Remove ads

Attempting to Fulfil The Plan: ISOT Edition

Reader mode
[X]Plan Mind the Farming Season
Infrastructure, 4 dice(40R)
-[X] Derveni-Zapantis Canal, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[X] Mycenae Water and Sewage (Stage 1), 3 die (30 Resources)
Heavy Industry, 3 +2 Free dice(70R)
-[X] Steam Engine Workshops: 1 die (20 Resources)
-[X] Iron Production Experiments, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[X] Machine Tools, 2 dice (30 Resources)
-[X] Experimental Glassworks, 1 die (10 Resources)
Light Industry, 3 dice(25R)
-[X] Farming Tool Production, 2 dice (20 Resources)
-[X] Mills (Stage 1), 1 die (5 Resources)
Chemical Industry, 2 dice(15R)
-[X] Ostwald Process Plant, 1 die (10 Resources)
-[X] Sulfuric Acid Production, 1 die (5 Resources)
Agriculture, 3 dice (15R)
-[X] Agricultural Education, 3 dice (15 Resources)
Services, 3 dice + 1 Free dice(20R)
-[X] Primary Schools (Stage 1), 2 dice (10 Resources)
-[X] Vocational Education, 2 die (10 Resources)
Military, 4 dice(45R)
-[X] Arquebus Production (Stage 2), 3 dice (30 Resources)
-[X] Cannon Production (Stage 2), 1 die (15 Resources)
Bureaucracy, 2 dice(10R)
-[X] Recruit Americans To Bureaucracy, 2 dice (10 Resources)

Resources Available: 330
Resources Used: 240
Resources Remaining: 90

Optimally using our urban labor while our rural labor is tied down in the harvest season might get us better returns, and avoid the chance of a famine from drawing down too many farmers. We have a surplus of urban labor right now, and adapting to that will enable a greater extent of mobilization later. Un-fucking agriculture to the point that second sons labor reductions gives us more urban populations is how we do an industrial revolution.

Infrastructure development with the goal of stabilizing the water situation and using our urban labor as optimally as possible. Heavy industry skips coal for broadening what we can do on charcoal and adapting things rather then transferring massive populations of entirely unskilled rural workers into the mines in the midst of the harvest season. We probably have the wood to operate for a bit/land clearing can always take a step up as a temporary measure to compensate for coal shortages. I don't expect to get that much out of mines without pumping, wood based transportation, and a complete lack of bulk wood processing to even set that up.

Light industry here is kitted towards augmenting the harvest season, bringing in more food and enabling us to accelerate urbanization later, or to further tap a greater extent of the rural population to expand the general state of the republic. A different focus can be taken later, but improving harvest processing now is a far lower hanging fruit then trying to change agriculture. We don't have the secondary chemical industry for a large number of cultivars, and are likely to hit into issues of soil depletion trying to keep yields high, especially with no one involved in the production chain knowing what they are doing.

Services is shifted towards more vocational education as we will have to, for at least quite a few years, deal with a population base of uneducated peasants and attempting to industrially utilize them. As much as primary school education can help us in the long term, it is an issue for later. Using iron that we can and will develop, going blunderbusses rather then pushing for more crossbows comes from the fact that most of our wartime troops will be levees. A arquabus with a bayonet that is capable of being used for most roles is worse on a one to one then a crossbow, but we can use it with poorly trained illiterate conscripts. With a more general end goal to make an army that can slot into Napoleonic tactics, with cannon to support/use limited trained crews, and mass blocks of levee/conscripts for line work.
 
Is there much of a point to steam engines if we're not also doing coal? It was already mentioned that we're deforesting at a catastrophically unsustainable rate even without trying to get more steam engines.

On the note of coal, I was told that the proximity of the coal mine to Mycenae would mean we could probably tap urban labor instead of rural, which is why I was okay shocking it. @garphield could you chime in on whether that's true or not?
 
Last edited:
Chimeraguard said:
Is there much of a point to steam engines if we're not also doing coal? It was already mentioned that we're deforesting at a catastrophically unsustainable rate even without trying to get more steam engines.

On the note of coal, I was told that the proximity of the coal mine to Mycenae would mean we could probably tap urban labor instead of rural, which is why I was okay shocking it. @garphield could you chime in on whether that's true or not?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Deforestation kills us slower then shifting labor out to massive implementation mining. Assuming a very optimistic agricultural efficiency, we might have a 2 per 10 mobilizational capacity for non agricultural labor. Mining is the mass use of it, while other industrial aplications are not, if due to a lack of expertise then anything else. Most of that capacity is likly already used, and the ag labor primary breadwinner we pull out during the harvest season means some fields go fallow. Subsistance farmers have no reserve, their farms collapse, families move to cities for work. This then gives us a massive surge of labor next year at a cost of higher mobilization capacity use. This then causes a compounding faliure state, otherwise known as a famine.
 
Funding a workshop to start constructing steam engines still makes sense even without an active coal mine, as long as we plan to build the coal mine within a few years. Hand-assembling steam engines using little more than an archived copy of Wikipedia and some people who used to be hobbyists a decade ago is not exactly going to have a very high throughput, and probably involve a few explosions before they get the kinks worked out. And even if they work faster than I expect and we have to operate a small number of engines on wood for a year or two before switching to coal, that's still a rounding error in fuel consumption compared to home heating/cooking and metallurgy uses.
 
[X]Plan Mind the Farming Season

I'm not 100% on arquebuses over crossbows right now, crossbows are still uptimer tech in 1600 BCE and I'm pretty sure we're using cheap attempts at a bare minimum product for downtimer peasants rather than the fuckhueg medieval ones for specialized professionals. But pipe gun arquebuses are hardly wasted even if they're apparently mostly for city garrisons, and I do agree with the focus on tooling + agricultural productivity so I'll toss it a vote for sure.
 
[X]Plan Mind the Farming Season

Alright then. Overall I like this Plan better than mine even if I'm not quite sold on Steam Engines or the mass swap to arquebuses right now.

At least now we're actually managing to work down our surplus instead of leaving me feeling awkward that we went for high taxes and are having trouble spending it all.
 
Last edited:
Blackstar said:
[X]Plan Mind the Farming Season
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh hello there Blackstar! Interesting to see you on the player end of a planquest! I do like that this plan does more to build up industrial fundamentals, though I am uncertain if it's a good idea to rush smoothbores and cannons so quick when we've yet to sort out the domestic iron and machinery industry.

As for coal, delaying it a bit won't totally fuck us. But fuelwood consumption is noted as being unsustainable already, before we get (char)coal-intensive steel production and steam engines (and both of those will be extremely fuel inefficent by modern standards) so we need to get that burn rock SOON if not now.

EDIT: Also, how come "illiterate conscripts" can't be given crossbows? I thought crossbows were the 'simple and idiot-proof' weapons of the medieval era before guns, contrasted against the very long period of body building needed to make a bowman?

On another note, how long before we can bulk manufacture slide rules because we'll need a lot of those when the uptime computers go.
 
Last edited:
I also think the canal should have more than 1 die. As is, we have a greater than 50% chance of failing to hit the 50 progress target.
 
Progress target is only 30 during the planting season instead of 50 during the off season, because a larger fraction of the workers are expected to be back home on the farms instead of digging our big ditch if I understand correctly.
 
Yeah, Canals is one of the most rural labor intensive options we have, and thankfully the progress needed is reduced in the farming season.
 
I'm assuming that the turns roughly correspond to off/planting/harvest seasons, so assuming that's true we're probably going to end up in a weird infra pattern where we do all our big earthmoving during one third of the year and then focus on urban infra the other two thirds (until we improve agriculture enough to make people do manual labour outside the fields all year and not starve anyways).
 
General_Urist said:
EDIT: Also, how come "illiterate conscripts" can't be given crossbows? I thought crossbows were the 'simple and idiot-proof' weapons of the medieval era before guns, contrasted against the very long period of body building needed to make a bowman?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
One is a harassing/high quality missile weapon that fires over peoples heads but has no value if blocks close. We do not have much control or coordination in the army leaving their artilery use even more questionable, leaving us with skirmisher roles. Our army however should not just be a horde of skirmishers(Who we would have to train hard and long away from harvest, sapping previouisly mentioned mobilization capacity.) And we have far far better artillery in the form of cannon that can overwhelm fortifications and serve far better in a role as a field clearer with canister. Crossbows are expensive, finicky, still need strength to fire at decent speed, and are far more reduced by range. They also have a far lesser terminal effect, compared to musket-balls of any era, and muskets also reduce the value of any armor prevelent in the era, rendering troops with it obsolete and causing it to become wasted expenditure from our opponents.

A musket with bayonet can hold itself together in melee, gives our troops a functional universal weapon, and it means we can do proper shot tactics. Bayonet and shot was the king of the battlefield for the longest time for a reason, and the performance of musket formations against everything else is semi incomparable. Compounding on this advantage, we can rapidly train conscripts from the countryside in the aftermath of a farming season as a semi decent mobilization scheme. No need for excessive aim, no need for excessive training. We call them up, give them single items that are both ranged and melee and coordinate with blocks using our few literate officers. The value of gunpowder based shock tactics are also not to be underestimated, firing and advancing is something that can be coordianted with conscripts and can give us several advantages.

Edit: Plus, assuming similar production techniques to even 16th century, crossbows were universally far far more expensive, and we frankly have piles of salvaged steel and can puddle furnace for yet more steel as things stop being as dysfunctional.
 
Last edited:
Crazycryodude said:
I'm assuming that the turns roughly correspond to off/planting/harvest seasons, so assuming that's true we're probably going to end up in a weird infra pattern where we do all our big earthmoving during one third of the year and then focus on urban infra the other two thirds (until we improve agriculture enough to make people do manual labour outside the fields all year and not starve anyways).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Most of the harvest is done by september/october, so if you take rural labor intensive actions in the third turn of a year it's assumed that a lot of the work will be put off until after then. So you have more labor availability than during the second third (trimester?) but less than in the first trimester.
 
Crazycryodude said:
I'm assuming that the turns roughly correspond to off/planting/harvest seasons, so assuming that's true we're probably going to end up in a weird infra pattern where we do all our big earthmoving during one third of the year and then focus on urban infra the other two thirds (until we improve agriculture enough to make people do manual labour outside the fields all year and not starve anyways).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think if we're dividing the Year into Thirds it's. Jan-April/ May-August/ September-December. So I think harvesting will be mostly over by third part of the year.

Edit: Yeah Garphield beat me to the punch. So basically Rural labor is completely free for the first part of the year, largely occupied during the middle and free but less so for the final third.
 
Crazycryodude said:
Funding a workshop to start constructing steam engines still makes sense even without an active coal mine, as long as we plan to build the coal mine within a few years. Hand-assembling steam engines using little more than an archived copy of Wikipedia and some people who used to be hobbyists a decade ago is not exactly going to have a very high throughput, and probably involve a few explosions before they get the kinks worked out. And even if they work faster than I expect and we have to operate a small number of engines on wood for a year or two before switching to coal, that's still a rounding error in fuel consumption compared to home heating/cooking and metallurgy uses.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean ideally I would want to start pushing hard on coal the moment Rural labor is more free again. Like if we can get stage one done before this time next year that would be my ideal.
 
[X]Plan Mind the Farming Season
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top