Video Game / Rise of the White Sun

A game about shady political intrigues in Republican China

Rise of the White Sun is the upcoming indie strategy game by Maestro Cinetik, focusing on the political turmoil in the 1920s China. As of 1Q 2024, it provides handful of regional, historical scenarios, where various factions have their own separate objectives for victory. There is a plan for a "all of China" map, with everyone against everyone.

The game is notable for the extensive historical research and, even more importantly, for focusing on just how messed up the warlord politics were and what sort of dodgy alliances it took from the KMT to unify even part of the country - all while providing a variety of "what if..." scenarios.

Currently an early access via Steam, with a single-scenario demo accessible for free.

The game contains examples of:

• Always Chaotic Evil: Other than the various warlord cliques, KMT and the communists, there are simply bandits controlling various areas. Unlike actual factions, they can't be interacted with in any other way than by simply stamping them to the ground or trying to bribe them away. They are always at war with everyone, too.
• Appeal to Force: Warlords, Generalissimos and commanders of various divisions have the special option to pacify territories - either freshly conquered or just unruly - by sending their troops against the people. Interestingly, it's not always a bad option, as there is a random roll for the outcome, so there is a chance to simply compel dissidents to drop their issue, rather than ending up massacring protesters.
  • Zig-Zagged in "Little Model China". Taking a "my way or the highway" approach can work in the short term, but your conquests will fall apart in the long run if you're running your empire on military might without proper district-building.
• Appeal to Tradition: Zig-Zagged. In general, you want to decrease the local tradition score as much as feasible, since "tradition" in this context means archaic farming techniques, culturally-accepted and widespread corruption, the passive nature of the population and all sorts of negative things plaguing the country you are trying to modernise. However, propagating Confucian values is the only way to counter communist agitation in the area and sponsoring temples is a great way to get popular support from peasants and landowners.
• Armies Are Evil: Especially those from warlord factions, but even the "good" guys are predominantly feeding their troops by letting them loot the locals and press-gang new recruits. Warlords however come with few extra options for Rape, Pillage, and Burn to simply sustain themselves.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: The default state of any given "army" (since they range in size from a battalion to actual armies). Keep in mind troops aren't paid on a regular basis and don't even require that - it's just good for the morale to pay them before new deployment.
  • Bandit troops are just barely armed rabble that would rather run away than fight against any other troops. They love to perform raids on unguarded territories, though, so make sure you don't border them directly without having a garrison posted at the border.
  • A freshly recruited army won't even have guns if there are none in your stock, will have zero training and will get easily defeated by forces a quarter its size. If you don't have characters good at commanding troops, it will take forever to whip them up into shape.
  • Thanks to their special abilities, Warlord characters can field those en masse and yet make them work as actual, combat-capable troops. Sure, they will loot provinces dry and readily turn into bandits, but for quick expansion, there is nothing better.
  • The various Militia-type units, other than the Customs Police, are not just completely useless, but actively detrimental to any faction that raises them. They are ineffective in combat, they can't be trained unlike actual army troops, they don't get any bonuses for having other weapons than rifles and generally speaking, they will just keep turning into bandits until the whole unit simply dissolves back into the countryside as a new gang terrorising it.
• Badass on Paper: Army size is pretty much meaningless, if it is not backed by a sufficient number of rifles, there are no support weapons like machine guns or artillery and the troops weren't drilled and paid their wages. It is perfectly possible to defeat troops ten times your size, as long as the smaller army is properly armed. However, unless you have an extensive spy ring, you won't know how the enemy army is doing, other than its rough size.
  • The Old Guangxi clique in the "Little Model China" scenario. Starting out with the third-largest army, and the second-largest income (not to mention controlling three provinces), they're a formidable faction....except for the poorly-trained troops and the fact that their generals are just waiting for the opportunity to defect.
• Bigger Stick: Machine guns and especially artillery. They are a massive power multiplier for any army. Tanks (which are incredibly rare and can only be procured as foreign support) take it up to eleven, as you will only ever have a literal handful of those and yet that will be more than enough.
• Black Market: The fastest, but very expensive, way of securing a shipment of guns is via a smuggling hub. Certain classes of characters get better results than others, but the most important factor is how far away from the coastline the hub is and is there a direct link to said shore controlled by your faction. Otherwise, expect your shipment to be simply commandeered by some other warlord along the way to your territories. Carving your way to the coast whenever possible (or simply starting by it), makes smuggling much more lucrative and successful.
• "Begone" Bribe: A variation. It is possible to attempt to bribe the bandits roaming the countryside, pointing them in a new direction for their next raid. They might refuse, but take the money anyway, and the people living in the affected area will hate you guts. The only situation where it is a good idea to attempt this at all is when you need to soften your enemies before starting a war or when you need a distraction for their numerous armies.
• Call to Agriculture: You can use troops to help with the construction of certain infrastructure, particularly roads and low-tier agricultural structures. However, your men will hate this, as they are essentially reduced to unpaid labourers doing back-breaking tasks.
• Cast Calculus: As a gameplay mechanic. Depending on the situation, faction and scenario objective, there is a specific number of people you want to have in your inner circle. Get too many, and you will risk being unable to keep tabs on all of them. Get not enough and you will have an insufficient number of actions per turn to properly manage your "country".
• Character Class System: Every character comes with a pre-defined class that has its own abilities, often unique to just that class, and different specialities. It is pre-requested to have a healthy mix in your par... er, inner clique to successfully govern your territories and keep the army running.
• Conscription: This is how you get troops. Except without a few mid-tier buildings, it will work more like a press gang, with predictable results on quality.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: Everyone plays by the exact same rules, meaning the only real difference is your faction name, the characters in it and the objective of the scenario. But the buildings, troops and all the gameplay mechanics are the same for everyone. There is a slight deviation when playing as communists, since they have a small handful of additional options as Rabble Rousers, but in the long run it doesn't change anything.
• Crapsack World: Famine, plague, earthquakes and warlords. Enough said.
• Cursed with Awesome: Famine. No, really. Usually, it only affects a total, rural backwater with poor infrastructure and lacking certain buildings and all it really does is slash the already meagre profit that territory is capable of generating. However, it opens a bunch of special counter-measures that, when applied, significantly improve your long-term situation in that territory. Once the famine is over (which, thanks to those counter-measures, will take just a handful of turns), the place will be easily twice as profitable as if it had never suffered from the famine in the first place.
• Dark Horse Victory: The historical outcome of the KMT winning their scenarios (not to mention uniting even part of China) is very hard to pull off in gameplay terms, as you are at best a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond, and usually just a local underdog or even someone else that just pledged their allegiance to the KMT.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • This is how the population at large will see any sort of interaction with foreigners other than Occupiers Out of Our Country. The higher the local tradition score, the worse it will affect the popularity of your regime. Keep in mind that in some scenarios, this is the only way to get weapons, especially the high-tier ones.
  • Dealing with the Soviets and their advisors is the easiest source of money, guns and even artillery. However, not only will any non-communist character doing that be seen as suspicious, they can actually change sides, running away with whatever resources are attached to them.
• Easy Logistics: There is a significant Gameplay and Story Segregation in this regard: the game constantly stresses out how tough logistics are, but in reality, as long as your army has a sufficient number of coolies, you don't have to bother with anything at all and just move around with impunity. And if a given territory has even dirt roads built in it, the logistics are a total non-issue, not to mention places with railways or ports. There is no ammunition, rations or transportation to take care of, along with being able to replenish your coolies anywhere you please, so even in provinces too poor to sustain your troops it is possible to still ignore everything and march on.
• Enemy Mine: The basic way to strike a functional alliance is to gang against a common enemy. Especially when there is a power disparity between the would-be-allies. And expect the alliance to be voided the second that enemy is defeated or even simply weakened into insignificance.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: The social reforms, curbing corruption, fighting bandits, setting up school system, even propping up a banking system... all for the sake of staying in power and an easier time getting loyal, well-armed soldiers for your personal armies. Conversely, if you decide to simply leech off your own population, you can still succeed, but you must act fast, before you ruin the local economy entirely and turn people against your regime.
• Evil Is Easy: Embrace opium trade and its cultivation. Let the corruption slide. Don't pay wages and press gang random peasants for big, scary number of troops. Steal everything not nailed to the ground. Deal with the local bandits. All of those options are easier and often more profitable... at least in the short run. However, take too long to finish the scenario's objectives (or it simply being a match of endurance) and you will make the rope to hang your faction on, because your terrible governing will blow in your face eventually.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Oh yes! You are in charge of running a ring of kleptomaniacs, thugs and power-hungry militarists, all sprouting nonsense about a strong, unified and well-armed nation, with unity behind the glorious leader - even when controlling rural nowhere in a complete backwater and being busy backstabbing each other within their own clique. On top of that, various options that rely on brute force are usually more harmful than helpful, both short- and long-term. Even when having a perfect play, players will still be affected by various standard inefficiencies of a fascist regime.
• Foregone Conclusion: In almost all of the scenarios, it is possible to prepare for certain hard-coded historical situations, as long as one knows just enough about the real events. Most importantly, this allows to foresee certain betrayals ahead - or to know when the accusations of being a spy are bogus.
• Guide Dang It!: Numerous examples, since the game is deliberately built on Trial-and-Error Gameplay, but two stand out the most:
  • The most prominent and important one is that if you assign a single character to a single project in any given territory, they will continuously "oversee" that project, greatly speeding up its completion. Thus it is always better to use your Administrator to start 4 projects in 4 territories, than all four in one place. This is especially important for projects like road and railway construction and arsenal upgrades, as without supervision, they will take a whopping 100 turns to finish.
  • Various buildings and initiatives, to work effectively, require reaching specific threshold values of both Vitality and Tradition first. Build a farming school in a place with high Tradition? The local farmers will ridicule the instructors and dislike your regime. An anti-speculation initiative in a low Vitality place? It actually makes things worse. And so on and so forth. So it's not just about building whatever is possible, but first making sure the results won't be counter-productive.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Enemy factions will perform those every time there is a poorly guarded frontier of other factions, along with performing probing attacks - showing up in a territory, but when facing any sort of military presence, instantly backing down. Bandit troops, meanwhile, operate entirely on this trope, as that's their way to sustain themselves. Red Guards, which are added in the 1927 Red Bases update is also this, they are specifically geared towards guerilla action.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Certain classes can perform a variety of tasks that normally would require getting a specialist for some very niche applications. On top of that, certain characters are simply better at their jobs than others from the same class. A skilled Administrator is particularly important, for they can deal with all sorts of civilian actions, while keeping your country running.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Communist characters, especially when in the ranks of non-communist factions. They have access to a bunch of additional options to interact with territories, agitating the local population, which both increases Vitality and decreases Tradition, which is great... but also increases support for the communists and their cause. Depending on your situation and specific scenario, this might range from an additional bonus, through a non-issue, to bordering on a very risky Deal with the Devil.
• Morale Mechanic:
  • Characters have their loyalties to various causes, and should they feel sidelined or have their personal demands ignored, they will suffer debilitating effects, including eventually switching sides to your enemies or trying to stage a coup against you.
  • Armies have a more straightforward system. The level of training, wages coming on time (or at all), political indoctrination and local economy or infrastructure keeping troops fed make the troops highly motivated to their duties and also stay loyal to their faction. If two identical armies, with the same number of soldiers and weapons and quality of training, clash together, the one with higher morale will simply prevail, while the demoralised side might even dodge the battle entirely, simply running away.
  • The Whampoa military academy allows the CCP and KMT to turn their armies very powerful with this. By having the right characters to build up the right departments in their armies, the originally weak armies can turn very powerful.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: It is, after all, a game about the Warlord Era, so there are many factions, ranging from the less-predatory troops of Chen Jiongming to the Terror God-worshipping bandits of Ja Lama... and everything in between. The planned feature is to have all of those interact with each other at once on a map of all of China.
• Non-Entity General: The player isn't represented by a specific character, but rather by the faction they are playing as. Even in scenarios where they are introduced as specific warlords, the game still gives them full control of the faction, rather than just that one character^note The faction leader however can't be bribed or betray his own side.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: An army of 25 thousand soldiers, with 25 thousand rifles, 200 machine guns and a handful of artillery pieces after a few weeks of extensive training and political indoctrination doesn't sound like much (that's just two poorly armed infantry divisions), but that's enough to conquer half of China by just rolling over whatever those troops will face.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: A communist movement gets a warlord to train their troops? KMT using communists to do field work in the rural areas for them? Just another day in China.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • Quality for your troops. With the exception of morale, everything else is pretty much a non-factor, and even then, quality outweighs morale.
  • Vitality for territories. It can be a total crap hinterland, but as long as the Vitality is high, it will make revenue and conscription skyrocket.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Exploited. When you are fielding a large army with adequate weapons and training, enemy forces will just run away from it, forcing a prolonged game of whack-a-mole. However, you can deliberately keep your army small(ish), meaning the enemy forces will feel confident in their numbers (including trying to attack you) and won't try to run away, until it's too late.
• Plunder: The bread and butter of bandits, along with a possible way of managing and feeding your own armies. While it has long-lasting consequences, if you know that you won't be able to maintain your freshly conquered territory, it is the advised course of action. Your enemy will be left with smouldering ruins, while you keep all the loot. Warlord characters even get a bonus for this sort of behaviour.
• Quantity vs. Quality: Without saying so outright, the game heavily favours quality over anything else. You want your armies to be first and foremost well-drilled and properly armed, with their size being almost a non-factor. In fact, keeping them small is beneficial for various reasons: their wages are lower (and thus possible to be paid on a regular basis, maintaining top morale and loyalty), the enemy isn't afraid of their "puny" size so won't run away when attacked and, probably more importantly, they can operate even in the poorest, least developed territories without any penalties, as they can still be easily supplied thanks to their low numbers. Meanwhile, having large, but poorly-trained and poorly-equipped armies (or even simply large armies) only works as a deterrent, since other factions will first look for smaller targets to attack.
• The Quisling: Any dissatisfied element in your own clique can switch sides, or, which is far worse, splinter off.
• Random Number God: You will fail the weapon smuggling action when you need those guns the most. You will get three times as many recruits as you need on the conscription roll, forcing you to make a coolie roll, too.
• The Remnant: There are two factions that represent the remnants of the White Russians that fled after the Russian Civil War.
• Repressive, but Efficient: While the default state of affairs is Fascist, but Inefficient, it is possible to create a very strict and effective regime over your territory, being the definition of Difficult, but Awesome: by combination of blind luck and just the right initiatives, along with perfect resource allocation and reining in all the unruly elements (or getting rid of them), one can create a state run by Badass Bureaucrats, with well-trained and equipped Elite Army and booming economy, all of which staffed with educated and well-motivated population. But getting there is near-impossible, so you will be cutting corners and you will use ad-hoc measures instead, while letting various inner infighting slip-by.
• Resources Management Gameplay: What makes the game stand out is that resources are tied to characters, and aren't a shared pool for the whole faction. If someone betrays, they take their resources with them, while effective management of your faction often requires an inefficient transfer of resources from one character to another.
• Rock Beats Laser: Playing as the Spirit Soldiers means that your men are sparse on rifles. All you have are magical charms and, well....that's it. Be that as it may, they can still rout enemy armies - even ones that have artillery and machine guns. Armored trains....not so much.
• Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Round by Round - each turn represents two weeks.
• Shown Their Work: There are few historical textbooks regarding 1920s China worth of information crammed into the game, both as flavour and mechanics. Even the extensive list of characters for each of the factions is worth mentioning, since those are all real people, and their classes roughly represent the part they were playing in real life.
• Stay in the Kitchen: One of the default problems your regime is facing is the extreme take on this trope that's just day-to-day tradition in China. In practical terms, it renders half of your population illiterate and jobless by default, and as such, resilient to propaganda, not paying taxes and not producing goods - so obviously you want to change that.
• Summon Bigger Fish:
  • While unlikely, there are situations where you can get allied support from a bigger faction, despite being an underdog yourself. It takes a lot of political and diplomatic maneuvers to pull off, thou.
  • You can always sell out to the outside powers, be they British, French, Americans or even Japanese, for their support. It will always anger your own population, but as long as you maintain a functional legal system and a half-decent economy, they will shower you with weapons and further investments.
• Token Evil Teammate: You can always recruit a warlord into your clique. Hell, there are situations where you have to, since they are the only people in the area that can handle military affairs with at least a semblance of professionalism.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: The game is deliberately and intentionally made obtuse for new players, expecting them to simply sink hours after hours of gameplay to figure out how things work. The alleged tutorial only covers the location of windows for basic actions and sparsely discusses what they do.
• Turn-Based Strategy: Not only is the game built on a turn system, but to perform just about anything, players have to spend both the personal resources and action points of characters from their faction. This makes juggling various tasks within the very limited wiggle room the core gameplay.
• The Uriah Gambit: If you have a military character that is one step away from betrayal, it is often advised to apply this trope rather than try to salvage the situation. Simply make them personally command some tiny army of a handful of freshly-faced recruits, then throw them against the enemy's main force. Since troops sent by the human player can't back off when attacking, there is a solid chance the unruly commander will perish, and even if not - lose face due to suffering a defeat.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Some of the scenarios require you to callously manipulate the masses into riots or strikes, only for them to be gunned down by your actual target and then use that as a rally point for other people to be just as callously used for your own means. Taken a step further when, in one breath, Mikhail Borodin talks about the betterment of life for peasants and workers while deciding on a few hundred of them getting killed in a frame-up.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: The dev is quite open about making the game as a passion project, by a history buff for history buffs. As a result, it is pre-requested to be familiar with the history of China between 1920 and 1930 to fully grasp what's even going on in the game and to know who is who, and the more one knows, the better the experience with the game. On the flip side, playing blind is a nightmarish experience, especially in scenarios railroading to some infamous incidents, because the player will go head-on into unwinnable situations.
• Villain Protagonist: As long as they are included in the scenario, nothing prevents players from playing as notorious warlords with historical and in-universe infamy. More: not only will you have access to certain mechanics related to running an Evil Army, but your objectives will usually be to stay in power and increase your faction's importance, disrupting such silly things as the unification of the country or pacifying bandits in the countryside.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • The general state of China: the country is torn apart by rival cliques, and those in turn consist of more or less stable alliances of local warlords, corrupt officials, landowners, regular bandits and a handful of communist agitators (the exact composition may vary). Even within a given faction, the characters can be in Enemy Mine or worse scenario, and those factions in turn can create ad-hoc, short-term alliances for their mutual goals or against mutual enemies.
  • The scenario surrounding the events of the 1925 Hong-Kong strike starts with the KMT being in "alliance" with the local warlord. In practice, that means his troops won't wipe out the nascent National Revolutionary Army, as long as KMT is capable of ponying up racket money for him. When picking KMT in this scenario, the objectives will flatly state that your goal is to build up your forces enough to simply end the "alliance" by wiping out your ally.

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