My argument against you was indeed because you were ignoring how government works, though I admit that the way in which you were defining centralization appears to be correct as interpreted by AN. I have yet to see negative effects, unless you count the decrease in the centralization stat as a negative effect in and of itself. Note that, as I admitted might occur, centralization decreased but was counterbalanced by an increase in hierarchy.
It depends on if the new settlement will actually decrease our economy in the long run. In the short run, we'll go down to 2 - which means we'll just be stable. In the long run, the farms that will be made with the New Settlement and the growth in easy access to X Y and Z resources will balance it out. Tbh, I don't get why people are not voting in black soil. It's explicitly stated in the text that the need is outweighing the supply. We can just do Black Soil - which provides an econ boost through the farms and orchards which it is also used in - and New Settlement at the same time.
Honestly, the need for Black Soil is real. I hate to do it but:
The negative effects are rather obvious. Centralization as defined by AN directly affects collective action strength; so even if the bureaucratic expansion boosted collective action strength, the subsequent loss of centralization ended up making the main argument you made for expansion moot, that being "if we do this, we will get more collective actions/action strength."
I'm pretty sure 3 was our stable, not 2.
The thing is, certain jobs are just inherently better done by those that have the mentality for it. Semi-hereditary means that we will have a core of experienced people doing the same jobs for generations, with room for newcomers as well. This is somewhat ideal as it means we have traditions that are strong for certain areas providing stability, while the steady influx of new blood will prevent the stagnation inherent to fully Hereditary positions.
1) I seriously have no idea what "collective action strength" is. Please define it at some point, as I asked last argument. 2) AN stated, in a question as to whether we'd ever be able to do 4 secondary actions rather than 1 major and 2 secondary, that we might be able to do so if we develop hierarchy/administration sufficiently. This allows for an increased number of actions. 3) My argument was based on how bureaucracy affects real life. In real life, having an immediate number of people who are already specialists recruited into your projects helps you do things more effectively in the short run than training and equal number of people who are specialists in everything. It is also cheaper for the number of people you get out of it, assuming the same amount of time has to be spent learning to the same depth.
*shrug* I'm talking out of my ass in regards to the value of numbers. It just makes sense that we'd be stable, cus we're just dedicating more people to addressing the forest, not necessarily taking away all of our farmers and etc.
It depends on if "mentality" is the result of a) being raised in an environment that puts the appropriate "I'm a leader and know best and owe it to people" memes in your head or b) undergoing experiences in general that make you a driven and virtuous person. Regardless, the whole experienced leadership thing was about the tradition of providing better education for your children, and then preventing other people's children from getting that education, i.e. by preventing them from attending meetings, for one.
The problem with hardwood trees is that they're slow-growing. Our issue is less preventing the rain from washing our efforts away over the long term, and more from keeping it washing away the trees and soil that were placed there a year ago, as well as all of the smaller plants whose roots are preventing erosion, too.
Fishing aids in creating black soil as much as having more cows would: both fish waste and manure are valuable in producing black soil due to providing organic detritus and nutrients that saturate the char. We do not need more cows to move things into the forest: assuming that they can get through it w/o knocking down trees, we already have enough from the cow expansion when we built the wall. Additionally, fishing would eventually provide technology that we don't already have. It is good to plan for more turns than just the next.
