My dream it to take the Gardener's trait to its absolute limit, shaping the entire valley so that every inch is shaped how we like it. The mountains carve up, rivers dammed or confined in canals, fisheries confining all the fish, all available land covered in carefully tended orchards, farmland, and pastures with the hills scultped into step farms. The mountains themselves covered in mines and quarries with all of our outer borders marked out with massive walls 10 meters high and three meters thick.
Nothing says domination of the land than being able to point at every single point within it and say that you changed how it worked.
My dream it to take the Gardener's trait to its absolute limit, shaping the entire valley so that every inch is shaped how we like it. The mountains carve up, rivers dammed or confined in canals, fisheries confining all the fish, all available land covered in carefully tended orchards, farmland, and pastures with the hills scultped into step farms. The mountains themselves covered in mines and quarries with all of our outer borders marked out with massive walls 10 meters high and three meters thick.
Nothing says domination of the land than being able to point at every single point within it and say that you changed how it worked.
The more we talk about the Not!fertile crescent, the more i want to build a Ziggurat on the limit of the badlands with flowing water and farms on each step of the giant building only because we can.
It seems about as useful as the Hanging Gardens...which was not useful. It was impressive, but ultimately it was incredibly resource intensive and produced nothing that would make up for it. The same would go for the Ziggurat.
They could maybe poison the fields by scattering bad earth or something, but I agree that at this stage poisoning is unlikely. Tbh, all of this was a throwaway scenario. No one, at this point in time, has the resources or really even the idea of poisoning people's land. It's wasteful to do so, since if you're aiming for revenge you'd kill people, and if you're aiming for land you wouldn't destroy it.
Hilariously, ONE population here has the near term ability to poison the land.
1) We have wagons and animal power to move them.
2) We have a coastal village.
3) We have all the experience with water, evaporation and all that to set up salt flats
So we could...well near our territory
Though why would anyone spend so much effort to haul something that's basically solid bricks of money for months across bad geography to throw it away and destroy money is inexplicable
See Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Colossus, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, every single Olympic Stadium to date.
They're a demonstration of wealth and prestige, effectively converting excess Economy to a major Diplomacy and Ideology/Mysticism boost. Consider, in a stone age environment, where everyone normally produces enough food to just feed themselves and their family with a little spare, what it says that you can afford something which requires hundreds of people invested in skilled labor to create.
And what that says for their ability to kick your ass.
Any civilization which can afford to create a megaproject has power and the favor of the spirits.
For Fthgoya, an early priority is to direct resources to the coastal village for a grand plan. With the agitation of the seas and the increased possibility of conflict, it is determined that the village should be the site of a new construction project. Because of the sea, it is determined that it is possible for a well motivated group to move quickly enough across the coasts that scouts would not catch them, and given that as the primary production facility, the dye stores there would be an ideal target, a massive wall is to be erected. The work of a generation, it is significantly aided by the fact that the village has already been set up along a proper organizational pattern and continued forward along those plans for generations, and thus there is little resistance to make necessary changes or buildings that are in inconvenient places. The initial building phases go quickly enough as earthen ramparts are built up taller than a man standing on another man's shoulders, but soon enough fired brick and worked stone are being added to produce smooth walls that would be impossible to climb without drawing attention to doing so.
The work is significantly aided by the new forests being brought under management, providing fuel and building materials, and additional pastures being set up to expand herds, which allows for more movement of goods and labour. While the sheer amount of stone and brick to be processed is greater than has been ever used for a single project before, the masons make leaps and strides in how to do their tasks by the simple reason that they have to.
However, while there are many great strides, it is probably the decision to majorly increase the management of forests - particular around the coastal village - that reveals something troubling. The as managed forests expand, the hunters range further out into semi-managed and unmanaged forest and begin to work out what has been going wrong with the coastal river. While proper storage and management means that the People ride out uneven weather patterns with little trouble, in other areas the forests are clearly stressed and suffering from blights. There are regions where the forest has succumbed to whatever is affecting them and not bounced back quickly after a fire or some other naturally periodic event, the dead material crumbling away in the next heavy rain and leaving denuded hillsides that offer no resistance to waterflow, only accelerating water cutting them to bare stone and washing the soil into the river.
Thus far the issue seems spotty and localized to patches, but the zones where forest has been reduced to scrubby hillside seem to be growing, and are far from any settlement, even those of hunter-gatherers from outside the People, who grow sparse as more and more people leave the wilds for farming settlements. It is like the spirits of the forest are either dying or moving away, leaving behind poorer land that spread like summer sores. Given the size and distribution of the damaged zones, it is beyond the ability of the People to fix, although attempts can definitely be made. Elders and those of spiritual sensitivity are consulted, and it is noted that there is particular discovery floating about that might be of some use to look into. For generations it has been known that ash and the wastes of people and animals can promote plant growth, but after the reorganization of the villages and the movement of several middens that had been built over during earlier, less organized expansions, it had been discovered quite by accident that there was a particularly potent mixture within those trash heaps. A blend of crushed black charcoal, shattered pottery, animal bones, and manure, it was a rich black material that easily retained water and plants seemed to revel in. Some families had taken to rotating their dump sites so they could cultivate the material for use in their farms and orchards, but with the discussion of the blighted regions the possibility of deliberate manufacture by the group as a whole was brought up. While the thought of making massive amounts of the stuff to deal with regions outside the immediate control of the People was... daunting... to say the least, the fact that the issue had nearly killed their greatest trade good was a definite motivator.
In news of a somewhat mixed character, word filters back from the north that there has been a great disruption of affairs as it sounds like the nomads actions somehow angered the spirits, as they suffered the unleashing of the seasonal sicknesses that the People had been forced to suffer through for generations, and had not the rules of cleanliness of spirit and body to reduce the worst of it to tolerable levels. While not exactly a pleasant thing, particularly as the pollution of disease could so easily spread from ones enemy to ones own house, it certainly reduced the incidence of raids on minor settlements who looked to the People for trade and assistance, both from the actual deaths and the subsequent political chaos indiscriminate disease caused. Elsewhere it sounded like the Spirit Talkers were undergoing some major shift in priorities as their warriors pulled back from their endemic conflicts with the Dead Priests, keeping to their own territory for their own reasons. For their part the Dead Priests seemed to be focused on other, more distant issues as their attentions were turned away from the Western Confederacy, who were rapidly becoming the biggest customers for dyes as the relationships between smaller settlements grew stronger and they grew more confident in their dealings with the outside world.
However, while all these new things were happening, the council was starting to struggle with itself. Fthgoya's heir to the High Chiefdom was not from the line of Gwygoytha, but it was noted that her successor was from a family of who had been chiefs of the coastal village for generations without swapping to another family, and it was noticed that the potential heirs all seemed to be coming from a limited pool of lineages. While the families who were at the centre of it all countered that it was simply a matter of their jobs being complex and the children who got to watch their parents and grandparents doing it picking up on the tasks and expectations of them early and the actually ambitious ones starting up the vast amount that they needed to learn before they were even in puberty. The elders and clan leaders outside those few dominant families countered that the current leadership was better able to get their children that education by telling people to give it to them when asked, and setting the rules on who could and could not attend meetings gave their children an unfair advantage in developing initial skills and interests. Further arguments flew that the children of warriors tended to be bigger and thus had an advantage over other children there, and the children of any of the well rewarded specialist professions were better off than those who were not.
About the only people who could possibly hope to make the jump to whatever they wanted were the warriors who spent extended periods guarding the elders at the waterfall and could absorb their wisdom most effectively, or those deemed to have too many souls in their body who were sent there upon recognition to learn how to harmonize their unusual soul structures with wider society. And even then the jump was a rather large one and most people preferred to do things they were already comfortable doing. About the only person who might have the attitude to become a leader of some sort was a grain counting sort of woman who had been born with an excess of maleness, and that was because they had recognized her behaviour early and sent her off to the elders and seers before puberty, where she had picked up useful skills while learning how to be a proper woman despite outward appearances. This did suggest that somehow getting more spiritually apt people into the population might help with the problem, but the grain counters all pointed out that there was no way they could afford to feed enough "young elders" to make a difference.
The solution settled upon was to...
[] Leave the situation as is
[] Add restrictions on succession to reduce powerful positions being held by similar families
[] Devote more assistants to the leaders, decreasing the complexity of their tasks
[] Support more wise folk to serve as educators
Black Soil - While individual families produce this useful material, a community wide effort to establish production and distribution could have profound effects [Gardeners] [King]
Build Wall - Long experience with retaining walls has lead to the idea of a settlement wall for protection (Coastal village completed)
Build War Wagons - Increasing the number of war wagons would increase the general strategic and battlefield mobility of forces, although would be expensive to do so
Establish Annual Festival - People already like to celebrate at certain times of the year, but with the level of control over food distribution a new and particularly lavish festival can be established
Expand Farms - The people have brought an enormous amount of land under cultivation in the valley, but there is more available in more marginal areas, and in the forests around the fishing village
Expand Fishing - There are managed cultivation zones along the shore, and dedicating more people to the tasks can increase the yields of fish and luxuries brought in
Expand Managed Forests - There are many forests throughout the hills about the various forests that could be brought under proper management
Expand Pasture - While the traders mostly just take their animals where there is good grazing, specific areas can be set aside around the settlements that can be made ideal for the protected grazing of herds
Expand Place to Spirits - The current place dedicated to the spirits and wisdom is nice, but it could be bigger and grander...
Expand Snail Cultivation - While now more reliably grown and harvested, the snail domestication has only managed to hold environmental changes at bay rather than increase production. More investment would increase cultivation
Expand Warriors - More men can be inducted into the ranks of the warriors every year and not face major food shortfalls
New Settlement - The land is not particularly good for farming in between the valley and the sea, but there are places where a settlement could be set up, serving as a stop over point along the journey between the two settlements
New Trails - The settlements in the valley and the coast are well tied together, but there are new contacts to the north who could be better tied together
Step-Farms - Step farms have been established and have grown across the valley, but there are still plenty of hills to resculpt [Gardeners][King]
Trade Mission - Sending a major caravan to another large group can bring new opportunities and find out more about the outside world
War Mission - You can send raiding parties against groups that have declared themselves hostile
Mega-Projects - Mega-Projects can require many generations to complete, take an unknown amount of time to do so, and drain Econ while active, but can produce massive benefits once complete. Once chosen, the occupy the Main Focus slot until either completed or stopped early. Early stopping once started does not refund any of the investments and increases social strife. To reduce confusion, mega-projects are not listed as part of the voting project list and must be "written-in".
Fight Forest Blight - Something is going wrong in a number of wild forests, and generations of intervention may be required to stop it [Gardeners][King]
Grand Canal - The hills between the valley and the sea are rough and the rivers there fast and wild. In one man's dream there is the vision of an artificial river cut through the land, tame and managed [Gardeners][King]
Great Dam - The river can run wild and dangerous when the rains come strong, but could it not be controlled by the same principles by which the water on the hills is channelled and contained, merely on a larger scale? [Gardeners][King]
Choose one [Main] Focus and two [Secondary] Focus. Unless otherwise marked
[] Black Soil
[] Build Wall
[] Build War Wagons
[] Establish Annual Festival
[] Expand Farms
[] Expand Fishing
[] Expand Managed Forests
[] Expand Pasture
[] Expand Place to Spirits
[] Expand Snail Cultivation
[] Expand Warriors
[] New Settlement
[] Step-Farms
[] Trade Mission
-Target Options: Spirit Talkers, Western Confederation, Dead Priests, Northern Nomads
[] War Mission
-Target Options: Dead Priests, Northern Nomads
Villages for projects: Valley, lower valley, coastal
[X] Leave the situation as is
meh
[X] [Main] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] Expand Farms
[X] [Secondary] Establish Annual Festival
Tentative since not sure
Hilariously, ONE population here has the near term ability to poison the land.
1) We have wagons and animal power to move them.
2) We have a coastal village.
3) We have all the experience with water, evaporation and all that to set up salt flats
So we could...well near our territory
Though why would anyone spend so much effort to haul something that's basically solid bricks of money for months across bad geography to throw it away and destroy money is inexplicable
Not really.
See Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Colossus, the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, every single Olympic Stadium to date.
They're a demonstration of wealth and prestige, effectively converting excess Economy to a major Diplomacy and Ideology/Mysticism boost. Consider, in a stone age environment, where everyone normally produces enough food to just feed themselves and their family with a little spare, what it says that you can afford something which requires hundreds of people invested in skilled labor to create.
And what that says for their ability to kick your ass.
Any civilization which can afford to create a megaproject has power and the favor of the spirits.
*shrug* I'd argue that all of them except for the pyramids have a use other than as simple demonstrations of wealth and prestige. (The pyramids basically being fancy tombs, tho arguably public works projects to supply employment.) The Statue of Liberty, for example, was might be considered less a demonstration of wealth and prestige and more a sign - through the expended wealth - of a certain level of dedication toward a shared relationship. Stonehenge, as far as we know, had a religious purpose. All of them had a use other than being "frivolous constructions" built to show our power.
While it shows that we are powerful to be able to build strictly frivolous buildings, if they have no use except showing that we are able to build them, that shows that we are frivolous people who do things for no reason but that we can. I find such a choice repugnant, and feel that it goes against the charitable but utilitarian approach we have exhibited thus far.
Let it become hereditary monarchy. Probably not enthused for the thread but it has benefits in terms of skill.
[] Add restrictions on succession to reduce powerful positions being held by similar families
Focuses on the 'problem' of developing a noble/professional politician class. This I think, is creating a problem when there was none. You NEED such a class to handle the burdens of
[] Devote more assistants to the leaders, decreasing the complexity of their tasks
Expands administration and makes it so you can survive with less badass leaders.
Naturally limits the power of the high chief, as routine decisions are going to be made by the clerks rather than the politicals, while the chiefs set policy.
This has synergy with megaprojects.
[] Support more wise folk to serve as educators
SV-instinct, making leadership more accessible by having more people becom teachers. Starts up a full time sage class...and doesn't actually stop a political class from forming.
It also will hurt the economy a bit.
[X] Devote more assistants to the leaders, decreasing the complexity of their tasks
[X] [Main] Fight Forest Blight
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] New Settlement
Much as it pains the desire to start a canal, we cannot risk letting the entire forestry collapse from blight. Full power to the probllem. A megaproject to fertilize the valley, to make fertilizer and a new settlement because why stop preparing for the canal?
I'm worried about the blight to be honest. That being said.
[X] Support more wise folk to serve as educators
[X] [Mega-Project] Grand Canal
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] Expand Managed Forests
[X] Devote more assistants to the leaders, decreasing the complexity of their tasks
[X] [Main] Fight Forest Blight
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] New Settlement
Much as it pains the desire to start a canal, we cannot risk letting the entire forestry collapse from blight. Full power to the probllem. A megaproject to fertilize the valley, to make fertilizer and a new settlement because why stop preparing for the canal?
why new settlement instead of something else like more warriors, we will need more warriors if in order to station troops in the new settlement for them to have a military force
Fixing the forest is paramount. We can always build a canal later, but if the forest dies we face catastrophe. Already we've seen the effects it's had.
[X] Devote more assistants to the leaders, decreasing the complexity of their tasks
[X] [Main] Fight Forest Blight
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] New Settlement
[X] Support more wise folk to serve as educators
[X] [Mega-Project] Fight Forest Blight
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] Expand Managed Forests
