Stability
3 (emboldened)
So, new color! We know yellow is near or at limit, we can probably assume red is at limit and dangerous, so green would signify at capacity. A similar color was used to indicate goal completion during the Tax Crisis.
a big part was that the chiefs recognized that Valleyhome was a good test case to see if they could extend the concept to other large settlements
We can assume, once the megaproject is finished, there will be a Build Aqueducts action available. Furthermore, that action will fall under the Infrastructure (if it's an extended action) or the Expansion policies. Lastly, provided Build Aqueducts is taken enough times -- probably once for every major city in our provinces, including Lower Valleyhome, as well as each of our provincial capitals -- we can also assume that action will leave the action list and be folded into the New Settlement action. Overflow on the project, then, would thus be spent on building more aqueducts for our other cities.
while they weren't nearly as bad as rumours and legends suggested, they were still a thoroughly unpleasant lot, who yes, did have a wall studded with skulls around the centre of the city, which was at least as big as Valleyhome, if not larger
And while I'm still saddened at the loss of Sacred War and the Restore Harmony action it gave us, I'm pleased that we lost that trait. We have Cosmopolitan Acceptance counteracting our dislike of human sacrifice, but indubitably we'll be forced into a war if we still have Sacred War. Now, though, this should give us the idea to build expanded walls around our cultivated areas in Northshore and Stonepen capitals. Not quite that useful with the March still protecting us, but if we can't stumble into a solution to the uncentralized March problem sometime soon, the walls will become very relevant.
The one the People had the least issue with was definitely Tuultox, a spirit with the lower body of a snake and the upper body of a woman whose venom could serve as both disease and cure, something the more spiritually apt knew was true of most medicines, with the dosage and application making the difference
I would say that this is a prime candidate for syncretism but while Tuultox has the least barriers of all the gods of the Xohyssiri, that doesn't mean there's no barriers. The People really do not like the bloodthirstiness, though that's not quite one of Arxyn's flaws, yet. Still, all of the Ymaryn's major spirits originated from important figures from history and new aspects are acquired from migrants. We're probably not going to see her become part of our mythos without accepting considerably large amounts of refugees from the Xohyssiri.
And all the other gods are awful and we don't like them, as expected. Furthermore, judging by how they seem to have acquired their gods -- demonization of enemies, followed by propitiation and adoption -- Crow's likely to be safe from having hearts sacrificed to him. There's no impetus for the Xohyssiri to adopt him if we aren't fighting them, after all.
Of course, if we manage to hit them with a Diplomacy action (like a Salt Gift with added cultural exportation) when they're suffering a major instability period, we might be able to displace their religious practices and gods with some of our own. We do have some inklings toward that idea, as mention in the update. Unlikely to happen anytime soon, but if we get the Eastern Hills province, we'll border the Xohyssiri tributaries in the lowlands, who might be receptive to such ideas.
for all its gruesome character and unpleasant smell, the city of the Xohyssiri was prosperous and a major hub for trade, with numerous rare and exotic goods brought to an enormous square where they were exchanged and swapped
Naturally the second oldest polity in our region has a similar or larger capital city than we do. Unfortunately for them (and us! with our trade links to both their neighbors and our role as refuge to the region), it looks like they're a series of massive plagues waiting to happen. They don't seem to have a good sewage system (judging by the smell -- which their human sacrifice practice likely doesn't help), they have a prime disease-breeding ground in the form of the slums, and they're a major trade hub that gathers and distributes travelers and therefore disease from all over their known world. The cholera pandemic we just saw was just the latest, I would guess, and that disease should have depopulated their slums for at least a generation, so what we see now was probably worse before. The star pox generations earlier probably also became a pandemic because of this city.
In any case, they don't seem to produce anything else than ceramics in enough quantities to qualify for a tech transfer, unfortunately. However, better metalworking is gated behind better kilns, so provided we maintained strong trade links to the Xohyssiri, we should passively acquire the necessary tech advances eventually.
Now, the two leading plans are to either get copper and the attendant tools, or to reestablish trade links with the Highland Kingdom and the Thunder Speakers. Getting copper now means that, next turn, our New Trails action should result in more trails, and thus, possibly more progress made in bringing the March back into our core state. Getting the trade links means better chance of tech transfer, notably opium (a painkiller), as well as the possibility of an easier time influencing future geopolitical decisions -- like cultural annexation of the Highlands or preserving our Xohyssiri trade route when the next lowlands war flares up.
[X] [Main] New Settlement - Southern Shores
[X] [Secondary] Copper Mine
[X] [Secondary] Copper Mine X2
[X] [Kick] The Garden
It's been around two turns since the end of the Tax Crisis, and I'd think we have ~3-5 turns from then before the March problem flares into a crisis. The original Ymaryn settlers of the March died out by the end of the crisis, and their children's generation should have died out by now. So, the people that are left are those who don't even have the memory of what our original values and expected behaviors are, nor were they raised by people who did remember. It takes around three generations for people to completely diverge, I think, and we don't have particularly good mobility between provinces as it is... So, striving to better integrate our potentially rebellious province rather than pursue things we can get later strikes me as best.
