A fair enough argument, though we shouldn't delude ourselves too much in thinking that we're going to do extended projects on a fequent basis. That said, the Library should be relatively cheap compared to the Saltern and Aqueducts. It might not even be an actual extended project.
Library would likely cost Mysticism to make more of, so while it might be cheaper timewise, costwise I suspect it to be impressive.
I suppose this is an interesting enough topic as, despite our claims to the otherwise, voting who to enshrine will mostly be about personal preference and we've mostly discussed the implications so people can make an informed decision based off of that.
To us yes, to the People, it's deeply disturbing to have the wise, all knowing shamans arguing in public over their interpretations of how spirits work, especially when everyone believed it was a different thing.
Doubly so when some aspects of it would seem heretical, like different attitudes of nudity in different areas, where one place says it shows off the bounty of the earth and the other thinks it's heretical to direct your lusts at the gods.
And then there's the arguments over a woman god of kings, when all can see kings are all men, of the northern provinces and migrants believing a king should be fit to lead in war while the southern provinces know that only someone old has the wisdom to lead the People.
And THEN people get...vigorous over issues like hairstyles, of the importance or lack of various accessories, like why isn't fish reflected in the bounty of the harvest, whether the harvest goddess should be armed, whether Crow would be more man, bird, or that nightmarish spider eye thing, etc.
We got a heated debate here and that's after the shamans working their issues out over 2 generations. If they had to decide on a central idol and how to best decorate it I think there might be a few priests who accidentally fell down a waterfall at some point.
The Mountain: Effectively a luxury megaproject, and really the least needed. That said, it is a pretty safe way of massively improving our engineering abilities. The result will be unimpressive, the important thing here is the act of building. It might be wise to build this before the dam in hopes of more greatly improving the dam.
Different kinds of techniques I think. A Ziggurut is about moving large amounts of stone more than anything else, while a Dam is about keeping stone standing against a sidewise force and moisture.
For dam experience, the best we can get is lots of aqueducts, and more Massive walls. Those have more connection to the process than Zigguruts.
The Mountain: This is going to be a major project that will take a good deal of time. I'm going to have to disagree with veekie that we can afford to rush this all the way through, as the construction process will involve careful forethought and figuring out how to build tall before we actually put our back into it. I'd give this roughly 3-5 turns.
Not so much. Zigguruts are naturally stable shapes, which is why you can build them to truly bullshit sizes. The primary challenge is making sure the stones are moved and fit, which IS a problem throwing lots of dudes at can solve.
Quantity has a quality of its own after all. Moving HUGE amounts of stone is very different and likely highly taxing on our trails. Can you imagine what moving 1 ton slabs of stone is going to do to our current gravel trails?
But I don't think we should take from the Highlands Kingdom. They're still very much assholes and we don't really want to emulate them. (Even the Xohyssiri would still be better as we won't take their sacrifice trait (way too different from our own values) but they still have lots of trade values.) Instead, I think we should take our boats, send them to far-off lands, and find more reasonable people to take values from.
Eh, we know a few things:
-Most new traits have to do with honor or wealth creation.
-The Highland Kingdom had only Order Above All as their compatible and non redundant trait previously.
--Recent events indicate the lack of a martial honor trait.
--Recent events include a rabid fortification spree.
We can theorize that they took their variant of Gardeners we taught them back then and turned it into a Defend Your Land trait of some form.
They likely still prize Order Above All, but it may have evolved due to the assassination based social unrest they get every couple of generations
-The Metal Workers almost certainly are packing some kind of Greed/Metal Extraction trait. Their entire society more or less revolves around it, and their river had well...turned green from mine discharge.
This is no longer incompatible with our culture now that we lost Humility, and it's not strictly exclusive with communal property anyways.
Might cause friction with Divine Stewards eventually though
-The Thunder Speakers used to have all the Nomad Martial Honor and Nepotism Traits. The Martial Honor probably got changed, but we don't know what. It's not a compatible spiritual trait apparently.
So still a bad-ish idea.
-The Thunder Horse, we know shit all about, other than their all being in feuding provinces and being raid happy to the extent that they ALL picked up Massive walls to keep up.
So still a bad-ish idea.
-The Xohyssiri have gone maximum Capitalism + Child Sacrifice. They probably have more wealth related traits yet, and are basically relying on All The Overflow to stay viable, converting Economy cheaply into Stability.
Without The Greater Good, their traits don't benefit us nearly as much. They act as an Expansive trade power, where they are the most convenient place to trade in the region and thus get a big flow of trade goods. We are the Gateway trade power, where we sit on terrible terrain for trade, but we have access to cultures that normally never meet due to hostile terrain and hostile 'terrain'(i.e. Nomads)
I don't think it'll work as you think it will. Rather, I think the fact that it's unknowable but knowable makes it more prone to sect divisions. Everyone starts out not knowing, then someone thinks they found out something, and then others either believe him or they don't believe him.
Any of the other interpretations would be the ones resistant to sect divisions, especially alien but unknowable. Someone would go "I know how to interpret Crow correctly! Listen to me!" and the others would go "Bullshit. No one can know him."
You can see how the Greeks handled it. They had a Public sect of each god, with variants for each city-state, and then secret cults for sect divisions. As a result, there was little religious strife generated, as the sect are segregated.
Likewise, polytheistic faiths like Taoism, Shinto and Hinduism do not face much sect strife, as you can always declare an alternative interpretation to be it's OWN deity or Aspect and spin that off.
Strife is limited to when a subsect's practices(i.e. some of Kali's followers) are aggressive assholes about it.
It's mainly centralized monotheistic faiths which run into the problem. Abrahamics and Buddhists, while their central theology is very stable, tends to break instead of bend when it comes to alternate interpretations of Truth.
I would like to point out that we are not assholes and that is therefore proof that there might be other people who aren't assholes. (It's also proof that people should stop wanking on about how we should be assholes because it shouldn't be possible for a civ in this era to not be assholes according to them, but that's besides the point.) At the very least we might find some people who aren't quite as much of an asshole as our neighbours.
If you want to find a non-asshole civilization you need to look for geographical barriers. Anyone who has to wage a lot of war will become assholes by picking up war-traits and slavery, because they're significantly superior if you spend a lot of your time at war.
The problem with finding people in geographical barriers is that they don't usually come out much...
