[] [Purity] If slavery is so bad in comparison, maybe even the half-exiles need to be addressed (-1 Stability, the next Patrician, Guild, and Trader quests are all spite quests, all Wealth costs are doubled going forward)
So, if this is at all tenable, it's clearly the thing to do.
Is it at all tenable? Clearly there are things that we currently plan to do that we would never do once this effect is in place; are those things worth pseudo slavery?
Are there things required to address existential threats which we would be unable to do with this option? If we do this and fracture, you can be quite sure that slavery will come back in force, so it's only if we can go for this and hold it that we should do it.
For reference, here's our up to date action list:
And here's
@PrimalShadow 's recent shortlist of ways to spend Wealth:
- We'll take Roads less often with this - it's already a little tricky to work them in and 4 Wealth will make them hard to budget from that end as well
- Build Mills we can live without and probably won't ever take. Our exciting new Increase Cement Production will be torturously difficult to work in at -8 Wealth.
- Kilns become less convenient, but we do have Repeated Expand Forests to look forward to - we'll have to limit our Infrastructure policies to account for this.
- Festival is already rare for us to take - I expect us to eschew it entirely with this.
- We'd switch to Secondary Hunt Troublemakers, I think, which isn't so bad. Launch Intrigue Mission becomes much harder to pair with military buildup which is usually when we'd want to use it.
- -14 Wealth for Main Support Sacred Orders , -10 Wealth for Main Raise Army, and -10 Wealth for More Warships. How do we accomplish that??
- Diplomatic Mission instantly supplants Salt Gift's role - and is probably a bit less effective at it.
- Study Health doesn't change that much, and Study Metal is probably still justifiable. We already have trouble justifying Study Alchemy, so I don't think we'd take that. I hope you didn't want gunpowder or better paper.
The main takeaway here is that the advancement of our internal logistics would be massively slowed, and military buildup would become very difficult - the most efficient way much of the time would be to lean hard on stat positive actions for several turns to overflow into Martial, then hold very tightly indeed onto that Martial. War would be a far more costly concern than it is now, as our ability to bounce back would be crippled. Watchtowers and Defence Policy would become important, I think, as a way to build up against the nomad threat without spending Wealth.
The other main aspect is our Wealth income and maintenance. With all three mercenary companies on our Wealth income - which I believe is what we need to do for them to properly maintain their role and for their loyalty to increase again - we'd go from +7 net currently all the way to -2 net. From tied as our largest income to having to actively generate a fairly difficult to generate stat just to stay afloat. That means that this change could potentially cost us our professional army if we discover problems with keeping them added to our martial score.
I'm tentatively in favor of going for this option, but let me say now that I expect severe buyer's remorse if we do. I think this needs to be worth, say, 5 Megaprojects over the next 15 turns to be the right choice, because in quite a few areas we will be barely treading water or our development will be stalled for centuries.
