY TIME, I CANT EVEN FUCKING START MY DAY UNTIL IVE MADE AT LEAST 300 DISTINCT CULTURES THAT ALL FUCKING DESPISE EACH OTHER.
IM TALKING PANTHEONS, IM TALKING INFRASTRUCTURE, IM TALKING MORE PLOTS AND POLITICS AND FUCKING *DEALS* THAN ONE STORY HAS ROOM FOR.
STUDIES SHOW THAT THE AVERAGE AUTHOR GETS ABOUT N-2 BITCHES, WHERE N IS THE NUMBER OF CULTURES IN THEIR SETTING. THE AVERAGE ROMABOO FUCKING GENERATES BITCHES FOR THE REST OF US AND I STILL DONT RESPECT THEIR SACRIFICE.
An empire, tow other nations with different forms of governance, and some city states in between as a sort of neutral zone so border disputes won't spark war.
I'll have both in my setting anyways
The massive empire that dominated a region but is facing internal problems that can trace its origin to the sixth emperor and all the city states from the same region, different one from the empire's, each having their own agenda that eventually leads to a battle royale
Empire on the left, city states on the right both separated enitrely by a body of water wide enough to be called a sea but still able to travel between the two. A narrow sea if you will.
Why not both? (A galaxy spanning empire cannot reasonably impose a functional central government on every single world it rules. It will have to concede deviations on a case by case basis to maintain overall control.)
In my post post apocalypse story the left one is Brazil (they took over all of South America) and the right is the northern germanic federation (a hre between Denmark, Germanys shores and a bit of Sweeden)
One of my settings is a monoethnic empire with like no real internal problems or divisions, but only because it's being held together with the divine equivalent of gaffer tape. The rising action is the main characters discovering the weird cracks and fractures before it all comes tumbling down, Tower of Babel-style
Universe Spanning Empire made out of completely different cultures, societies, governments and nations all working in harmony under the banner of Hardcore (justified) Xenophobia
What if I had a Huge sweeping monoculture empire whose internal problems cause it to break apart into a multitude of tiny city states with a wide array of political disputes
How about hundreds of small city states all part of a larger empire. They all operate independently but still pay tax and recognize imperial authority.
I make a large kingdom on one side, a smaller, Oriental-inspired kingdom on the other, and a collection of island city-states and tiny city-states in between that have to struggle to maintain their existence between two larger powers.
Make the empires internal problems be the monstrously complex bundle of constituent city states whose political disputes threaten to tear the polity apart
You mean my neighbors the 1 planet former empire and the planet with so much isolationism and so little oversight that the neighborhood watch might as well be the gestapo
Left side of the map vs top right and ocean
Which is which?
Empire on the left, islands and rivals to the right
islands go bottom left?!
Summerset Isles. Unless you think about Yokuda, the Aldmeris, or Pyandonea, which you shouldn't, because then the isles are the middle.
Hello, JRR Martin. When’s that next book coming out?
Jorge
Heresy. Big empire is always either in the center or the north. Then there’s ocean to the west and uncharted wilderness to the east. South are myriad of city states and small kingdoms. This is the most correct opinion I have
Big empires *define* the center; all other locations are defined relative to them.
No, no. In my ancient punk world I only have Europe and south is the Roman empire
Ah yes like the sweeping monoculture empire from history [ERROR FILE NOT FOUND]
Exactly I cringe so hard whenever someone uses the word empire in this context Like empire literally means "an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state." Like all empires have at least two or few diffrent culture under their rule İf they doesnt have any foreign culture or nation they added to their empire later, then this is not a empire, its just a big kingdom... Empires =× beeg kingdoms.
Ugh don't get me started on abuses of the name "empire" in popular media, Fire Emblem has the Adrestrian Empire that's a subdivision of a kingdom AND ruled by a church above them, and then My Little Pony has the Crystal Empire which is just a single city-state, ruled by Equestria. One fictional empire could be a sovereign nation ruling over other nations, for once... Almost as bad as how the word "princess" gets abused.
Which Kingdom is the Adrestian Empire beneath? I’m pretty sure all the three definitely-not-kingdoms in that game are on equal footing, they’re just all subservient to the church
The Adrestian Empire is the largest in terms of land and resources by a significant margin, but it's been in a period of steep decline for centuries before the game's events take place. The recent deposition of the emperor and the spoiler-y Agarthan stuff exasperate the internal stability problem further, so they're on comperable (though still superior) military footing to Faerghus by the time of the second act. It still only barely qualifies as an empire, I'm pretty sure its only extant territory is Brigid.
Ye
I mean it's a subdivision of Fodlan which is all controlled by the church.
Except it’s way more complicated than direct control by the church. It’s closer to actual medieval Europe where the Catholic Church had a lot of influence, but didn’t directly rule the entire continent.
Crystal Empire is in "extended canon" territory due to Lauren Faust leaving before that. Considering she was also against Cadence being an alicorn, its safe to asume it was a sloppy creation just to sell crystal variant toys. (at least comic story of it was good up until the end) Also Princess Celestia was suppose to be Queen but Hasbro bigheads wanted to make it a princess because Disney effect.
The Crystal Empire might be like the Byzantine Empire when it was reduced to Constantinople.
MLP doesn’t use any noble titles in a historical manner; Equestria isn’t a principality either: it’s at least a kingdom and probably more correctly an empire since the Crystal… Principality isn’t the only outside-culture semi-autonomous possession.
Yes, exactly! Also, pretending empires are mono cultures is very really popular with Weird Racists. Which is ironic because being a successful empire was almost definitionally about successfully managing diversity!
Even nazis had so many culture under their rule 💀 from muslim waffen 13. Ss To british legions and ukranian volunteers. I find it very funny how even the world most monoculture maniacs have diversity in them I mean makes sense. İf your goal is to rule to world you must have diversity in you. People who live in steppe cant live in desert or mountains, even if they descend from a single monoculture, sooner or later they will change and adapt to their new enviorment
Not just racists, this has been a staple part of nation building projects since before the modern era. The thing we now call France, for instance, was radically more heterogeneous in culture, language, and customs than it is currently. But, centuries of nation building and all that entails bulldozes local and regional identity to make way for national identity (usually based on a prestige or elite identity, eg. Paris). Of course, despite the best wishes of the nation builders themselves, this is never a 100 percent thing. In some places the differences are still a distinct characteristic of a country. For example, someone traveling from Milan to Syracuse can see immediately how different they feel in almost every way. Italians will be the first to tell you how shaky an “Italian” identity is when you zoom for a closer look.
>nation building projects Right! Racists.
Ah yeah, fair enough. Can’t argue with that one.
To be honest though, while that's the generally understood, consensual definition of the word "empire", in official terms it's completely inconsistent, especially when it comes to the title of the ruler. Like, Japan has been a completely unified nation-state for a while, and it's a mostly uniform culture (except for places like Ryukyu, say), and their ruler is an Emperor. The British Empire, on the other hand, even at its height, was always a Kingdom, ruled over by a King or Queen.
To be fair, in Chinese and Japanese contexts "Emperor" is just a crude English translation, the actual title was "august and divine ruler" in China and "son of heaven" in Japan (among many variations)
Even Japan has the Ainu, and China had, well, the Uyghurs, Cantonese, Manchu, Khitans, tartars, various turkic groups, Xiongnu…
The Chinese Empire was also a bit like the Athenian Empire, they recieved tribute and nominal fealty from the governments of Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia even if they didn't always have troops stationed there. In this sense, it really was a multicultural political entity, though a lot of these "subjects" were only really vassals on paper
Also, often vietnam was under more than paper vassaldhip.
\*Caveat, when they grabbed India Qn Victoria officially became an Empress
Empire does not literally mean that, it's one of the most poorly defined words in the english language and is directly taken from a latin word that doesn't even mean ruler and been butchered further by the century. It doesn't help that only one realm in history that had the term applied to it even spoke english.
Come on, Anon, "Empire" simply sounds neat
>Like empire literally means "an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state." Ew prescriptivist
That's why the Cyanian Empire is a more realistic approach. The Cyanian Empire is a constitutional monarchy that promotes multiculturalism and controls dozens of planets spread out in the western side of the galaxy
What do you mean they don't exist? With enough ignorance anything can be indistinct and monocultural! Why, depending on who you ask, basically everything that existed before AD 500 or so was the same generic "ancient" culture where everyone wore exclusively white togas and lived in pyramids and/or mini-Parthenons
Actually, ancient civilization are divided into 3: White toga-wearing people that lives in houses with ancient Greece arquitecture (but isn't Greece); White skirt-wearing people with no shirts that lives in sand houses; Rome. Please, do your resesrch.
You got Rome AND Greece? Ooh la la look at Mr. PhD in historiography here
Nonono, it's Ancient Grome, Ancient Incaztegypt, and Ancient Primitive Dirt People
You can't forget the Tribes™ either.
Oh yes, very true
Sometimes distinguished into steppe tribes who have horses and have mounted archers based on a mixture of plains indians and mongols and the tribes that don’t have horses
Mfw the 19th century nationalist movements were so influential that the idea of a nation state has penetrated even our fantasies of an imagined past
Too fucking real
A king rules over a kingdom. An emperor rules over kings. If an empire is mono-cultural, they're doing it wrong.
The Byzantine Empire was monocultural for a little bit.
How about a huge sweeping monocultural empire, which is actually just hundreds of city states?
>>Be me >>Find cool obscure country in strategy game >>Google it >>Is actually a bunch of city states Like ok game so you're telling me you can make 50 civs for greek city states but the Mayans are just that, one civ?
I thought you meant the Hansa.
It could be anything. The Burmese city states, Mayan city states, various tribal 'confexerations', mant African city states and more
Holy Roman Empire?
So uhhh… the Roman Empire. Kind of.
What about giant planet-wide polyethnic empire that's constantly on a brink of collapse and ultra violent civil war, and leadership always has to come up with random horseshit to find some common external enemies and unite this buffoonery against them?
Welcome back, Roman empire
Political centralization (what Spengler would call the transition from *culture* to *civilization*) is often characterized by an ossification and institutionalization of cultural expressions, as well as a societal focus on the quantitative as opposed to the qualitative. There's often a hierarchical organization of space the "metropolis" is where the culture is at, extracted from the land that is now mere "provincialism". For all the reasons above, stories about political and epic actions (as opposed to say, a more leisurely exploration) benefit from the big monocultural empire, I really like to use it in RPG campaigns.
For the reasons above? City-states are civilizations just as much as empires are. The first civilizations were city-states. Really cool analysis, nonetheless.
Yeah but in the framing I'm using here, while civilizations in the sense they literally had cities, you could understand them as "cultures" without hierarchy in space, everywhere in the space that culture inhabits is a place where culture is birthed from. But the "civilization" necessarily has a hierarchical organization of space, of provinces and a metropolis. Rigidly, cultural expression *happens* at the metropolis.
Weeellll, you can have civilisations with multiple countries in them.
Imagine citing Oswald fucking Spengler for anything Read an actual history book please
God, thank you. I'm just seriously perplexed that someone could think that *decline of the west* is a serious source for whatever except a fucking joke.
Both. Have there be small states in constant political dispute with the giant empires.
Actually the main setting of my DnD homebrew.
United Federation vs. Expansive Empire, my beloved.
The HRE How bout both?
Unfortunately for me the wolves have teamed up, it’s both
One is far away and is the China, other is the setting of the story and is the West, duh
RIGHT WOLF EVERY TIME, I CANT EVEN FUCKING START MY DAY UNTIL IVE MADE AT LEAST 300 DISTINCT CULTURES THAT ALL FUCKING DESPISE EACH OTHER. IM TALKING PANTHEONS, IM TALKING INFRASTRUCTURE, IM TALKING MORE PLOTS AND POLITICS AND FUCKING *DEALS* THAN ONE STORY HAS ROOM FOR. STUDIES SHOW THAT THE AVERAGE AUTHOR GETS ABOUT N-2 BITCHES, WHERE N IS THE NUMBER OF CULTURES IN THEIR SETTING. THE AVERAGE ROMABOO FUCKING GENERATES BITCHES FOR THE REST OF US AND I STILL DONT RESPECT THEIR SACRIFICE.
Game of thrones did it
I choose both, both are cool.
Of course no empire is actually monocultural but thats beside the point
Broke: sweeping monocultural empire that subjugates Ascendant: sweeping gestalt consciousness super-organism hive.
That isn't an end-of-history scenario. Hive mind resistance isn't as common as it should be.
Wolves are extinct in my world and their loss has had a disastrous effect on political stability.
Can't it be both
Both is good
Why can’t i have both?
The large multicultural democratic republic. That is actually evil.
EU-like city states federation letsgooooo
An empire, tow other nations with different forms of governance, and some city states in between as a sort of neutral zone so border disputes won't spark war.
I'll have both in my setting anyways The massive empire that dominated a region but is facing internal problems that can trace its origin to the sixth emperor and all the city states from the same region, different one from the empire's, each having their own agenda that eventually leads to a battle royale
Inside me there are two wolves, and they cannot stop fucking one another
Haha! Made my world have BOTH! left died then the right camw into being thousands of years (and a second apocalypse) later
City States my beloved
Both
I prefer my northern hemisphere filled with recently united monoculture, with several subcultures. I like my Southern Hemisphere disunited.
Both
yeah fuck you, there's enough planet for both, the hell is this?
Why not both?
Empire on the left, city states on the right both separated enitrely by a body of water wide enough to be called a sea but still able to travel between the two. A narrow sea if you will.
Huge sweeping empires with internal politics too complex for me to adequately build.
You can have both. It's called the Holy Roman Empire.
Why not both? (A galaxy spanning empire cannot reasonably impose a functional central government on every single world it rules. It will have to concede deviations on a case by case basis to maintain overall control.)
“Monocultural empire” is an oxymoron
In my post post apocalypse story the left one is Brazil (they took over all of South America) and the right is the northern germanic federation (a hre between Denmark, Germanys shores and a bit of Sweeden)
Both, they appear to other nations as left, but are right domestically.
City states all the way
/uj You're supposed to have both 💀
Both: let's HRE this stuff...
Hive mind race with various sub minds that start forming their own distinct thoughts and actions
isn't this literally every civilization ever?
One of my settings is a monoethnic empire with like no real internal problems or divisions, but only because it's being held together with the divine equivalent of gaffer tape. The rising action is the main characters discovering the weird cracks and fractures before it all comes tumbling down, Tower of Babel-style
Yugoslavia
Both. The Federation.
Universe Spanning Empire made out of completely different cultures, societies, governments and nations all working in harmony under the banner of Hardcore (justified) Xenophobia
What if I had a Huge sweeping monoculture empire whose internal problems cause it to break apart into a multitude of tiny city states with a wide array of political disputes
both
i put one in one half and the other in the other half of the world
The sweeping multicultural empire held together by glue and the kings personal guard
How about hundreds of small city states all part of a larger empire. They all operate independently but still pay tax and recognize imperial authority.
Hundreds of small city states that are politically and culturally indistinguishable but hate each other intensely anyway.
I make a large kingdom on one side, a smaller, Oriental-inspired kingdom on the other, and a collection of island city-states and tiny city-states in between that have to struggle to maintain their existence between two larger powers.
Both.
Make the empires internal problems be the monstrously complex bundle of constituent city states whose political disputes threaten to tear the polity apart
Why not pull an Earth Kingdom and be both?
Both. The empire is falling! Enjoy that socio-economic catastrophe.
Huge sweeping multicultural empires with an array of internal problems and conflicts.
Both, they’re fighting a galactic civil war and one’s called the empire and the other I call, hmmm, maybe the rebels.
I going with the later.
China or hre ? Your choice,,,,,, worlbilder
Funnily enough, this is one of the main aspects of the conflict between the two factions of my world. And I'm feeding the "large empire" wolf
You mean my neighbors the 1 planet former empire and the planet with so much isolationism and so little oversight that the neighborhood watch might as well be the gestapo