BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Redlining Centralization and Hierarchy is a no no by Word of AN.
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- Philippines
To all of you people voting for both degrade influence and split attention you guys do realize that it is a bad idea right? I mean it is like the tax system vote where people voted to take the most complex actions.
- Location
- Staring into the void
Tally
Theory mostly, but yes. Our draining of any social stress means absolutely no impetus to deal with underlying social flaws for our neighbors.
Just think about it from Enemy Player PoV:
-Your highly stratified society builds up friction between the castes over time, especially with much of the physical labor done more cheaply by slaves, driving farmers off their land in favor of warrior-landowners who work it with slaves. In turn, the slaves being maimed and sacrificed have led to a sense of desperation over time.
--No Interrupt Path: While some of the disenfranchised farmers moved to pottery, weaving and other forms of labor, many of these freemen are trained with weapons and demand equity. You will have to make some painful choices, either to increase the demand for artisans to absorb their numbers, perform grand sacrifices to appease the people, to raid for more slaves such that they may advance in social status to full warriors too or take a stability hit to change the structure, risking civil war in the process.
---Where the player is concerned, they need to fix this QUICKLY, because they can't afford to keep eating Stability hits like that! Dump excess farmers into making pottery quick!
--Ymaryn Interrupt Path: Your unhappy freemen farmers and slaves ran away, costing you 2 points of Economy as fields are abandoned to lie fallow before your warriors could stop them. Lose some economy, but you can just raid for more slaves.
---Where the player is concerned, social issues can be dealt with in the future. Winning the war takes priority, you can't risk Economy getting near 0 because you might suddenly lose a few points, you need more slaves!.
I think you might see where they were forced to tone down their actions. It didn't matter before when they pissed off anyone but their professional warrior noble caste, as they'd simply leave!
Taking an Expand Economy action to repair a 2 Econ hit is cheaper than taking a Grand Sacrifice action AND an Expand Economy action to repair a Stability 1 hit.
-Dead Priests - They have the technology. It's in fact, optimal for them to do so right now. It's easy for them to make City Walls standard when they've been reduced to one city. Again. As long as they have the Economy to do it with.
-Thunder Speakers - Large number of decentralized warrior-noble clans. They could adopt the idea from the Thunder Horse, and do so relatively quickly, but they'd have difficulty paying for it. I expect a period of time while they rebuild their military power before churning it into walls, but producing such a large number of masons will be stressful on their society without heavy raiding.
-Highland Kingdom - We actually don't want them to learn how to do this. They're the biggest threat if they pick this up as they have pretty much everything needed to spam walled towns all over the place with The Law. They'll inevitably pick up on the strategy rapidly once they encounter it on the field.
Defense policy personally. It takes far too much consistency to accomplish manually, especially when we need to avoid opening new settlements until the walls are done.
That depends on what state the Thunder Speakers are in. If we trash them bad enough the Thunder Horse will probably face their vassal breaking away again, because their vassals called for help and got nothing.
Understatement of the year
Cycling the water like that would probably lead to the whole dam catastrophically blowing out downstream.
We've seen it. Unopposed war mission can be fine if you have enough fortifications(which we do, the Stallion March and Black River are 100% walled settlements, while the Stallion March has heavy towers as well), as long as you don't maintain it too long or lose much Martial.
The idea behind focusing fully on the Thunder Speakers is to break them quickly, which will mean that the Nomads who want loot will split over to attack the Thunder Speakers, forcing them to sue for peace if they want to fend off Nomads effectively.
Nomads attack EVERYONE, but we've been playing Tower Defense in the March.
The so-called Dark Ages are less caused by a civilization and more an element of a powerful, stable civilization breaking up, leaving you with a lot of settlements dependent upon empire scale resources and administration bereft of both.
If we broke up right now, the north is going to suffer a sudden deficit of administration, things will be a total mess in terms of intellectuals, their luxuries will largely dry up, and they'd find that without reinforcements from the south their home production of warriors need to ramp up dramatically, while the south will face a sudden deficit of animal workpower and all the major infrastructure projects will need their logistics restructured, and also remap all the trade routes.
Looks awfully like a Dark Age isn't it?
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- Location
- his hidden lair
I think the biggest issue here is that they really wouldn't have the mindset to. As a culture, they're all about tributaries funneling wealth, slave, and trade into one massive city- developing tributaries means they're no longer merely tributaries. It's possible, but it's not a leap I see them taking anytime soon.
They're modeled off the Aztecs and the Assyrians, both of which were civilizations that despite holding a lot of land, mostly held a loose grip over said land in the form of tribute being shipped to the capital. I mean, look at the HKs with powerful regional nobles and how it arose from an oligarchic society, and us where we arose from simply offering lucrative deals in exchange for assimilating neighbors as equals. It's night and day from how the Xoh think from what we've seen.
It'd be the equivalent of a civ relying on Restore Order thinking fortifying all his cities is a good idea, it might offer a lot of benefits, but if they're primarily looking at it from that specific angle it's going to seem like a bad idea. Fortified tributaries feel safe, if they feel safe they don't feel the need to pay tribute.
It's possible they might adapt, but it would be an immense cultural and sociological change on their end.
When? Every war mission we've seen hit us thus far has had a mandatory [Secondary] to fight it off.
We never actually conquered any village. Everyone we absorbed wanted to become part of us, because of our wealth and protection.
And they'll have to weigh it against traditional land ownership.
Actually, Enforce Authority, not Restore Order.
Restore Order is not affected by walls(unless it triggers rebellion anyway), and for the Xohyssiri, it's simply not something they'd rely on when they can just Human Grand Sacrifice their way up to maximum Stability, with slave raids feeding it.
Actually, a thought here @Academia Nut
What other ways to drop Centralization other than New Province and Pioneering Spirit exist anyway?
Enforce Law/Authority suggests that the action might be very useful, but most of the time you'd want the Trails more to begin with.
Actually, only in season of particularly intense raids:
Most recent significant example. No war mission taken. Raiders rebuffed by passive defenses without any damage.
We've also rebuffed the casus belli raid last turn without a War Mission, because they were too few to matter. And back in the days of Stonepen we got to the point where walls made raids taper off
Which is to say it's POSSIBLE to temporarily ignore the Nomad raids provided you have decent standing defenses, but they'd need to be addressed within the next generation
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That's precisely my point, everyone we absorbed had no land... indeed in many cases they had nothing so their first interaction with the state was being given things. Cotrast that with the plans to conquer a chunk of the lowlands where the first thing we would have to do is take away people's land.
Northshore. Stonepen. Lower Valleyhome.
pblur
Reminiscing over the halcyon days of Ymaryn
- Location
- Lawrence's Wagon
Really good series.
I think my favorite fantasy series atm is Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance. He has a real knack for worldbuilding.
- Location
- Sweden
I just saw the new map on page 1. What do the colours stand for?
- Location
- United States
[X] [Honour] Quality training
[X] [Mystic] Wait
[X] [Goal] Humiliate (Hard, +1 Prestige)
[X] [Stallions] Split efforts between Thunder Speakers and nomads
Switching vote, as i'd rather wait than roll the dice on evolving a trait (which is significantly likely to be honorable death).
[X] [Mystic] Wait
[X] [Goal] Humiliate (Hard, +1 Prestige)
[X] [Stallions] Split efforts between Thunder Speakers and nomads
Switching vote, as i'd rather wait than roll the dice on evolving a trait (which is significantly likely to be honorable death).
[X] [Honour] Quality training
[X] [Mystic] Evolve spiritual value (-7 Mysticism)
[X] [Goal] Degrade sphere of influence (Hardest, +1 Prestige, pleases allies)
[X] [Stallions] Focus efforts on the Thunder Speakers
Quality for Synergistic effect.
We already have Quantity with our large population. We can easily raise more troops with all the extra food we're producing. We don't need a value to do that. Besides, large amount of untrained troops... is just asking people to go into a meat-grinder. The casualty rate will be horrendous
For Loyalty, we already have a bunch of things to support loyalty: Carrior Eater, Honorable Death, Carrion Eaters. Loyalty is also a double edged sword. Loyal to who? If a certain general decided to civil war, which side will they go? Both are possible answers
For Quality, that's where we're weakest. We don't have much experience in war. Training should solve that issue nicely.
IMO, the drawback is that we can't just throw out tons of people by having them go through a weekend bootcamp to die. And that's fine with me.
No opinion on Mystic
For Goals, I think we can smash TS, if Stallion focuses on them. For Nomads, let us handle it. We watch their back while they go to war.
We [Main] War mission- Nomads.
[X] [Mystic] Evolve spiritual value (-7 Mysticism)
[X] [Goal] Degrade sphere of influence (Hardest, +1 Prestige, pleases allies)
[X] [Stallions] Focus efforts on the Thunder Speakers
Quality for Synergistic effect.
We already have Quantity with our large population. We can easily raise more troops with all the extra food we're producing. We don't need a value to do that. Besides, large amount of untrained troops... is just asking people to go into a meat-grinder. The casualty rate will be horrendous
For Loyalty, we already have a bunch of things to support loyalty: Carrior Eater, Honorable Death, Carrion Eaters. Loyalty is also a double edged sword. Loyal to who? If a certain general decided to civil war, which side will they go? Both are possible answers
For Quality, that's where we're weakest. We don't have much experience in war. Training should solve that issue nicely.
IMO, the drawback is that we can't just throw out tons of people by having them go through a weekend bootcamp to die. And that's fine with me.
No opinion on Mystic
For Goals, I think we can smash TS, if Stallion focuses on them. For Nomads, let us handle it. We watch their back while they go to war.
We [Main] War mission- Nomads.
- Location
- United States
We shouldn't forget that Red Hills and our new shiny Badlands settlement both need black soil expansion (badlands more than red hills).
I think we should also expand forests in Red Hills next turn, as it's still vulnerable. Forest expansion isn't done with the defense policy, only expansion/balanced.
I think we should also expand forests in Red Hills next turn, as it's still vulnerable. Forest expansion isn't done with the defense policy, only expansion/balanced.
- Location
- Philippines
We do not get to vote on actions next turn the heroic admin is still alive so he decides what actions to take
How densely inhabited were they though? Nowhere near as much as the lowlands, I bet.
We'll have to survey first before covering it up with forests. Wish there is just a policy for expanding forests.
I know it's highly pedantic, but my OCD says you ate my 3.33%