Editing Mongols (section)

==Nomad Tech-Tree==
To understand the Mongols you first need to understand steppe nomadism. Steppe nomads were, essentially, [[munchkins]] in a very poorly designed campaign. Most societies of the time had a lot of options and thus spread their proverbial character points around. Metallurgy, agriculture, architecture, and philosophy were all valuable links in a massive skill tree that allowed great classical civilizations like [[China]] and the [[Roman Empire]] to thrive. Steppe nomads on the other hand, living in an environment that resembled the moon as much as anything, had a access to a slightly more restricted skill tree. And by restricted we mean it basically consisted of "raising sheep", "riding horses", "shooting things with bows". It's no accident that every society along the steppe belt from East Asia to Central Europe had the same basic patterns of life, adapted the same tactics, and made their neighbors lives the same living hell with a cyclical "trade and raid" policy for thousands of years. Essentially they were all one trick ponies, but that pony had a man on it, and the trick was putting an arrow with sixty pounds of draw tension behind it through your eye at a hundred paces.  To this day the steppe nomads still live like that, although now they use snowmobiles and AK-47's.  

While it's true that their environment is unsuitable for sedentary agriculture and their population-area ratio is nowhere near those of settled socities (but again, their territories are massive) the idea that nomadic economies are inefficient is just agriculture bias. When your environment is dry, cold, and full of inedible grass, the only thing you can really raise is livestock, which converts grass to pretty much all of your basic necessities. If you remember basic bio, herbivores are pretty efficient converters of energy, and meat/milk is very calorie dense. Moving around also avoids overgrazing and depleting natural resources, giving the land time to regenerate, and is considered efficient (work put in vs calories gained) and sustainable; while the virgin farmers were busy being exploited by "landowners" to do the backbreaking work that makes farming possible (irrigation, land clearing) and giving up their surplus value, the chad nomads were living free across wide territorial expanses.

Whatever nomads couldn't make themselves, they traded for, and they made a killing on their control over trade routes (and that's if they weren't doing the trading themselves). Besides trading what they had looted, they also traded their trademark horses with others. The horse was probably domesticated by the ancestors of the Mongols, and while the horse caught on in the West, Chinese horse breeding could never compete with their steppe neighbors, and there are instances of Emperors ''buying'' or arranging trade deals just so they had a reliable source of military-grade horses. 

Even the warfare aspect between nomadic societies isn't like the total warfare of annihilation that Genghis Khan became famous for, but subjugations of other nomads for their territory and manpower, which is how all those nomadic empires (and the Mongolians specifically) got so powerful: the Huns, Khazars, and Mongolian empires were named after the nations at the top, but conquered nomads would either be vassalized or assimilated (or even LARP as Mongols, see Timurkhan below), inflating their numbers and giving them lots of access to hardened veterans. Total annihilation was done on settled cities that didn't pay the Horselords proper respect, because they were, well, settled, and thus [[Exterminatus| conveniently easy to wipe out]]. 

What made the Mongols unique was that they actually had a plan for all the territories and people they conquered. Genghis delegated authority to his generals and his family, and made sure that there was a clear chain of command that should be followed. Other nomadic empires, like the Huns or Khazars, would break up at the loss of the Khagan, or would continously change sides/religions to facilitate better relations with their neighbors. They also tended to simply raze and occupy conquered territory, but the Mongols gave them a choice: surrender and be assimilated, or fight and die. Those who surrendered were incorporated, which gave the Mongols sedentary vassals who knew how to actually run a sedentary society.