- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Education in Saphery
[X] Investigations into forest spirits
[X] Investigations into forest spirits
From the Hidden City (Warhammer Lizardmen Temple-City Quest)
- Thread starter CuttleFish2.0
- Start date
- Fantasy
- Location
- The Space Between
the big obstacle to shipping is that there's no harbors/docks/coastal-access for most/all of the Temple Cities. We're sort of in a spot where we need to make a pipeline for the pipeline of repairs.
Hell, some of the Temple Cities don't even have walls properly standing. We're talking about having to drag some of these places out of hunter-gatherer stage rather than merely dealing with uplifting an agricultural holding into a functional magical+industrial Geomantic City.
I'd be happy just getting walls, farms and ranches up so that the local populations can be solidly in the "Self sufficient military fortress supported by internal agriculture" stage.
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Man. Am I glad we are elevating humans. Could you imagine those discusions without chance of warmbloods help?
They can not grow fast enough given our desires about them. Then again. That makes it even more importand to get right.
Do hope any future migrants get to expirience some culture shock. Especially for our pov enjoyment.
Do wonder what our Slann been teaching them... oh well. we'll see soon enough.
They can not grow fast enough given our desires about them. Then again. That makes it even more importand to get right.
Do hope any future migrants get to expirience some culture shock. Especially for our pov enjoyment.
Do wonder what our Slann been teaching them... oh well. we'll see soon enough.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm curious if the elvish education if mages could provide insight to further improve our Skink Priests.
Perhaps if we didn't have Wik it wouldn't be possible but with him…
Given the approval of the split attention bees option, is it possible his Hive upgrades could unlock an Additional Wik action @CuttleFish2.0 ? Or alternatively, something that captures the essence of the elvish biology in harnessing magic?
Perhaps if we didn't have Wik it wouldn't be possible but with him…
Given the approval of the split attention bees option, is it possible his Hive upgrades could unlock an Additional Wik action @CuttleFish2.0 ? Or alternatively, something that captures the essence of the elvish biology in harnessing magic?
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- Location
- barking
I do like seeing lizardmen being forced to interact with warmbloods its making them open up for lack of a better word
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We are expiriencing a change in turn mechanics soon. Who knows....
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Quoting stuff that is in error helps one to find it you know?
I think he learned
To be honest, at least this one is fun.
Don't worry Artoria I already found it c:
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Additional actions are... tricky. Each turn already takes a fairly long time, by design to an extent, and giving you additional actions would only increase that. While I won't rule it out entirely I'm also not going to commit to it.
Basically a very longed winded, 'maybe, but don't hold your breath.'
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Actually I just got another idea. Spites! And we just so happen to have a burgeoning option to go looking for forest spirits.
That's…fair. I didn't think of what it meant broadly speaking, just what it meant for ability to do things.
Do we have any capacity to study the Spawning Pools that produced chameleon skinks/our chameleon skinks to attempt to get them spawning again? We keep getting special expeditions where Navigation is a factor, like this one.
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- Location
- barking
what happened with the roads we were reparining or replacing I remember we were doing them but we didn't finish them and theirs no option for them
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I assume it was finished offscreen because they were one of the things Cuttlefish didn't like doing every update, same shit summed up as "the work continues"
- Location
- barking
fair I was just curious on how it ended as yeah it was getting repetitive as you said
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
If it's that or "not rebuild a temple-city?" Good question. Zlatlani lizardmen are just built different I guess.
But seriously, we'd probably see a division of labor with humans doing a lot of the insensitive stuff (growing the crops, reinforcing the security details, clearing vegetation and keeping it clear, hauling rubble, pulling on ropes to lift stuff in a big-ass crane if there aren't enough kroxigor around) while, of course, skink artisans and kroxigor do the sensitive and important stuff.
But having humans to do a lot of the grunt work would make this kind of thing way easier, which is actually one of the big factors that makes me want to foster a human civilization. If we can trade and pay them to perform labor, that could make a big difference in the long run.
- Location
- barking
guess its all the forced get along with warmbloods while they complain about it
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Building your highway network has been on-going for the last several turns and just completed this turn, the work has been referenced several times.
Not at the moment.
Both Huatza-Botl and Khaxilitli had Navigation as skills, and if you look at the spoilered Navigation roll for Curious Archmages you'll notice Atahuinqua's Divination skill applied.
- Location
- barking
ah sorry I missed that
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm not at all sure they were all saurus.
A lot of the tasks that need performing aren't going to be functionally all that different.
Suppose it takes 1000 farmers to feed a work crew of a fixed size (plus also themselves) in Zlatlan.
Now you move the work crew to Cuexotl. It still takes 1000 farmers in Zlatlan to feed the work crew, plus maybe let's say 100-200 more to account for feeding the sailors continuously shuttling stuff back and forth plus also the loss of some of the food due to spoilage in transit.
Alternatively, you move the farmers to Cuexotl. Farming in Cuexotl may be a bit less efficient than in Zlatlan, but the shipping is not an issue. It could be a toss-up. It could even work in Cuexotl's favor if it turns out the soil is more fertile there- remember, lizardman cities are placed for geomantic reasons, not so much because of suitability for agriculture.
Now, I really don't know how many farmers it takes in Cuexotl to feed the work crew. Maybe 1100. Maybe 1200 or even 1300. But the point is, it's not going to be a huge revolutionary deal. Similar calculations apply to other things that can be outsourced and shipped to the workers (such as tools made in the forges).
Relying on ships to move stuff back and forth and leaning on Zlatlan's better infrastructure isn't a bad idea, and it'll probably help enough to knock years off the requirements for the project. Maybe even many years. But it's not enough to move it from "this is just too big for us right now" into "let's go do it right now."
I don't even understand what you're saying here. A feasibility assessment would, as a matter of basic logic, be the first step here and there's just no point in doing anything else first until such an assessment is done.
Because the problem with temple-city repairs is that there is no "easy, quick, most-bang-for-buck" repair option. When a temple-city is fucked up as comprehensively as the ruined cities are, you can't get any of the cool geomantic stuff like spawning pools working until you significantly clear up all the city, including the big temples that are otherwise completely useless for day-to-day stuff like "actually do more stonemasonry."
The sheer size of the task is such that we should not even be trying to talk meaningfully about sending out a work crew to "just go do it" without an extensive survey of how much would be required. And it is also such that the garrison is effectively not even trying to repair the city, it's not even really what they're about. They're all about just subsisting, staying alive, and discouraging anyone or anything from settling in the ruins and fucking the place up even worse. They are not slowly bringing the city up to tip-top condition, they do not have nearly enough peopel to even begin that project because no matter how motivated they are and how long-lived they are, a couple of dozen skinks cannot rebuild an entire colossal-ass pyramid. It would, like, literally be worn away by erosion faster than they could make progress in the time before an unsupportable number of them were killed in workplace accidents.
I mean, my gut feeling is that ten thousand lizardmen who were adequately supplied, with the tools we could now provide, might actually be able to get the job done in, say, several hundred years. The trouble is that ten thousand lizardmen plus the labor to supply them is more or less "all the effort Zlatlan is capable of," so what it comes down to is "the entire workforce of Zlatlan could do this in several hundred years," which is indeed what we did with Zlatlan itself.
Given your track record of not always being correct about specific number statements or details that you think you remember but actually hallucinated, I suggest that we step back from making firm pronouncements other than "holy shit this is a lot of work" and wait until Iwannabuildthat has actually tallied up an estimate for us.
Well, a harbor is a lot easier to build than a whole-ass temple-city, as we know because while it took several centuries to even repair Zlatlan more or less, we were able to build a whole new harbor for the city entirely from scratch in well under a century as practically a side project as I recall.
If we were serious about getting Nahuantl or Cuexotl stood back up again (it'd almost have to be one of those first), then it would be an obvious important first step to build a harbor near the respective cities. Among other things because we'd want to keep warships nearby constantly in order to chase off any pirates who are attracted by all the work we're doing.
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That is a reason why I usually copy paste his name or us his title instead. And HOW in the ever loving Lord of the Puns did I not noticed that before?!
Also yes, lot of work. yes will need lot of resources and hands either way....
Any bright ideas how to help Vohlu grow? Helpfull dreams apparently can help.
- Location
- barking
speaking of volhu wonder how many their are now and how they interact with other human neighbours and how said neighbours view them
- Pronouns
- highness
Alright, that is true, I was massively underestimating the scale of devastation as well as how well out of it we came, I must admit that every time I think of Wik'keer'mal musing on the pre polar gates implosion lizardmen, and he thinks of how they never had to negotiate with dragons, they could instead just Zerg Rush them with numbers. My brain does a weird doublethink where it wonders, how many lizardmen, armed with stonedged clubs, or blowpipes does it take to zerg rush a dragon? And if you're totally fine taking those casualties, what the hell are your numbers like. But then my brain gets all those answers and goes, number too big, like how many are we actually dealing with now.
Yes fixing the City would absolutely take numbers that would also make my brain hurt, like Marshall Plan levels of Reconstruction, I absolutely do understand that, my idea is that instead of doing that we do something far less grand is not the right word, that would only take decades. To really push a metaphor, the equivalent of saying "yes Europe from France all the way to Moscow is rubble, but we have rebuilt Calais enough that it is liveable so we are going to leave now".
The idea would be more about getting them to the point were there population is growing every, century like we were on turn negative 10 perhaps so that they are able to actually get some more done by themselves, instead of just trapped in being able to mostly keep on top of stopping actual backward movement, in the small amount of the city they have not sealed up yet.
Yes pipeline to pipeline is absolutely what I was thinking in general terms, when we made the Harbor in Zlatlan it was the fact there was a bit of coastline within a weeks walk of Zlatlan, that was considered close enough for us to have a harbor. When I looked at a map the cities that aren't Teotiqua, Golden Tower of the Gods and Temple of Skulls, all look similarly close to me, to the point where I think getting a Dock up within a week of the city is possible and that was all I hoped for.
Golden Tower of the Gods during Brawl in the Bush was my mental model, kind of, we had three thousand scaly bodies over there for a turn and when we left about the only thing we had been able to do for them was get up a wall that cut off the peninsula but they would not have the bodies to man when we left. To quote CuttleFish2.0
Long twisting roots and tufts of grass had transformed what had been the avenue for which the Temple-Avenue was named from a broad plaza twice as wide as the Grand Temple of Xholankha of Zlatlan to a series of paths between towering trees. Canals which had once delivered fresh water from one end of the city to the other, were blocked by fallen bridges and now overflowed their embankments, creating marshy pools where the avenue itself had sunken down.
Those marshy pools led to flooded barrios swarming with jungle life, the structures which had once dominated them collapsed down to only a few worm eaten timbers jutting up form the placid waters.
Walls, Farms and ranches was about all I wanted except I would of put it more like, a Nursery, Knapping spot, Functional door or two and get a Farm online would all be nice, now that you have them we are all going to leave because you guys have an awful mess to clean up.
Now the big one, Simon_Jester I am going to split up your post into pieces and tackle them in smaller chunks because my ability to keep something straight in my head is directly proportional to my ability to look at it in front of me.
Good catch, that was me being unclear, I meant "saurus" to mean "group of lizardmen" not actually Saurus Scar Warriors, it was simply a shorthand to save my finger from typing out Skinks, Saurus and Kroxigors everytime I mentioned them it was not meant as actual Saurus instead as Cuttlefish2.0 put it Scaly bodies, just that I began to run short of easy Synonyms.
It's more the British Empire Empire model of management, as long as Cuexotl can manage basic subsistence, which they are doing, then everything that they need that requires any amount of light industry can be shipped in from the beating Heart of our Empire of Slann, The glorious Temple City of Zlatlan. Sorry got a little bit of Nationalism caught in my throat just there, but the basic idea was like Cape town in the 1700's. Instead of taking a turn to find a granite mine then another turn to be able to get some amount of granite from it then one more to lift it into place, we could simply ship in a crane and stone blocks from Zlatlan, alternatively if it turns out we need to repair the door hinges, we can just send them the tools they need or they can send us four pieces of broken door hinge and we can send them one working door hinge.
I thought this would simplify the entire supply chain enough to make what would be impossible to achieve in a century, instead something that is very difficult to achieve in a decade, especially if we avoid anything too big and simply "tinker around the edges".
I meant a Feasibility assessment as in asking Cuttlefish2.0 hey does this work, why doesn't this work, what if I change this. Spamming the Chat with a dozen Variants of doomed to failure, which I feel as if I have already done, Sorry chat, not in the manner of which you suggested it as in sending Awanabil'tat to make certain that we don't send them stuff they don't want to places they don't want it, for a plan that wont work. Sorry, still not very clear, to clarify, hopefully, I do support sending a Skink Priest to see if we can get it done, I do not support spamming everybody here with foolish plans that have no chance of working. He says in his eighth post in two days.
I know that everything in the city works via geomantic magic and needs to be whole to work properly but for Zlatlan on turn one we had the city wrecked but the glyph still working with new "manpower" spawning in from the functional pools we had even though I think we only had three working pools. That would be similar to what I want from the Cities we fix up, I am simply unsure if we can even have that happen because as you said the glyphs ability to do things is directly based on how close to repaired the city is. I am currently thinking of the Glyph being "functional" meaning functional in the sense that a Steam Turbine that can move, even with only one blade and two ball bearings that is connected to absolutely nothing, can be described as functional as long as a kroxigor can get in and push and the turbine will move.
The size of the task is huge, but all I want is them to be capable of replenishing the losses they will take over centuries of attempting to keep out of the city everything that wants in and that seems to me an easier goal than get a second city up to the level we are currently operating at. I apologize if I have misread something, I was under the impression that they were doing as much as they can, but it is very little and will take more than 4000 years to actually show some results, and so I thought that there would be some minimal things we could do to have an outsized impact.
For instance getting rocks out of farming fields, Barrio Refurbishment, the spawning pools that can be completed in less than a decade of work and other such things that would speed up their time to getting themselves self sufficient by a lot if they could do them, such that repairs do outpace erosion.
That was the problem I was having was a lack of surety between, this is a lot of work, an amount of work that would take up most of our ability to do new projects, or an amount of work that requires mobilizing 90% of our population for 400 years in order to get them to their equivalent to turn 1. I thought it was wildly optimistic that we could get perhaps a Quarter of their spawning pools functional, obsinite production back online, make a granary weatherproof, get one or two crop fields repaired, take out blocks of stone from their doorways and put in actual doors, as well as any rubble that is in the way of these goals being cleared in 4 turns. But I did think it would be possible to do, I just wasn't sure how long it would take and if it would all be useful, because even if we do all that and it takes us 10 turns, I wasn't sure if the temple glyph would be able to power all that enough to have their population start growing by one or two a decade.
That was the thought I had, we can probably get a small dock online fairly quickly, and that would make getting necessary equipment to them far easier than walking it all the way, escorted by armed guard there and back. If we could get to Nahuantl from inside the bay it may not even need to change up our ship patrols, as we already patrol there. Also I cannot find but thought we had some statues or a temple that made the bay practically the Lake of Zlatlan.
Alternatively we could stretch out our ship patrols so as to come at Nahuantl from the North and build docks, repair it etc for three or four turns, and then use it as a jumping off point to go upriver to Cuexotl similarly to turn fours Forward Operating Temple at some point in the future. Which would likely take more time and effort including Charting, Dredging, De-rapiding, if that is a word just to make it possible but would get us another temple beginning to have new tadpoles growing to maturity over months.
I only wanted to spend less than 4 turns on this but was unsure if that would be able to get even a single Spawning pool spawning as well as build ditches and walls around it, or if a single working spawning pool requires 200 years of repairs to all the other pieces of the temple city just so the glyph has enough power to activate every century. That was the reason for being unsure of the feasibility of the plan.
And HOW in the ever loving Lord of the Puns did I not noticed that before?! Ditto
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Their no such thing as a quick fix of just a part of a lizardmen city.
Lizardmen cities are more akin your whole body, with infrastructure being the organs, and the general level of the cities level of infrastructure being the blood.
They are very binary in how they work, either their is enough geomantic energy to run properly, or not. All the cities are below the level where they have enough infrastructure/blood to run. They basically need what amount to a complete tear down and rebuild.
We are not getting the spawning pools to work at any level worth mentioning, without repairing the city to the point where it can generate geomantic energy; enough to run the spawning pools at all.
Lizardmen cities are more akin your whole body, with infrastructure being the organs, and the general level of the cities level of infrastructure being the blood.
They are very binary in how they work, either their is enough geomantic energy to run properly, or not. All the cities are below the level where they have enough infrastructure/blood to run. They basically need what amount to a complete tear down and rebuild.
We are not getting the spawning pools to work at any level worth mentioning, without repairing the city to the point where it can generate geomantic energy; enough to run the spawning pools at all.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The fundamental problem here is that you're suggesting doing the first 1% of a job, when we don't have a clear picture of the scale of the job, and most of us who've been at this a while suspect that we'll get no useful results from the job until 50% or more of it is done.
As we've said, the problem is fundamentally that we can't do a ton of good with a few "quick renovations" here and there. We can't get the spawning pools working just by patching them up specifically, we can't rebuild the city walls to enable secure agriculture inside their perimeter, and so on, and so on, not without doing tons and tons and tons of work on a staggering monumental scale.
If we're actually mentally and physically prepared to declare "LET THE RECONSTRUCTION BEGIIIN" and commit to this massive mega-megaproject, well and good. But we're not, we haven't even begun to survey the scale of what is required compared to our own resources, so just... please, no, stop, you are massively jumping the gun.
See, the trouble is that the scale of reconstruction required to accomplish anything really helpful here is dramatic. Like, could we help the garrison clear some fields for agriculture? Probably. Will it make a big difference whether they have cleared fields or whether they just hunt the wild beasts of the jungle and grow food in smaller garden patches? Frankly, probably not! Not much, anyway. These become very marginal improvements when all we're talking about is whether the garrison is catching fish in a swamp created by the low-lying part of the city flooding naturally versus them catching fish in a weir we helped to construct.
This comes across more and more as you looking at the ruined temple-cities and going "we must do something about this, this is something, therefore we must do it," and I'd like to really press pause on that and ask if we can find more cost-effective ways to get things going. Enhancing Zlatlan's geomantic energy efficiency may give us more people to build things with, for instance, and getting those mechanical contraptions our people are thinking about prepared may allow us to improve the ratio of support laborers (people doing things like chopping wood and growing crops) to 'primary' laborers directly doing things that would help repair a temple-city.
And if nothing else, the survey should absolutely come first as a priority, because any work we do in a ruined temple-city has to be done with an eye to "how will this impact the eventual repair process."
No, I don't think there is remotely anywhere near that level of difference. The thing you're kind of missing here is that "Britain," as a whole, in the 1700s and 1800s, was an entire industrialized country, whereas Zlatlan is a small city of between fifty and one hundred thousand actual inhabitants.
Thus, Britain as a whole could easily provide a vast supply of tools and construction equipment (including things like pre-cut stone blocks) to build any single fortification or small city anywhere in its empire, because "build a small city worth of buildings" represented like 0.1% of Britain's gross domestic product or something like that.
For us, it's more like representing 5000% of our gross domestic product. As in "you would have to work your asses off for 50 years while somehow NOT needing to spend any of your own efforts on your own sustenance to do this," which in turn translates more realistically into "given the requirements of not starving or otherwise dying in the meantime, this will take several hundred years."
(I am pulling these numbers out of a hat, but you get the idea)
...
You're right to have the instinct that logistical support from a better-established home base can make a major construction project much easier than if you just throw workers into the mud around the site and tell them to build it all from the ground up with their bare hands. But it's just nowhere near enough to make it a good idea to commit to a city reconstruction project blind right now.
And there is very little point to doing a bunch of construction work in one of the ruined temple-cities if we're NOT actually ready to start steady reconstruction, and it feels like you keep whipsawing back and forth on whether you actually intend that.