You're correct, I did forget about that.
The issue is, one action worth of breweries is pretty tiny compared to your other luxuries production. It amounts to about 3% of all the luxuries you make. It's enough that the Star Shaman at the Cave of Stars can have a semi-reliable supply. If it was distributed evenly across your population, you could afford for most people to have one or two alcoholic drinks a year. Given alcohol's intoxication properties, it's entirely reserved for shaman due to its obviously mystic nature. You just don't make enough alcohol for it to be a big deal.
Do we get any innovations in regards to alcohol? Such as making different types?
Also , how many brewery actions would we need to take in order to make it semi-available to the masses?
You can put it wherever you want if you really want to. Putting it at Crystal Lake or the Cave of Stars is strongly recommended, however, to take advantage of their Natural Wonder.
Makes sense. Probably going to be put at the Cave of the Stars in order to accommodate the Star Shaman.
Will the Grand Temple option be customizable, meaning, will we be able to vote on specific options on how it will turn out? As it seems to almost be like a major wonder in and of itself. Such as for example certain cosmetic choices, or symbolic choices in order to shape our values and religion.
This is getting into a new mechanic I'm going to introduce: Paradigm Changes. Whenever you get to a new technological tier or social reform, it will need a certain number of terms to percolate throughout your civilization. This will require several turns depending on multiple factors including: technology, willingness to change, incentive to change, secrecy, infrastructure, etc.
For Arboriculture for example, it will take 3 turns to full 'sink in' and change the Paradigm of your agriculture.
You can speed up a Paradigm Change by spending actions on it. These actions won't cost resources, but they do represent an opportunity cost since they represent something else you could have done.
New Paradigms are unlocked by new technologies and/or social factors. To change your Paradigm from Bronze to Iron, for example, you'll need Iron Smelting; Iron Weapons and Iron Tools; Charcoal Kilns (Ceramic) or Mines (Coal); and hopefully have an Unfulfilled Demand for Metal. I'll let you know when you have the tech to change Paradigms, and you can force it, but if you don't have a social reason, pushing a Paradigm Shift is going to take a long time and a lot of actions.
So essentially, paradigm shifts are essentially a passive changing of one system to another, such as say from stone tools to copper for example, which can be sped up but don't necessarily need to be?
When it comes to spending actions on speeding up a paradigm, do we need to specify which of the key factors the action would affect, such as say pressuring for more willingness to change, or is it assumed that it will be the most optimum choice per situation?
Also, when you mentioned forcing paradigm shifts, how is that different from normal passive paradigm changes? Do we always need a social reason for a paradigm shift?
Not the Fingers in particular. After they're satisfied, they won't be any more likely to rebel than another other settlement.
That's good to know at least, though this does make worry about the particular part.
You need to have a reason for them first. You are going to take a long time to cap out on fishing. You have a lot of internal rivers and lakes that could be filled up with fishermen before you need to develop blue water capability.
Could we eventually develop a reason? Such as say, attempting to explore more of Rahu Bay or other areas of the Great Lakes, but due to our canoes being sub-optimal for trading and traveling that then leads to boat development.
Not really. The only way to really avoid it is by restructuring the Holy Orders so that they take in and care for orphans, raising them to be the future of the Holy Order. That's not likely to happen since you have Familialism right now and you've outlawed slavery. Turning the Holy Orders into elite slave-soldiers like the Jannisaries would be possible, but I doubt the thread would do that.
Something important to remember: Nepotism is only considered a bad thing in a very modern context. Before, it was considered understandable good practice. With your family, you knew who you were hiring, but with strangers you really weren't. Additionally, since social safety nets basically didn't exist, if you didn't set your children up with a potential future career, they were screwed. Starving to death happened all the time and was a very real fear. If you have influence, would you give your own children a very real risk of starving to death, or given them a guaranteed shot at survival?
To some extent, hereditary nobility also gets a bad wrap. Even if nobility was hereditary, a single Idiot was enough to completely wreck a noble house's chances. They could lose holdings and territory due to debts or by being lost legally or in war. Centuries old families could be ruined in a single generation if an Idiot took control. The idea of an aristocrat that's totally moronic, but can get away with everything due to their money is more a modern phenomena.
Social mobility was still there, but it was a lot more down than up and it was very slow. On the other hand, there's evidence that modern societies are being ruled by rich, hereditary oligarchs. The percentage of super-rich people who inherit all of their money has been going up for a while now. The present isn't that different from the past in that regard.
Got it. I was just curious if the change to hereditary holy orders would cause the holy orders to lock out those who are not say of the Pareem, since that is the way it is likely to go, thus making it so that a hero/genius or such would be kept out even though they might be qualified in other ways to be included.
South Reach still mines some lapis lazuli. Not as much as Arrow Lake does, but they still mine some. Since you don't have a monopoly, you don't get the same prestige boost.
So, say if South Reach ended up going defunct as a civilization, such as if their neighbors ended up sacking and destroying the settlement, and we are left as the only producers left of lapis lazuli, would that be enough to give us said prestige boost?
Calling it a Meagaproject was probably a misnomer. It's just that the actions are going to be so expensive that they will be priced like a Megaproject. They are much more expensive than Temples or Hills. Once you build one of those, it's basically stable. You don't have to spend nearly as many resources maintaining something as you would building it. With orkers or mastodons, it's different. The biggest expense for them is food and that's a constant. You can't ever reduce how much you're feeding those animals or they die.
To put things in perspective: for each human in your civilization, you need about 5 pounds of food per day on average. An orker would need to eat between 35-50 pounds of food per day; 80% grain and 20% meat. An elephant would need to eat 800 pounds of food, pretty much exclusively grain. It takes a lot of effort to acquire that much food. For anything you build, you only really have to feed people while it's being built. After that, workers are reassigned and only a small amount of food is still needed for shaman and their support workers.
Just to be clear, to utilize animals such as orkers and mastodons at all, do we need these buildings? Or are the buildings only for more advanced uses of orkers and mastodons, such as having pens kept for them in order to feed them high calorie food in order to use them for labor/war, while other more passive uses such as herding them requires much less?
Otherwise, it basically seems like we're going to do a lot of work on either increasing our agricultural yields, or conquering more agricultural lands if we ever want to field any Orkers or Mammoths.
For domesticating animals, you have a choice of what you want to focus on first. For caribou, you'll probably get: size, fur-bearing, and climate adaptation as options. Dogs will probably have: hunting dogs, war dogs, lap dogs, herd dogs, and prize dogs. Mastodons: advanced labour, war, climate adaptation, and hair production (like sheep). You can focus on any of these in any order you choose. The order will effect the outcome, however. Turning your mastodons into giant sheep with Hair Production and then going into Climate Adaptation is going to do weird things.
The Soft Eyes have learned to farm. They mostly farm corn.
How often/frequent can we make these changes to our domesticated animals? Meaning, aside from constraints such as research or studying, how many turns does it take before we can choose another feature we want to focus on?
I'm mostly asking because it's been more than 10 turns, I think it was turn 9 where we voted on prizing intelligence in our dogs, and I was wondering when the next opportunity to choose which feature for our dogs we prize next.
Hmm, Caribou are probably going to focus on Size first(they got plenty of terrain after all in the north) to make them better work beasts and light cavalry, then Climate Adaptation. Furs and Climate Adaptation probably clash, since they're a little contradictory, fine thick pelts means overheating in warmer climes.
Dogs, we'd probably want Herd Dogs next, since it helps with the dog upkeep(dogs are a lot more efficient for managing large herds than multiple human herders), then probably war dogs next. Not sure how the traits will react here, herd dogs end to be pretty clever bois, but tend to be less aggressive unless they are dealing with aggressive beasties.
Mastotons...Labor and climate first. War mastodons are prestigious and I'm not sure how anyone is going to stop them in the bronze age, but they're also the most likely to go extinct along the line from being too hard to upkeep.
I pretty much agree with you regarding the caribou. It doesn't matter much if we adapt caribou for the climates of the south if we don't have anyone capable or riding them as our people are more likely to grow larger rather than retain the small size they had before. Considering the choices we made this turn to empower the Horned Riders, and the fact that we are very likely to research caribou domestication by the next turn or sub-turn, I think we're probably going to get our chance sooner rather than later regarding how we shape the caribou.
As for dogs, I'm not entirely sure which choice is more optimal for our next change we want to enact, as from what
@Redium has said it seems to me that order does matter in regards to how it will affect the animals we are trying to shape. For example, when it comes to herding vs hunting dogs I think we would probably need to pick herding dogs first as from what I understand, herding dogs are mostly shaped and modified so that they retain their predatory behavior but when it comes to livestock they stop treating them as prey. Hunting dogs on the other hand would likely involve us shaping them to be more predatory and better at things such as sensing and tracking prey. With all of that in mind, my ideal build for dogs would likely be first herding dogs, then hunting dogs, then war dogs. Herding dogs first so that we can teach them to be predatory only in certain cases. Hunting dogs next so that we can breed them to be more adept at scouting and tracking. Finally war dogs next so that we can refine all of the above by making this breed larger and more aggressive in war.
@Redium Considering dogs do have many different breeds, will developing certain types of dogs apply to all of those we have as a whole, or could we simply just create different sub-breeds that specialize in certain things?
For Mastodons, it's a toss up for me between climate and advanced labor, with war as a close contender. Considering how long mastodon domestication is likely to take, especially when looking at how much it will take to tame them, I want to do whatever is best for ensuring that they don't go extinct, and I think climate might be the best bet for that as they will surely mate with other wild mastodons and hopefully propagate the changes eventually. When it comes to war and advanced labor, I think the key factor for me is what advanced labor will offer us. I don't think it's a coincidence that
@Redium added the qualifier of advanced before labor without any reason, which makes me believe that once we domesticate them they will likely be able to perform basic labor functions. If the advanced labor changes are not too significant, then I would rather train them for war, as we will always have a use for them there before advanced labor. Hair will probably come last as an adaptation, mostly because I don't think it's very useful yet, and secondly because I want to see what the weird change is going to be if we go climate first then hair.
Surprisingly, though, he didn't mention anything about Orkers and their potential changes.
@Redium Any reason for this or did you just forget?
South Reach is pretty pissed. The Mountain Clans never really stopped, the raids have just intensified due to their own relative weakness. They blame you since they're now weak enough the Mountain Clans can bully them instead of the other way around.
Boo hoo...yeah, not really feeling too guilty, they got what they deserved. Anyways, how likely is it for South Reach to collapse due to the raiding from the Mountain Clans?
You did not have to change your government type. Without your heroes, it would've been the easiest option by far, but it was never necessary.
Good news to me, as I prefer our current system for now, and also because I think it will likely help us centralize later on.
You killed like 95% of them, but you didn't get all of them. Unless you systematically purge the enemy's upper class, some of them will escape.
Did Arrow Lake's upper class, seeing as they lost the war, retain their status, or even potentially become Pareem, or have they started to simply just be normal tribesmembers?
The river flows from Arrow Lake towards the Fingers. There is a point south of Arrow Lake where the rivers start flowing north, but that would be very near to the edge of the map you can see.
So there's no rivers that flow from the Fingers to Arrow Lake? That must make shipping things to Arrow Lake rather hard as they will have to rely on the overland.
Not particularly, at least, not enough to matter on a macroscopic scale. The stilled homes were pretty, but didn't do too much on a mechanical level.
So the Mountain Clans don't really have any techs then that we could want? As I am wondering what other reason we could have for continuing to feed them when they now know how to farm corn.
The Hunt does help and when you unlock the Hunting Grounds and Wild Hunt versions, it will help more.
Which techs do we need to research to unlock those? As I don't see anything under the research tab that will lead to those developments.
Monoculture is something that's taken care of a bit with the Hunt. You will have issues, however; the caribou that the Northlands domesticated is actually of a rare subspecies. Caribou normally flee when encountering humans and are very hard to domesticate. This particular subspecies (which still exists IRL) has the opposite response and will collectively freeze as a herd. That makes them significantly easier to interact with since they don't run away.
Do we have anyway of solving said issue with the caribou?
Something important to consider is that you have a lot of land that's not suited for widespread agriculture, especially to the north. Most of the terrain around you is rocky hills with very shallow soil. You could farm in those places, but they would be small plots scattered throughout the wilderness. Hill farming wouldn't be possible due to how shallow the soil is; you reshape it to create a flat space and you're going to be digging into solid stone. Even if you cultivate everything you can, there's going to be enormous waste due to the unevenness of the land. It would be good for subsistence level, but not much beyond that.
Plus since herders are subbing in as budget, bulk traders, they're very unlikely to disappear.
So essentially, if we want better farmland, spread south, but if we want herding territory, that's to the north?
The people you're directly trading with: Pearl Divers, Peace Builders and Island Makers have something to trade with you. It isn't enough to buy all of your products, but it's enough that they don't have to offer up their own tech in recompense. It's the people that they trade with that are too poor.
Quick question related to this, when is salt going to finally stop trending and be replaced by something else?
There was about a 15% they would still decide to keep fighting after they lost. This was for a variety of reasons: revenge, throwing good money after bad, glory, etc. They just happened to roll a 16 on their willingness to leave the war.
Have we essentially dealt a mortal blow to them? As it seems like they are in dire straits right now.
The big thing was beans. You're also going to get a whole bunch of tree-based crops (apples, walnuts, hickory nuts, etc.) as well. You're also picking up Sassfras albidum which is the tree that root beer is made from.
So it looks like we're going to have a new staple when we develop arboriculture as we have a bunch of crops there, right?
If you give them the chance, the Star Shaman are most likely to pick Study Magic, providing they don't have any other overwhelming needs.
What other needs would the Star Shaman need to attend to? As we sorta picked them to empower as we were under the impression they would Study Magic.
The Soft Eyes get everything. The Hard Foot are too far away to pick up anything and the Stout Heart have turned you down.
Was there a values based fracture that caused this? I don't any of them are our enemies though, right?
The Peace Builders have a generally positive impression of you. They're more focused on the fact that you're nice to them. They have too many enemies in the south already, so they're not looking for any problems with you. Your wealth is a distant second concern. You're happy to trade obsidian with them and that's enough.
Are we going to hear from them anytime soon, or is the southern front quiet over there?
It's not surprising, though, that they think well of us considering our mutual bonds. How has the influx of Peace Builders into our tribe, where some of the warriors from after the Northern War decided to join us, changed our relationship with them?
Arrow Lake does have a shrine. Their theology is basically going to be overwritten by yours. They simply don't have anything that they could possibly give you theologically. You're profoundly dominant over them culturally and theologically. In a comparison between your Mysticism and theirs? It's not even close.
Unsurprising. What will happen to their old shaman, though?
The Horned Riders don't really have any other magic. They have a lot of mysteries and they dress things up, but at their heart they are mounted warriors first and foremost. The Fangs have their dogs and the Frost-Scarred have their masochistic love of the cold. It's only the Ember-Eyes that have the fingers in ever pie.
Can Holy Orders ever go obsolete? I'm curious as some of them seem limited in the magic they practice, and if that magic has inherently limited pathways, won't that make some of them defunct eventually? Or could they evolve over time?
Your Holy Orders are governed by an Elder council. The oldest and most learned all meet in order to discuss policy for the order as a whole. Due to your Law choice, they have a program where they also include younger members, from initiates all the up to note-quite-elders. These individuals don't have voting rights, but they are very rarely ignored when they make declarations. The advisory council is typically made up of the wisest/most successful/martially inclined of the order. There doesn't exist any bias for or against Pareem within the orders at this point.
How do the hierarchies of the Holy Orders fit in with the overall structure of the people? Are they distinct enough that they are essentially separate societies right now??
It is not a moat. It is significantly more awesome than that.
Is it a type of wall?
There was a degree of immigration/emigration in the Neolithic, but they use 'tribe' in a very different way than I have. Each civilization here is a massive confederation of many tribes that tend to share cultural and linguistic characteristics. A individual person's 'tribe' would consist of a small number of interrelated bands (20-40 people). Each tribe would only consist of a few hundred people. The People are made up dozens of each of these tribes.
Individuals would leave and rejoin their birth tribe in exchange for other, closely related tribal groups. A young man or young woman might decide, at the winter gathering, to spend a few years living amongst the tribe of a distant cousin before settling down with them or returning to their birth tribe. This was done among tribes with common blood ties and cultural beliefs. It would be extremely rare for a young person to decide to move to a tribe where they did not have any blood ties or cultural links.
A person deciding to move from the Fingers to Hill Guard would be relatively common. A person deciding to move from the Island Makers to the Fingers would not be. It happens, but it's much more common that such immigrants are slaves or war captives.
Other people are dangerous. Moving to a new tribe where there's no existing blood or cultural ties could very easily lead to abuse or slavery. Travelling throughout the countryside risks starvation and banditry. New tribes are also very skeptical when they encounter individuals trying to join their group. There's often a reason that people are looking to join a new group and it's because they were kicked out of their last one.
So, going with that, how are refugees treated then? Such as, when the Hundred Bands way back when had that catastrophe, we eventually took them in. The fact that we seem to be so accepting of other tribes, especially when it comes to taking in more people, how does this square with what you've just wrote?
They had a completely different version of the Threefold Stag, where she was more of a caring mother, but they like your version better. They have the Flayed Mastodon which is an undead spirit. It appears in dreams and on the absolute edge of hearing as a whisper of something once powerful. It's a spirit of knowledge and forgotten lore. The Sister of Spears is an important war spirit to them as well. She's an earth goddess, but somewhat unusually, she's associated with stone more than earth, and with war more than motherhood. They have an evil wolf spirit, but that one's rather quietly being forgotten considering how important Brother Wolf is to the People.
Any particular reason why they like our version of the Threefold Stag better?
I'm betting the Flayed Mastodon will be something we will likely adopt once we finally tame and later domesticate the animal. Though that tidbit about it representing forgotten lore is somewhat curious, how did that develop?
Was the Sister of Spears an older hero of theirs? Also, how will it mesh with the legends of Kaspar, and later Priit who will be our incarnation of a War God?
She-The-Snow still exists. She's actually been reinforced due to exposure with the Northlands and Arrow Lake. Both of them had female personifications of winter so the fact that it's a universal spirit has triggered some intrgue.
I take it this intrigue is something we will investigate or learn about later on, right?
I've completely forgotten about him. He's too overshadowed by Kasper to really merit his own mention.
Ahh, that's kind of sad, really.
The average person in the Pearl Divers doesn't know your values that well. They could give you a list of things that were important to do an important to avoid, but they would miss the nuances of your culture.
Speaking of this, aside from spiritual advisers, are there any other things we could do right now that would help us change their values in order to eventually assimilate them?
