The Doomed Sith Empire

[Euphrosyne]

lol, 1 simple resource is what helped save/build (or could have saved) empires time and again in real life...

 

Horses (made the Huns, the Magyars, and the Mongols the forces they where)

Bronze (saved Greece from Persia)

Gunpower (France won Hundred Years War Finally)

Winter weather (Saved Russia twice)*

Oil (from China made Japan the force it was in WW2)

A-bomb (could have saved Germany)

 

so really, it isn't that far-fetched. I shouldn't have to justify this stuff though, it is just a game... Also, if you don't like the EU then go back and re-watch the same old movies alone on your couch for hours on end and let us enjoy the rest of this expansive franchise in peace.

 

*yeah I get this might not be a resources but I was making the "1 factor can change history" point here...

ahahaha what

 

Here's a rebuttal to this resources thing.

 

Okay, first of all, "horses" can't be meaningfully described as a "resource" for the many, many pastoralist transhumant societies of Central Asia. Generally, the state societies that they fought against possessed horses too. Rome could muster vastly more cavalry than could the Huns, even in 450. And it wasn't an influx of horses that allowed the Huns, Xiongnu, Mongols, Magyars, Avars, Saka, Yuezhi, Dzungars, et al. to create their empires. These groups possessed about as many horses before they went on their big runs of conquest as they did afterwards. The horses were just part of their way of life. It's like claiming that "humans" were a resource that were essential to their success, or "yurts". It's nonsense.

 

By the time of Marathon and Salamis, bronze was not a new technology. Not even close. And the Greeks tended to possess significantly less of it than the Iranians (who helpfully controlled major tin deposits in Anatolia, tin being, of course, rather essential to the production of bronze). It was not the reason the Greeks won the so-called Persian Wars.

 

French employment of gunpowder weapons was largely incidental to the ultimate Valois-Armagnac victory in the civil wars that engulfed the French monarchy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While it's true that the development of compagnies d'ordonnances and the Bureau brothers' establishment of an institutionalized artillery were important to a developing French tactical ascendancy, that tactical ascendancy only speeded Armagnac victory along. What was most important was that the English lost the control that they'd had over large swathes of the French nobility, and the Burgundians patched up their differences with the Armagnacs in the Treaty of Arras. Superior French numbers and leadership told against the English even before the late 1440s; that last spasm of fighting merely went to show just how far the English had fallen from the heady days of Henry V and the capture of Paris.

 

Winter weather, as you pointed out, isn't meaningfully a "resource". And it certainly did not "save" Russia in either 1812 or the Soviet Union in 1941-43. In the former case, Napoleon had embarked on a war that he could not in any meaningful sense "win", picked one of the worst possible targets (Moscow instead of St. Petersburg), and finally, due to casualties along the way, sickness, and detachments, the main force of the Grande Armee had already been decisively defeated by the time he occupied Moscow in October, long before winter weather set in. (On that last point, see David Chandler's magisterial, if somewhat dated, history of Napoleon's campaigns.) In 1941, winter weather actually improved Germany's chances by hardening the ground from the autumn rasputitsa and permitting the Wehrmacht to make one final bid for capturing Moscow in Operation TAIFUN; in 1942, the Sixth Army was already exhausted before the fall ended, as were the armored spearheads further south in the Caucasus. Also, I'd like to know why winter weather supposedly saved Russia from Napoleon and Hitler, while conspicuously failing to save Russia from the Mongols or Imperial Germany.

 

Japan did not get oil from China. The Chinese war actually disastrously depleted Japanese oil stocks. Japan got most of its oil from the United States, and when the Americans embargoed Japan in 1941 the Imperial Japanese Army decided that it had to secure other oil supplies. It chose the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, even though attacking those places meant war with America. And, of course, the result was the ultimate destruction of the Japanese Empire. What's more, the Japanese barely saw any of the oil that the Indonesian and Malaysian fields produced, because the US Navy's submarines annihilated Japan's merchant marine and put a stranglehold on seaborne traffic.

 

And the atomic bomb would not have "saved" Germany. Germany lacked the resources to produce atomic weapons on any real scale, unlike the Americans. It also lacked the capability to deploy such weapons against any targets in the United States or the Soviet Union; of civilian targets, only the southern part of the United Kingdom would've been in danger. So the Germans would almost certainly have had to use their limited nuclear weapons against the armored spearheads carving up their country from east and west. Since the Wehrmacht had been virtually destroyed as a coherent entity by 1945, Allied ground forces were spread out, the better to take lots of ground quickly. So one or two bombs would barely have done any damage at all. Anyway, such a question would be purely academic, because Nazi Germany was never even sort of close to developing nuclear weapons, and certainly would not have built them before the Americans did.

 

 

None of this is to say that "one factor" doesn't change history all the time. It can, of course. For instance, a lot of very good historians would argue that one man getting sick destroyed the Western Roman Empire. Others would say that it was unseasonable winds. In either case, things could very well have gone the other way, quite easily.

 

But the Roman Empire was an unimaginably vast and powerful state that was destroyed largely by accident. It basically collapsed because it suffered from one of the worst runs of luck in world history, and even then, the collapse is qualifiable in many ways. (See pretty much everything that has come out on late Roman and post-Roman history since the 1970s, unless it was written by somebody from Oxbridge; Chris Wickham, Guy Halsall, Walter Goffart, Michael Kulikowski, etc. are all excellent.) It doesn't bear comparison to the Sith Empire. SWTOR's Empire is relatively small (compared to the Republic), commands much less industrial and scientific potential, has a much smaller population, and has been bedeviled by the kind of internal conflicts that belong in the Wars of the Roses or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

 

Never in human history has a state in such dire straits managed to save itself in war with the development of a single secret weapon or the exploitation of a single resource. It simply hasn't happened. There have been plenty of states that have been in situations just as dire as that of the Sith Empire between the beginning of Chapter 3 and the end of Chapter 4. States like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Confederate States, and Napoleonic France. You know what else those states have in common, other than being morally despicable? There are a lot of eminent historians who argue that they were doomed to lose their wars. (Respectively: Ian Kershaw, Michael Burleigh, and Richard Evans; Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven; James McPherson; Paul Schroeder.)

 

That doesn't mean it won't happen in SWTOR. The Empire might very well win this war; it wouldn't surprise me if it did. Because the writers will write what the writers want to write, and to hell with the logic or consequences; they've done it before. But as I've argued in this thread ad nauseam, if you think that the writers will do this, your argument doesn't rest on historical grounds. It's based on sentiment: you think that the Empire will win because you want the Empire to win.

Edited July 13, 2013 by Euphrosyne

[StarSquirrel]

eh, forget it... won't even bother. dude, I accept your depth of historical knowledge on such a variety of topics is superior to my own. Thank you for preventing my own lack of knowledge from confusing the 5 or 6 people like me who read your entire post. Edited July 14, 2013 by StarSquirrel

[Path-x]

Empire has everything better looking (uniforms, ships, etc.) and Sith are way cooler than the Jedi. So it is only fair that Republic/Jedi has at least this one thing (they win at the end). Otherwise who would even want to be Republic/Jedi.

[Jetreaperz]

hope the game enters an alternate dimension or something. its the thing the writers can do because story content is so hard to create in which the ending is fixed (defeat)

[BradTheImpaler]

hope the game enters an alternate dimension or something. its the thing the writers can do because story content is so hard to create in which the ending is fixed (defeat)

 

No need for that. The ending isn't "fixed" in terms of the span of the game's timeline. There's a huge amount of time for both sides to have periods of coming out on top, and for another "Republic Dark Age".

 

If it is a defeat, it's a loooooooooooooong way away yet. No need to veer off into different dimensions.