676-935 CE
The Sillans were the people of Silla, the Korean kingdom that outlasted its rivals Goguryeo and Baekje, unified the peninsula in the late seventh century, and built a Buddhist civilization of remarkable refinement in their capital at Gyeongju.
Silla was the southeastern kingdom of the Korean Three Kingdoms, the smallest and initially the weakest, which outlived both its rivals through a combination of military tenacity, diplomatic cunning, and a willingness to ally with Tang China when it served Silla's purposes. After the destruction of Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668, Silla turned on its Tang allies and drove Chinese forces from the peninsula, unifying Korea south of the Taedong River by 676. For the next two and a half centuries, unified Silla governed one of the most stable and culturally productive states in East Asia.
The Sillans were inheritors. They absorbed the populations, technologies, and administrative traditions of the kingdoms they conquered and synthesized them into something coherent. The result was a society more refined than warlike, more Buddhist than Confucian, and more interested in scholarship and craft than in further expansion.
Silla's heartland was the Gyeongsang region of southeastern Korea: fertile river valleys surrounded by mountains, with a mild climate by Korean standards. Rice cultivation dominated the lowlands. Barley, millet, and soybeans grew on the upland margins. The landscape was densely settled and carefully managed, with irrigation systems channeling water to the paddies and terraces climbing the hillsides wherever the slope permitted.
Gyeongju, the capital, was a planned city that at its peak may have housed close to a million people. Tile-roofed aristocratic mansions lined gridded streets. Buddhist temples rose on every hill. A goldsmith in a Gyeongju workshop, shaping the delicate filigree crown ornaments for which Silla metalwork is famous, worked with techniques refined over centuries and materials that arrived through trade networks stretching to Central Asia. The city's artificial ponds, pleasure gardens, and the Cheomseongdae observatory, one of the oldest surviving astronomical structures in East Asia, projected an image of civilized order that impressed visitors from China and Japan alike.
Silla's military tradition was shaped by the hwarang, an elite youth corps drawn from the aristocracy that combined military training with Buddhist devotion, poetry, and communal bonding. The hwarang code emphasized loyalty, courage, and a willingness to die in battle. These were not monks playing at soldiering; the hwarang produced the commanders who led Silla's unification wars and whose tactical skill compensated for the kingdom's smaller population.
Unified Silla maintained a standing army and a system of provincial garrisons, but the kingdom's military posture was defensive after unification. The northern frontier with Balhae required vigilance, and coastal defenses guarded against Japanese pirates. Silla invested heavily in fortification and in military technologies that favored defense. The kingdom's engineers were skilled at siege warfare and the construction of fortified positions that exploited Korea's mountainous terrain. Strength lay in holding ground, not in conquering new territory.
Buddhism permeated every level of Sillan society. The state sponsored massive temple construction projects, and Bulguksa temple with its companion grotto shrine Seokguram, carved into a mountainside overlooking the Sea of Japan, represents the pinnacle of Korean Buddhist art. Inside the grotto, a seated stone Buddha gazes eastward across the water with an expression of calm that has survived twelve centuries of weather, war, and neglect. The Sillans understood that scholarship and faith could be weapons of their own kind, and the meticulous preservation and copying of Buddhist texts laid foundations that would later produce the Tripitaka Koreana, the most complete collection of Buddhist scripture carved into over eighty thousand woodblocks.
Sillan society was rigidly stratified by the bone-rank system, a hereditary hierarchy that determined a person's permissible clothing, house size, and career ceiling. A man of the sixth head-rank could serve as a provincial official but never as a minister. A woman of true-bone rank wore silk and jade; a woman of lower rank wore hemp regardless of her family's actual wealth. The system preserved aristocratic power but also bred resentment. A talented official barred from the highest positions by birth rather than ability had every reason to question the system, and several prominent Sillan scholars did exactly that, though quietly.
Unified Silla maintained active diplomatic and commercial relations with Tang China and with Japan. Students and monks traveled to China in large numbers, returning with Buddhist texts, Confucian scholarship, and technical knowledge. Sillan merchants traded across the Yellow Sea, and a Sillan trading community established itself at the Chinese port of Chudong. Maritime commerce connected Gyeongju to a wider East Asian world of goods and ideas.
The kingdom's decline in the ninth century came from within: aristocratic factionalism, peasant rebellions, and the rise of regional strongmen who carved out autonomous domains. Silla's last king surrendered to the founder of the Goryeo dynasty in 935, ending a kingdom that had lasted nearly a millennium. What survived was the cultural synthesis: the Buddhist art, the metallurgical skill, the literary traditions, and the administrative framework that Goryeo inherited and built upon. Gyeongju became a museum city, its tombs and temples preserving the memory of a civilization that had valued refinement as highly as power.
2 | 
1 | 
2 (1-2)
1 
8 
| Siege Workshops
of all 4 classes (
)
is engaged in a battle within your 
, you may transfer 1 white cube
from your 
to the bag
In the game, the Sillans are a scholarly military nation whose research investment pays off in every bag draw. The redraw-without-returning ability is exceptionally powerful: it improves your odds not only in battle but also when spreading religion and overcoming adversity, getting better with each complete set of four technology classes you research. This echoes the Sillan commitment to Buddhist scholarship and systematic knowledge, a tradition that would eventually produce the Tripitaka Koreana. Recovery after battle reflects the hwarang military medical traditions, and white cubes transferred from recurrent technologies to the bag let you deactivate and reactivate technologies strategically. Invest in balanced research across all four classes early to unlock your redraw potential as quickly as possible.
You must have at least 1 castle built. Recruit by activating the castle area (up to the number of your castles) or by activating the siege workshop area (up to the number of your siege workshops).
Each Hwacha has 2 base strength, so it adds 2 cubes to the bag before applying its strength bonus.
+1 per enemy engaged unit. If you attack an army of 3 units, each Hwacha gets +3 strength bonus. It is most effective against large armies.
Yes. If you successfully recover a unit, you may transfer all drawn cubes to your government card as experience cubes, following the normal recovery rules.
Yes. The ability grants you recovery regardless of your government form.
Yes, but you cannot gain experience cubes from a successful recovery since you have no government card to place them on.
It adds a white cube to the battle bag, improving your chances of drawing white (avoiding losses or preventing enemy damage). It also deactivates that technology, which lets you reactivate it later in the same round for a second use of its effect.
Set aside 1 drawn cube, draw a new cube in its place, then return the set-aside cube to the bag. You keep the new draw and the original goes back. This improves your odds by replacing an unfavorable draw.
No. You may redraw up to 2 cubes (one per complete set of 4 classes), but each redraw must target a different drawn cube. You cannot redraw the same cube sequentially.