MA T'ien Ch'i - a little of this, a little of that and BAM!

[Sombre]

I thought rain of stones hit the head especially, largely bypassing body armour? This may just be my imagination though.

Conscription to my mind makes order turmoil slightly less painful, because your core provinces which you hold for quite a while can build up enough pd to see off the small barbarain attacks. It's not a really big deal, but there's some synergy there.

I also want to reinforce that MA TC really does have very nice troops in the early game. Sure they aren't going to pose a massive challenge to some crazy MA Van bless rush, but they pretty specialised and you've got all the ingredients that make other nations troops awesome, just not all in one or two places. Imperial Guard I find really solid (under cbm), almost as good as the heavy infantry from the roman nations and let us not forget troops with patrol bonus to go with eunuchs - you can crank significantly more gold right when you need it using tax patrolling. Couple this with the spies you send out and I think winning an economic grind war is totally doable.

They really, really need to get forts up though and I think patrol taxing early is a good way to get those going.