India · 1707–1795

Mughal & Maratha: The History Behind the Game

The slow collapse of the largest empire India had ever seen, and the scramble of Marathas, Sikhs, Nizams and a foreign trading company to inherit the pieces. Era of Warlords covers nine decades of fragmentation, from Aurangzeb's death to the Company's rise.

An empire overextended

The Mughal Empire reached its greatest territorial extent under Aurangzeb, who spent decades of his long reign fighting costly wars in the Deccan against the Marathas — a Hindu warrior state built around fast cavalry and guerrilla tactics. When Aurangzeb died in 1707, he left an exhausted treasury, a demoralized nobility, and a succession crisis that his successors never fully recovered from.

Without Aurangzeb's iron grip, the empire's regional governors began acting as independent rulers in all but name — the Nizam carved out Hyderabad, Bengal's governors ran their own state, and Mughal authority over the Deccan and the north effectively evaporated within a generation.

The Maratha flood, and the Company waiting

The Marathas filled the vacuum fastest. By 1740 the Maratha Confederacy, now organized under the Peshwa ministers rather than a single king, was raiding and taxing across most of central and northern India, effectively becoming the dominant power on the subcontinent. Their expansion was finally checked in 1761 at the Third Battle of Panipat, a catastrophic defeat against an Afghan invasion under Ahmad Shah Durrani that broke Maratha momentum for a generation, even as it also fatally weakened the Afghans' ability to hold northern India themselves.

Into this fractured landscape — Marathas, Sikhs rising in Punjab, Rajputs, Mysore and the remnant Mughal court — stepped the British East India Company, originally a trading concern that had built its own private army. By 1795, on the eve of the Company's decisive wars against Mysore and the Marathas, it was already the strongest single military power in India, setting up the conquest that would follow in the next century.

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