The Yuan were not the main opponent of the Ming; by the time the Ming got around to seriously fighting the Yuan, they pushed them out of China with relative ease.

Yuan control of China largely evaporated in the mid-14th century. A combination of overtaxation, government corruption, inflation, and the inability of the government to deal with crises such as famines, floods, and bubonic plague led to widespread revolts. These problems and the revolts they inspired made each other worse - trying to suppress revolts was an expensive business, and in the general economic collapse, this overstrained govenernment finances and the economy, further reducing the capacity of the Yuan to deal with revolts and natural disasters. The Yuan had largely lost control of the Mongol-ruled regions outside China, and could not draw on outside help. The only real chance the Yuan had of suppressing the revolts was to devolve power to regional warlords (who would pay for their own armies), which further eroded their control. On top of that, the Yuan had their own succession crises and coups and fought their own little civil war in parallel with these revolts.

The key part of the fighting that led to Ming rule was the fighting between the difference Chinese rebel groups and warlords, with the key theatre being the Yangtze valley. This was not fighting between scattered groups of rebels or guerillas, but battles between organised armies and navies often with strengths of over 100,000. After the Ming gained control of the Yangtze valley, there was further fighting to defeat regional warlords and to evict the Yuan from China. By this time, the Ming had grown formidable, and as far as the Yuan were concerned, irresistable (in the military sense).

The Yuan withdrew to Mongolia, and continued to fight the Ming as the Northern Yuan. Here the Ming had more difficulty with them (the traditional difficulties logistics-constrained infantry-heavy armies had on the steppes against steppe cavalry armies).