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Tamerlane (April 8, 1336–February 18, 1405) was the ferocious and terrifying founder of the Timurid empire of Central Asia, eventually ruling much of Europe and Asia. Throughout history, few names have inspired such terror as his. Tamerlane was not the conqueror's actual name, though. More properly, he is known as Timur, from the Turkic word for "iron."

Early Life

Timur was a member of the Turkicized Barlas tribe, a Mongol subgroup that had settled in Transoxania (now roughly corresponding to Uzbekistan) after taking part in Genghis Khan’s son Chagatai’s campaigns in that region. Timur thus grew up in what was known as the Chagatai khanate. After the death in 1357 of Transoxania’s current ruler, Amir Kazgan, Timur declared his fealty to the khan of nearby Kashgar, Tughluq Temür, who had overrun Transoxania’s chief city, Samarkand, in 1361.

Tughluq Temür appointed his son Ilyas Khoja as governor of Transoxania, with Timur as his minister. But shortly afterward Timur fled and rejoined his brother-in-law Amir Husayn, the grandson of Amir Kazgan. They defeated Ilyas Khoja (1364) and set out to conquer Transoxania, achieving firm possession of the region around 1366. About 1370 Timur turned against Husayn, besieged him in Balkh, and, after Husayn’s assassination, proclaimed himself at Samarkand sovereign of the Chagatai line of khans and restorer of the Mongol empire.

For the next 10 years Timur fought against the khans of Jatah (eastern Turkistan) and Khwārezm, finally occupying Kashgar in 1380. He gave armed support to Tokhtamysh, who was the Mongol khan of Crimea and a refugee at his court, against the Russians (who had risen against the khan of the Golden Horde, Mamai); and his troops occupied Moscow and defeated the Lithuanians near Poltava.

In 1383 Timur began his conquests in Persia with the capture of Herāt. The Persian political and economic situation was extremely precarious. The signs of recovery visible under the later Mongol rulers known as the Il-Khanid dynasty had been followed by a setback after the death of the last Il-Khanid, Abu Said (1335). The vacuum of power was filled by rival dynasties, torn by internal dissensions and unable to put up joint or effective resistance. Khorāsān and all eastern Persia fell to him in 1383–85; Fars, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Georgia all fell between 1386 and 1394. In the intervals, he was engaged with Tokhtamysh, then khan of the Golden Horde, whose forces invaded Azerbaijan in 1385 and Transoxania in 1388, defeating Timur’s generals.

In 1391 Timur pursued Tokhtamysh into the Russian steppes and defeated and dethroned him; but Tokhtamysh raised a new army and invaded the Caucasus in 1395. After his final defeat on the Kur River, Tokhtamysh gave up the struggle; Timur occupied Moscow for a year. The revolts that broke out all over Persia while Timur was away on these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls.

In 1398 Timur invaded India on the pretext that the Muslim sultans of Delhi were showing excessive tolerance to their Hindu subjects. He crossed the Indus River on September 24 and, leaving a trail of carnage, marched on Delhi. The army of the Delhi sultan Mahmud Tughluq was destroyed at Panipat on December 17, and Delhi was reduced to a mass of ruins, from which it took more than a century to emerge. By April 1399 Timur was back in his own capital. An immense quantity of spoil was conveyed away; according to Ruy González de Clavijo, 90 captured elephants were employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a mosque at Samarkand.

Timur set out before the end of 1399 on his last great expedition, in order to punish the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I for their seizures of certain of his territories. After restoring his control over Azerbaijan, he marched on Syria; Aleppo was stormed and sacked, the Mamlūk army defeated, and Damascus occupied (1401), the deportation of its artisans to Samarkand being a fatal blow to its prosperity. In 1401 Baghdad was also taken by storm, 20,000 of its citizens were massacred, and all its monuments were destroyed.

After wintering in Georgia, Timur invaded Anatolia, destroyed Bayezid’s army near Ankara (July 20, 1402), and captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes. Having received offers of submission from the sultan of Egypt and from John VII (then coemperor of the Byzantine Empire with Manuel II Palaeologus), Timur returned to Samarkand (1404) and prepared for an expedition to China. He set out at the end of December, fell ill at Otrar on the Syr Darya west of Chimkent, and died in February 1405. His body was embalmed, laid in an ebony coffin, and sent to Samarkand, where it was buried in the sumptuous tomb called Gūr-e Amīr. Before his death he had divided his territories among his two surviving sons and his grandsons, and, after years of internecine struggles, the lands were reunited by his youngest son, Shāh Rokh.

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[–] Frank@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Outpost: Infinity Siege combines my three favorite things - rooting through unpacked boxes from three moves ago, legos, and tetris.

[–] CliffordBigRedDog@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you give it a reco, i was interested but i saw that there were alot of bad reviews

[–] Frank@hexbear.net 7 points 1 year ago

The marketing is somewhat misleading. The game loop is you assemble your fort waifu then head out in to the wilderness to fight robots and pick up stuff you find lying around.

The game generates a node map. Each node has different loot weighting and sometimes side objectives. You have to spend base energy to move to the next node. Sometimes their are branching paths.

When you arrive at a node you go in to fps mode to fight robots, explore points of interest, but mostly to scavenge stuff. Some maps have side objectives or little puzzles. You can find building mats for your base, gear for your soldier, consumables and ammo, and valuables that you can sell for cash.

Once you've scavenged everything you want to scavenge you go back to your base and end the mission. Sometimes you have to do a mini tower defense here.

Then you go back to the map and decide if you want to move to the next node and repeat the process, or end your exploration and go to "recovery day", the main tower defense portion.

On Recovery Day the game tallies up the value of all the loot you found exploring map nodes. The value of your loot determines how long the final tower defense is and what kind of enemies you have to fight. During the tower defense you fight off huge waves of robots to protect your base. You can use your soldier in fps mode, your base's guns and special abilities. You can also control your base directly, build field defenses, and control friendly robots by switching between fps mode and rts mode.

If you lose you lose most of your loot except some pity loot, which sucks. : (

If you win then you go back to your main base with all your loot. There you build new pieces for base waifu, research new tech, train your soldiers, modify your fps guns, use the shooting range, dispatch soldiers on side missions, and most importantly design and build base waifu.

Base waifu starts out as a grid of a given size. You assemble your base from walls, floors, armor, generators, batteries, special pieces that grant different abilities, and lots of guns.

It's a very satisfying build system. Everything snaps together on a grid system. There's lots of little synergies between building pieces. There's plenty of room to fiddle with your base layout and there's even some automation later in the game.

Downsides

  • it's a bit janky. The translation from Chinese is iffy. Some game systems are not well explained.

  • progression, especially early on, is slow. Early missions take a while before the game opens up.

  • multiplayer is a bit weird. There's no jip during an explore node so if someone wants to join your match they have to spectate until you start the next node. Loot sharing has some weird rules about who gets what.

  • losing the tower defense can be very punishing if you spent a long time in the exploration mode them lost your loot

  • some people who aren't silly little loot goblins find the looting portion of the game repetitive

  • the story missions are not complete yet so when you get to the end the "last mission" just says "still under development". The story isn't very important but it's still kind of a bummer.

  • the ai is designed for tower defense ie " walk forward and maybe shoot" so with a few exceptions the behavior of the robots in fps mode is extremely simple. Watch out for the machine-gun pumas, though.

Upsides

  • for people who care run it it seems to run well

  • the devs have been pushing patches daily or every other day to address issues and improve many gameplay aspects, especially with the flow of exploration missions (your robot mule buddy can return items to your base so you can keep looting, for instances)

  • the gunplay is fun. You assemble your own guns out of a bunch of diffferent parts, special abilities and modifiers, and ammo types. You can end up with normal stuff like machine guns or shotguns, or goofy stuff like the triple freezing lightning strike gun i was rocking for a while

  • there's tons of room to fiddle with your base, configure the behavior of the guns, optimize or automate systems, and try to squeeze the most out of the parts you have.

Overall it's a fun game with novel ideas and implementations. Sort of chill FTL + chill PvE Tarkov but with DIY Borderlands guns + base building and management + a first person tower defense that can get utterly bonkers at high level.

[–] theposterformerlyknownasgood@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Have you tried out unpacking . It's a game about unpacking stuff from three moves ago.