Eternal Persia

The first scenario for 2017: a cover of QuantumBranching's Eternal Persia. He helped me out a lot with this, and a lot of the text below is his. 

• The PoD is 482 BCE, where the discovery of rich new veins of silver ore that financed the Athenian fleet did not occur. This allowed the Persians to triumph over the Greeks in the Greco-Persian Wars.
• This world isn't very ideological, so alliances tend to be more of cultural/religious amity or simple convenience. Persia is on good terms with the Vendeska and the Arabs, they compete for influence with the Tian Zhia in SE Asia, and have various alliances with states in fragmented India and the Americas, and has Mediterranean interests: they don't have much influence in west Africa or Northern Europe, which are sort of on the fringes of their attention span. Similarly they don't care too much what goes on in North America north of Carthagos-the-Furthest.
• Tian Zhia is a rising superpower competitor like OTLs China vs the USA, with the added fun of a history of border disputes but also considerable cultural exchange. Tian Zhia is not as far ahead of Persia in population as OTL China vs the USA, but relatively richer.
• Aethiopia is a great power, having never been cut off from the outside world, and extends deep into Africa. Aethiopia has been a naval colonizer for a while, but only have become recognized as a true power, if not quite on the Persian level, since their large-scale expansion inland thanks to modern tropical medicine and have something of a chip on their shoulder. They remember the last time Persia ruled Egypt and the Nile valley, and it's not happy memories. They are allies of convenience with the Tian Zhia.
• The Yamato kingdoms have been disunited for centuries, and although they consider themselves as being a single people, there has been enough cultural divergence that reunion is looking fairly iffy at present. There were over two dozen kingdoms at one point, and the last unification wars were so horribly bloody that the three survivors essentially ritualized warfare and practically, if not in theory, gave up on unifying the whole island. Border clashes are common, but rarely interrupt seaborne trade. All three share a holy god-king, whose city is considered perpetually neutral territory.
• "Incorporacies" are states run by corporate interests justifying themselves with an "everyone is a shareholder, and everyone profits" line which sounds a lot better in theory than it works out in practice (this is not a _dominant_ mode on this planet, but it does crop up here and there as one of the models of economic organization).
• North African Punic culture is heavily mixed with the Berbers, and as a result, so is their former colony, Carthagos-the-Furthest. Carthagos-the-Furthest has a sour relationship with the "mother country," having fought several wars against them.
• Hinduism did better in SE Asia and Indonesia relative to Buddhism than OTL, and it's association with a pushy imperial Great Power has limited the growth of Zoroastrianism. This has become part of the Tian Zhia conflict, as the Tian Zhia back the Buddhist Bian Vue to the north, and the Avanti and Persians back the Hindu Srokmun to the south.
• Sahelian/Sudanese Africa is less developed but still at least on the fringes of the civilized world, while west Central and far south Africa have suffered from colonization and exploitation, although with developed black nations elsewhere rather less racism was involved than OTL.
• Affalon and Furthest India have much larger Native populations, and have retained much more Native culture, due to the slower pace of colonization, and the fact that the center of the world - Persia - wasn't really interested in colonial exploits that far abroad.