Thread has slowed down a bit, so I figure there's time for a longer post without it being immediately lost to the crush of votes.
First of all, I fully expect the reform vote to go through, so I'm not going to waste time discussing that. Rather, I just want to go over the ramifications of this change, and the general shift people are probably going to need to accept with it.
For starters, urbanization.
Don't like cities? Too bad. We just voted to make them essential. Every new city and city level translates to increasing our wealth. In particular, we'll be reliant on Free Cities since they're much harder to pop. Because we need to prevent plagues, we need aqueducts and baths. Combined with marketplaces giving +2 threshold and Valleyhome getting Block Housing after the Dam, we'll be getting a lot of them. This means we'll need a large amount of Infrastructure passives going at all times, since manually building the majority of extended projects just became horrifically expensive.
This is a natural consequence of gutting our cheap labour source. We can't just force people to build stuff for us anymore, so we need trade to pay for stuff. We've rejected being an external trade power, so we're stuck leveraging our strengths as a population dense civ with marketplaces. No, I am not saying we need to do this immediately, but this is the trend we just committed to.
Technically, there is an alternative in that we can start allowing private ownership of land and start distributing it, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
This goes hand in hand with industrialization.
If we succeed in reforming the half-exile system, then we're going to be taking away a huge source of income. Long term, factions like Guilds, Traders and Patricians are going to look to innovate their way out of this need to actually pay people, and industrialization is the most likely result for us. I fully expect that, after the tantrum quests, we'll receive a deluge of quests that encourage things like building Ceramics, Ironworks, Academies, Docks, having higher level cities and the like. When you can't force someone to do stuff for you, you need to get creative.
Finally, increased social strife.
Aside from the massive reform we'll be pursuing, we're further opening the door for questioning societal foundations. This will have all kinds of effects, from negative ones like questioning Lord's Loyalty and conservationism, to positive things like gender equality, social mobility and disruptive technologies. Positive or negative, these events will be disruptive and lead to us juggling even more problems. Expect this to bite us a lot more before it benefits us, though.
You know, assuming it doesn't outright kill us.
First of all, I fully expect the reform vote to go through, so I'm not going to waste time discussing that. Rather, I just want to go over the ramifications of this change, and the general shift people are probably going to need to accept with it.
For starters, urbanization.
Don't like cities? Too bad. We just voted to make them essential. Every new city and city level translates to increasing our wealth. In particular, we'll be reliant on Free Cities since they're much harder to pop. Because we need to prevent plagues, we need aqueducts and baths. Combined with marketplaces giving +2 threshold and Valleyhome getting Block Housing after the Dam, we'll be getting a lot of them. This means we'll need a large amount of Infrastructure passives going at all times, since manually building the majority of extended projects just became horrifically expensive.
This is a natural consequence of gutting our cheap labour source. We can't just force people to build stuff for us anymore, so we need trade to pay for stuff. We've rejected being an external trade power, so we're stuck leveraging our strengths as a population dense civ with marketplaces. No, I am not saying we need to do this immediately, but this is the trend we just committed to.
Technically, there is an alternative in that we can start allowing private ownership of land and start distributing it, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
This goes hand in hand with industrialization.
If we succeed in reforming the half-exile system, then we're going to be taking away a huge source of income. Long term, factions like Guilds, Traders and Patricians are going to look to innovate their way out of this need to actually pay people, and industrialization is the most likely result for us. I fully expect that, after the tantrum quests, we'll receive a deluge of quests that encourage things like building Ceramics, Ironworks, Academies, Docks, having higher level cities and the like. When you can't force someone to do stuff for you, you need to get creative.
Finally, increased social strife.
Aside from the massive reform we'll be pursuing, we're further opening the door for questioning societal foundations. This will have all kinds of effects, from negative ones like questioning Lord's Loyalty and conservationism, to positive things like gender equality, social mobility and disruptive technologies. Positive or negative, these events will be disruptive and lead to us juggling even more problems. Expect this to bite us a lot more before it benefits us, though.
You know, assuming it doesn't outright kill us.
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