Glad to see that Miri is at least remembered. Has Alvar's line died off or has it just not been prominent as of late?
Kaspar has about a 33%-50% chance to be descended from Alvar. The People's genepool isn't terribly large so there's quite a lot of intermixing. Within another generation or two, basically everyone will be descended from Alvar. I'm honestly not tracking geneology that far back; the People don't, so it's not really relevant.
Are our traits and values permanently capped for the moment? As of right now I'm not entirely sure which of our current traits would help us with stability or longevity, so we might need a new one.
Traits can't be capped, but they're not really prone to upgrading. Values can be, they're noted by being marked with (Maxed Development) if they are locked. You only have the technological and social complexity to support values up to a certain extent. A modern value like Consumerism or Multiculturalism, simply doesn't make sense; it would never be able to evolve in the Neolithic. You can exceed Maxed Development on some traits based on special circumstances, but that tend to has undesirable results. Society will strain in order to accommodate a value it simply can't support.
Couldn't the same be said for all the options?
Yes.
Every single option can easily be twisted into something bad, both in isolation and with the other options that you pick. Every single choice you had this update is going to have long lasting consequences. I will say that you've threaded the needle for one of the two 'best' solutions, or at least as close to ideal as you could gain.
I want to be extremely up front about that; most choices you make are probably not going to make things better. Every society has terrible aspects to it. If you took one of the People and put them in, say, the USA, they would be horrified. They would appreciate the 'magic' of climate control, medicine, automobiles, etc. but they would be horrified by other things. Consumerism would make them deeply uncomfortable; you buy stuff... because other people tell you to? Stuff you can't use? The fact that Trump was elected, an unmitigated conman who ruined the livelihoods of hundreds, would make them think the US is hell. Your Big Man is a thief? A Debtor? Why was he not taken out back and had his kneecaps introduced to a hammer? They would be utterly terrified of the disintegration of family structures; people don't see their extended families daily?
No society is perfect. There's a reason that Utopia is defined as a place that 'cannot be'. A lot of the issues people had in PoC was because they thought the Ymaryn Empire was an Arcadia when they very much weren't. It basically killed the quest, AN revived it as a Vicky 2 sequel, but the initial quest died due to people being unable to accept that they didn't have paradise. I want to avoid that.
In Cradle of the Neolithic, a huge reason the quest died was because people didn't understand how the Neolithic works. Farming was not an 'I win!' button. It took 3,000 years for humans to transition from the discovery of farming to actually doing it full time. Hunting, fishing, foraging, herding, gathering; all of those were critical sources of calories that got overlooked, leading to the group in that quest to starve and collapse. Tribes often abandoned farming many times over the years, only to take it up again when the climate changed.
I'm not really dead set on any option over any other. I just want everyone to understand why and how the story will develop as it does. It's when it doesn't that people freak out and molten salt reactors start spooling up.
Does that mean we essentially play the leaders and the government of our civilization more that the civilization as a whole?
It's a trend I've seen happen in most civ games on this forum now, only to suddenly be subverted in certain situations when a plurality of voters don't expect it at all anymore. The constant viewpoint from the eyes of the hero/king and the other political factions always being seen as adversaries does perpetuate such an impression, coupled with our plan votes being usually portrayed as commands from up high as opposed to us occasionally voting on social trends that may or may not even be going against what the elite wants. In your quest this hasn't problem really happened yet all that much, since we are still very few generations in to truly hierarchical structures and have been seeing a lot of turn hijacking heroes anyway, but some would say that PoC for instance really shocked people on this point, what with players most of the time not having a clue of just how 90% of their own population lived till shortly before the ightning rounds.
tl;dr Just want to clarify now where our supernatural lever usually interfaces with our ever-evolving civ, before I get shocked due to misinterpretation on the player's side.
This is complicated. As your civilization gains Hierarchy, your decisions are imposed more and more from a top-down perspective. The average person doesn't normally get much of a say. Even today, everyone in a democracy theoretically has one vote to determine representatives and thus laws. How well does the average person's vote actually translate into making specific legislation they really want to see passed? Weakly at best. There's recently compelling evidence that a politician of 'your party' saying something will reshape a voters views on whether that thing is good and bad. There's undeniable influence from the top, but from the bottom, the voter's ability to influence the political elite is starkly limited.
IC, I'm likely going to do some updates from the perspective of someone lower on the totem pole so that people don't lose touch of what things are actually like. You're going to sit at Hierarchy 3 after the next update. That's low enough that if Kaspar wanted to ask a question, he could ask a subordinate, and that subordinate could directly get him the person he needs. It's the minimal level for people to start pulling bullshit and spreading lies, but those lies are going to be small ones.
OoC, I'm trying to be very clear that a lot of the options that you choose, even with the best of intentions, will be twisted by time. The best that you can do is evaluate what you want to focus on improving while other areas languish. The act of civilization is like juggling knives. You need skill, training, resources, infrastructure; a dozen different things in order to make such a feat possible. Actually, it's even worse than juggling knives, it's like juggling knives while blind folded with a dozen people shouting in your ears.
Votes Closed!
[X] [Pay] An elected council.
[X] [Politics] Select one Big Man to become a Bigger Man (likely Crystal Lake)
[X] [Men] Trial of Utility: a boy becomes a man when he becomes an asset to his settlement.
[X] [Women] Trial of Motherhood: a girl becomes a woman when she gives birth.
Are the winning options posted after the last thread mark.
