Awesome map is awesome, but it is sadly wildly inaccurate in places. The Thunder Speakers actually sit in the western gap on that map, the Snake River on that map is the Great River (linguistic drift turned the Snake to the Snycruv). In the map I need to update, the Spirit Channel is basically on the far western side of the territory labelled as the 'Thunder Speakers', their river is essentially useless within their own territory because it passes through very rough terrain and is unnavigable rapids all through the mountains, and does not flood in a sufficiently reliable manner to use for agriculture.
Hmm, sounds like a series of small dams would make it into a good source of hydropower.
Mylathadysm basically has elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism; while not explicitly monotheistic (it can sort of 'fit over' existing polytheistic beliefs, or even be atheistic), it sort of has a central 'idea' that has monotheistic elements and has a few points of firm doctrine. When it hit the Highlanders with their strict, hierarchical society and religious beliefs bent to reinforce that society it caused a reaction that produced a (mostly) monotheistic religion. For the "mostly" part there is something of a spectrum between "There is only One God" and "There is only one god worth paying attention to" that mostly depends on local circumstances, as well as the various secondary spirits and heroes that tend to crop up as "I don't need to bother the Big Guy with this, I'll just ask some of the Saints and Angels for a hand here".
But yes, what you have is essentially two organized religions with partial common ancestry butting heads.
Oldest religious conflicts ever. The three Abrahamics did more damage to each other than entirely different faiths ever managed.
2 out of 4-6.
2-4 left.
Hah. MP support has a decent chance to finish it in one turn then.
I don't think we even need MP support since we can finish it by the next mid turn in theory.
Schism that spawned a new Organized Religion. The Highlander religion has a different set of traits, dumping out Syncretic and Independent Priesthood. While not fully developed yet, this new religion seems to be developing traits around resisting outside influences.
Mmm, xenophobia...does reduce it's threat down the line unless they develop something for aggressive missionary activites.
Probably, if I made a mistake I will add something else in next turn as compensation.
Yay!
...more damned dams?
To be fair to them, if they didn't have pretty good resistance to outside influences, they would have probably been culturally assimilated by us quite a while ago.
All that prestige, usually at least 1 max stat, and various traits encouraging others to join makes it a pretty attractive culture for their people. If they didn't buckle down like they did, they would have kept getting pulled in closer and closer to us over time.
Well we've eaten everyone who didn't have some kind of xenophobia or internal cultural dominance that liked us...
If you had taken direct authority, you would have moved closer to
Caesaropapism.
That would be a little problematic since it'd really muck up the whole checks and balances we rigged wouldn't it?
The thing we need to keep in mind is that R and B is going after puritans because they are heretics against the king. This is ok because they Are heretics against the king (ie us) but we need to be careful as we are introducing the idea of heresy=bad into our religious canon.
Keeping in mind we already have heresy = bad, and the Puritans are the ones doing the selling. We just have a sidewise view of what amounts to heresy.
Okay:
-Believing different things about the nature of the universe and spirits.
-Practising different ways to communicate with the spirits
Not Okay:
-Farming badly
-Slavery
-Damaging the environment
-Attacking people that the King didn't say it was okay to.
The earliest Organized Religions are kind of vulnerable to that, by design. The fact that you took a very laissez-faire attitude and it developed Syncretism means that it's pretty much going to serve as a way for other groups to nucleate their own regional religions using the theological developments of the People as fuel.
Plus side is that we're sneaking in our own beliefs along the way, and I suspect we're going to be making some cultural bank from the resultant pilgrimages.
Other plus side is that since we have founded it with the Independent trait, a lot of other regions are going to be dealing with splinter theocracies and parallel administrations
It's a trait used by a lot of religions!
-Christianity was pretty persistent about using similarities to local deities or wholesale retroactively adopting deities as saints to spread the Word. In Scandinavia, they drew upon the similarities between the Thor's Hammer symbol and the cross, in China they drew upon the similarities between the Mary and the Goddess of Mercy, etc.
-Buddhism did it's own bit here. They acknowledge that powerful spirits exist(borrowing from hindu mythology), and that some of these spirits are closer to Nirvana, though in a "my faith is better" angle, these spirits are unlikely to reach it because they are distracted by their great power and desires. You could fit just about any belief system inside it, benign or abstract powerful spirits go into Deva, primal passionate spirits go into Asura, and these all double for afterlives.
Good and great, respectively. The Harmurri have realized that they can use the People as an umbrella - so long as they don't do anything stupid they are fairly well protected from invasion - and so they can focus on internal affairs and trade.
It's quite a good deal really. We block off their long northern border, their south should be the sea, which leaves them only needing to ward from the east and west.
Of course, if we wanted to attack them it'd be very hard to defend properly, but they know we have basically no interest in doing so.
@Academia Nut are we able to build a level 2 temple at Prophet's Home, and if so would it complete the priest quest?
Yes, you have a few sites where you could build a Level 2 temple, a Prophet's Home is one of them.
Hmm, looking at our level 2 temple sites with pros and cons:
-Horse Valley
--Location: Stonepen
--Supports a larger observatory
--Near Sacred Forest
--Near Dragon Graveyard
--Near Heaven's Hawks
--Exposed to Steppes
-Prophet's Home
--Location: Northeastern Hills
--Near Sacred Forest(recommended Boundary Passage in near future)
--Near Heaven's Hawks
--Near Spirit Channel
--Near Redhills
--Hilly terrain, difficult to damage, but also difficult to bring in line if it goes out of hand.
Hmm...Prophet's home is mechanically less effective, but it's also better for cultural influence over the Spirit Channel. Horse Valley would support a level 2 observatory, but considering we didn't even build a level 1 there yet...
As turns are generational would even a protracted siege be relevant? I can't imagine a city taking a 15 year siege.
There is the whole rest of the country to go through. And all of it is fortified. Taking a fortified and defended pass can take many more years than that since you can't siege something supplied from the other side in complete safety.
Well I would expect larger-than-normal econ-loss as we need to cart food to the siege-forces from our home-territories.
Really? I would think that building a siege tower would be easier than figuring out rock ballista. I guess we do have the most basic of idea with the crossbows...
Siege towers vary a lot by the height of the wall being attacked. The taller the harder it is to build, protect and move. We could probably manage a 2 meter tall siege tower, but we could also build a static wall substantially higher than that.
I would still say the Ymaryn are stupidly powerful.
AN says that the Storm People are almost a Great Power in their own right at this point, Freehills has expanded greatly and is likely heading towards being as strong as the Trelli in their peak, who were also a Great Power, and the Forhuch are Hard Mode Nomads, who as we just saw a few turns ago are stupidly powerful.
Being able to hold off three powerful neighbors at once is not at all a fall.
Well, it's in our legacies. Three At Once.
On the other hand, we don't actually have to take the capital to 'win'. In fact, just taking the fortified passes into the HK would be a massive blow to them, since we'd come to hold a bunch of well-protected places that the HK are unlikely to be able to retake if they are garrisoned, plus it would let us place an army right next to their heartlands.
It'd be a strategic nightmare for them.
The passes are likely
harder to take than the capital. Look at the Ymaryn scenario. Is Valleyhome hard to fight in if it was fortified? Hell yes.
Is the fight easier than trying to force the Stonepen mountain passes? Hell not.
AN's statement, if anything, downplays the risks. Nevermind taking the capital, we're exceedingly unlikely to take the passes unless they invade us first. OR if the Khemtri show up with a reclaimation casus belli on their south.
I think if they get pinched between Khem and Ymar they probably won't enjoy that.
This is actually how many languages work. Up until very recently most people identified themselves as 'just people (unlike those gibbering savages over there)'. The nomads literally didn't have a group identifier word in their own language beyond 'People', as this band only organized recently and it wasn't around a single prominent tribe with it's own major totem identifier.
Also an important element in this is that often people take their identifiers from their neighbors after they lose continuity. Thus, the only people who call themselves People are either recently post-tribal OR have never lost continuity.
More complex names also tend to arise from cultures that had a reassessment of national identity while in contact with multiple neighbors.
-The Western Confederacy worked because when they formed, there was nobody to their west anyway. And no other confederacies.
-The Highland Kingdom worked for a name because they defined themselves as being on highlands rather than lowlands during their formative period. That the Ymaryn are also on hills didn't matter because they were isolationist at the time. That the eastern side of the lowlands also had hill people didn't matter because they couldn't reach it at the time.
-Or take from RL, China is literally the Middle Country because it was in the middle of all known lands and clearly the center of the world.
Freehills was probably accidentally named by Ymaryn warriors I bet. The freed slaves have no common identifier beyond being Free(likely even using the Ymaryn word for it) and being on hills.
@Citino Maybe limiting scope of response cus on phone & relying on memory despite u being an easy scroll up.
I think the pros of subordinating HK are that we can actually fight their whole "resist external influence" thing, have some grasp on their culture in a wider sense and the range of actions they can take, & have ~1/2 of the lowland's sides covered by reliable allies (ourselves & associates).
The cons are that it would take effort.
I think the biggest con isn't the effort. We can invest that much effort.
The biggest con is it takes
time. There will be no clear decisive victory against the Highlanders any more than it was possible to achieve a clear decisive victory against the pre-Phygrif Ymaryn.
The thread(not the civilization) will lose morale long before we run out of troops.
Even if we're winning.
As such, our ideal scenario is that the Highlanders fancy themselves a shot at Take the Crown on us. Yes, their trait negates the Stability loss from the King Still Stands, but it also means that we could Terrify-punch our way through and cause Order Above All to turn into a poison pill over 4-5 turns. And also the thread has higher morale in a defensive war.
...but the problem is they are not stupid(unless they roll an idiot king) and thus they won't do that.
Well we know some.
The HK have traits which are basically copies of ours or are outright incompatible.
The Harmurri a couple centuries ago had a trade value of some form.
The Forhuch have the old Nomad Hero Generator Trait, which we knew has existed in some form ever since the beginning of the game.
The Storm People have Cosmopolitan Tolerance, a down and side grade of PiA as well as possibly still having Pioneering Spirit.
The Khem have God King.
The Freehills has Division of Powers, which we currently hold as well.
We cannot steal legacies with PiA as it is not listed, plus it wouldn't really make sense for PiA to be able to considering how legacies work, though it is interesting to figure out what they may have.
The Forhuch may have gotten a Civ Destroyer Legacy of some form from the Pure they absorbed/conquered.
The Harmurri probably have some trade legacies of some form. Maybe. The Trelli may have nicked those and no one has gained them yet.
A few things to highlight from these:
-The Forhuch are likely to lose or evolve the Hero Factory trait in the centuries to come unless they keep getting in wars. We know the Mountain Horse, Thunder Speakers and Thunder Horse lost theirs fairly quickly. My personal theory is that the trait is disruptive to legitimacy for non-hero kings because of high expectations. We've seen it ourselves whenever we've had a streak of hero kings, the next king winds up looking like a disappointment despite being solidly competent. Hell, after Magwyna the Double Hero, her Single Hero son was considered lacking.
-The Forhuch did
not absorb the Pure. They absorbed the tribes that the Pure left suplexed into the ground behind them.
