Paths of Civilization

notgreat · Oct 20, 2017

Eh, if people literally want us to slow down and stop doing things, hey- we got that! Overcentralization means we can do less per turn, which is exactly what you people want right? Seriously, 'we want less stuff'? How is that at all even slightly reasonable?

Would've been nice to know about the refugees before choosing our [PSN]/[React] actions, we actually could've gone with [PSN] Gold Mine instead with that extra econ which would've solved a lot of our problems next turn.

Anyway, updating vote for the 5x. With an unexpected extra city hitting us with an extra -2 econ and it going to +4 stats/turn soon, it's definitely worth it. We're at -13 econ/turn maintaining our true cities, that's quite frankly obscene.

[X] [Art] Sanitation is too important not to entrust to experts! (Several actions gain or increase their Tech costs, +1 Urban Poor power, ???)

[X] [Policy] Infrastructure (+1 Free Progress to an infrastructure project (Aqueduct, governor's palace, saltern, etc.)/turn)
[X] [Policy] Skullduggery (+1 Intrigue/turn, -2 Diplo)
[X] [Policy] City Support (2 True Cities have their maintenance paid for each turn)
[X] [Policy] City Support (2 True Cities have their maintenance paid for each turn) x2
[X] [Policy] Special: Vassal Support (+1 Subordinate while active, increases Loyalty while active at less than full subordinates)

[X] [HK] Offer to let them buy the Banner Company contracts
-[X] [HK] Show goodwill (Pay upkeep costs yourself but gain Diplomacy instead for duration of hire)

ctulhuslp · Oct 20, 2017

PrimalShadow said:
Sorry; that sounds a bit to imprecise to place bets on. I don't suppose you have a clearly defined definition you wouldn't mind betting on?

Hm.
Thing that we are not willing to gamble on policies choosing and what to ensure completion of are cool.
We are not going to build Extended project for the sake of generating more income or spamming aqueducts/baths/ironworks/marketplaces/whatever, but will for strategic concerns even if policies can do them, because do not know whether they will. Which is going to be the case regardless of if we have 1 or 10 passive Infrastructure policies.

So. We are not going to do Infra for the sake of growth for the growth god but we will for the sake of concrete concerns and solving concrete problems.

So..."if this is important enough project for our goals we do not want to gamble on provinces choosing it", I think.

If this does not work, I am not sure how to make distinction more clear for you, sorry.

DragonParadox · Oct 20, 2017

[X] [Art] Sanitation is too important not to entrust to experts! (Several actions gain or increase their Tech costs, +1 Urban Poor power, ???)

[X] [HK] Offer to let them buy the Banner Company contracts
-[X] [HK] Show goodwill (Pay upkeep costs yourself but gain Diplomacy instead for duration of hire)

I have to ask, does anyone know what the population of Ymar is right now. We do have a census active so we should know IC.

ctulhuslp · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
Eh, if people literally want us to slow down and stop doing things, hey- we got that! Overcentralization means we can do less per turn, which is exactly what you people want right? Seriously, 'we want less stuff'? How is that at all even slightly reasonable?

In a same way "development of society should not lag behind development of technology" or "as any industrialization inevitably leads to societal upheaval we should take heed of consequences" are reasonable.

That is, unless you think cyberpunk dystopias or IRL Gilded Age or climate change are examples to follow.
Or, to be more applicable to Iron Age, bronze age collapse. Or roman cycle of "plunder to pay armies so they can plunder".
Or, to be applicable to this game, Trelli "in what way less wealth can be reasonable?", or early Lowlands "in what way less clay and dudes can be reasonable?".

Keeping a lid on boiling pot of society sometimes requires removing foot from gas pedal.

10ebbor10 · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
Eh, if people literally want us to slow down and stop doing things, hey- we got that! Overcentralization means we can do less per turn, which is exactly what you people want right? Seriously, 'we want less stuff'? How is that at all even slightly reasonable?

Strawman appears unreasonable. More at 9.

People don't want less actions. They want less rampant and uncontrolled expansion, and more time to stabilize.

ctulhuslp · Oct 20, 2017

10ebbor10 said:
Strawman appears unreasonable. More at 9.

People don't want less actions. They want less rampant an uncontrolled expansion, and more time to stabilize.

Thanks. I guess I am not good at explaining the position if such incised (incensed?) reactions are provoked.

8bitBob · Oct 20, 2017

So, I've just been going over our new reform outcome because it amuses me:

Myranyn Reforms Result: Mass Levy Active Policy
Mass Levy - While this policy is active, the sum of Econ + Wealth + (Sum of Ironworks Levels) x2 added to Temp Martial Score one combat phase after policy activated, but Expand Econ and most Wealth generating actions disabled while this policy active. Otherwise acts as the Offensive Policy

Let's assume its a few turns from now and our passives have built some marketplaces, so our wealth is in a better place, and we've built Ironworks 2 and an additional Ironworks 1, because why not. I'll assume reasonable stat numbers instead of maxed ones:

15 econ + 15 wealth + 4 ironworks x 2 = 38 temporary martial.

That's an absurd amount of martial, and it's nowhere near the max use case.

Just for fun, let's imagine we're in a defensive war with decent martial.

20 martial + 38 temp martial (reforms) + 5 temp martial martial (Swords and Ploughshares) = 63 martial total for a war mission

For maximum silliness:

[]Main War Mission x3
[]Kicker

I pity anyone who tries to take the crown any time soon. :lol

notgreat · Oct 20, 2017

ctulhuslp said:
In a same way "development of society should not lag behind development of technology" or "as any industrialization inevitably leads to societal upheaval we should take heed of consequences" are reasonable.

10ebbor10 said:
Strawman appears unreasonable. More at 9.

People don't want less actions. They want less rampant and uncontrolled expansion, and more time to stabilize.

Ok, these are two different things so
1) Industrialization != all infrastructure projects
Pretty much only Block Housing and Ironworks are at all related to industrialization. Markets... maybe a little? Aqueducts, Baths, libraries, salterns, walls, governer's palaces, and others all really don't have much of anything to do with developing technology and are in fact the very things that we use to help ensure we remain healthy
2) We did one massive expansion of Western Wall + Reorganization. That's pretty much it in recent terms. I agree that we don't need to expand any more, we need to build up. And you know how we build up? Creating more infrastructure. (Well, get 1 more province to get +2 actions and satisfy the quest. That's it.)

ctulhuslp said:
Or, to be applicable to this game, Trelli "in what way less wealth can be reasonable?", or early Lowlands "in what way less clay and dudes can be reasonable?".

To be specific to your examples- Trelli had a massive wealth income and an equally massive wealth payment per turn. Then they hit the liquidity crisis and died.
Lowlands specifically dropped Centralization to like -10. And thus they died.

We've actually got a similar problem in our massive city count causing a ridiculous econ cost, which can pay but it makes us very fragile. We need to fix that by increasing our EE, preferably by increasing our LTE but just dropping our econ and getting refunds works too. Increasing our infrastructure doesn't really do anything to help or hurt that problem. Some of them (baths in particular) raise the amount of EE required, but they also add that much EE at the same time so it's net neutral.

I agree that having 7 true cities is probably not a good idea. 5 is probably a better number for now. Again though, that has nothing to do with our actual infrastructure amount. (On a side note, how do we have 5 more policies? +3 forming cities, +1 from Redshore being level 2, where's the last coming from?)

Infrastructure is not universally good, but it's pretty damn good anyway and we have a massive backlog that'll keep us busy for a century or two- and that backlog is growing all the time. Back when we were at 7 we were just barely keeping up, often falling just a little behind as the free cities took infrastructure policies themselves to keep up. At 5 it's not even close and we're having to do infrastructure actions which are expensive. They're getting done, but inefficiently.

Basically, I want my free megaprojects. Right now we're going to have to put some actions in ourselves to get them. We almost certainly will because, well, free megaproject, but still.

8bitBob · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
Trelli had a massive wealth income and an equally massive wealth payment per turn. Then they hit the liquidity crisis and died.

Not actually interested in getting into this argument at the moment, but not only did the Trelli hit the Liquidity Crisis, they crit failed it as the only polity that it could outright blow up from doing so. Super bad luck on their part.

Shard · Oct 20, 2017

[X] [Art] Sanitation is too important not to entrust to experts! (Several actions gain or increase their Tech costs, +1 Urban Poor power, ???)

[X] [Policy] City Support (2 True Cities have their maintenance paid for each turn)
[X] [Policy] Expansion (So long as there is land to expand into, +1 Econ Expansion/turn, reduces threshold to produce new provinces the longer active)
[X] [Policy] Special: Forestry (+1 Sustainable Forest and -1 Econ Expansion/2 turns)
[X] [Policy] Special: Forestry (+1 Sustainable Forest and -1 Econ Expansion/2 turns) x2
[X] [Policy] Special: Vassal Support (+1 Subordinate while active, increases Loyalty while active at less than full subordinates)

[X] [HK] Offer to let them buy the Banner Company contracts
-[X] [HK] Show goodwill (Pay upkeep costs yourself but gain Diplomacy instead for duration of hire)

So, changing my vote.

Policy (Expansion) magically gives us EE from nowhere, and is frankly very promising.
Policy (City Support) magically gives us 4 Econ/Turn.
Forestry because with all this talk you'd think our forests were on fire.
Vassal Support, ugh, we should integrate our vassals so we don't have to handle vassals breaking away.

ALanos · Oct 20, 2017

[X] [Policy] Special: Forestry (+1 Sustainable Forest and -1 Econ Expansion/2 turns)
[X] [Policy] Special: Vassal Support (+1 Subordinate while active, increases Loyalty while active at less than full subordinates)
[X] [Policy] City Support (2 True Cities have their maintenance paid for each turn)
[X] [Policy] Skullduggery (+1 Intrigue/turn, -2 Diplo)
[X] [Policy] Diplomacy (+1 Diplo/turn)

[X] [Art] Sanitation is too important not to entrust to experts! (Several actions gain or increase their Tech costs, +1 Urban Poor power, ???)

[X][HK] Offer to let them buy the Banner Company contracts
-[X][HK] Show goodwill (Pay upkeep costs yourself but gain Diplomacy instead for duration of hire)

10ebbor10 · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
2) We did one massive expansion of Western Wall + Reorganization. That's pretty much it in recent terms. I agree that we don't need to expand any more, we need to build up. And you know how we build up? Creating more infrastructure. (Well, get 1 more province to get +2 actions and satisfy the quest. That's it.

Yeah. This is not nice.

Twisting people's statements so they mean the opposite of what was being said is dishonest argumentation, and very annoying.

So, let me reiterate my statement in unambigious terms.

People don't want less actions. They want less rampant and uncontrolled expansion of the cities, of industry, of basically everything the infrastructure policy does, and more time to stabilize.

Shard · Oct 20, 2017

{S} Found Free City - Valleyguard
{S} More Spiritbonded
{S} Expand Economy
{S} More Spirit Bonded
{G} ???
{G} Gold Mine

Econ 24-2-2-2-7-4+6= 13
Wealth 7+3+11-10 = 11

We could go for this.

Alratan · Oct 20, 2017

The thing is, we have the cities. Avoiding infrastructure policies doesn't mean that we don't have rampant and uncontrolled city expansion. It just means that the cities we're getting anyway are a mess with massive infrastructure deficits.

The way to avoid rampant growth of the cities is to keep EE high. It's not to deliberalty make the cities cesspits. Look at the Urban Plague for the results of that.

notgreat · Oct 20, 2017

10ebbor10 said:
Yeah. This is not nice.

Twisting people's statements so they mean the opposite of what was being said is dishonest argumentation, and very annoying.

Sorry, misread it. I've had dozens of "we should expand more" arguments in this thread and I've recently switched sides due to our recent massive expansion. My bad.

However, aside from Ironworks and Block Housing, none of the Infrastructure projects do much of anything in terms of industrialization. Many of them help deal with the problems that we already have.

The primary reason we're going to build the Ironworks 2 is that we get a Megaproject out of it. The actual industrialization it provides is not significant from what we understand (it's certainly nice, particularly the city support being +4 econ, but that's not why we're making it).

We're not going to fix our city overload by not building infrastructure unless you want to wait for a second plague. We fix our city overload by increasing our EE value.

Shard · Oct 20, 2017

What that means is that we should take the [Expansion] policy.

That one gives us EE.

10ebbor10 · Oct 20, 2017

IIRC, the baths that infrastructure keeps putting down everywhere increase the EE treshold, right?

notgreat · Oct 20, 2017

Shard said:
What that means is that we should take the [Expansion] policy.

That one gives us EE.

It gives us +1 EE/turn.
{S} New Settlement gives +3. {S} Mills gives +3 (via refunds). Integration varies but is usually between +10 and +20.

Aqueducts give us +1 EE.

It's a problem we need to solve fast. Passive Policies are not the solution.
Honestly the easy solution is just to spend our econ.

Shard · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
It gives us +1 EE/turn.
{S} New Settlement gives +3. {S} Mills gives +3 (via refunds). Integration varies but is usually between +10 and +20.

Aqueducts give us +1 EE.

It's a problem we need to solve fast. Passive Policies are not the solution.
Honestly the easy solution is just to spend our econ.

The Econ which we need to fill up basically every turn?

8bitBob · Oct 20, 2017

10ebbor10 said:
IIRC, the baths that infrastructure keeps putting down everywhere increase the EE treshold, right?

Yeah, but the alternative is to intentionally make our cities horrible places to live. With our focus on public health, that seems ill advised, never mind the plagues it would cause from all the failed health rolls.

To be clear, aqueducts in random towns only increase the EE threshold by one for themselves alone, and our policies have never built baths outside of a city. The issue is that we need baths and aqueducts in our cities, and those trickle down to other city candidates, increasing their EE threshold.

If people don't want more cities, then they need to focus on keeping our EE up, not keeping our city infrastructure down.

ctulhuslp · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
Ok, these are two different things so
1) Industrialization != all infrastructure projects
Pretty much only Block Housing and Ironworks are at all related to industrialization. Markets... maybe a little? Aqueducts, Baths, libraries, salterns, walls, governer's palaces, and others all really don't have much of anything to do with developing technology and are in fact the very things that we use to help ensure we remain healthy

Yes and no.
Baths are straightforward - they consume fuel. The impact of it is discussed to death.
They are not Industry, but they strain our capacity to sustain it.
Liraries, salterns, gymnasiums - no question, sure. I don't recall them being built all too often - in fact, I do not think they've ever built saltern, though my memory is bad.

Walls, Block Housing, Temples and Palaces....weell, that one is trickier. They are not industry, but they give us yet more problems to deal with - namely, risk of disloyal city, governor, urban poor, redlining RA and so on. All problems of course manageable - but they do need to be mamaged.

Aqueducts increase chances of TS spawn, so they have, again, their drawback - namely, juggling all the cities.

Ironworks are industry: useful but catalyzes upheaval and carries costs (see second aqueduct just to keep water clean).

Marketplace: have not seen them yet in action, but likely has Ironworks-like costs throygh lens of money and trade. That is, again, societal upheaval, changed balance of powers, some issues with currency while we are strughling in vague direction of banking or so....

I think that's all?
Point is - yes, all the drawbacks are manageable. As long as they come one by one.

Now imagine if we had 6 policies. Imagine them building Ironworks in two different cities and us facing a choice not whether to build aqueduct 2, but in which city to build it and from which eat riots.

This is a crude example, but I hope it does translate my point: with current pace of policies we can keep up and solve issues in timely manner; the more policies we have, the harder it will be.

Although dubbing them all 'industrialization' is a misnomer, apologies.

notgreat said:
To be specific to your examples- Trelli had a massive wealth income and an equally massive wealth payment per turn. Then they hit the liquidity crisis and died.

AN all but explicitly said pretty much at the day we met them (or was it when they started pushing mercs button?) that they are riding sotta super duper efficient gimmuck which us going to blow them up once they stumble wrong way. Which is what happened: they were explicitly only civ in region who were able to outright blow up from nat1.

notgreat said:
I agree that having 7 true cities is probably not a good idea. 5 is probably a better number for now.

Either Black Soil or Expansion passive. We have options.

Shard said:
What that means is that we should take the [Expansion] policy.

That one gives us EE.

As long as it does not mean external expansion cue border conflicts.

notgreat said:
Sorry, misread it. I've had dozens of "we should expand more" arguments in this thread and I've recently switched sides due to our recent massive expansion. My bad.

However, aside from Ironworks and Block Housing, none of the Infrastructure projects do much of anything in terms of industrialization. Many of them help deal with the problems that we already have.

The primary reason we're going to build the Ironworks 2 is that we get a Megaproject out of it. The actual industrialization it provides is not significant from what we understand (it's certainly nice, particularly the city support being +4 econ, but that's not why we're making it).

We're not going to fix our city overload by not building infrastructure unless you want to wait for a second plague. We fix our city overload by increasing our EE value.

And if they did not come at cost of Kilns and thus edgesdancing on hope passives will not consume more than 1 fuel slot it would not be a problem.

Plus w/o us doing it passives will - in fact, that's precisely what they are there for.

TLDR: infrastructure spawns issues, we physically cannot deal with too many issues, thus better not have too many Infras. 3 is fine.

notgreat · Oct 20, 2017

Shard said:
The Econ which we need to fill up basically every turn?

Yeah. We just did a bunch of turns showing how we can deal with ~15 econ... acceptably. We don't really need to be maxed out at 24 econ aside from for the Priest quest.

Integration is the better solution but we need a couple turns of PSN and roads before that's safe, and that'd take.... A couple turns.

ctulhuslp said:
TLDR: infrastructure spawns issues, we physucally cannot deal with too many issues, thus better not have too many Infras. 3 is fine.

I agree, 3 is fine. Too bad we only have 2 right now.

ctulhuslp said:
or was it when they started pushing mercs button

Yeah, it was that. Using mercs to get slaves to sell to afford more mercs. That's inherently unstable without massive wealth reserves which are literally impossible to have due to overflow mechanics.

ctulhuslp · Oct 20, 2017

notgreat said:
I agree, 3 is fine. Too bad we only have 2 right now.

2 and our native from corvee, 3 total.

SeptimusMagisto · Oct 20, 2017

It's amusing how we're flirting with a Golden Age one or two turns after we were flirting with our civilization totally falling apart.

Yorick's Skull · Oct 20, 2017

[X] [Art] The entire half-exile practice should be reviewed (-1 Stability, ???)
What does spiritual pollution MEAN anyway? (Especially in light of the new hot religion in town, which may convert our less spiritually *robust* neighbours and cause a non-King-of-the-Hill CB, which net us no bonii)

Approval votes of Policies!
[X] [Policy] Diplomacy (+1 Diplo/turn)
[X] [Policy] Skullduggery (+1 Intrigue/turn, -2 Diplo)
[X] [Policy] City Support (2 True Cities have their maintenance paid for each turn)
[X] [Policy] Special: Forestry (+1 Sustainable Forest and -1 Econ Expansion/2 turns)
[X] [Policy] Industry (+1 Tech/turn)
[X] [Policy] Innovation (Extra 2 innovation rolls each turn, -1 Wealth)
[X] [Policy] Infrastructure (+1 Free Progress to an infrastructure project (Aqueduct, governor's palace, saltern, etc.)/turn)
[X] [Policy] Defence (+1 significant walls/turn)

HK
[X] [HK] Offer to let them buy the Banner Company contracts
-[X] [HK] Show goodwill (Pay upkeep costs yourself but gain Diplomacy instead for duration of hire)

Diplo for an Intrigue throne!!!

Paths of Civilization

DON'T PANIC

One and Many

DON'T PANIC

One and Many

One and Many

DON'T PANIC

One and Many