Okay, much belated analysis owing to being too busy at work.
General
Diplomacy
14 (max, overflowing) [+1]->9 (+3) [+1]
-Weregild -5
Pretty much as expected. Trade Missions paid off at least.
Economy 10[-1]-> 8 [-1]
-Walls -2
Nothing much to say here.
Econ Expansion 6
We have establishe expansion slots as a stat now. Way easier to track.
Martial
11 {14} (partial limit) ->
10 {13}
-Event -1
Martial will be at cap again once Economy hits 12.
Quality of it's own is such a pain.
Greater Justice
Justice exists for the good of all, protecting the community from the depravity of those who would do it damage.
Pros: Justice is a community objective that can be served through the careful application of punishment
Cons: The needs of the many can outweigh the needs of the few
New trait!
This is overall good for us, but we must be very careful about the tyranny of the majority with this trait, as it's highly accepting of imposing costs upon undesirables even if the perfect happy ending is that nobody suffers.
Which overall means we can likely get Stability loss waivers for actions taken for the good of all that screws some subgroups, but likely not so much for anything which screws the leadership.
Authority
Directed Political Violence
Law Itself
Non-familial Patronage
Tradition
Meanwhile, we've developed another means of extending authority without relying upon marriage as a result of the last turn.
Non-familial Patronage was practiced by Ancient Rome, which basically says that "you know, you can trust people even if they aren't family".
The process of Patronage is as such:
-Powerful family has an excess of resources and favors, which they PREVIOUSLY will use to do favors for other powerful families, so they pass favors around between themselves.
-Under the Patronage model, the powerful family will use their excess of resources and favors to do favors for weaker families, helping them to social climb, in exchange for gaining that family's support.
-However, at the same time, this expense is an ongoing drain on resources for the stronger family, as their social status stems from their ability to constantly invest into weaker families.
-In Ancient Rome, this led to wealthy families investing in public facilities, monuments and entertainments as a means of gaining prestige. They set up markets, invested in the arts, paid (expensively) to establish libraries which they could loan access to, etc.
(yes, this is Iron Age Investments, though missing a couple of things)
Retrieval went... poorly. Not disastrously, but they only managed to peacefully retrieve a fraction of the warriors in the occupied village before reinforcements from the Highlanders showed up. There was something of a brief clash as some of the warriors realized that they would not be directly supported, some deciding to stand their ground and others opting to run for safe lines, with the Highlanders not entirely discriminating, but the individual warriors also distracted by the warriors sent by the king deliberately abandoning a section of the baggage train for them to run off and loot rather than stay and fight.
Well, I see Order Above All has yet to evolve into Martial Discipline if they break ranks to loot.
Also whoever thought of that stunt was pretty clever.
That kept further bloodshed between the two groups to a minimum, although something like half of the wayward warriors ended up dead, along with several dozen Highlanders. Still, that at least gave the traders an opening to tell them that the king had not sanctioned this attack in any way but was still offering apology tribute in compensation for the actions of the People.
By Crow, look at that damned Kill/Death ratio...
The Highlanders were pretty clearly still pissed, but they fairly obviously didn't want to face a two front war and were willing to accept the tribute as an initial apology, although they were also fairly pissed over the fact that some of the offenders were "getting away". Promises that the People mostly wanted them to interrogate and compare against internal investigations didn't really appease emotionally, but intellect definitely won out in the end, although again mostly on the pragmatic reasoning of not wanting another enemy. While not willing to compromise on the taking of iron weapons as trophies, they at least allowed the bodies of the dead to be taken back for proper burial.
Well now. The Highlanders now have (very limited) iron weapons for their elites. Enough for a squad.
Something tells me the Thunder Horse won't be very happy to learn that.
As for the investigation... things quickly got bizarre.
While entirely possible that they were forever missing information, interrogation of the warriors and people associated with them began to put together a truly strange story. While no man ever admitted to being hired to attack the village when directly asked, they pretty much all claimed nebulous rumours of other warriors talking about being hired for a war mission. Where to exactly was never really defined, but from the survivors it seemed that there was this idea that they were supposed to fight with someone beyond bandits floating around.
Okay, this is very suspect. Everyone remembers someone talking about a war mission, but none of those guys were ever retrieved. It's theoretically possible they all got killed, but unlikely in such a large group.
Interviewing the traders associated with the mission revealed that the planning and execution was a disaster before it ever even left Valleyhome. The organizer for the mission had changed hands three or four times, and at least once because of clan shenanigans, and the most recent handover had been because the organizer had suffered a heart attack and the situation had been inherited by his son, who was not entirely experienced with how to organize a trade mission and thus seemed to have not understood that there were waaaaaaaay too many warriors attached to the mission to be normal.
Noting that Carrion Eaters know how to use drugs to induce a heart attack, just for the record so it's not entirely unknown, but changing the organizer repeatedly like that sounds like a deliberate attempt to obfuscate things.
Further backtracking seemed to indicate that at some point a rather disreputable man had been in charge of finding the men to serve as escorts, but he had disappeared into Valleyhome and was probably avoiding the agents of the king. His associates from before his disappearance did explain that he had repeatedly complained about the entire operation as he had been tasked to do the same job multiple times. It thus seemed entirely possible that the reason that the trade mission was overstuffed with warriors in the first place was simply an organizational accident caused by confusion: a project repeatedly passed off, accumulating a list of warriors that a young man didn't know was too large for its own good. From there you would have a bunch of warriors attached to a caravan who didn't quite know why they were all there or why their recruitment had been so odd, and rumours might start circulating. Throw in the first foreign village also being confused as to why this caravan had so many warriors and someone got spooked. Then a small fight broke out and someone went "Oh, we're doing this now? Makes sense," and things escalated, and then everyone else went "Got to defend the others!"
This really smells too hard like arranging plausible deniability...but it's just barely plausible.
It was possible, plausible even, but it didn't fit right with the king or the rest in the know. For a series of mostly random events to build up to a war nearly being declared, the only common thread being social disruption elsewhere and simple human stupidity, it seemed... wrong. Someone had to have engineered all of this, although some were starting to consider the possibility of a spirit acting invisibly - while more cruel than usual, the situation did have the air of a prank Crow might pull. In the end the king told everyone that those responsible for the mess had already been killed in the fighting and moved on.
Yep. It's too pat, too perfect. Every individual part could be chalked down to confusion, but the whole didn't work out, especially when all possible witnesses conveniently died while the one recruiter in common vanished.
Regular chaos usually has multiple accountable persons blaming everyone else for arranging it. Not disappearing.
Elsewhere, the trade missions the king had authorized were coming back. The visit to the Hathatyn had mostly been an informative one, introducing the People to the kingdom in the southern hills. The city they had in the river valley there was not comparable to Valleyhome, but it was perhaps a peer to Redshore.
Hmm, fairly well established.
The land there was also obviously much richer than in the north, with simpler farms able to support a river valley as well as the lowlands farms. The upper hills not being covered in farms also seemed to allow for more quarries and mines to be made closer to the walled city, although the ugly trade of slaves taken from other villages and cities was a definite concern, along with the generally unclean conditions.
So richer soils, and I guess our mine sites are all under 3 feet of black soil by now, heh.
For their part the Hathatyn were curious about the obviously wealthy outsiders who claimed to come from beyond their backwoods regions and who were claiming responsibility for turning back generations of their minor raiders. Claims of territorial extent to the west were acknowledged, if considered dubiously over large.
And they're pretty sizable to the west, so it looks like we both underestimated each other's size. We've only been dealing with their people going bandit and unauthorized war missions.
No wonder their king back then was so confident about a conquest.
More interesting though were the Metal Workers. The destruction wrought upon the nomads had given them the chance to attempt to kick out the invaders that had bottled them up for generations, and while somewhat successful, part of the process had involved an ambush going sour and the majority of their upper nobility getting killed, with a surviving nomad chief taking control of the clans in exchange for finishing the job of kicking out his cousins. While their new king was not exactly a fan of the People, he was willing to put that behind him in exchange for peaceful trade, knowing well enough how much damage the People were capable of, and was offering favourable deals in exchange for the People not hitting him.
Natural selection at work!
So this guy had gone native, and become an elite warrior cavalry class. Like the Thunder Horse had everywhere else
As for the clan issue... it was sorting itself out slowly and painfully, but as best everyone could tell the key was to simply strengthen the clan leadership. While this made the process of transferring clans harder than had originally been envisioned to solve Valleyhome's problems, it would definitely help cut down on malicious abuses from those outside the leadership trying to seize control through gaming the system. However, given the general distaste for the changes, along with several clan leaders expressing anger and frustration over the fact that they had not realized that some of the prior proposals had not been as radical as they had been lead to believe, hence why they had campaigned against them, there was a feeling that these rules should simply be rolled back, at least outside Valleyhome. Of course, uprooting the rules again carried the risk of further social disruption.
Threaddebate.txt
Cosmopolitan Acceptance will now draw from...
[] [CA] Highlands Kingdom
[] [CA] Thunder Speakers
[] [CA] Thunder Horse
[] [CA] Xohyssiri
[] [CA] Nomads
[] [CA] Metal Workers
Not much we know about anyone, except they are all slaving cultures and picked up some interesting Honor Traits.
Noting that due to Quality of it's Own and the loss of Nobility in Humility, we are no longer blocked from Martial Honor.
We know the Highland Kingdom had Order Above All, but they also picked up a more recent trait, possibly one involved in their fortification spree or regime changes.
We know the Xohyssiri almost certainly still have The Greater Good, but when they changed to a City-State they likely picked up some Honor traits which enhanced trading or cities further.
We know the Thunder Speakers have gone Spiritual, but not how. Their Martial traits have been forcibly weakened for sure.
Interestingly the Hathatyn have no compatible values with us.
Action changes:
Build Wall - The practice of building city walls has reached new heights with access to superior tools making the cutting of stone simpler (50% light walls, 25% significant walls, 10% massive walls)
*S: -1 Econ, +5% light walls
*M: -2 Econ, +5% significant walls
*2M: -4 Econ, +5% massive walls
Walls have been reformatted, though the percentiles are less clear. Massive Walls spend 4 Econ and repay 1 Art and 1 Mysticism, so it's a pretty decent deal overall, if very difficult to justify without further improvements. We could finish 100% Light Walls within 2 turns of Defense Policy taking all Secondary actions however, allowing for sufficient Econ.
@Academia Nut
How does the Wall of Skulls classify here?
Build Watchtowers - Stone and brick towers for warriors to sit in and scan the horizon for trouble, these towers can help stave off raids and improve response against attacks. (40% coverage)
*S: -1 Econ, +5% coverage
*M: -1 Econ, +10% coverage
Watchtowers meanwhile are pretty fantastic, and builds both fast and cheap.
They've got to line up though.
Enforce Justice - The king is a servant of the law, and he can use the army to remind people of that fact [GJ]
* S: 1 Stability, +1-3 Centralization
* M: 1 to 2 Stability, +2-3 Centralization
* the more settlements with walls outside of the capital, particularly large walls, the less effective this action is
*Max Stability: Legitimacy
The Justice Trait removed the random factor in Enforce Justice's Stability gain as secondary. Given the description, if we build walls everywhere we can use Enforce Justice while only boosting Centralization by 1.
Expand Forests - The People have knowledge of how to regrow and repair forests, which extends to bringing them to places they have never been, with considerable effort. With charcoal now in higher demand, can also provide a sustainable supply (3/4 currently locked up)
* S: -1 Econ, -1 Econ Expansion, grows forest, +1 Econ next turn if in settled territory and controlled
* M: -1 Econ, -1 Econ Expansion, grows forest, +2 Econ next turn if in settled and controlled territory
Pleasant surprise, silver mine didn't use enough charccoal to reduce Forest by one level...which was obvious in hindsight.
You could smelt Galena using a campfire, see.
Also now it's confirmed that Forests use up Econ Slots rather than generate them.
Found March - Sometimes you need an extra buffer between you and hostile powers, or a place to stash excess warriors. Current Target: North-East
*M: -5 Martial, -2 Econ, +2 Econ Expansion, founds march to take independent martial actions
Found Trading Post - When doing long distance trading, sometimes having your own infrastructure in place at the other end can be quite useful. Current Target: Greenshore River Mouth
*M: -5 Diplo, -2 Econ, -2 Martial, +2 Econ Expansion, founds trading post to generate Diplomacy
Practical or Profitable?
Main thing with a Metal Worker trading post is that with Iron they don't particularly offer us anything but gold, I think.
New Trails - There are many settlements with only marginal trails, so more could be useful
* S: -1 Econ, +1 Centralization, other effects
* M: -1 Econ, +1 Centralization, +1 Diplo, other effects
Still marginal, but I doubt anyone's listening anymore, so eh.
AN may have forgotten to refund the econ slots on a bunch of stuff, but we'll see.
@Academia Nut how do you determine if an action generates Econ slots or leaves it neutral? Or are the slot refunds listed from actions which explicitly free up slots on top of the City's effects?
Consuming econ slots seems obvious: if it uses up land for cultivation it eats slots.
