From Stone to the Stars
- Thread starter Redium
- Start date
- Original Alt. History
Ghostdevil
The Devil of Ghosts
- Location
- United States
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways
- Location
- Asia
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I know they won't be much of an immediate help. My point is that they are better as nomadic vassals than as an assimilated group ATM.
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways
Sol Zagato
senseless brute
I think we need to analyze the following options in regards to whether they resolve our societal crisis and get us closer to stone age law;
[ ] [Teach] Empower the Big Men. Given them the ability to formally direct the labour and resources of others.
Centralization and hierarchy. Resolves problems, but doesn't do it elegantly.
[ ] [Teach] Develop a group whose responsibility it is to ensure enough specialists are trained without wasting food.
This smells like the correct answer to me. This is a new group outside the Big Men, sort of a economic central planning board. It is not without its own negative side effects, of course, but it's directly grappling with the problem through rational economic planning.
[ ] [Teach] Delegate authority to longhouse leaders, make them responsible for organizing and training labourers.
Deentralization ahoy. I don't see where this leads to law.
[ ] [Teach] Have teachers take apprentices by finding promising children, like the Holy Orders do.
Gives power to naescent guildmasters, to solve the problem. Probably improves our elites, but doesn't solve the problem where we're making too many nonfarmers. Not bad, but still not the best.
[ ] [Teach] Discourage taking Debt for education so that another food bust will not sneak up on the People.
Brute-force our elite overproduction, likely leading to some kind of aristocracy; this makes it harder for less well off to try apprenticing.
[ ] [Teach] Limit the amount of skill needed to be an adult, numerous dilettante can serve just as well as a specialist.
Counter to "be the best", and seems riddled with potential ambiguities.
[ ] [Teach] Do nothing yet.
The wrongest answer.
Also, does anyone else get the feeling that diplo-annexing anyone soon is a mistake, as it will lead to massive overextension and fracture?
[ ] [Teach] Empower the Big Men. Given them the ability to formally direct the labour and resources of others.
Centralization and hierarchy. Resolves problems, but doesn't do it elegantly.
[ ] [Teach] Develop a group whose responsibility it is to ensure enough specialists are trained without wasting food.
This smells like the correct answer to me. This is a new group outside the Big Men, sort of a economic central planning board. It is not without its own negative side effects, of course, but it's directly grappling with the problem through rational economic planning.
[ ] [Teach] Delegate authority to longhouse leaders, make them responsible for organizing and training labourers.
Deentralization ahoy. I don't see where this leads to law.
[ ] [Teach] Have teachers take apprentices by finding promising children, like the Holy Orders do.
Gives power to naescent guildmasters, to solve the problem. Probably improves our elites, but doesn't solve the problem where we're making too many nonfarmers. Not bad, but still not the best.
[ ] [Teach] Discourage taking Debt for education so that another food bust will not sneak up on the People.
Brute-force our elite overproduction, likely leading to some kind of aristocracy; this makes it harder for less well off to try apprenticing.
[ ] [Teach] Limit the amount of skill needed to be an adult, numerous dilettante can serve just as well as a specialist.
Counter to "be the best", and seems riddled with potential ambiguities.
[ ] [Teach] Do nothing yet.
The wrongest answer.
Also, does anyone else get the feeling that diplo-annexing anyone soon is a mistake, as it will lead to massive overextension and fracture?
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- Location
- USA
Because the QM says that we can lock it in if we take it as an action this turn. And that saves us time in the future in terms of giving us an automatic agriculture option.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not to mention the old incentive of quinoa being the most cold resistant, which is important both because of the obvious danger of famine and because TBF rewards us for doing well against the Ordeal of bad climate and punishes us even more than usual if we are seen as "failing" the ordeal.
The problem is that the Warrior training option doesn't lead to that either. Its a dead end, because they are nomadic and unable to sustain the food production needed to actually maintain a class of professional warriors unless they either transition to a slave-raiding economy, or become our warrior/mercenary class while we provide food to them.
Not by far. Its the Full Time Teachers/Mystery Cult approach where we form a pseudo-guild in a ritualized format that will be dedicated to training youths.
This solves the problem by changing a random food drain every season into a fixed high food drain from creating a job where certain people do nothing but teach, train and initiate youths.
All of them lead to Stone Age Law, because ALL the solutions means even MORE rules to interpret, to prevent abuse and to establish grounds for protest.
Which means we need to actually write them down or paint them so that we can resolve disputes.
Our farmers also take apprentices, I'm not sure where the guildmasters thing came from(Apprenticeship predated Guild system by a thousand years).
Apprenticeship solves the problem of people taking Debt to get trained by having them work at their new trade while training.
Before:
-Teacher must stop working to train students
-Students must stop working at previous trade to be trained, but not allowed to practice new trade yet
-Loss of 2 manpower for duration of training
After:
-Teacher continues working while training, but loses some work to distraction.
-Students must stop working at previous trade to be trained, but are able to produce apprentice-work for the teacher(e.g. grinding limestone or shells for mortar while the master supervises the burning)
-Loss of 1 manpower for duration of training, reducing as the student becomes more skilled.
Yep
This is also viable(its the one which maintains the broadest voting franchise), but it is the option where we get no innovations.
Yep
Sol Zagato
senseless brute
@Redium
[ ] [Teach] Develop a group whose responsibility it is to ensure enough specialists are trained without wasting food.
Is this option a bunch of full-time teachers or is it an organization that just plans and controls the proportion of our people in each specialty?
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- Location
- Anchorage, Alaska
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways
Or say, if we were going to introduce agriculture to our Northlands Minions. I THINK they can still grow quinoa in their southern camp, the temperature band gap isn't that drastic
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmm, in that case, my views depend on whether or not their camps turn into our settlements, or whether they just filter into ours. If they don't add new settlment, then I'll just vote for your plan. If they DO, then I'd say we should just do nothing. Can you clarify, @Redium ?
We're a couple of generations away from assimilation yet, even on the fastest timeline. And I'm mostly taking a leaf from China's nomadic northern vassals from time to time. They sometimes did assimilate, but only if the land was good for agriculture, otherwise they were basically a cavalry wing.
GildedSergeant
Tarnished Gold and Rattling Bones
- Location
- Over There
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways
Basically. Over the last four turns, Arrow Lake's lowest Raid related roll, before modifiers, was 84. Divine providence is so strongly in their favour it's actually hurting them. They haven't been forced to develop proper warriors yet because they're so unbelievably lucky that they win without any extra training.
They are way off the right side of the map, southeast of your current position. I don't want to expand the map to be honest because I hate maintaining it. If someone else wanted to volunteer, I would help them put it together. I'm not an art person. At all.
Yes.
Not yet. You need more technology or social sophistication. The only reason that the current crisis was so minor was because Aeva allowed you to notice and avoid it. If you want to solve it, you need to either Centralize power, move to a hereditary system, or develop a memory/admin related innovation. Writing and math, essentially.
The reason that hereditary systems were ubiquitous in human history is because they're stable. If a family line produces the same goods generation after generation, the people who are administering everything know roughly how much can be produced because of what happened in the past. Change is slow.
Currency would make everything worse. Adopting or shifting currency (i.e. from silver to gold, banknotes, or fiat) tend to cause a lot of short-term instability. People don't know how to handle their money so they do stupid things with it.
Essentially how well the initial takeover went.
Yes.
It would be up to a vote. You could absorb them whole say, turn them into more People, absorb most of them but keep their cavalry as a Holy Order, let them keep their traditional lifestyle, or push them to settle down at either their own camp or along the Great River.
Bricks. Oh dear God, the bricks. You've likely used more than a million bricks to build your longhouses, your walls, and all the other things you do with them. Kilns are burning day and night in order to sate your insatiable demand for them.
You're also burning enormous amounts of wood in order to make maple sugar. It takes something like 1/2 of a cubic meter of wood to boil a single liter of maple sap into maple syrup, a 3/4 cubic meter to get maple sugar. You're producing as much of this as you can. Hundreds of pounds a year, easily.
None of this touches of fires for cooking and heating, both of which were major fuel uses in history.
The volume of wood you burn could be measured in cubic kilometers every year. All of that has to be cut down and dragged back to your settlements. Having proper charcoal kilns will reduce your fuel consumption immediately to 2/3s, saving you an enormous amount of labour. It's also necessary if you want to learn how to smelt metals. Copper and lead melt much, much easier in a charcoal fire than with straight wood.
They don't really have anything you don't. If they develop sailing, you're not likely to get it. You need to either get ocean access or access to the Great Lakes to uncap sailing technology.
Yes.
Yes, manage forests and gathering are most likely to get beans. Explore actions work too.
Oh, yes.
It was a mix of Aeva's changes to the Trials as well as good innovation roles.
You already had them. Pumpkins and squash were both under gourds, I just separated them.
It's more of an administrative organization.
The temperature wouldn't be the problem. The issue for them is more than the type of forest changes. You're in primarily deciduous, but with mixed conifers. They're in primarily coniferous trees. All the pine trees that they have up there have done major damage to the soil. The northern camp would be too cold for qunioa.
You get a choice for how you would unify. You could push them to settle down where they are, settle down within the People's existing settlements, partially integrate but keep their warrior culture, or found their own settlements on your territory.
No update tonight, I plan to start working on it tomorrow.
- Location
- USA
So assuming the Mountain Clans fracture and collapse like they are going to. What other opponents do Arrow Lake even have? I mean they're going to need to either develop a hereditary slave caste or raid others to keep up their slave system. And considering how brutal they are, I doubt the former is likely to happen naturally.
So essentially the winning options were centralize, which was this option: [ ] [Teach] Empower the Big Men. Given them the ability to formally direct the labour and resources of others, move to a hereditary system, which was this option: [ ] [Teach] Delegate authority to longhouse leaders, make them responsible for organizing and training labourers, and possibly the memory/admin related option but I'm not sure if we have that yet as we don't have writing yet.
I'm not entirely sure if the option that's in the winning plan matches what you've illustrated so far. So...maybe change is needed before the vote locks...
What would we need to adopt currency anyway?
So absorbing them into the People I'm guessing is similar to what we've done before to others, where they slowly lose over time their old tribal identity and adopt our practices and beliefs rather than their own right?
While I think it would be a good idea to get cavalry from them, would taking their cavalry as a holy order preclude us from training up Orker Cavalry?
I'm guessing that letting them live their traditional lifestyle would net us the benefit of having them be distinct and possibly letting us get some of their innovations such as domesticated mammoths later, but I'm not entirely sure how this would work in the long run. Is there a chance to more fully integrate them later if we made that choice?
How much of a boon would it be for us to create these charcoal kilns then, at least in economic terms? As we seem to burn a lot of wood.
I thought Hill Guard was our connection to the Great Lakes as the Bay it empties into can access the Great Lakes too?
I thought we already had beans discovered, it's in the current technology list?
Uh oh...I'm not sure we're going to like not taking this option.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Instituting a last min modification to deal with the northlands. I don't want to raid, given the state of our army, and I don't want to drop warriors, so It's the sugar action that goes for now. We could also drop the quinoa action and trust in tribute:food to hopefully lock it in for us.
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways(mountain edition)
-[X] [Salt] Yes
-[X] [Teach] Have teachers take apprentices by finding promising children, like the Holy Orders do.
-[X] [North] Put the People's shaman in with the Northlands as advisers or leaders to their new High Shaman.
-[X] [Action] Trade (Mountain Tribes)
-[X] [Action] Train Warriors (Warriors)
-[X] [Admin] Expand Agriculture (Quinoa)
-[X] [Martial] Raid (Enemies of Peace Builders)
-[X] [Art] Raise Temple (Crystal Lake)
-[X] [Tribute] Food
[X] Plan Learn Our Ways(mountain edition)
-[X] [Salt] Yes
-[X] [Teach] Have teachers take apprentices by finding promising children, like the Holy Orders do.
-[X] [North] Put the People's shaman in with the Northlands as advisers or leaders to their new High Shaman.
-[X] [Action] Trade (Mountain Tribes)
-[X] [Action] Train Warriors (Warriors)
-[X] [Admin] Expand Agriculture (Quinoa)
-[X] [Martial] Raid (Enemies of Peace Builders)
-[X] [Art] Raise Temple (Crystal Lake)
-[X] [Tribute] Food
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
Honestly, I am of the opinion that we should just settle them along the great river so that we can snag some prime settlement spots.