Fluff question: why do you like Yu Jing?

Actually I think the fluff makes the point to say that they are just military personnel gone bad.

Which makes sense, you wouldn't send an untrained civilian through the power armor training and to assault a beachhead. You would just get him cleaning the streets for a while.

I always assumed the promise was true, because it makes more sense to have it as a "rehab" process. Obviously the worst reincident criminals would get pretty much indefinitely dumped in there, but I doubt it is a blatant lie.

The spirit and aesthetic of the SS, but the competence of Mussolini's blackshirts*.

This is what the IS has become. May as well make up some bullshit so the acronym is ISIS. Imperial Service of the Imperial State? That works.


*While I generally dislike the blanket dismissal of the entire Italian Army in WWII, this made for a good humorous remark.

 

The appeal of Yu Jing is largely in Aestetics - A great deal of care has been taken to convey the asian feel of the faction into each model.

In terms of background, what used to be the appeal was the idea of an authoritarian regime that, while oppressive, had also managed to unite the various disparate cultures of the east, and allowed its citizenship an amazing amount of freedom (considering the mentioned authoritarian tendencies...) to celebrate and preserve said culture.
A society built on some interesting paradoxes, basically.

Sadly, with recent developments, the pan-asian cultural project has devolved into the incompetent evil empire, and I find there's very, very little appeal to be found in this. It feels like CB (Gutier, I'm guessing?) ran out of ideas for the faction and decided to write them as increasingly braindead evil.

Most recently, the CBL fluff seems to simply underline this tendency.
I like this setting for its nuance. Increasingly, YJ simply doesn't benefit from it.

 

Politically I see them as a refreshing parallel to the corporate oligarchy of PanO, as a state that's ultimately looking out for its people and their future. Their authoritarianism plays as a good contrast to other large factions like PanO and Nomads.

Militarily I get a Starship Troopers vibe from the Invincibles, who are everyday civilians who want to do their part for the state empire, with some heroes rising from the ranks. Massed power armour and heavy weaponry is what got me into this faction in the first place (and Samurai, but that's still raw).

The ISS...I've honestly not been much of a fan of, even before the hit piece that is the JSA Codex. Unfortunately now that my options are more limited I've been paying more attention to them and they're growing on me. I see them as brutal urban law enforcement, Judge Dredd style. I'd believed they were so brutal in order to be pragmatically and ruthlessly efficient but it turns out they're just mad dogs. I think a lot of what I like about "new" Yu-Jing is unfortunately head-cannon fluff of heroic power armoured soldiers and badass underpaid cops. The sculpts are great too, but that can be said about most of Corvus Belli's range.

Edit: I've just realised that we've become genocidal racists complete with "ethnic cleansing death squads" CBL's and it's pissed me off a bit. This isn't something that was portrayed in the faction a few months ago (when I picked up the game) and yet now it's our primary defining feature. What, because we have Kuang Shi? This is a pretty stupid move by the writers at Corvus Belli, and from what I've read of Uprising the rest of the writing is just as poorly thought out. Honestly, I'm not happy with the way CB is treating its customers and this will definitely affect not only my future purchases (I still have glaring holes in my collection from the JSA loss) but how I talk to others about this game.

 

Quite frankly, I hate, and have hated, the ISS.

That said, the IA is really cool, and I like them a heck of a lot. The aesthetic and overall look of the terracotta warriors is really cool, and I like the idea of them as the pragmatic defenders of humanity.

So for me, I like the pan-asian aspect (sadly now gone), the pragmatic leadership (which has been undermined by ISS going insane), and the awesome HI army holding the line against the CA (Luckily this remains).

So for me, fluff wise, the faction is less appealing atm, but with IA supposedly coming down the pipe, I have hope that it will improve for me, the CBL were a miss because I hate ISS, but I like to think YJ will, in future, do a bit of purging of the party and move more toward the imperial court holding power, so saner heads and debate can prevail. Time will tell.

 

The pan-asian elements are still intact (minus Japan). Korean, Vietnamese, Mongol, Thai, etc are all united under YJ.

 

If you want sanity I think the last thing you want is the Imperial Courts having more power.

No sneaky counter-revolutions OK? No Ming or Qing restorations.

 

But at least courtly infighting is more politics and ninja stuff than firebombing and concentration camps.

 

Initially, when I bought in to them in 1st Edition? I liked a few things:

• China doesn't tend to get a lot of play in sci-fi games for some reason. You usually just get Space-Japan and they're always Space-Samurai Japan at that (i.e. they go back to being Imperialist and Feudal for some strange reason, and their only character trait is Honour, heaping spoonfuls of Honour). So a faction that was Space China front and centre (with, at the time, a tiny little Japanese component) was cool. Reminded me a bit of the Middle Kingdom from The Diamond Age, which was pretty cool (I loved the Neo-Confucian stylings of their courts harkening back to that especially).
• At the time, they were mostly shown to be a bit ruthless, a bit cut throat, but above all else they were competent and made for a good underdog superpower. For me, the background of the Quingdao Report basically set the tone for the whole setting as a cool way to incite a sort of tense, Cold War vibe while painting a picture of an intelligent and complex faction.
• Before more context was added, the Wu Ming seemed like a perfectly grey concept at the time and I loved that they weren't under-armed, explosive-vest wearing, suicide troops (something they had avoided in Haqq, to their credit). The background was perfect for a slightly ruthless state following Confucian ideologies. Confucianism is big on education and is loathe to waste talent and potential. So instead of executing dangerous, criminal military personnel, they give them another chance to give back to society instead of just putting them down like rabid dogs. But they don't do it by ensuring they'll die, they equip them well (better than some actual troops) and equip them to succeed (because why bother with them if failure is assured?). They were the exact kind of thing I'd expect in a setting where black ops and clandestine action were the order of the day. They weren't crappy criminal conscripts, they were Chinese Snake Plisken! Sadly with more time and expansion on the Imperial Service they'd gain a lot of nasty extra stuff around them. But that initial concept was dynamite.
• I liked the idea of a largely unified East Asian alliance. I mean, in PanO it led to some cool places (Sihk troops, Maori troops, etc.) and while this wasn't done well in core, I was sure we'd eventually see more variance (I mean, at least Ko Dali and some of the remote names were Korean and there was a smattering of Japanese here and there for flavour *cough*).
• The idea of a power-armour loving force was also nice and was right up my alley at the time. I liked the concept of Yu Jing being in the middle of modernizing with a bunch of fancy new stuff. It made them the best generalist list in the game up to that point with a smattering of high-tech and low-tech options.

Sadly, they've very much focused on the bits that I wasn't interested in and they've slowly shifted away from being shrewd, competent, and more than a little ruthless in to being a bunch of jackbooted thugs leading around zombie-bomb people. Now they've simply made the short leap to also being villains whose only purpose is to make the good guys look good and my enthusiasm for them has waned heavily.

The RPG still paints a pretty even-keeled picture across the whole setting (I mean, the ISS are in there, but the book doesn't over-focus on them while also giving greater depth to a lot of the darker grey and black bits from other factions and polities), but I'm not sure whether they'll be able to fix the structural issues of the Uprising when the Yu Jing source book comes around for it. So for the time being, it looks like the RPG will become my primary interaction with the setting going forward since I'm not really that interested in the wargame at this point.

Yu Jing is a great example of an idea with great potential that ended up being executed poorly. It probably hurts a bit more since they managed to do a much better job with Haqqislam and that one was equally as fraught as Yu Jing at the time it came out. So sometimes it feels like they just dropped the ball with Yu Jing by making them Evil PRC amped up to 11 instead of taking the more even-keeled and at times optimistic and idealistic approach they took with PanO (hyper-capitalist state where wage-disparity hasn't ripped it asunder? Hmm...) or Haqqislam (humanist Golden Age Islam in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace). Just feels like a missed opportunity caused by lack of general research in to the culture and too much playing in to current stereotypes instead of what we got with the other factions.

Hopefully they can turn the ship around eventually and present the faction more like the others rather than constantly making them the heel of every scenario involving human super powers.

Edit

And just to add, I agree with a lot of folks that the ISS started off more Judge Dredd in the way they were displayed. Though I do bristle a bit at how Judge Dredd doesn't really fit with the rest of the setting of Infinity. I love Judge Dredd, but it is very much a satire of the caliber that Infinity doesn't really indulge in. For Judge Dredd to work as the protagonist, he needs a shitty crapsack of a world where things are so bad that what is a jackbooted, authoritarian thug IS the hero of the story.

Judge Dredd is the progenitor of 40k-style GRIMDARK, that is, he is a farcical caricature whose purpose is basically to poke fun at authoritarian extremists by showing how far the world needs to descend before their ideals even start to look a little heroic.

For a setting that is otherwise optimistic or at least idealistic in its presentation (that is, Infinity is largely played straight and most of the nations are generally viewed as utopian but with some dark spots and shadows) they look like exactly what they are. Villains.

This is why, as the ISS have flanderized more and more (and with Uprising, dipping their toes in to the Chaotic Evil waters) they've seemed more and more at odds with the setting. Because the thing they look the most like (although I say they've gone rather past Dredd at this point and appear to be going Judge Death now) is basically a completely different genre than them. This kind of genre clash can work (for example, the Combined are basically a Space Opera setting impacting on a near-future Transhumanist Setting to awesome effect) but in this case I think the portrayal is not only dragging ISS down (who should be pegging more off of Detective Dee, or HK action movies) but also dragging the whole faction down by making it so front and center.

 

Expendable yes, more than the average empire troop, it is a penal sentence after all, suicidal as you "thousand take a combi and assault the enemy TAGs no armour or heavy weapons", no.

They make sure they are a proper military unit and operate as one, yes, they will get the worse missions and will be left behind in evacuations if there is no space but their chances of survival are not impossible (usually).

And yes, Wu Ming do get out of the regiment, if they did not it would have been mentioned a lot.

 

Eeeeh, I wouldn't count on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

That wasn't a commie thing.

 

Yet there were many periods of Chinese history where the court kept reasonable order.

Win some, lose some. Meh.

 

You can say the same about the Party.

 

The reason why there has been so much focus on ISS and JSA is because those are the only to sectorials currently, and they are at odds with each other. From the beginning, JSA had the anti YJ terrorist sub plot, and ISS is the ruthless counter terrorist force.

Once we get an actual state army sectorial (aka Invincible Army) I would bet the focus will shift.

 

And all signs point to the beginning of 2019 at the earliest, so buckle in for a long wait.

 

I always viewed Wu Ming as the Dirty Dozen in SPAAAAAAACE.

 

Yeah, part of the problem is the fact that ISS is the only Yu Jing sectorial now.

It's hard to play up the parts of the faction which literally don't exist yet.

Which is why I so hoped that we would see IA sooner rather than later...

 

A year or so ago I had a conversation with some students from Singapore on a train and there are some interesting points from that conversation as they pertain to Asian cultures and outlook.

In the west we have a further education system that is based around choice where an individual student picks the subjects they want to study (to a greater or lesser extent) in high school and again at university level. The expectation is that the personal choice and personal drive will lead to individuals who excel in their chosen field and can transition into a productive work cycle from that education.

While this works for some there are also people who might enjoy certain topics/subjects that don't directly match to their skills. As we encourage freedom of choice those situations manifest in people generally trying to do more of what they like than what they are good at.

In Singapore by comparison the schools are all streamed from very early age and students are pushed hard to be the best they can be in subjects that they are good at whether they enjoy them or not. As that education continues the pattern repeats with the state pushing individuals to subjects where as a society they may have deficits, subjects that are in high demand internationally, etc. Students simply don't get a choice about what they are going to study but the state puts them in the best position to succeed not only internally but also on the international stage. There is a reason they have one of the highest rated education systems in the world.

Now that isn't Judge Dredd or ISS authoritarian but it is the state removing some personal freedoms from individuals in a way that makes both the society and individual excel.

In a similar manner there were a number of studies done on World of Warcraft performance across various different tasks within the game. In a massive over simplification it showed that US based players excelled at small group PvP that emphasised personal skill, Asian based players excelled at large scale raids that required personal sacrifice to benefit the group and strong group co-ordination and European players excelled at midscale PvP that sat as the hybrid of skills from the other two. That willingness to put the group/team/nation first over personal glory means that on some level the state doesn't even need to be authoritarian to push some of these ideas as they are already intrinsic to certain Asian cultures.

That mindset isn't something that you see very often in (primarily western) sci-fi settings and was a definite factor in my desire to play YJ.

 

Is pretty simple. Japan an china have a history. Several wars including some heinous crimes. but they are similar in their cultural pride. So when Yujing absorbed Japan, the japanese refused to be just regular citicens and wanted to keep "privileges"... the result was a lot of grudges between the other Yujing members and Japan. Then the japanese terrorism began... so some penalties were imposed to Japanese population for actively harboring criminals. (This is probably the more alien thing, because we all know is a crime to punish the sons for their father's sins)

Regarding the wu-ming... If I'm not mistaken, US has penalty conmutations to young felons by enlisting the military and they are not used as expendable cannon fodder (there are even films about it). so, not so alien for anyone. The Daofei are also bad guys in power armours (If I recall right they are criminals too)

And there have being a lot of authoritarian coutries all over the world (not just Eastern countries)

What I find more Romantic about Yujing is the fact that the Politics are in fact searching for union, progress and the well being of the main bulk of their citicens... Of course it has some twisted parts, to make it feel more human and real. But the main motto is pretty warm.

The other fact that I like about Yujing is that it was the first Hyperpower. The rising star that was the frigtening reason for a lot of countries to pack up and create PANO. They fear us because our potential, and I honestly think our raw potentitial is the Key to win the war against the EC.

 

It's funny, four years ago when I created this flow chart, I was reluctant to get Wu Ming or Kuang Shi because they were too grimdark/edgy*. Eventually I was won over by the crunch.

I wonder if I would have started today's Yu Jing back then.


*Seems I was also a better painter and a better writer too.

 

Gameplay is why I want to start collecting Yu Jing. The new models are much better than the old ones (I can say that across all factions), and I like the HI focus of Yu Jing. Theres some very nice builds that fit my playstyle that I can make with the faction.

As for fluff, I kind of like all the factions fluff wise but I only have so much money to collect minatures. I like that Yu Jing is the rivals of Pano and the cultures/governments are opposites of each other. Its not just a political or economy clash. Its also very much a cultural clash.

I like the naming of the Yu Jing units. The video explain the Chinese names of the units was very interesting and a nice attention to detail by CB.

As for how evil Yu Jing is, so far its been pretty focused on the ISS being evil. So I think Yu Jing is a big enough faction to hold more honorable sectorials like hopefully the IA. I want my Yu JIng HI focused sectorial!