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Paths of Civilization

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ctulhuslp said:
are we allowed to know specifics of new settlement costs, and if yes, could you please tell us?
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Develop at least Writing and I will start adding expected costs and gains to actions.

I considered leaving Pioneering Spirit without numbers, but its effects are sufficiently complex that I decided that obscuring it would only lead to headaches as people screamed at each other over what exactly it did while sitting there as a semi-permanent thing.
 
pbluekan said:
See my post above, but I don't think we can afford to wait out for the ROI. The initial investment might cause enough instability to make the return moot.
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I was assuming we'd see an ROI in the same turn. Setting it up would take 1-2 years, which is about the same time as a single lot of black soil takes to mature. So "the cost" would be zero or negative.

And yes, it takes away people from farming and etc., but we already have a lot of people in our dense villages doing things. Taking away the extra hands will mean a bit more work for the ones left, but in the course of the turn there would be a large return.

All of this is basically repeating myself, but that's because we just have different assessments of the cost of the initial investment and how quick the return will be.
 
Academia Nut said:
Develop at least Writing and I will start adding expected costs and gains to actions.
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Okay, we need to expand damn Shrine or do something. Like...writing is amazing by definition, but this one remark has made it much, much more enticing.
I am hereby declaring that I will start to shill for Expanding Shrine and doing other related actions as soon as I am sure economy won't die under the strain. So, maybe next turn, definitely at the very moment we finish the megaproject. Screw canals, screw dams, screw anything - ability to actually plan stuff with some sort of knowledge of results is absolute game changer.
 
Academia Nut said:
Develop at least Writing and I will start adding expected costs and gains to actions.

I considered leaving Pioneering Spirit without numbers, but its effects are sufficiently complex that I decided that obscuring it would only lead to headaches as people screamed at each other over what exactly it did while sitting there as a semi-permanent thing.
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TBH if I was in your shoes I'd be watching the thread and giggling as my little ants try to keep everything afloat at once.
 
veekie said:
I think you're imagining something that's going to be a VERY poor use of educator's times. The whole point of using Teachers instead of Apprenticeships is that one teacher can teach a dozen or more youths, full time. Teachers going from farm to farm doling out wisdom that they are 90% of the time, never going to use, takes far greater prosperity than we have at present.

Like said previous, the Teacher option basically means the Warriors and Traders are the most likely to become promoted to the Noble/Politician caste, because they actually have a lot of free time for their children! The farmers, artisans, etc are going to be fully employed, even the children, pretty much all day. They couldn't learn even if there were teachers for it.
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Mm. That wasn't actually what I was imagining though. First, all the tasks I mentioned are ones where it's fairly common (or would not do any harm or difference) to gather large groups of people to do together, at least half a dozen, more likely a dozen or two. So "class" size would be bigger than what you thought I meant. Also I was thinking this would be a once in a while thing and the rest of the teachers time would be taken up by teaching/watching children. Not very clear on that I suppose, sorry.

Second, I didn't imagine them going from farm to farm or village to village like the travelling teachers in Discworld. We don't even have farms in that sense I think, but attached to a work team/area/farm or something of that nature, for a year or two, then moved back to the holy place to learn themselves from the other teachers there while (and teach what, if any, they learned from their students) while another teacher was moved out to take their place. Then moving back a year or two later while the other teacher was moved back to the holy place. This might be a bit ambitious in terms of the amount of teachers you would need, but I was thinking a big majority would be elders moving back and forth between the holy place and their families, watching children and teaching. But it would also ensure that any new innovations were not lost.

Thirdly I wasn't imagining them teaching things like things from one speciality to another specialty, apart from to children and youths who haven't chosen a specialty yet. I was thinking stuff like maths, myths/legends/history, and philosophy. I like the image of having our working songs be a record of our myths or a geometry lesson or something. Or even a straight out description of how to farm or fish or whatever we're working on. Reading and writing when we get it will probably be better taught earlier since it's difficult to do while working.

There was more too, but of course it's not really relevant anymore.

[X] Send experts
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] Expand Fishing

I'm going with fishing, because sending both experts to the Confederacy and people to the new settlement seemed a bit much and sending experts just seemed so in character.
 
Eri said:
Mm. That wasn't actually what I was imagining though. First, all the tasks I mentioned are ones where it's fairly common (or would not do any harm or difference) to gather large groups of people to do together, at least half a dozen, more likely a dozen or two. So "class" size would be bigger than what you thought I meant. Also I was thinking this would be a once in a while thing and the rest of the teachers time would be taken up by teaching/watching children. Not very clear on that I suppose, sorry.

Second, I didn't imagine them going from farm to farm or village to village like the travelling teachers in Discworld. We don't even have farms in that sense I think, but attached to a work team/area/farm or something of that nature, for a year or two, then moved back to the holy place to learn themselves from the other teachers there while (and teach what, if any, they learned from their students) while another teacher was moved out to take their place. Then moving back a year or two later while the other teacher was moved back to the holy place. This might be a bit ambitious in terms of the amount of teachers you would need, but I was thinking a big majority would be elders moving back and forth between the holy place and their families, watching children and teaching. But it would also ensure that any new innovations were not lost.

Thirdly I wasn't imagining them teaching things like things from one speciality to another specialty, apart from to children and youths who haven't chosen a specialty yet. I was thinking stuff like maths, myths/legends/history, and philosophy. I like the image of having our working songs be a record of our myths or a geometry lesson or something. Or even a straight out description of how to farm or fish or whatever we're working on. Reading and writing when we get it will probably be better taught earlier since it's difficult to do while working.

There was more too, but of course it's not really relevant anymore.

[X] Send experts
[X] [Secondary] Black Soil
[X] [Secondary] Expand Fishing

I'm going with fishing, because sending both experts to the Confederacy and people to the new settlement seemed a bit much and sending experts just seemed so in character.
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I find the idea of people singing out geometry lessons and philosophical treatises attractive, tbh.

I feel like veekie understood your point on class sizes satisfactorily, and while I had assumed you were thinking teachers would be assigned to a specific group, it wasn't inherent in your phrasing.

Reading and writing would probably be taught to children when we develop it. But even then, as long as most of our crafts are based on creating things, e.g. hand-learning centric tasks, writing and reading will largely be for administrative or recreational purposes. And we do not yet have a great amount of time for recreation.

Minor point: It'd probably be better to have them be out for 2 years or something and then go back for two years. That way you'd have more overlapping between cycles of people. One in one out means that transmission only occurs inside a year and to the students unless you permanently station teachers-of-teachers at the shrine, who would learn from each year, evaluate it, and communicate it to others. Which would be a kind of useful choice, but that would lead to more of a dedicated research group while the others are the equivalent of minstrels.
 
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godofsmallthings said:
Now that I think about it, formalised education could have sped up the establishment of a writing system. Hind sight, I suppose.
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Only select few families would have time to dedicate to learning, and bureaucracy is historically integral to major nation (we are far from one, but we will grow into it), so this was not a wrong choice.

EDIT: Also, look at this shit:
Academia Nut said:
The droughts and floods and diseases have progressively caused people to drain out of more marginal lands into the People, where hard work guarantees food, and despite the fact that no one has seriously gone hungry within the People in generations, the elders going over old memories and tallies remind people that there have been crop failures, its just that the People maintain enough stores to ride them out year to year.
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Holy fucking shit.
Seriously, no serious hungers and the like for generations? That's...impressive. Very, very impressive. Before 20th century and refrigerators hungers just tended to happen, as far as I know. Being that good at handling food is quite amazing, truth be told.
 
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Duesal said:
Yep, after the great drought the People were like "Fuck that."
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Well, I mean, historically such level of equality and stuff is...I don't know, rare. Famines just happened time to time and, until modern preservation technologies, lower stratas just had to shut up and deal with it. And even with such technologies, sometimes, but much less often.
Granted, I have little to no clue about neolithic societies, but I kind of doubt such level of successfull food management was common then.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Well, I mean, historically such level of equality and stuff is...I don't know, rare. Famines just happened time to time and, until modern preservation technologies, lower stratas just had to shut up and deal with it. And even with such technologies, sometimes, but much less often.
Granted, I have little to no clue about neolithic societies, but I kind of doubt such level of successfull food management was common then.
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*shrug* most early societies past tribal - I can name exactly 0 - weren't communist, while we are. We narrowly avoided it by not allowing the people who owned richer land to keep it and get the reward from managing it well. We were split >1/2 commies and <1/2 merito's, but I think everyone was happy in the end.
 
Umi-san said:
*shrug* most early societies past tribal - I can name exactly 0 - weren't communist, while we are. We narrowly avoided it by not allowing the people who owned richer land to keep it and get the reward from managing it well. We were split >1/2 commies and <1/2 merito's, but I think everyone was happy in the end.
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not communist.
 
Omegahugger said:
Of course we don't have magical singing yet, our spiritual ability is way below desired levels.

Honestly, how Crow's favoured people could be so left behind by the Spirit Talkers is a mystery to me. They must have the support of a nebulous spirit of some kind, though I have no idea which. That's the only way I see they could have progressed in the mystic arts so quickly.
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Surprise Artone when
 
You know that story from the Bible about how the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream about seven lean cows devoured seven fat cows, and seven withered stalks of wheat devouring seven full stalks of wheat and this was taken as a prophecy of seven good years followed by seven bad and he should really stock up in preparation for bad times?

That sort of story is basically the fundamentals of the People's food management practices. They are always stocking up as much food as they can, and with central collection and organization they can do that and ensure it gets eaten in the right order to minimize spoilage. They basically always assume they're going to lose the next three harvests and plan accordingly.

Going forward, this system is going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
 
Academia Nut said:
You know that story from the Bible about how the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream about seven lean cows devoured seven fat cows, and seven withered stalks of wheat devouring seven full stalks of wheat and this was taken as a prophecy of seven good years followed by seven bad and he should really stock up in preparation for bad times?

That sort of story is basically the fundamentals of the People's food management practices. They are always stocking up as much food as they can, and with central collection and organization they can do that and ensure it gets eaten in the right order to minimize spoilage. They basically always assume they're going to lose the next three harvests and plan accordingly.

Going forward, this system is going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
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You heard it guys we have to stop going forward.
 
Academia Nut said:
You know that story from the Bible about how the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream about seven lean cows devoured seven fat cows, and seven withered stalks of wheat devouring seven full stalks of wheat and this was taken as a prophecy of seven good years followed by seven bad and he should really stock up in preparation for bad times?

That sort of story is basically the fundamentals of the People's food management practices. They are always stocking up as much food as they can, and with central collection and organization they can do that and ensure it gets eaten in the right order to minimize spoilage. They basically always assume they're going to lose the next three harvests and plan accordingly.

Going forward, this system is going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
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So basically we are the Ant to everyone else's Cricket?
 
Academia Nut said:
You know that story from the Bible about how the pharaoh of Egypt has a dream about seven lean cows devoured seven fat cows, and seven withered stalks of wheat devouring seven full stalks of wheat and this was taken as a prophecy of seven good years followed by seven bad and he should really stock up in preparation for bad times?

That sort of story is basically the fundamentals of the People's food management practices. They are always stocking up as much food as they can, and with central collection and organization they can do that and ensure it gets eaten in the right order to minimize spoilage. They basically always assume they're going to lose the next three harvests and plan accordingly.

Going forward, this system is going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
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Good thing we are trying to get a working bureaucracy to help us maintain complex machinery of the proto-state.
But we need writing even more to keep track of the grain too.
 
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