EB2 discussions.............bigger map?

[Obelics]

Oh, and by the way. Those 'million man armies' got smashed by 30,000 or so mongols with no better technology than the ingame Sarmatians

that was not a fine comparisons in my opinion, the chinese that were doomed by mongols ordes, were the chinese of the Sung dinasty, this was a sort of a Great Reinassence Period for the Chinese, it was comparable at somethink like Florence in the '400, or more generally at the italian states of the '400, their culture reached one of the most fine form of expression, and even the plastic arts, still now the masterpiece of chinese ceramics for example, are the Sung period, not the Ming in the view of a chinese, and there were an explosion of the commerce and of the "financial" activity, there were cities like HangZhou who was considered "urban cities" in the actual meaning of the term, the life was very "urban" for much men, and as counterpart, they were not a fine military power.
I can recall, that the most used form of war, by the Sung emperors, was the corruption, they just tryed to buy the enemies or to make some commercial treaties, to make them calm, so in definitive i dont see all this military power for Sung China. There is a plenty of books on the Sung Period, and you can make an image of what it was, and how they were bad on the military side. There were corruption in the generals and even the "baojia" sistem of recruitement was very ineffective, since it was based on the recruitement of militia peasants, and the urbans class and financial class didn't have interest on fighting, even a lot of what we "Western" can call nobles, were absorbed in the financial activities, and even the confucian funtionaries, despite the confucianism, "officially", hated the merchant class.

but I agree that a comparisions between roman army and Han army (around 1 century b.c) is stupid, but not cause what you call the "individual" and "duel" style of fight of the chinese, remember that china was never and i say never a feudal state as we intend in the West, it was almost always a "burocratic" state even in his worst "dark ages", yes if you think of the Tang there were a sort of feudal nobless, but it was quicly absorbed in the functionary class, and it lost fast its power as the economy had its bump.
Returning to Hans, im not an expert of military history, but ive never heard of individual fighting style etc. The chineses have nothinkg to share with the japanish samurais...
The real power in china in all its confucian history, was never of the warring nobles, but of the functionaries (chen), and if a noble wanted to have some effective power, he has to become a functionary.

the main difference is resumed (with all the limitations of labels) by this two charachters: WU (martial) for the Japanish and WEN (cultur) for the chinese.

It could sound strange, but japanich had an history more comparable to that of our westerns, than the hystory of china, that is a long history of burocracy... and this is not only due to the "confucian" substrate, but even to the "legist" (or "legalist" i dont know what is the correct english word) substrate of the Qin period.

PS do not confuse, the "individual and duellant" image that can give some movies like "Hero, of Zhang YiMou" or some litterature, i think for example to the "ShuiHuJuan" (the border of the river), or even the nasty brigands who follow the monk Xuan Zang in his travel in the West, XiYouJi) and all the successfull genre WuXia (martial) with the effective chinese armies, who were imperial amies, of levies.
The genre of the individual heros, and of the picaresque brigands who had some individual and heroic skills, was developed as a counterpart of the strong burocratic empire. And this individual and duellant heroes often fight against the Empire, or against what they see as an usurper dinasty... because in the optical of the confucianism you can't fight against the official power. So it often happen that these individual hero and their bands, fight against what they reputes usurper etc.