I'm not looking at the refugees as a source of economy, I'm looking at the refugees as a source of unrest and potentially conflict with the Forluc. To me, the temp econ we get from them does not exceed the practical issues of letting them in. It is not a shiny to me, because to me it has negative material value. I'm voting to go as much as possible with helping refugees because helping refugees is good, and being people who do the most to help others is something I want to see the Arthwyd become.
In other words, the shiny you are chasing is that of our civ being omnibenevolent, offering aid to tribes that are a forest the size of Scotland away.
Claiming that it is not a shiny because it has no material value is bullshit. The notion that it is an impractical thing to do with negative material value is not a virtue. Rather, it having negative material value is
exactly what makes it a shiny; something which is not exactly practical that we should be cautious about doing. Because you are assigning it value based on how aesthetically pleasing it is(shininess) rather than whether or not it is the smart thing to do.
If you want to prevent the refugees from being a source of unrest? You only need to deal with the ones that are actually fleeing the Southlands. You do not need to travel into lands that we have not visited for hundreds of years(with the only things we know being that it's a warzone and that the ultimate evil is fighting together with evil slavers against some kind of empire that is apparently even more evil).
Besides, your stated goal of making the Arthwyd culture shift towards helping people in unexplored parts of the world doesn't seem to mesh with your vote to reinforce the Arthwyn's current culture(which seems to take a rather dim view of foreign barbarians that don't know the light of Arthryn).
If you want the Arthwyd to become the type of people who help people for the sake of doing good? You want Trade Expeditions to actually send foreign aid rather than focus on the internal culture of the Arthwyd while supporting the Caradysh claims of Arthwyd prosperity.
Short term stuff isn't always worse than long term stuff, not in certain circumstances, such as when focusing on short term stuff leads to greater changes down the road. In this case, more shrines will give us more priests eventually, and eventually that'll have an effect. However, during that time, we'll also have a bunch of refugees who have not been culturally integrated spreading their wrongheaded views, and those priests will, in the long term, spread lowlander-influenced values. The values we reinforce in the long term cannot be tainted.
Except accepting a large influx of refugees already results in a free Venerate that leads to the Arthwyd trying to culturally integrate the refugees, so the choice isn't between short term or long term but rather whether or not to double down on the short term(SEC Venerate on top of the free SEC venerate to combine into a MAIN) and whether or not to double down on getting more refugees with wrongheaded views(Accept the Lowlanders headed North versus Go South to advertise the lands of the Arthwyd).
Right now? While the Arthwyd have a fairly large population for their size due to their food production being pretty decently organized, the low number of settlements has somewhat slowed down our growth(though as a function of Econ, MAIN Farming to fill the farming slots might also help).
Because if we don't want the Lowlanders(or other groups of wrongheaded foreigners) to impact our culture every time a small group of refugees flees some warzone or another? We need to expand the size of our civ.
And if you don't want too many refugees spreading Lowlander values right now in the current generation/short term? You should switch from this:
[] [Refugees] Advertise the lands of the Arthwyd as a place of food and safe haven. (-1 Stability, Small Chance of Stability Loss, -1 Temp Martial, +4 Temp Econ next Main Turn)
to this:
[] [Refugees] Accept the large number of lowlanders that move north. (Large Chance of Stability Loss, +2 Temp Econ next Main Turn)
and limit us to the Lowlanders that are already fleeing North instead of focusing on attracting more from down South.
