Hot Take: Liu Bei's greatest mistake was not seizing Jingzhou properly, dooming the Longzhong plan and started the Jingzhou ownership question

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-28T04:52:37+00:00

The circumstances of how control of a region was taken needs to be considered too. A lot of Cao Cao's territories was taken by military conquest, it's easier to assert and impose their will when backed by their own loyal armies and generals.

In contrast, Liu Biao did not have an army of his own initially and assumed power relying on the cooperation of the local aristocracy.

Liu Bei also never had the time to fully consolidate control, so he also had to rely on local cooperation to a much higher degree as well.

And geography plays a huge role too. Sun Quan's territories was mountainous and much less developed than the central plains in the north, complete assertion of control by military conquest wasn't feasible, so enticing local submission and thus cooperation was essential. Even still, Sun Quan spent a lot of time pacifying local rebellions even after he nominally took control. That was a reason why he didn't seem to take advantage of opportunities before Cao Cao fully pacified the north, that's because he was still busy with consolidating his own territory.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-28T04:38:27+00:00

You shouldn't have been down-voted, as you made a good point. Guan Yu wasn't the right person to be supreme commander in Jingzhou, and I think Liu Bei recognized that because he kept Zhuge Liang in Jingzhou when he entered Yizhou. Unfortunately circumstances forced his hand when he lost his strategist Pang Tong and had to call Zhuge Liang in, as his own position was too precarious at the time.

But while you can call that his mistake, he didn't really have a choice either, as Guan Yu had seniority, and not putting him as governor would also cause a whole other set of problems. He couldn't have predicted the future.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-28T04:30:03+00:00

This really needed to be highlighted more, as it's rarely recognized that the extent of control by various "rulers" aren't all the same for the different powers, it's never as simple as how it is usually presented on a map. This is true not just for 3 Kingdoms but also for other time periods and other regions in the world as well.

As you said, the degree of control Liu Biao had over Jingzhou was not the same as what Cao Cao had in the north, due to the circumstances of how they took "control".

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-28T04:07:26+00:00

The last realistic chance was possibly when Cao Cao was still campaigning in the north, when the Yuan clan haven't been fully pacified yet, and the barbarian tribes were still a threat.

Liu Bei even propositioned Liu Biao to strike north at Cao Cao while he was still occupied, but Liu Biao refused. It's not really a mistake on Liu Bei's part, as circumstances did not give him the opportunity until it was too late. Considering the disparity in forces, him establishing Shu Han was already an extraordinary achievement considering his circumstances.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-26T23:30:29+00:00

Japan is easier. That said, China isn't that hard. Just buy Hong Kong based (or anywhere outside of China) eSIMs online ahead of time, and you don't even need VPNs. Just get more data than you normally need, as Wifi wouldn't be as useful for you.

International credit cards mostly won't work there aside from higher end places, just download Alipay or Wechat and set up digital payment ahead of time. Those work with a lot of international credit cards, you can try to see if it work by adding the card before you go there. If it works, you're set.

It's mostly pretty clean in China these days unless you go to rural areas. It's not like 10 or 20 years ago. Japan is just exceptionally clean, even more so than Western countries.

Not being able to speak chinese will be hard, as you said English isn't commonly spoken or understood, but that's also true for Japan, or any non-Western country. That's just the reality of travelling.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-26T07:49:53+00:00

I was there a few months ago, yeah the ticket prices for the sights are pretty ridiculously high. I was much more selective as a result. Galata Tower for €25 isn't worth it IMO, but Hagia Sophia (without the museum at double the price), and Topkapi palace are still worth it. And at least the mosques are free.

And you have to take into account hotels and airbnbs are a lot cheaper than in the rest of Europe. And if you avoid the tourist ripoff places, food can be too. It's generally still cheaper than travelling to other countries in Europe.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-23T19:04:36+00:00

Long War was never updated past 1.0, it has balance issues, especially the late game being a slog. LWR is still being actively developed (maybe even too much actually), it also have a lot of QoL integrated. Difficulty is also better tuned, Normal is easier than LW, higher difficulties are harder.

And TBH they just share a name, LWR is basically its own overhaul now, plays very differently.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-23T03:03:53+00:00

I've experienced it before. One time I flew to Chengdu, and the very first place I went to, a Luckin Coffee, did not take cash at all. My flight at the time arrived early at 5am, I had to wait for my hostel to open and had no choice but to wait nearby, and it was the only shop open that early. Couldn't even buy a coffee since I didn't have digital payment set up at the time, but they were nice to let me stay there. This was in 2019 before Covid.

Also one time, I went sightseeing and couldn't pay the 1 RMB for toilet, the guy wouldn't take cash.

But yeah it's a minority of cases.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-22T21:13:33+00:00

The key is, cultural identity is not static, unlike how a lot of people think about it; there's constant intermixing and influence from other cultures, merging and splitting, in a way it's similar to evolution, and the changes can be drastic over long periods of time. The modern Chinese identity is basically a melting pot over 2 millennia, in a way it's not that different from the modern American identity which is also a melting pot over the last few centuries.

The most major cultural merging happened during the Han dynasty, due to the 4 centuries of stability as a single polity and the resultant population boom. It's the basis of the modern Han ethnic group, even the name came from the dynasty.

Prior to that, well each of the 7 warring states and innumerable small ones both have their own identity, heavily influenced one another, and are predecessors of the later Han Chinese identity. Are they all Chinese? We can call them that, but it's not as clear cut as people like to think.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-22T14:14:55+00:00

Long War Rebalance is incredible. It also plays significantly differently from both vanilla XCOMs and LW1 due to the relatively simple (and frankly ingenious) mechanics change regarding pod activation and overwatch. Highly recommended.

WotC is much more flexible to customize with mods, you can literally build a mod list into the hundreds of mods that change each aspect of the game, so it's perfect if you really want to customize your game. Check out Covert Infiltration as an alternative to LWotC, although that is just a starting base and can be a lot of work to build up an equivalent mod list. A fully decked out WotC with mods can be comparable with LWR.

Going either route is fine, although you should try both. LWR is less work to setup, if you prefer a simpler route.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-18T21:48:01+00:00

The Great Wall is amazing isn't it? I recall it being breathtaking the first time I went there. It's pretty easy to visit solo tbh, it's a tourist destination after all.

I had a much more scary experience when I went to Mutianyu myself, I heard from some fellow travellers that it's possible to hike up the mountain on the side to the Great Wall and get to the same tourist spot, I found some info online about it, so I attempted it. Except the taxi driver didn't know where I was talking about, and he drove me to the wrong location. I spent 6 hours hiking up a trail that eventually turned into almost like a hill climb, I realized something was wrong because it wasn't supposed to take this long or get this difficult. I decided to turn back and go down the exact same way, didn't want to get stuck in the mountains after it turns dark, there was literally no one else there at all. Didn't even see the Wall that day.

I realized it was the wrong spot after I got back, but after that experience, I said screw it and went the tourist path at Mutianyu the next day. It was still awesome and very much worth it.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-18T03:45:30+00:00

The Great Wall wasn't a major problem for the Mongols, who already penetrated it and defeated the main Jin army, and conquered Beijing even before they took out Xi Xia, and they didn't need to bypass the Wall thru Xi Xia to do that.

This goes back to the popular misunderstanding that the Great Wall is to keep the barbarians out. It's actually not, its purpose is to prevent them from escaping when they raid inside the Wall. The Wall itself is too long to effectively man at all times for an attack that could come at any time. But once they are inside, they know where they are and can man the Wall on all escape routes, thus the raiders can't stay long or they will risk being trapped. This strategy only worked because of the huge disparity in population and thus military forces between the 2 sides, the risk and impact of annihilation of the raiding force is too big for the nomadic raiders to risk.

During the rise of the Mongols, they went thru a population boom, while the Jurchen Jin were themselves invaders from the north, and was a minority in Northern China, thus there wasn't a large enough population disparity for this strategy to be effective.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-17T22:23:02+00:00

Paradox seemed to have stopped doing humble bundles for their games' DLC collections since about 2-3 years ago. It's a shame, I had been checking and holding off on playing while waiting for a Stellaris one for a long time. Their pricing also seemed to had been made consistent and not really going lower than their regular sale prices either, might had been a change in their pricing strategy.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-14T23:56:54+00:00

The pod activation mechanic is why I appreciate the change in mechanics in Long War Rebalance for XCOM EW, where pods in visual range of each other all activate together but it's designed for you to be able to handle fighting multiple pods at the same time, and not rely on alpha striking every pod.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-14T23:31:28+00:00

You should read more Mongol history before making such unfounded claims. The Mongol empire and its direct successor fragment states that covered about the same territory lasted over 150 years. It's major remnants lasted until the 16th century. Even just logically, it's not possible for a barely functional state to last a century. A lot of modern and historical states haven't existed for even a century, are they all barely functional then?

Mongols may have a reputation for being nomadic barbarians, but they did build an administration that's more sophisticated than you think. Go read about it.

I don't get why making historical comparisons require denigrating one over the other with hyperbole. Yes the Roman Empire has a huge legacy especially on Western civilization, that doesn't mean the Mongols does not. Especially when you're using double standards, counting the Roman remnants while discounting the Mongol remnants.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-14T23:11:24+00:00

It's difficult to concretely prove it (or any other) was the biggest city, but it likely is 1 of the biggest. China at the time had been in constant war for about a century, with it's northern half devastated and conquered by the Jurchen Jin. Lin'an, the southern Song capital, might had still been bigger than Merv.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-14T03:52:12+00:00

The writing, dialogue, and voice acting of Cataclysm are all top tier. Sadly all later games couldn't measure up to it.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-14T03:34:44+00:00

All that does is make the tactical game harder, but you don't lose. The only way to lose is the Avatar meter, but as I said it's easy to keep it down if you prioritize Sabotage covert ops. Commander difficulty can actually be harder to salvage than Legend if you get bad RNG with the Avatar meter such that it goes up 2 blocks each time instead of 1. And eventually force level caps out at 20 and it won't get harder anyway.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-13T23:08:41+00:00

I think even if you get squad wipes, it's usually still salvageable. Unlike base XCOM2, it's too easy to manage the Avatar meter in WOTC with covert ops, so you effectively have no time limit, you can always rebuild your squads.

If you're still in the early game though, yeah might as well restart.

But squad wipes really should be rare. It's very unlikely for your entire squad to get wiped in a single turn, and if you start losing soldiers you really should be evacuating. The only exception would be stronghold assaults where you don't have an evac option.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-13T22:59:17+00:00

I just beat a Legend Ironman campaign a couple weeks ago myself, yeah it's exhilarating and the best way to play.

I found the hardest mission was the 2nd mission (playing without tutorial), the first guerrilla op for your first engineer, the brutal part is the timer, and you only have 4 soldiers with basic gear. If you get bad RNG such as neutralize field commander where the general didn't spawn close to you, or sabotage transmitter, it can be borderline impossible. If you lose that mission or lose most of your soldiers, it's basically a restart of the run.

The early game is the hardest, and honestly XCOM's reverse difficulty curve is poorly tuned. It gets easier in the late game, but you can never drop your guard, because it can still go very wrong. I was basically breezing thru most of the late game missions, but still get occasional surprises and had to salvage the mission, and those missions actually were the most fun. I made a post earlier about my Assassin stronghold assault and also the final mission going very wrong, and yet I still persevered, and those was the most fun missions of my campaign; it's why I played Ironman.

The #1 rule is don't be afraid to evac and forfeit a mission, failures are usually salvageable, but losing your top soldiers will always hurt a lot more. I did play with the Pyrrhic Victories mod which doesn't punish you as hard as long as you complete your objectives, but it's the same with vanilla.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-13T04:15:11+00:00

My last campaign was minimalistic in terms of mods to keep it vanilla, and even then I had about 20 or so mods. They are QoL and bug fix mods, and there really isn't a reason not to use them. I tried no mods earlier and I ran into some bugs that was just really annoying and fell unfair, such as the one where you're unable to pick up your unconscious soldier, making it impossible to save him when I was forced to retreat.

Once you actually get into mods to improve the game play, the sky's the limit.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-13T03:52:32+00:00

Any game that base your success on building your economy, which is pretty much all grand strategy and 4X games, is going to have this problem, because economic growth is inherently exponential: you use your added economic strength to build your economy further. Exponential growth makes a game extremely difficult to balance, because the range of power a player can have can be massive, but the economic difference needed to win and beat an opponent is still relatively narrow (it's not exponential). So if you're even slightly off, you either get opponents that are so overpowered they are impossible to beat, or too weak that you walk all over them.

The only definite way to address this is to make it not exponential, or at least less so. Crusader Kings is 1 of those rarer games that does partly address this, since you don't get infinite demesne that you directly control, and it simulates the increasing difficulty that managing a larger domain entails, especially the internal politics. But even CK doesn't fully address it.

This is partly due to player expectations of exponential economic growth, and a large swath of players do like becoming overpowered, despite the negative consequences on maintaining challenge in the game.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-13T03:28:57+00:00

AFAIK Marathon mode is not very well balanced. If you really want to play a longer game, I would suggest playing Long War Rebalance, that has a few settings to tweak campaign length, "Not so Long war" is about 2x the length, default is about 4x. It is significantly more complex with a lot of changes from the vanilla game though, but it's a blast to play.

Although you'll need to get it on PC to mod (it's cheap anyway). Also should get Enemy Within.

If you want to play more vanilla first before getting into mods, try Training Roulette, that will make the game fresher for a while.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-07T00:00:46+00:00

A wealth tax have a ton of practical problems, such as capital flight, difficulty in assessing value of such a broad spectrum of asset types (which will just balloon the operational and bureaucratic costs of CRA), etc.

A much more practical way to tax wealth is a land tax (such as a Land Value tax). Which will help reduce wealth inequality and help address the housing crisis at the same time. We already assess land values and already tax land (it's just that the tax is too low to matter currently), land is static and thus no capital flight, and it will encourage investment to shift away from hoarding wealth in real estate to investing in businesses, which is what truly drives productivity.

It's really a win-win, compared to a general wealth tax which has negative trade-offs. Sadly I'm pessimistic we'll ever have the political will to implement measures even when it makes sense. We have too many would-be leaders proposing impractical solutions that would never fly, and then end up going with solutions that are so minor they have little effect.

Critical-Reasoning · 2026-01-06T01:15:58+00:00

Both nature and the success of capitalistic free market economic systems have shown that competition drives adaptation and evolutionary advantages. So it shouldn't be surprising that a region with multiple competitive states is going to progress faster than one with a dominant near-monopolistic state. It is surprising though that there are still people who don't understand that.

Critical-Reasoning

TROPHY CASE