Paths of Civilization

Primary: Gylruv
Secondary: Kielmyr
Secondary: Black Sheep

Agendas:
Primary: Greater Ymar
Secondary: Great North-South Road
Secondary: Anti-West Economic Alliance

It was a complex idea with a variety of simple objectives that required complex methods to actually achieve. Through strengthening ties with the Gylruv and encouraging the Kielmyr and Black Sheep to have the "right" set of objectives, the intent was to secure the People's own borders in such a way that they could safely focus on the outside world, while also encouraging their neighbours in good position to interfere with their rivals to take mutually beneficial diplomatic, economic, and military action.

With the most intense focus on tying the Gylruv ever closer to the People, one of the major issues was to secure the Gylruv western border in such a way that the Patriarch would be more interested in exploiting trade routes and internal development than in building up the army. To that end, the diplomats to the Kielmyr made major strides. With the People already providing warm water ports, it was easy to convince the Kielmyr that if they wanted to join up the Gylruv in carving up the Wyrmyn, the Gylruv had little interest in the rich port city of Gayns. With the Kielmyr very much wanting to dominate trade in far northern Kalesee Sea and Gayns being the biggest port outside of their control, the offer that the two empires might rip up the annoying Wyrymyn between them was extremely tempting. There were other rivals to the Wyrmyn, like certain factions of the Styrmyr, and some of the eastern principalities of the United Ueman Empire of the Tortuns - only the last element of the name being remotely accurate - who also wanted a piece, but there were some complications there as the former were also rivals to the Gylruv and People at times, and the latter often had issues with the Kielmyr. Still, keeping them neutral in the coming conflict was enough.

The People also took this prelude to speak with the Black Sheep about their own stance. In the generations since its inception, the Black Emperor had moved his throne progressively east to be closer to the richer and more populous regions of Kus. While from an administrative standpoint this made sense, the northern and western parts of the empire were growing increasingly discontent, even as the people of Kus were rattled by the encroachment and expansion of the Empire. Revolt was steadily brewing, not helped along by the fact that Black Sheep successions tended to get messy if the strongest heir didn't take steps to kill his brothers before the death of the current emperor. More than a few military expeditions into the petty kingdoms within the interior of Kus had been launched in an effort to loot enough to pay the debts incurred during a civil war caused by a succession crisis. The People's envoys and ambassadors thus whispered caution into the ears of courtiers who had the Black Emperor's ear. He was pushing many coastal cities and minor princelings into the arms of the Syffrynite traders, who brought trouble upon everyone. Better to step back and take more careful measures. Better to spend time reforming elements of the bureaucracy so that those tax collectors and surveyors who had been appointed by one Emperor would not need to be replaced or have their loyalties reaffirmed during succession. Better to secure strong and lasting peace treaties with certain neighbours - like the People and Gylruv - than to risk someone taking advantage of a moment of weakness. The precedent of the breakaway Mahratathan Empire in the interior north-east in recent years was a fresh wound in the mind of the Black Emperor.

So it was that the People and their Gylruv overlords did secure peace and alliances with all the right people, and had a solid generation to do with as they wished.

They wished to kill the Wyrmyn.

The Wyrmyn were very, very wealthy from rich farmland and trade out of Gayns. By some estimates they fed most of the northern Syffryn cities with their output, directly or indirectly. Their nobility was thus extremely wealthy, able to support many sons as cavalry equipped with an extravagance of armour and weaponry... theoretically, in past years. The People in particular had been keeping tabs on the situation through university contacts and the like, and the Wyrmyn had slowly become victims of their own success. The situation had not quite reached a tipping point, but the nobility had been dividing the farm lands finer and finer as the number of nobles grew ever larger, and while on some level this had not divided up the actual fields, management had become a mess, while their parliament had become ridiculously unwieldy. Even the councils of the various trade republics the People knew of or had incorporated into their territory knew to add new layers of government to limit top level parliament sizes to a few hundred at most, while the Wyrmyn parliament had a theoretical elector count greater than ten thousand! And each had the right to speak their minds at least once, but with no limit to how long they could speak during their turn, so the parliament simply did not meet in full, and rarely even were rump parliaments called.

This was allowing a deep rot to settle into the kingdom as dysfunctions were not addressed. On their own it might take another few generations to become utterly untenable, but with the People working to isolate the Wyrmyn and get their biggest rivals aside from the Gylruv onside...

In a slow press the Gylruv and the People attacked from the east and south while the Kielmyr struck from the north and west, catching the Wyrmyn in the jaws of a vice, as they had feared might happen to them before they had requested vassalization from the Gylruv. The response was an utterly panicked response as the nobility discovered that they had no ability to coordinate with each other in a meaningful manner, the king paralyzed by just the effort to shout down nobles who had a legal right for an audience but no practical capacity to get the king to defend their farm in particular. Winter came and went and the next season the two fronts pressed in faster, pausing in their mad dash towards the middle only when the first autumn snows appeared. By this time the Tortun and Styrmyr had both realized that the Kielmyr and Gylruv were not going to stop, and decided that rather than oppose them at this point, they would rather gobble up scraps, striking in from the relatively unaffected south-west - just as they had been expected to do.

And all the while the Black Sheep were quite content to keep their western front troops deployed to garrison duty and their eastern front troops within their own borders instead of threatening their neighbours.

The initial slow press had been calculated to sow discord and also give a false assessment of the capacities of the aggressors, and now that the full strength of the People was revealed in a massive push, resistance along the south-east border collapsed, turning an inevitable loss of territory into the feeding frenzy of kingdoms over the carcass of another. The People's direct gains were small, but given the amount of influence they had in the Gylruv court and the degree to which the Patriarch's dynasty had been intermarried with the people's own royal family meant that saying one group was in charge of the other was a bit disingenuous. In any case, the Greater People were then able to convince the Kielmyr that their interests were best served by disrupting transoceanic trade in the Artemian, as the route that went through the People's and Gylruv lands favoured the Kielmyr significantly with their control of the Kalesee Sea as the north end of the Great North-South route. Given friendly relations with the Black Sheep and suggestions to focus on trade to them, this meant that exotic goods from the Kus could flow north, while bulk food and timber could flow south.

The Kielmyr thus agreed very much so that the disruption of trade by south-western Syffryn was very much in their interests and took up piracy with vigour.

The southern Syffrynites obviously objected to this, but if there was one strategy that simply did not work against the People or the Black Sheep, it was bombarding their shores. They might have difficulty besting the Vortugs at sea, but any attempts to wrest coastal concessions was met with massed battery fire that rapidly turned any attempted toeholds into burning timbers and piles of gravel. This thus created a zone of trade where the Syffrynites could not bully any locals, and ensured a small but significant supply of tea and spices that the went only to the friends of the People. Overland, the Gylruv and Black Sheep had enough control over the land routes that spices and silk could also flow by caravan. This brought great wealth to those controlling the routes and gave another path outside of Syffrynite control, especially since the Hung were also capable of expressing extreme displeasure to any who presumed to dictate terms to them.

Some of the wealth the People obtained went towards other neighbours, like the Khemetri and the petty kingdoms of Eastern Great Khem, to shore up their kings against the pressure of the piratical nations that plagued them. It perhaps wasn't enough, but with their situation stable the People knew that they could offer more assistance.

Select an area to increase ties with Gylruv
[] [Gylruv] Land reform (1.8x)
[] [Gylruv] Social reform (1.5x)
[] [Gylruv] Administrative reform (2x)
[] [Gylruv] Financial reform (1x)
[] [Gylruv] Education reform (0.8x)
[] [Gylruv] Mutual integration (1x)

Select an external focus
[] [Outside] Increase aid to groups opposed to the Syffrynites (2x)
[] [Outside] Collaborate with the Khemetri on mutually strengthening measures (1.5x)
[] [Outside] Increase privateering and promote useful pirates (1.2x)
[] [Outside] Send diplomats to Tortun and Styrmyr groups to solidify a peaceful western land border (1x)
[] [Outside] Continue to assist the Black Sheep in having control over their internal and external policies (1.2x)
[] [Outside] Subtly push the Black Sheep into splitting along an East-West fracture point so you can dominate the Western break (0.9x)
[] [Outside] Attempt to convince the Sketch that they would be better off looking east than west (0.9x)