units i'd like to see

Quote:

Originally Posted by Subedei

Chinese engineers for the Mongol faction....could be solved with extra nasty & mean seige equipment with this faction has at the start of the game, but not rebuiltable in any city....

Now I am not an expert on siege weapons by any reckoning, but why would chinese siege equipment ca 1220-1240 (when the mongols will appear in M2TW) be more nasty and mean than islamic, latin christian or orthodox christian siege weapons? After, all the "state of the art" siege weapons of the time were the fully counterweigh trebuchets, who had, in the form of traction-trebuchets, been imported from china to the middle east and then to europe somewhere around the 9th century (possibly even earlier, and possibly invented separately, if the vikings were actually using traction trebuchets at the siege of Paris in 873, as the Germainian chronicle has it).

After bouncing around the middle east, persia, the mediterranean world and europe for several years and getting improved along the way, the now-improved trebuchet, equipped with a weighed counterweigh instead of lots of sturdy men pulling at ropes, made it back to china somewhere in the late 13th century or early 14th, brought by mongols who had dragged along some persian siege engineers - which was why these engines were called "Huihui Pao", huihui meaning muslim.

At the time of the mongol invasion of russia, gunpowder technology was used by the Song and the mongols could have brought some along, possibly using them in their later invasion of russia and at the battle of Legnica. However, these weapons were not, as a rule, siege weapons (at least we have no sources describing them attacking fortifications), but primarily used as psychological weapons to unnerve opponents: As late as the battle of Bun'ei in 1274, the gunpowder weapons used by the sino-mongol-korean forces were primarily catapult-flung firecracker-bombs. The Huochong cannon, who we have no or very weak sources for in the western mongol campaigns, seems to have been relatively small and mainly used for either firing clay pellets like a shotgun, or arrows in continuation of chinese rocket tradition - which, after all, primarily used gunpowder to propel an arrow, not as an explosive device.

All in all, I still fail to see any mean and nasty chinese artillery technology popping up in 1240 with the mongols, although they of course could build artillery like anyone else, and likely quickly would adapt to whatever was at hand.