Probably our best bet is to just try to build temples in every province, so that instead of two competing centres of religious thought there's a gradient, and just make Sacred Forest bigger and prettier. Of course, that runs into religious authority problems.
Not feasible for a while I suspect, we'd need to develop coping technologies to handle multiple Great Temples first.
But we should be able to handle three for now, Sacred Forest -> Redshore(Holy Sea) -> Black River(Star Mirror)
Having the RB go from the west, through the hills is a bad ideas! The Highlander held out against the Xoh/Thunder Empire because of their fortifications! So we don't want to cross mountain passes into their territory!
Their fortifications are all facing east, against the Xohyssiri. In the west they had lesser forts due to fighting only the Hathatyn briefly.
Strategicallly, it's a flanking maneuver, they have one army, we have five(Red Banner, Lowland Vassal, Hathatyn Colony, Core x3). By hitting them from both sides we can swiftly disabuse them of the notion that this is a good idea at all.
@Academia Nut Where is my dragon research option??
@Da Boyz only if people get rid of the foundations the city + temples + etc. have been built on and the giant hill and all of the bricks filled with skulls
And the several meters thick strata of alluvial soil as people build on top of of subsidence.
And so from what I can tell the Stallions are building their own temples.
@Academia Nut will integrating the Stallions increase our centralization and hierarchy?
We know this, Integrating a province drops Centralization by 1, though it does raise Admin burdens.
One thing I'd actually like to see about doing in the not so near future is transitioning away from Marches to primarily utilizing professional mercenary armies to hold our borders. More flexibility, more professionalism, less capable of serving as fault lines for realm divide (they depend on the actual civ after all), better force projection, etc. It'll cost a fair amount of Wealth, but we have quite a bit of Wealth generation when trade picks back up and we only have one Merc Company right now considering the HH became a March.
Besides, the idea of transitioning from vassal border lords to self-contained professional armies that answer directly to the central state would definitely be a step towards a more advanced military and has a certain narrative appeal. Normally I'd be a bit skeptical of this, but Symphony, Justice, and Honorable Death as cultural values all help ensure the loyalty of these armies.
The risks however is that if Wealth production drops for any reason, then these armies are quite liable to go rogue a hell of a lot faster than Marches.
With the double-main roads this turn solving our primary divergence admin problem, we're in a good position to do the expansion.
Explicitly wrong.
If you want, but right now if you are not specifying you will strengthen the main arterial trails above all, increasing contact for all the outlying sections. Focusing entirely on the north may in fact increase drift with the south, and the far more able to go independent Hatriver and Hatvalley.
Our roads are so fucked up that even a Double Main Trails is mainly just improving the core highways. We hadn't even STARTED on the provinces. It sounds much more like we need another 2 more double mains in fact(core, North, South, maybe East).
Yeah we were Pre-Ymaryn and we were inviting in everyone who wanted to join us peacefully, Crows Tribe was one of those who just ignored us and raided anyway. To absorb Crows Tribe we ended up giving them all the warrior jobs, which gave them the best women, food and eventually social positions.
It was peaceful but they took over us because of the Daughter and she did it like that purposefully via her son.
After all, Crow is the troublemaking, demon outsider who taught us a lesson and made us who we were today.
