India · 600–261 BC

Ancient India: The History Behind the Game

From a patchwork of sixteen rival kingdoms to the first empire to unite most of the Indian subcontinent — and the emperor who conquered it all, then renounced war entirely. Era of Warlords covers the full rise of the Mauryan state.

Sixteen kingdoms

Around 600 BC, the Ganges plain was home to sixteen major Mahajanapadas ("great realms") — a mix of monarchies and early republics, including Kosala, Kuru, Panchala, Avanti and, increasingly dominant among them, Magadha. Over the following two centuries these kingdoms warred, absorbed one another, and consolidated, with Magadha steadily emerging as the strongest power on the strength of its fertile heartland, iron resources and river access.

By the mid-4th century BC, the Nanda dynasty had turned Magadha into the dominant power of northern India, ruling from the fortress capital of Pataliputra with what ancient sources describe as an enormous standing army — but also, by most accounts, deeply unpopular rule.

From Chandragupta to Ashoka

Around 321 BC, a young Chandragupta Maurya — reputedly guided by the strategist Chanakya — overthrew the Nandas and founded the Mauryan Empire, then expanded it further by negotiating the ceding of the Indus valley from Alexander's successor Seleucus I. Within a generation, the Mauryas controlled nearly the entire subcontinent north of the far south.

His grandson Ashoka completed the conquest with the brutal invasion of Kalinga in 261 BC — a war so bloody, by his own account, that it converted him. Ashoka renounced further military conquest, adopted Buddhism, and spent the rest of his reign governing through edicts on morality and public welfare instead of the sword, making the empire's final expansion also its last.

71 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.