Remove ads

Paths of Civilization

Reader mode
It is actually quite funny how history repeated itself so if history does repeat will we get another military crit fail an interesting thing to think about. I mean seriously here are the similarities between the Trelli and the HK

They were both dominant in a resource ST with pilgrimage and Trelli with slaves

They both got the tribes around them to follow them

They were both quite small
 
Last edited:
Inserted tally
Adhoc vote count started by Killer_Whale on Jul 14, 2017 at 6:57 AM, finished with 75563 posts and 75 votes.
Click to expand...
 
DakkaMania said:
Could we get the pine trees by sending trade mission up north? Our traders know that the priests would love to have even more plant species to mess around with and would absolutely collect as many seeds as practical. It wouldn't give us a reliable access to the tradegoods up there, but the trees are just as good for us.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Seeds maybe. It'd be down to luck.
maximillian said:
@veekie

Your absolutely right that bulk shipping of timber is centuries away from developing. However we don't need to ship it.

The north post would be on the river, and the Russian riverine network is both deep, flat and Interconnected. This means that we can do what historical riverine societies did. Float the logs down the river. This is a development that won't take long to occur.

And if we develop more river posts or better infrastructure in our crimean province, We can have waystations and storage areas along the river as well as workshops and Mills for processing the wood before shipping to redshore for the shipyards and workshops of the South.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The river network thing I didn't know(floating logs down rivers I'm not so sure about given the sheer distances involved and the potential hazard to shipping, I mostly see the idea used on smaller streams with no rivercraft than major rivers), though regardless, I think the point is well made that the Northern Post would be a long term payout thing which won't give much in the short term but be immensely lucrative long term?
Somebodynobody10 said:
... Actually, I need to point out that this is false.
Remember whatever that polity HatRiver-lands used to be part of? We used to have some ancient naval raiding going on there, if I remember right.

That being said, none of the current creews have experience on that front, I admit.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Reminder that we took all the Hathatyn pirates in as refugees too. They might not have had much to fight(and we beat them there anyway, iron arrows pack a hell of a lot more punch and range than stone or bone, while bronze is too valuable to fire away on arrows that will end up in the sea).

Basically, the assumption that we'd be helpless against their raiders is unfounded.
That we'd be disadvantaged unless we pick up a Size(so boarding parties face numerical inferiority) or Speed(so we can play their maneuver game) improvement on our outriggers is true.

But the Ymaryn have had long experience fighting a foe with superior mobility using slower but harder forces. Boarding actions are hell on quality gaps, and well...scalemail is an utter bitch in a boarding action. No room to wind up a large weapon to get through by force, and while we have 'large knives' made of iron for the close in melee.

And then there's defending a Trade Post, which is right up our alley. Really the most risky turn is the first one. Once the walls/towers go up they aren't taking it down.

Overall, if they fight, they bleed faster than we do. They'd have to blitzkrieg the Trade Post to have a chance of winning.
 
[X] [Exp] Integrate the Stallion Tribes
[X] [Diplo] Tie everything further together (Main New Trails)
[X] [Int] Party! (Main Improve Festival)
 
pbluekan said:
  1. Umm. We literally had to send our shaman king to go defend us from their spiritual nonsense. They took a swing, lost, and died.
  2. Metalworkers merged with some nomads and took a swing a while back.
  3. Sea tribe were the Hathatyn. Our war with them was fairly dubious on our part, but they had also pretty much just collapsed.
  4. That's just being pedantic. The minors don't even have their own actions.
  5. The Xoh ... actually, you might be right, here.
Desperation or not, the HK and TS took the swing. We didn't force it. They just simply realized what a monster we had become. Hell, nothing we even did was designed to drag them into a war.

I'll also remind you that Phygrif kind of did all of that shit on his own. We picked him thinking he would probably pass away soon enough and wouldn't get much done. A lame duck, essentially. He turned out to be an asshole.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
  1. No, the Spirit Talkers didn't threaten us. They tried to convert the nomads to their side using their mysticism score because they couldn't keep up the war with the Dead Priests. We decided we didn't like that so we tried to stop them and ended up offing them as a result.
  2. No, the metalworkers merged with some nomads, and then one of the nomads kicked out the rest of the nomads so he could be king of the metal workers. They were planning on attacking us, but it never happened. This is also something of a special circumstance in that the nomads were much more at fault than the Metal Workers.
  3. The Sea Tribe was from the beginning of the game, they are currently Redshore and were starving when they came to us. They decided that instead of attacking us for the food they desperately needed to survive, they'd ask us nicely for food. They did it because of our reputation for generosity.
  4. The Minors absolutely have the ability to wage war, and this mattered early in the game. Though I will say, noting that, that Crow's tribe did attack us so I was slightly wrong there.

I don't see how us washing our hands of not intending Phygrif to do what he did stops what he did from happening. You effectively asked for evidence that our neighbors weren't all secret massive aggressive factions waiting to stab us in the back the moment it became convenient, not proof that we were different. Also, I remembered poorly, the TS only fought us when their stability drop + High Martial forced them to. Didn't actually take a swing at us in this last mess.
 
Thomasfoolery said:
We were pretty much along for the ride in regards to the ST collapse. We joined up with the TH but we didn't start the ball rolling and our contribution was somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Everyone but our hero died and the TH cleaned house on their own.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Our mere presence from our reputation stopped the other nomad tribes from interfering during the fight.
 
Thomasfoolery said:
We were pretty much along for the ride in regards to the ST collapse. We joined up with the TH but we didn't start the ball rolling and our contribution was somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Everyone but our hero died and the TH cleaned house on their own.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Nope it was a war of showmanship between our shamans and theirs which while we did not win neither did the TS and for them that war of showmanship was literally do or die for them they could not afford not to awe the TH or else they would attack them which they knew they had no way to defend.
 
veekie said:
So a Terrify can have a few outcomes.
Terrify + War Mission
-Success(likely) - Vassalize, integrate or lose Stability.
-Failure(less likely) - Use the War Mission on them after they call your bluff
-Crit failure(unlikely) - Your own people object to terrorism.

Terrify alone
-Success(less likely) - Vassalize, integrate or lose Stability.
-Failure(more likely) - Look weak, just lose the diplomacy
-Crit failure(likely) - Your own people object to threatening people.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't think crits become more likely in the terrify alone case; if they did they won't exactly be crits...
 
veekie said:
-West Trade post + No War
--They accept that Ymaryn traders are as good a source of Tin as the Tin Hills, and must curtail raids on Ymaryn traders if they want to keep it. Ymaryn meanwhile are perfectly happy to sell them the tin and bronze. It's not like we need them!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is the only outcome that sounds positive to me.

The plausible deniability of pirates being set loose by them means that they can raid us indirectly for Tin (most likely by trading other goods with their friendly neighborhood pirate) which could go on indefinitely and the latter is a war we would be committing heavy resources to solely gain trade dominance. This choke-point would remain vulnerable to pirate raids (pirates won't be going away now that they know of this gold mine) and require further investments. Almost a sunk cost fallacy at that point. All the while this is diverting our most precious resource (actions) from better ways to improving the People's quality of life.

There are plenty of opportunities that are less risky around us to consider.
 
Worth noting that the West Trade Post is not declaring war, or even threatening their trade directly. We have no other market for the Tin now that we ate the Hathatyn, just selling some to the Metalworkers who are too small to actually buy it all.

It in turn says that if they immediately take a swing at us for building the West Trade Post even if the trade keeps flowing, they're pretty much going to go for us eventually. After all, you could say the same for them for sitting on major straits and limiting traffic and trade through it.

I wouldn't really ever declare war on them unless they declare on us, but to prevent war, you need leverage.
In the east and south, we have geography as leverage, over which invasions are too painful.
In the north, we have the Marches as leverage, over which invasions are too painful.
In the west, coastal control is the leverage. The more of the coast under our control, the harder it is to threaten us and the more docks pushing out ships to control the waters.

It has a factor of realpolitick, but this is also why we dropped Center of Trade. We can play economic dominance without turning it into a stabbing match.
 
Ok...how are we supposed to vote here?

Choose one option out of each category or choose as much as we want, if not all?
 
PrimalShadow said:
Inaction is also risky, albeit differently. Instead of the risk of giving the Trelli a nearby target, we risk allowing them to expand without a direct means of mitigating their influence.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm not saying we do nothing, but that we play the long game which reduces the loss of Ymaryn lives. Ridding the Trelli of their advantages first by researching better boats and building more docks appears more viable to me as it replaces the cost of human lives with other resources as well as puts us in the position to stamp down on piracy more permanently.
 
Finite Magician said:
This is the only outcome that sounds positive to me.

The plausible deniability of pirates being set loose by them means that they can raid us indirectly for Tin (most likely by trading other goods with their friendly neighborhood pirate) which could go on indefinitely and the latter is a war we would be committing heavy resources to solely gain trade dominance. This choke-point would remain vulnerable to pirate raids (pirates won't be going away now that they know of this gold mine) and require further investments. Almost a sunk cost fallacy at that point. All the while this is diverting our most precious resource (actions) from better ways to improving the People's quality of life.

There are plenty of opportunities that are less risky around us to consider.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Which, they are already releasing pirates into our waters for their profit. There are only two means of getting rid of them:
-Having leverage that their backers must acknowledge. This would require controlling the Tin supply.

-Putting up enough naval war power to purge them like we do nomads. This would require bases near the straits we can station patrols and warships from.

And it's not nearly so easy to take the Tin as you might be imagining. They're going to run a boarding action against better armed, better armored and better fed warriors after approaching through a hail of arrows from the best archers in the region.

The Hathatyn pirates, you may recall, backed off after they realized the effective range and power of our bows.
 
Completing the Forest Renewal megaproject before the crisis was over seems like it gave us a bonus tbh.
 
[X] [Exp] Found Trelli Trade Post, East
[X] [Diplo] Open fresh trade (Two Sec Trade Missions to neighbours)
[X] [Int] Water wheels are awesome (Main Build Mills)
 
Finite Magician said:
I'm not saying we do nothing, but that we play the long game which reduces the loss of Ymaryn lives. Ridding the Trelli of their advantages first by researching better boats and building more docks appears more viable to me as it replaces the cost of human lives with other resources as well as puts us in the position to stamp down on piracy more permanently.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Except you are LOSING the long game. The only thing stopping the Trelli from eating the coast is that they only have one Dominance to pay their mercenaries with. Which means they can only fight one front at once.

Once they take the West Trade Post, they have:
-Strategic resource control to prevent retaliation from the Mediterranean.

-Enough passive Wealth income to finance 3-6 mercenary companies.

By the time we come back with better boats we'd need to assault fortified positions to dislodge them...and we'd STILL be fighting pirates.
 
veekie said:
Except you are LOSING the long game. The only thing stopping the Trelli from eating the coast is that they only have one Dominance to pay their mercenaries with. Which means they can only fight one front at once.

Once they take the West Trade Post, they have:
-Strategic resource control to prevent retaliation from the Mediterranean.

-Enough passive Wealth income to finance 3-6 mercenary companies.

By the time we come back with better boats we'd need to assault fortified positions to dislodge them...and we'd STILL be fighting pirates.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm convinced. The narrative is probably gonna kick us in the ass for this, though, given the warning we got.
[X] [Exp] Found Trelli Trade Post, West
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top