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Paths of Civilization

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veekie said:
Actually, we don't see downsides evolve very often
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This made me go and check what they've done when upgraded:

Caretakers of the Land -> Gardeners of the Land
Cons: Additional strife caused by deliberate environmental disruption or loss of territory to others
->Cons: Additional strife caused by deliberate environmental disruption unless it is for the long term betterment of the land, or loss of territory to others
This one was a straight upgrade, but we got basically no additional benefits from the upgrade.

Gardeners of the Land -> Shapers of the Land
No change in cons, gained megaproject bonus

Shapers of the Land -> Divine Stewards
Again, no change in cons, gained kicker ability

Eye for an Eye -> Protective Justice
Cons: Justice must be served
->Cons: Sometimes the call for justice comes early...
We haven't and are probably unlikely to really trigger this hard, but being pushed to do justice early is just as bad as being forced to do justice, but in a different way.

Love Thy Neighbour -> Land of Opportunity
I can't actually find Love Thy Neighbor, but assuming it's the same as Sharing Circle's
Cons: Strife generated from turning people away, paints a target
->Cons: Many think you weak, not accepting the needy can cause stability drops
It's basically the same but worse.

Harmony -> Symphony
Cons: Disharmony is to be corrected
->Cons: Disharmony is to be corrected, require casus belli to declare war
Significant downside added.

So, of 6: 1 had a reduction in cons, 1 had a sidegrade (justice), 2 did nothing, 2 got worse. So, reasonable odds, but we've definitely seen it happen.
 
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Deathbybunnies said:
I understand that that's what would happen mechanically, but narratively I'm struggling to think of how building roads could cause a crisis.
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Helicopter parenting from the King for instance
notgreat said:
Eye for an Eye -> Protective Justice
Cons: Justice must be served
->Cons: Sometimes the call for justice comes early...
We haven't and are probably unlikely to really trigger this hard, but being pushed to do justice early is just as bad as being forced to do justice, but in a different way.
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Remember Eye for an Eye demands exact and specific justice. Protective Justice means we might jump the gun in terms of timing for preemptive punishments, but we ALSO have greater liberty in HOW we enact justice(which is significantly more important than acting only after shit happens).
i.e. it didn't get worse, it just shifted direction to make it better really.
 
veekie said:
Remember Eye for an Eye demands exact and specific justice. Protective Justice means we might jump the gun in terms of timing for preemptive punishments, but we ALSO have greater liberty in HOW we enact justice(which is significantly more important than acting only after shit happens).
i.e. it didn't get worse, it just shifted direction to make it better really.
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notgreat said:
1 had a sidegrade (justice)
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Need I say more?
 
I'm just not seeing how it benefits us to wipe out any of our neighboring polities. To do so would require us to pay most of the cost, while allowing our other neighbors most of the benefits. We still have plenty of room to expand to, they do not. So they will quickly colonize the ruins of the destroyed civilization. We are at peace with our neighbors, they are not. If we wipe one of them out, that means that their relative security has increased and that they would have more resources to contest us.

I could see its utility once we run out of land to claim, or if one of the powers becomes a regional hegemon, but otherwise it seems to me that it would weaken our nation's prosperity and security, not strengthen.
 
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notgreat said:
Need I say more?
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I'm saying it's a clear case of an UPGRADE, not a sidegrade. Outright superior, even if it has it's own troubles.
Rakuhn said:
I'm just not seeing how it benefits us to wipe out any of our neighboring polities. To do so would require us to pay most of the cost, while allowing our other neighbors most of the benefits. We still have plenty of room to expand to, they do not. So they will quickly colonize the ruins of the destroyed civilization. We are at peace with our neighbors, they are not. If we wipe one of them out, that means that their relative security has increased and that they would have more resources to contest us.

I could see its utility once we run out of land to claim, or if one of the powers becomes a regional hegemon, but otherwise it seems to me that it would weaken our nation's prosperity and security, not strengthen.
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Mainly? Terror effect. It would buy us a fair stretch of not being fucked with if we do get the casus belli, such that we don't have to deal with issues like them seeking to dictate our trade relations or raiding us. It's the sort of thing that leaves a mark, especially if it requires clear and definite provocation.
 
Rakuhn said:
I'm just not seeing how it benefits us to wipe out any of our neighboring polities. To do so would require us to pay most of the cost, while allowing our other neighbors most of the benefits. We still have plenty of room to expand to, they do not. So they will quickly colonize the ruins of the destroyed civilization. We are at peace with our neighbors, they are not. If we wipe one of them out, that means that their relative security has increased and that they would have more resources to contest us.

I could see its utility once we run out of land to claim, or if one of the powers becomes a regional hegemon, but otherwise it seems to me that it would weaken our nation's prosperity and security, not strengthen.
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When fighting a war where anything and everything goes and people are willing to go to the point of personal suicide experimentation would be quite common. I suspect we would get quite a few military advances out of it.

Then there's myth-making to take into account. The act would be so incomprehensibly brutal by the standards of the age that the only ones who would dare raid us for many, many generations would be the nomads.
 
DragonParadox said:
When fighting a war where anything and everything goes and people are willing to go to the point of personal suicide experimentation would be quite common. I suspect we would get quite a few military advances out of it.

Then there's myth-making to take into account. The act would be so incomprehensibly brutal by the standards of the age that the only ones who would dare raid us for many, many generations would be the nomads.
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I still kinda want to do that double-main war mission on the nomads when we have the chance...
 
Lailoken said:
We probably should have asked this sooner, but does this game have a "everybody, everybody, even hated enemies, team up to destroy you simply on principle" mechanic like what Harzey sprinted into?
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It can happen, but it takes a special kind of asshole to inspire it. Dead Priests have come closest, and they realized that they were digging a hole and have reined things waaaaaaay back in recent generations (mostly due to a lack of ability though).

Abby Normal said:
Thinking about doing a nega-verse omake for the Highland Kingdom, is this an accurate summary of how they work?
They've got a hereditary king who rules over settlement-level chiefs and more loosely rules over a scattering of minor vassal settlements in the lowlands. They've picked up a little bit of our culture, such as using a slavery system with elements of our own, but still much closer to average prehistoric slavery than to ours, with raiding for slaves and the use of slave labor in farming and other regular work instead of just for shit-work. We haven't heard much about their spiritual values, but they're not a very spiritual focused civ. They've wrecked face in the lowlands with massed, relatively "heavy" infantry with basic formations and chariot support. They don't seem to have metal working secrets, but do import some limited metal for luxuries from the southern hills metal workers.
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That's about right, yes. They're very much a more 'standard' group.

veekie said:
I'm guessing if it was like the Sacred Forest, a project which generates a new repeatable action option, the overflow might sink into those actions, but otherwise it's generally wasted?
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Yeah, something like that if you go overboard it would carry on into other stuff.
 
Academia Nut said:
That's about right, yes. They're very much a more 'standard' group.
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Cool--do they have a specific term they use for their slave-ish caste or for their vassals? It'll have to wait until tonight when i'm more free, but i intend to do a nega-verse of the turn they freaked out over our law geas :p If not, i'll probably try and do some play off of our terms, since their slavery was influenced by our half-exile system
 
godofsmallthings said:
Wouldn't taking the max instability option adversely affect our relationship with the March? I get that people want to influence the trait gain as much as possible. But don't get greedy people; last time we did that we overstressed the system and went into a downward spiral.


Do we even need this much Econ at the cost of stability ? The provinces are gonna be supporting us too, you know.
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Mainly, I'm thinking the heavier instability options will improve our values gained. And likely fuse TGG as mentioned by AN if voting goes a certain way.
 
[x] The whole lowlands are kind of a mess, you know? (-3 Stability, +6-8 Econ, other effects)
[x] Share with even those who don't want to listen (-1 Diplomacy, +1 immediate Stability, chance for additional stability, other effects)
[X] Megaproject Support
This last part leads right into Salturn

And turn after, we do the dam, then the garden project.
If we do it in that order, we get stuff off the list that has been sitting there hundreds of years, and the cumulative effects should be really good.
 
Citino said:
AN outright said that the nomads would remember it quite well, and would avoid raiding us for quite a long time.
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Academia Nut said:
Unless you rolled incredibly poorly, you would probably get at least one full generation before anyone even considered poking you again, allowing for some recovery.
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1 generation =/= 1000 years.

1 Generation is a single turn. So we get about 1-3 turns respite. Hardly spectacular.

By the implications there, we would not even have sufficient time to fully recover from the economic damage it would inflict.
 
Academia Nut said:
You would get 2 Stability, but man would that be a drain on the economy.
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It's tempting, but my pessimism says we cannot afford to do so.

Abby Normal said:
Cool--do they have a specific term they use for their slave-ish caste or for their vassals? It'll have to wait until tonight when i'm more free, but i intend to do a nega-verse of the turn they freaked out over our law geas :p If not, i'll probably try and do some play off of our terms, since their slavery was influenced by our half-exile system
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I guess that was in part because they have not sent us a trade mission for a long time, or at all, and thus their nega-SV was expecting so see primitive mountain farmers and got most populous state in the region with some metal tools and written law in copper age, thus freaking out on mid-mission choice.
 
When we defeat an enemy of the spirits, we create a settlement of their women and children, and train shamans of a few. We teach them to read. And we teach them so that they may understand the writing on the stele in the center, remember the wrath of the Hill Folk, and learn to never transgress again.
 
Abby Normal said:
Cool--do they have a specific term they use for their slave-ish caste or for their vassals? It'll have to wait until tonight when i'm more free, but i intend to do a nega-verse of the turn they freaked out over our law geas :p If not, i'll probably try and do some play off of our terms, since their slavery was influenced by our half-exile system
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Their slave structure is very much... it's more internally conceptualized as a form of indentured servitude, someone paying back a debt owed to someone else or society. That debt can be 'was on the wrong side of a war', and the debt can be hereditary, and it can even be conceived of as a moral failing to have, but it is very much conceptualized as something that can be worked off.

Vassalage is also very much seen of as a familial relationship, typically reinforced with actual ties of marriage and adoption and the like. So loyalty is owed to the king in a similar way that loyalty is owed from child to parent. It's not Confucian level yet, but familial loyalty is very much how they work, and while they're not quite an elective or seniority based system, succession isn't necessarily directly from father to son if there is an older and more successful male relative and the immediate primogenic heir is young and untested.

It's not the most stable system, but they mostly skip over the worst heirs.
 
pblur said:
When we defeat an enemy of the spirits, we create a settlement of their women and children, and train shamans of a few. We teach them to read. And we teach them so that they may understand the writing on the stele in the center, remember the wrath of the Hill Folk, and learn to never transgress again.
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But then we just absorbed the remnants?
If we are already in settlements and stabilizing the place, why would we leave?

In any case, we get better return and advances if we turn our attention to coastal and hilly areas instead of poor plain soil.
 
10ebbor10 said:
1 generation =/= 1000 years.

1 Generation is a single turn. So we get about 1-3 turns respite. Hardly spectacular.

By the implications there, we would not even have sufficient time to fully recover from the economic damage it would inflict.
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That's for the lowlanders.

This:
Academia Nut said:
2.) Yes, but unless things go very wrong you will also be very aggressively grinding away at the nomads. Double kicked double Main War Mission would be... well, you would be in bad shape afterwards, but you might actually leave a long lasting traumatic scar in nomad culture
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Citino said:
@Academia Nut If double main boosted mentally scars the nomads, what would something like a boosted main and a boosted secondary war mission look like?
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Academia Nut said:
Still pretty psychotically aggressive, but maybe not enough to scare children listening to campfire stories thousands of years later.
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Is for the nomads.
 
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