(No Spoilers) Which real or fictional character from outside ASOIAF would fare the best in the Game?

The Russians did reach the Carpathians in the Brusilov Offensive in 1916, during which they completely steamrolled the Austrians. Their troops were poised to pour into the Pannonian plain until the German counterattack with troops drawn from the Western front and diverted from the Verdun offensive forced the Russians to abandon their forward positions. The Carpathians aren't that huge an obstacle, they are like the Appalachians and resemble big rolling hills in many areas, and the Russians had no problem crossing them from Poland through Galicia in 1849 to put down the Hungarian Revolution for Austria.

Austria alone stood no chance against Russia on its own, but it likely wouldn't have come to that if Bismarck was still a factor. He devoted much diplomatic energy to maintaining friendly relations between the three Eastern great powers negotiating a careful balance of power between Austria and Russia in the Balkans as in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. He would not have allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to expire as Kaiser Wilhelm did - Russia wanted to maintain its alliance with the Germans but was rebuffed, driving them into an alliance with the diplomatically isolated France.

Finally I would point out that you seem to be attributing a desire for imperial expansion to Bismarck that he simply did not possess, although that is understandable given the prevailing sentiment in Germany at the time. Later German nationalists certainly falsely attributed such sentiments to him so they could use him as a symbol for their cause. However, he was the foremost advocate of the Lesser German solution, and he did not want Austria inside of the German Empire where it could threaten Prussian and north German Protestant domination of the state. Bringing even more Catholic south Germans and Slavs into the empire would have been anathema to him, as he saw even the population of Catholics and Poles that the empire did possess as a potential threat to the unity of the young state. Bismarck also saw overseas colonial possessions as more trouble than they were worth, and what colonies Germany did manage to snap up were a result of Wilhelm II's Weltpolitik.

/r/asoiaf Thread