It's ok, Japanese people can't commit war crimes. Uprising showed this. Using civilians as human shields is ok if they do it.
My ideal resolution: Support for vanilla I was expecting the CBL's to be just that, our sectorial hadn't even lost anything in the split. New units would be ideal, but I'd also be happy with temporary alternate profiles for our existing units. Fluff support I chose to start Yu Jing earlier this year partially because of the faction fluff, and I can't say I'm impressed with the direction the writing took in Uprising. I think Yu Jing desperately requires more fluff to give it some depth because they're horribly 2D villains at the moment in a setting that I thought was meant to be a little more subtle and ambiguous. New characters This is a no brainer. We lost most of ours overnight. I'm sure we'll get some eventually, but that brings me to my next point. Community support When I started this game I thought it was a small friendly dev team that were well connected with their fans/players/customers via the warcor program. Uprising clearly got some people (justifiably imo) upset, so why the radio silence from Corvus Belli? The mystery or "just wait and see" is completely lost at this point. Build some hype!
I have read the uprising, the narration of the Japanese rebellion (thanks to a friend who plays JSA). To say that I am upset is to say little, and I can understand the most exalted of the forum. The role of Yu Jing is grotesque, without leadership or authority, militarily mediocre, even his fort that is the space armada does not shine. And the Imperial Service looks more like a group of ultra football fans than an elite force, undisciplined and without tactical training. After reading the descriptions of the units in the CB Store and reading several references of the Lore in the forum (not all of us have read the books), you expect a much better performance. The truth is that the story could have been made much better. My verdict is negative, very negative
That's not the problem. By sending troops into Kuraimori (Yu Jing territory), DaiNippon is declaring war on Yu Jing. And that's a war they cannot win. I think @Interruptor is trying to parallel the Crimean/Ukraine events with this, but the reason Russia got away with it is largely because the US wasn't willing to do anything about it. Ukraine didn't have much military capacity to do something about it, either, since they'd given up their nukes in exchange for promises about respecting territorial integrity. But the power balance is the opposite direction between Yu Jing and DaiNippon. DaiNippon openly sending troops to Kuraimori gives Yu Jing an opportunity to utterly curbstomp DaiNippon. DaiNippon getting caught covertly sending troops makes DaiNippon a state sponsoring terrorism, which is also an excuse for a major power to invade (see the US invasion of Afghanistan). No modern treaty of alliance will back a member that attacks first. They are all phrased as "an attack on one is an attack on all," so an open attack by DaiNippon means that there are no allies standing to protect them. It's uncertain as to whether an attack on a state sponsoring terrorism would count as an attack first, considering that DaiNippon-sponsored "terrorists" (read: covert military forces) launched an attack on Yu Jing.
@Section9 I think you're missing the point I'm trying to make. The story will be written as if DaiNippon is morally correct to wage war in Kuraimori, and the other geopolitical actors in the setting will specifically intervene even when it hurts them to hamstring Yu Jing, who will be assumed to be perceived as morally bankrupt by the reader because that's the authorial intention. Trying to analyze it in terms of geopolitics is bound to fail, because it's not written at that level of complexity.
Was it really? I see a lot of cribbing from Hyperion, various cyberpunk works, A Fire Upon the Deep, and so on, hell, even Dog Soldiers, but very little that's original.
Here's the thing with not taking modern (or medieval or classic) geopolitics into account and going "oh, the logic works this way here": current geopolitics is founded in the wants and needs of nations in contest with each other. They make universal sense. Simply doing away with it might result in unintentionally saying "yeah, people don't actually need to eat or piss in this setting" (and I'm not being figurative here) All those minutia that makes a nation tick. All those tiny deals that have to be negotiated so that the tiny island of Nowhere and all their 1000 inhabitants can get clean water and all the thousands of trade deals that ensure trade is kept reasonably level upwards and downwards, etc. Doing away with the logic and the humanity that makes those things work is very literally like saying "a space wizard did it" (some edits: writing on mobile makes for occasionally funny text...)
I'm gonna echo @Hecaton here. In my opinion Gutier's not actually a particularly talented writer, which isn't uncommon amongst people who write for various miniature companies. Let's be realistic here, if they were A list writers they'd be selling novels or scripts, not miniatures. He's borrowed alot of material and built a pretty decent plot outline for a sci fi universe with its own spin. While the gaps have been around you and the rest of the community have been largely filling in the blanks with logical assumptions and it's been all good so far. The problem is while Gutier's passable, he's not particularly good and when he gets down to the details and starts filling in the blanks for himself he starts making mistakes. Over arching Japanese/Chinese tensions based around current modern historical tensions, he can write that it's a broad strokes image and it works. However when he fleshes everything out with a full blown uprising involving lots of closer inspection and details to the story? Mistakes, illogical events and character actions, and it all starts falling apart. It's not just Infinity every game system has this. You can have a decent overarching basic story like Warmachine, and then someone gets too involved and writes a story about Deneghra giving a captive soldier a blowjob (that is not a joke, that was actual 100% Privateer Press canon). Or you give Matt Ward too much creative freedom and he starts writing about space marines bro fisting Necrons. Or the multilaser guy. Heh. Overarching story that players fill the blanks in on, fairly easy. Trying to write uprising? Very difficult, and above Gutier's ability levels unfortunately.
@Mahtamori I agree but authors get themselves into Dunning-Kruger territory when they don't understand why it's important.
Yes, that, and the story was never all that good, and even fans of where it was will never automatically be fans of a new, mediocre, direction and all those things... On some level it's also not realizing they were being given a free pass by players that already knew the fluff was bad as long as fluff stayed in its god damn place. The second it became fashionable to claim the things done game mechanically were justified indeed required by immutable inevitable fiction (note: not how fiction works), that took all the former fluff fans unhappy with the new fluff content and added to them all the game fans unhappy with the new game content as additional critics of the new fluff content. Not a thing that needed to happen. But it's what happens when a game company mistakes a free pass for unconditional love of every aspect of what they produce.
There's nothing wrong with stealing other people's stories, you really don't want to know how many writers have borrowed either someone else's plot or actual historical events. Though it's really bad form to not file off the serial numbers when you use historical events (Looking at you, Rogue Trooper, you're straight up copying the American Civil War so bad that I literally threw the book across the room!) Like @Mahtamori said, the problem is that the various nations are not currently acting in their own interests (for the most part). Everyone weakened the second power in the Sphere when there is an existential threat on their doorstep. When the nations of the Sphere were acting in their own interests, the fluff made sense. Now the fluff does not make sense.
And on reflection, the way Pan-O acted should send anyone who's played EU, Stellaris, Civilization etc a jolt. Simply marching into another nation's territory with a huge military should give Pan-O all the shitpoints that Haqq or Ariadna can give. Still, I wouldn't go so far as to reach for Dunning-Kruger as an argument, I wrote as an appeal to Psychoticstorm to argue that real life is where we anchor our reference points and to appeal to Interruptor's intellect that there's other means for a super-power to force their issue by taking inspiration from real life. Example: If Pan-O arranged an impromptu military exercise near Yu Jing borders on Earth under the guise of prepping for O-12 mandated peacekeeping, faking bombing runs, flying sorties and just generally making it difficult to launch an invasion on Nippon while simultaneously keeping an eye on Pan-O and meeting Pan-O's fake aggressions in the air (as you're required to do), it could have forced the issue of making a full scale reclamation effort on Nippon impossible without breaching the suspense of disbelief. Full on violating sovereignty and starting an illegal war like Pan-O actually did isn't necessary.
Appealing to @psychoticstorm won't work however, since he’s made it clear that he doesn’t see that there’s any problem with the way @Interruptor has written Uprising.
Psychoticstorm also doesn't have creative oversight of the project, I'm more appealing regarding forum moderation that this situation naturally asks for real life comparisons because the setting asks the reader and gamer for it.
The story just isn't written that way. It's not written on the level to simulate geopolitical actors or politics in any meaningful way. That's why @psychoticstorm was saying that you can't apply modern values to whether or not the nations in Infinity are acting believably. The story wasn't written to portray these different fantastical nations interacting in a believable way, the story was written to get people hype on JSA and to buy the new stuff. When the racist, oppressive Yu Jing was portrayed in the story we were supposed to be all "Boo! Hiss!" and when the Japanese were portrayed heroically fighting for their freedom we were supposed to be all "Oh yay! I want to buy those models! Screw Yu Jing!" The problem is is that the whole thing is a bit transparent. Moreover, taking an ensemble of factions that various players identify with and enjoy, and casting one of them as a villain with no redeeming qualities, not even competence, leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. I saw this happen in l5r when some fanfiction maven got ahold of the narrative and wrote her pet faction's enemies as incompetent and buffoonish. The difference here is it's the originator of the setting who's doing it, so perhaps Yu Jing were always meant to be straight villains (and bargain basement ones at that, next to the Combined Army) but they were worried it'd be harder to buy into the faction if they portrayed them like that from the start.
What confuses me is that so many players, including warcors, have come out and said "yeah, Yu Jing has always been an evil faction". I've got the starter booklet on me now, the one I used to pick this faction. It talks about Yu Jing as the heterogenous pan-Asian faction that's gunning for the position of #1 hyperpower with their technological advances. This dissonance is really jarring.
I think there's two reasons that's the case. The first is that there's that segment of people who are going to support CB no matter what, and so when other members of the fanbase say "This characterization doesn't match up with how Yu Jing has previously been portrayed" they say "well, you must be wrong, ergo Yu Jing has always been evil." Notably, their chain of logic is *not* "Yu Jing has always been evil, so you must be wrong." The other factor is that, despite its initial characterization as a conglomeration of emerging economies in Oceania and the Indian subcontinent, PanO has morphed into the "Euro" faction for a lot of people, and a lot of the European members of the fanbase are perfectly content to see PanO's rival cast as morally reprehensible as it makes PanO more heroic by implication.
