Chronicles of Nations - Civ Quest

[NúmenoreanNazgûl]

It wasn't obviously genuine. People are complaining it clearly was because that they think it was in hindsight. They want someone to blame for the current mess and since they have been blaming Urth and the Caradysh for the last couple of generations, they are now blaming their leaders for not stopping the actions of your enemies. It is an emotional reaction to a bad event happening that is neither rational nor fair.

The enemy being capital E Evil doesn't mean that people are going to be okay with endless war. They can get war weariness even if the enemy is evil and they may be okay with cutting a peace deal if it means that they don't need to worry about the war. They see a chance to end the war being rejected followed by a serious escalation events and are going, "Maybe if we accepted the peace, things wouldn't have gotten so bad" and then playing the blame game because they want someone to blame for the bad things.

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Maybe you should make the fact that it was an irrational view of the people clearer in the update, even if only a line in the AN? It could be just because I'm stupid (always a possibility) but I read it at face value, as you hinting at us not picking the "right/smart" option of accepting the genuine peace offer.

 

[Kiba]

My God you are just completely incapable of letting things go or even acknowledging that staying in the war was a perfectly valid choice based off the info we had. Maybe in the future you could try actually addressing people's reason for choosing to stay in the conflict or making their choices because just maybe people have different priorities and opinions than you? So far your general reaction to the last update in the thread had been very unimpressive for a "wise" veteran of POC.

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Staying in the war was stupid because we have to fight a stupid war with a civilization we know zip zero nada about. No, we got to be stubborn!

So what if we return to the status quo when Urth finally betray us or something? It's only three turns. Three turns is enough to find information and make decisions on how to best undermine Urth.

 

[Oshha]

Maybe you should make the fact that it was an irrational view of the people clearer in the update, even if only a line in the AN? It could be just because I'm stupid (always a possibility) but I read it at face value, as you hinting at us not picking the "right/smart" option of accepting the genuine peace offer.

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To be honest, I was surprised that people might have thought it was an rational reaction because I thought it was obvious that it was emotional, unfair and illogical as people looked for someone to blame for things getting worse.

It is illogical and irrational because it is supposed be illogical and irrational because people aren't always logical and irrational and sometimes make decisions with their emotions instead and assign unfair blame.

Edit: And to clarify, I don't provide an 'right/smart' option as that depends on a person perspective. Different options have different pros and cons and it is up to the players to decide which option they think is the smart one or the right one.

In picking war, you get the chance to military go after the Caradysh and force them to continue to devote time and resources to fighting back. The downside is that the Caradysh are going to devote time and resources to fighting back. War is an action/resource sink for both sides.

In picking peace, you could have gotten a shiny or two and a few turns to expand or build up or prepare for the next war with the Caradysh. You could have begun to take intrigue and diplo actions to undermine the Caradysh. The downside is that the Caradysh wouldn't have to sink time and resources into waging war against you and may have taken the opportunity to undermine you non-militarily or otherwise strengthen their position.

 

[NúmenoreanNazgûl]

To be honest, I surprise that people might have thought it was an rational reaction because I thought it was obvious that it was emotional, unfair and illogical as people looked for someone to blame for things getting worse.

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That's exactly it. It was so irrational, that I was frustrated about why the update treated it as logical.

Plus, I can't read your mind. So I assumed you thought it was rational somehow.

Edit:There's precedent: I thought Evalyn subjucating the Maradysh was completely justified, but the updates treat is as a huge injustice.

 

[Zaealix]

I'm...Thinking no, actually.
Urth's a pain because she's going to be one step ahead on anything in the Lowlands, but the Merntir area is semi-seperate and more importantly, I don't think Urth knows about it yet. If we expand that-a way we can find more easily-made friends instead of us clashing with Urth's diplomatic potency. We're potentially better but Urth is much sneakier.
Bigger thing is that AFAIK Urth's not really going to give up control of the Caradysh, he'll just be able to fight our Goddesses head on. Which...Hrm. We've got a few fighters in the Pantheon but I don't know if that works out for us.

Here's what I want going down the road.
send the Arthwyn-allied Maradysh some aid juuust in case of shenanigans (Freak folk might be bird-people and if Urth can get their ear we're going to have Problems diplomatically.)
MAKE THAT SACRED FOREST! It'll help us see just what Urth pulled to twist his forests and we don't get terrified at trees anymore. Win-Win!
Honestly, as far as tech goes I'm half-thinking better boating is an angle we can take later on, especially if the war against Urth goes against us- we get good enough to sail to some far-off land we can pull the 'hi guess what? Everyone around here hates your guts!' trick Urth engineered on us just now.
1.Help our allies.
2. GET DAT SACRED FOREST!
3. secretly work on our boats.

 

[taovkool]

Because being able to trust what the devil said is a tool in itself for the devil.

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Yes, so obviously the right thing to do is not to trust the devil, right?

Again, it is emotional response looking for someone at hand to blame rather than a rational thought-out response that is fair to all parties involved.

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We do have a word for that. It's called being salty.

Staying in the war was stupid because we have to fight a stupid war with a civilization we know zip zero nada about. No, we got to be stubborn!

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Again, no, it's not.

We chose the vote based on the information we have, and said information involves Urth being a deceitful asshole with a penchant for heresy and just generally a power hungry bastard. We did not know a thing about their war exhaustion because we never chose to scout the Caradysh for it, before all this trouble with Urth began. Just because said decision was wrong that doesn't mean it's stupid. It just means that the opposition was better at being the opposition than most quests I know.

So all in all, it's not the GM fault it ended up the way it did. Oshha did roll for other civs aside from us and Urth just rolled really well.

So let's just all move on and get on with the quest already.

 

[10ebbor10]

So what if we return to the status quo when Urth finally betray us or something? It's only three turns. Three turns is enough to find information and make decisions on how to best undermine Urth.

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Here's a little bit of speculation of what Urth could do.

1) Continue relations with the Maradysh. Seduce 1 male member with blood ties to the Royal family
==> Urth now has the male blessing
2) Make serious inroads in peacefull relationships with the Barbarian Maradysh.
==> Cause a peaceful split, or even a renewed break of the PU. We can not militarily intervene due to the peace treaty
3) 75 years worth of reproduction. Urth's immortal daughters no longer number in the hundreds, but now make up the as much of the Caradysh population as can be sustained
4) Make proper prepations to ascend.
5) Deal with whatever bothers Urth, allowing him to focus all attention towards us when hostilities are renewed.

MAKE THAT SACRED FOREST! It'll help us see just what Urth pulled to twist his forests and we don't get terrified at trees anymore. Win-Win!

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This is a bad idea. In a war, we can't really afford to spend all resources on a fanciful pointless project.

So all in all, it's not the GM fault it ended up the way it did. Oshha did roll for other civs aside from us and Urth just rolled really well.

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I'm not sure Urth rolled that well. It's just us having an information deficit. Specifically, we were not aware of :

1) The extent of the Maradysh internal divide, and how close they were to violence.
2) The extent of the infiltration of the Maradysh.
3) The amount of actions Urth could take per turn.
4) The presence of a value that Urth could exploit to rapidly trigger a war with the Lowlands, and create an alliance of convenience.

Specifically, I wouldn't have had a problem with the Maradysh being triggered into a civil war. I didn't expect the infiltration to be so complete, but it's not too suprising.

What I had a problem with is that a value that was previously not mentioned, popped up to trigger a war declaration, and was then easily shattered by Urth to allow for the alliance to occur with the barbarians. Oshha has brought sufficient explanation for that (which you can find earlier in the thread), but the impression it gave was bad.

Edit: Speaking of which, we need to be carefull to ensure that that delibating belief doesn't cross over to our main society. It would be terrible if our entire society started believing Urth had mind control plagues.

 

[Oshha]

That's exactly it. It was so irrational, that I was frustrated about why the update treated it as logical.

Plus, I can't read your mind. So I assumed you thought it was rational somehow.

Edit:There's precedent: I thought Evalyn subjucating the Maradysh was completely justified, but the updates treat is as a huge injustice.

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Just to clear things up, no characters in the quest nor any characters of my writing represent my personal views. What I do is base the reactions of the characters based on what I feel make senses for them and if the players think the character or characters are wrong, that is fine. The players are allowed to disagree with the NPCs and feel that they are wrong. Heck, you aren't even suppose to agree with the characters all the time. Plenty of Arthwyd are okay with sexism and killing the children of their enemies and I don't expect the players to agree with that.

 

[Zaealix]

Fanciful I will give you. Pointless...No.
The Forest Spirits are the guys who came up with the Necromancy Urth wields down to this day. Urth simply managed to take over from them, but they were spoken of as twisted and wrong even back then.
A Sacred Forest is effectively a 'pure' verison of said forests, that will have normal happy Forest Spirits. Also that will guarantee us getting to practice warfare in forested regions since we don't have those in our territory yet...I think.
I will call it FANCIFUL because as a Megaproject, it's going to take us quite some time to set-up, and lots of resources. Moreso if we decide to invest in it to the point that the Ymaryn did and learn to naturally maintain the Forests as a matter of fact.
We might, however, get to start it to calm the Priests (I think that's still their faction quest!) And then once that's done, we can focus more wholly on Urth again, who probably will have thrown a war party or two our way in a few turns.

 

[NúmenoreanNazgûl]

Just to clear things up, no characters in the quest nor any characters of my writing represent my personal views. What I do is base the reactions of the characters based on what I feel make senses for them and if the players think the character or characters are wrong, that is fine. The players are allowed to disagree with the NPCs and feel that they are wrong. Heck, you aren't even suppose to agree with the characters all the time. Plenty of Arthwyd are okay with sexism and killing the children of their enemies and I don't expect the players to agree with that.

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I mean, there are some things that are clearly results of IC bias and some are not that clear. Ah, I guess we'll chalk this up to yet another failure of communication on my part.

To the Sacred Forest I say we don't have the luxury of wasting actions and resources on things that may or may not help our war against Urth, especially one so resource intensive and taking so many consecutive actions. We can do it after we cleanse it of Urth and her heresy.

 

[kobo]

Staying in the war was stupid because we have to fight a stupid war with a civilization we know zip zero nada about. No, we got to be stubborn!
So what if we return to the status quo when Urth finally betray us or something? It's only three turns. Three turns is enough to find information and make decisions on how to best undermine Urth.

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And you wonder why people weren't convinced by your argument? Pretty much a classic case of ignoring every point anyone else has stated and screaming your same two talking points to the sky. Anyways I'm done engaging with you, and hopefully in the future when two sides disagree on a decision an effort can actually be made to address the opposing sides points. To be honest my issue after the immortal heroes was clarified to me has been the continued attacks upon our decision last turn, said attacks having little substance to back them up and mostly entail calling the people who voted for it dumb and stupid.

@Oshha can you answer the questions I asked earlier about our military and military stuff in general? Im actually kind of excited for the next turns it promises to be very interesting.

 

[Oshha]

I mean, there are some things that are clearly results of IC bias and some are not that clear. Ah, I guess we'll chalk this up to yet another failure of communication on my part.

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Remember the Arthwyd are not reliable narrators. They have their bias and that influences how they act and view things.

@Oshha can you answer the questions I asked earlier about our military and military stuff in general? Im actually kind of excited for the next turns it promises to be very interesting.

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I must have missed those questions. Can you state them again?

 

[kobo]

So we've been fighting for a while now do we have any new military tactics or organization or does that need a hero. A couple of updates ago we had a martial hero but I don't think we had any improvement in that regard? Also how do military strategies like phalanxes and the like actually develop mechanically? Is there anything we can do to encourage our civ to develop down a certain path martially?

 

[Kiba]

Yes, so obviously the right thing to do is not to trust the devil, right?

We do have a word for that. It's called being salty.

Again, no, it's not.

We chose the vote based on the information we have, and said information involves Urth being a deceitful asshole with a penchant for heresy and just generally a power hungry bastard. We did not know a thing about their war exhaustion because we never chose to scout the Caradysh for it, before all this trouble with Urth began. Just because said decision was wrong that doesn't mean it's stupid. It just means that the opposition was better at being the opposition than most quests I know.

So all in all, it's not the GM fault it ended up the way it did. Oshha did roll for other civs aside from us and Urth just rolled really well.

So let's just all move on and get on with the quest already.

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For the last two turns I been hammering in people's head is that We. Know. Very. Little. About. Urth.

So, when you guys say we should attack based on the fear of Urth ascending to godhood, we were also doing it based on basically no information about the strength and size of his force, making a bunch of speculation about whether he's weak or not. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but ultimately we were almost completely blind.

Oh, we cannot continuously wage war with Urth, not when there's a boarfolk horde that could form any turn. We cannot waste men and lives on an enemy we do not know yet if we could defeat.

 

[10ebbor10]

For the last two turns I been hammering in people's head is that We. Know. Very. Little. About. Urth.

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Yes we don't.

We didn't know enough for a proper and, equally importantly, we don't know enough to trust him with peace.

 

[Kiba]

Yes we don't.

We didn't know enough for a proper and, equally importantly, we don't know enough to trust him with peace.

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Getting peace doesn't required trusting him. All it means is that he stopped attacking us, and we stopped attacking him. It said nothing about using diplomacy and proxy wars.

 

[NúmenoreanNazgûl]

Edit: And to clarify, I don't provide an 'right/smart' option as that depends on a person perspective. Different options have different pros and cons and it is up to the players to decide which option they think is the smart one or the right one.

In picking war, you get the chance to military go after the Caradysh and force them to continue to devote time and resources to fighting back. The downside is that the Caradysh are going to devote time and resources to fighting back. War is an action/resource sink for both sides.

In picking peace, you could have gotten a shiny or two and a few turns to expand or build up or prepare for the next war with the Caradysh. You could have begun to take intrigue and diplo actions to undermine the Caradysh. The downside is that the Caradysh wouldn't have to sink time and resources into waging war against you and may have taken the opportunity to undermine you non-militarily or otherwise strengthen their position.

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Just saw this edit. And yeah, I was expecting the drawback to refusing the peace offer would be war from the Caradysh and the Maradysh joining them. So I'm not upset about the war. I was actually pleasantly surprised that half the Maradysh were on our side.
I chose this over the peace option as that would have allowed Urth to diplomance even more of our people to her side until we eventually go to war, giving us a bigger disadvantage. So I'm okay with this outcome. Only thing that I was blindsided by was backlash from our own people.

Edit:

So, when you guys say we should attack based on the fear of Urth ascending to godhood, we were also doing it based on basically no information about the strength and size of his force, making a bunch of speculation about whether he's weak or not. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but ultimately we were almost completely blind.

Oh, we cannot continuously wage war with Urth, not when there's a boarfolk horde that could form any turn. We cannot waste men and lives on an enemy we do not know yet if we could defeat.

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You are conflating the decision to decline the peace offer with attacking him without any intel. As I have said above, declining the peace offer was to prevent him from consolidating even more power. We have not chosen to "attack Urth on basically no information" like you claim. We can always do recon before we attack the other civ.

 

[Oshha]

So we've been fighting for a while now do we have any new military tactics or organization or does that need a hero. A couple of updates ago we had a martial hero but I don't think we had any improvement in that regard? Also how do military strategies like phalanxes and the like actually develop mechanically? Is there anything we can do to encourage our civ to develop down a certain path martially?

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Right now, you are limited by your techs as different metals are gateways for new techs due to allowing for more options and possibility to be accomplished.

When you do actually fighting, you can get military innovations out of it as since in the Epic Age where the constant fighting with Vervov and the Boarfolk result in a lot more techs developed or how the fighting against the first Caradysh invasion got you maces. You don't get the chance to get martial innovations by just being at war as you need to be actively waging in. Since you haven't been doing much fighting, you haven't unlocked any extra military techs a result.

Gwyn got killed before she could really shine and got put into an unfortunate position where she had to compete with a Heroic Diplo/Martial and a Heroic Diplo/Mystic. Had she not died to the Caradysh or Elwyn had not been assassinated, they may have gotten you some techs, but as it is, they haven't. This is because while Heroes increase the chance of getting techs, they don't guarantee it the same way that they don't guarantee success, but increase the chances of success.

A variety of factors such as the mindset/values of your civ, what sort of enemies you are fighting and where you are fighting as certain techs require the right environment to be developed in. For example, a civ fighting mounted archers in the steppes are going to end up with different military techs and traditions to one that is fighting formations in the desert. Furthermore, you need access to the right materials or resources. You won't be getting cavalry without any the right animals to ride and you won't be developing chariots from fighting in the mountains.

So to get certain techs, you need to get the right factors to develop them. Therefore if you want to develop down a certain path martially, try to get the right factors, circumstances and environment to get the desired technology.

 

[demonthese2211]

The All-Seeress is the process of being uplifted from non-sapient to sapient and is about halfway through it. Basically going from machine to person...

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This actually brings up the interesting question of why she is this way. Is it because she isn't based on a human or an ascended human? Or is it because of how she was viewed by her original worshippers or because of her domain? Something else?

 

[Kiba]

That's why we need to trade with the boarfolks to get boars for our boar cavalry!

 

[Raichu1972]

That's why we need to trade with the boarfolks to get boars for our boar cavalry!

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We have a much closer access to cavalry in the form of the Boarfolk living in the Maradysh (who all happen to be loyalists coincidentally). It would be much easier to get it from them.
Speaking of @Oshha would it be possible to encourage a Boarfolk immigration into Arthwyd lands (along with their mounts)? If so, what actions would we need to take to accomplish this?

 

[Oshha]

Speaking of @Oshha would it be possible to encourage a Boarfolk immigration into Arthwyd lands (along with their mounts)? If so, what actions would we need to take to accomplish this?

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Build up good relations with them so they will have a positive opinion of you and therefore open to the idea of living amongst you and then use diplomacy to convince tribes to join up with you.

Also be prepared to social issues to rise from bringing a minority that is both of a different species that cannot breed with your own and will refuse to convert to your religion.

 

[Raichu1972]

Build up good relations with them so they will have a positive opinion of you and therefore open to the idea of living amongst you and then use diplomacy to convince tribes to join up with you.

Also be prepared to social issues to rise from bringing a minority that is both of a different species that cannot breed with your own and will refuse to convert to your religion.

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Yep, I would be expecting such things to occur. I honestly wouldn't mind it if it let us break the whole "everyone not us is barbarians" thing. It's one thing to be principled, and another thing to be dogmatic.

Would such an action to specifically increase their opinion of us be Support Subordinate - Maradysh (Boarfolk) or something similar?

 

[Oshha]

Would such an action to specifically increase their opinion of us be Support Subordinate - Maradysh (Boarfolk) or something similar?

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It depends. If you are trying to get the support of the Maradysh Boarfolk, then yes, got for Support Subordinate and make it clear in your post that you are aiming for that. If you want the Boarfolk Tribes, then trade with the Boarfolk Tribes instead.

Note that despite sharing the same species and religion the Maradysh Boarfolk and the Boarfolk Tribes are distinct entities to each other.

 

[Raichu1972]

It depends. If you are trying to get the support of the Maradysh Boarfolk, then yes, got for Support Subordinate and make it clear in your post that you are aiming for that. If you want the Boarfolk Tribes, then trade with the Boarfolk Tribes instead.

Note that despite sharing the same species and religion the Maradysh Boarfolk and the Boarfolk Tribes are distinct entities to each other.

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Yep, I would specifically be going for the Maradysh Boarfolk, both because I would be assuming that they can much more easily adjust to living with the Arthwyd (considering they have been living with the semi-Arthwyd Maradysh for generations with no major issues that we know of) and and are generally much more used to a more settled lifestyle as well as the idea that the top boss doesn't have to be a Boarfolk (something that might be an issue with nomadic Boarfolk).