East Asia · 770–221 BC

Warring States China: The History Behind the Game

Nearly five centuries of shifting alliances, philosophical ferment and escalating warfare between rival Chinese states — ending with one of them swallowing all the others. Era of Warlords lets you replay any stretch of it, from the fall of the Western Zhou to the eve of unification.

From ritual war to total war

In 771 BC the Western Zhou royal house collapsed and its king fled east, leaving the Zhou as figureheads while power scattered among dozens of regional lords. The Spring and Autumn period that followed was still bound by aristocratic codes of chivalric warfare — but as centuries passed and lesser states were absorbed by greater ones, roughly a dozen major powers remained: Qi, Chu, Qin, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei among them.

By the Warring States period proper (from 475 BC), those codes had broken down entirely. Armies grew from thousands to hundreds of thousands, iron weapons replaced bronze, and states like Qin under reformer Shang Yang restructured their entire societies around agriculture and war.

The road to unification

Qin's advantage compounded over generations: better logistics, a merit-based military, and a defensible heartland behind mountain passes let it outlast rivals in wars of attrition like the catastrophic Battle of Changping (260 BC), where Qin reportedly buried hundreds of thousands of captured Zhao soldiers.

By 231 BC, on the eve of the final campaigns, only the exhausted remnants of the old great powers stood between Qin and the throne. Within a decade King Zheng of Qin conquered them all and declared himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor — ending five centuries of division and founding the first unified Chinese empire.

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