Having a ton of enemies seems like extra reasons to have more allies as well as superior diplomatic ability overall. Once again, arguing that an option among a list which are stated to be benefits provides only negatives or is strictly inferior (by dismissing it's advantages) and that by extension voters for that options are fools is doing your position no favors whatsoever.
I never said they were fools, not once, only that it was a poison chalice, or people didn't quite understand what the idea of Citizenship meant, and why exactly you can't just give parts of it up.
And yes, I am dismissing their advantages, because they're temporary at best, you get a boost to manpower and tax revenue, but now you have to deal with more reliance on a underclass of people who will agitate more and more over time for more rights until you give it to them or break society. And giving it to them might break society anyway.
You get better at diplomacy, except it's still the players controlling the options and we've done some pretty big screw ups, I myself was involved in a few, before. So I don't trust our diplo skills. Nor am I going to ignore that the option itself admits that it has a higher likelihood of drawling us into 'Wars Abroad'. It's in the actual option itself. It can't be ignored. And I'm not interested in fighting someone else's war. And unlike the other two options, where the Drakonids beat down the Illyrian threat, and the Exorians beat down the Dauni, the Antipatids don't get rid of any faction that threatens us in any decisive manner, it gives us one alliance, which is with a city that's on the other side of Taras and involved in disputes to its West, and can't help us with the Illyrian, Messapii or Dauni.
The benefits of the Antipatids don't suit our play style form the last two threads, nor does it outweigh the possible costs. The benefits are short term, the negatives? Very long reaching and far more dangerous than the others. It's short term reward, very high risk and suited to a play style we haven't, historically, been very good at.
I'm sorry if I insulted you at any point, but I literally see the Antipatid option as being the only option that could possibly kill Eretria as we know and love it.
It's been 34 years. Many of the metics from the original game have died, or have been swamped by other immigrants. Further, as the city chose not to rely on slave labour, many metics are much poorer than their Athenian counterparts because they are filling a demand for manual labour.
The opening has the metics agitating for more, but that's because being a metic is a position of economic and social disadvantage. You cannot own land, you have no representation in the ekklesia, you are taxed heavily and yet expected to fulfill military service. Your assemblies don't have a lot of power. Unlike in Athenai, many of you are labourers as well as artisans. If the Antipatrids are chosen, many of the smaller Metic demands (like fairness in marriage contracts or similar fees in the agora) have been met, calming them in the short-term, but in the long-term, the higher number of metics will make further reforms more difficult to resist.
In other words, metics in Eretria are plebeians.
And resisting those reforms for a time is necessary, we do not have the ability to go though major social changes when surrounded on all sides by enemies. Literally all sides. If we pick the other options we can give them the smaller reforms to placate them whilst using superior military, or financial, in the case of Drakonids, Might to secure ourselves long enough to be secure.
My issue with the Antipatids is that they want to make this underclass you describe, that is necessary, larger whilst not removing any of our enemies. Essentially increasing danger from within and without on the eve of the Peloponnesian Wars.
Eretria cannot survive reducing the tax, Eretria cannot survive giving them more rights for a good while, why should we give away all the pacifying half measures in the time skip instead of using them, after a vote that pacifies one of our many enemies, either Illyrian or Dauni, until the chaos of the age has left us somewhat alone?
I'd rather not have a civil war brewing in a decade whilst surrounded by enemies during the Classical Greek Equivalent of the Great War happens around us.
If I haven't made it clear that I recognise we're gonna have to give them something. I apologise, but we have to hold out for a while yet, we can't just see them as copy and paste plebs to appease, the situation surrounding us, and the future we face, is a bit more dire in my opinion.
