Technically there are goat herders who are "nomads", but they can't support the larger and more numerous kind of nomadic groups that you see in the north. The land is scrubby and hot and is mostly desert with a few watering holes. The People secured a number of wells along the route as part of their efforts, and there is likely mining possible, but all in all its just not a good place to live.
Hmm, we can make that work. Just need Black Soil and trees.
And things not being on fire so we can deploy those.
I don't think holding the lowland minors for any period of time is strategically tenable unless we also conquer either the Highlanders or the Thunder Speakers.
They're away from good land and any major routes of trade and share borders with the most dangerous groups, unless we get a drastic victory and conquer the Highlanders within three turns I have to recommend cutting them loose.
Edit, or just not defending them
If we lose iron exclusivity AND a lowland foothold, you can expect to be conquered by a lowland army in about 20-30 main turns, because there's just that damned many of them and iron is pretty much the only reason we're in the game at all.
Currently what works(if we weren't busy with internal strain problems) is to secure the minors, link them up to our greater networks, then fund their fortification efforts.
Maybe integrate everything else and take stability boosting actions?
Mind you I'm still hoping for a victory over the Highlanders that'll give us population centers close enough to the minors to defend them.
The highlanders are barely holding against the weather and we outnumber them, alongside siege tech and armored troops they don't know how to deal with so it should be doable.
it'll make the admin problem worse, but that's better than a military problem.
Personally I'm hoping the highlanders crumple into internal woes rather than conquest or collapse. That'd be largely ideal for the short and mid-term.
They've probably seen enough that they could given pointers to a society with their own access to ores to assist in reverse engineering much of the process.
It's the lords fault for not providing sufficient direction for it to have got that far. Even if the subject is a dipshit, their superior shouldn't abandon them until such point as the subject is in open defiance of the law and have thus broken their obligation. The superior will likely be strongly criticized even then if they were not visibly attempting to correct the situation first.
So basically no go, we can't let it go unless they rebel first, and then we'd be obligated by justice to punish them for it(and reconquer them again)
They're currently on a path to drop branches like crazy.
Hmm, with the burnouts I think we'd also see faster growth cycles?
Wouldn't they just end up using coal? our neighbors are all pretty big geographically, i would imagine they'd have a source of coal somewhere within each of them, right? Or am i underestimating the rarity of coal and/or the difficulty in mining and using it?
Coal is not that hard to get, relatively common in fact, and any metalworking civilization would figure out that it burns pretty fast.
...but the trick is that they'd be looking in the wrong places unless they're already working Iron or actually looking for limestone. Gold, Silver, Copper and Tin are mostly found in igneous rock, so prospecting in those areas would not give you any coal at all.
In fairness, even if they figure out iron, all the other issues still exist. Access to fuel, ore, experience and we still have a chance of becoming the single biggest state if we solve the admin issues and north/south divide.
The secret getting out merely equalizes the field again. But if we can vassalize then integrate the HK, we still end up top dog as the HK have roads galore and are still fortified.
Besides, we have the next big game changer already in the works thanks to the Heavens Hawks. Another few turns should be enough for them to start fielding real cavalry and maybe even horse archers, which is a whole new level of pain.
Our longships give us some incredible strategic mobility as well. Basically, if there is a river nearby, we can strike at it. Which is a strategic nightmare to defend against.
Add our trade networks that are beyond the lowlanders reach and we can keep financing ourselves reasonably well. Including churning out Companies to do war on our behalf while we build up our territory. I know veekie doesn't like them, but professional armies do have a lot of advantages in this situation. The action economy alone means that we can do other stuff as long as we can keep the mercenaries paid.
Put simply, losing the iron monopoly would suck, but it's not the end of the world.
Noting that I recommended a short term cap of TWO mercenary companies, and a mid term cap of THREE. We're at ONE, so we can(and really should) form an additional company if we want to be able to hold onto our provinces.
However, losing the iron monopoly and the lowlands at the same time can be catastrophic. Any iron wielding civilization with access to floodplains soil is going to rapidly expand and consume their neighbors.
Remember the Highlanders attacking us? This is why. The first ironworking civilization to claim the lowlands will rule it by dint of being able to roll everyone else before they can finish research.
Sorry for the late reply. The comment about the Odyssey was distinct from my statements in regards to the use of winds and currents. Your opinion in regards to the latter is identical to that stated by myself.
My opinion that he was sent off into uncharted lands so that he can go off to invented countries remains. However, I would argue that the use of maps would negate the lack of familiarity for people rich enough to own a boat and hire men to man it. I suppose, though, that in the Late Bronze Age maps might not be entirely common and worthy navigators difficult to press-gang.
Accurate charts of sea currents and weather is...difficult in the bronze age. A lot of it is not particularly codified, mostly because people are terrible at tracking distances at sea.
Huh. During their heyday the Hat were much larger then I thought they were then.
Not quite. Everything indicates that the Trelli are a breakaway trade post, rather than a far flung province. I mean, Greenshore isn't exactly representative of Ymaryn geographical extent.
Okay, I realize that people have strong opinions about what to do next, but we have to do one thing. Aquaducts in the Stallions territory. Here's my thought: The Stallions have been planting forests in the steppes. Great! Except while it will be wetter, it might not be wet enough. More, what happens the next time there's a drought? The whole damn steppe forest becomes a tinderbox, that's what!
1) Aqueduct in the north is currently an explicitly terrible idea(really, if you want one, putting them in the Eastern Hills or Southeastern Hills which are dry as hell makes more sense), as we cannot sustain another city at present.
2) Sacred Forest project eliminates the risk of forest fires, due to extensive harvesting of deadfall and regularly performed controlled burns.
We are fighting the HK directly and the Vassals are fighting the Swamp People and probably the East Thunder Horse too. We can send the Vassal the support of the Red Banner, especially if we are mopping up the HK. E: I think that will be sufficient for a very brief moment, especially if we are on Offense Policy.
I'm mostly okay with integrating the Stallions, the Econ and Martial will be nice. I'd like the Palace started and finished ASAP too.
As to the forming a new merc company, the hardliners would migrate from the Stallions to the New Mercs and would basically have no moderation so I would expect problems.
Moving the hardliners to a mercenary band is actually helpful. We can culturally assimilate a mercenary band more easily than a March, simply by parking it in Valleyhome for 3 generations to normalize them.
Well, we'd be deploying them a lot so I'm not sure whether we'd have that luxury, but a culturally divergent mercenary band is a much smaller problem.
the disease might actually have died out by now, or can't survive in the envrioment created by our forest collapsing. As for the tinder issue, he said it's starting to pick up but it might not be at the point where it's super dangerous yet. We also manage the draining so it's possible the forest would end up too waterlogged to burn.
basically it's a complex system with a lot of things that could go wrong, and some things in ways that mitigate or change each others fallout.
Actually, not quite on the disease. Normally the forest canker fungus dies off
along with the forest, but since we're keeping the forest alive and regularly burning out the worst hit patches, the disease sticks around.
Tinder wise, it's worse than it sounds, the forest is growing at a density greater than natural forests because we harvest the deadfall heavily for our increasing charcoal demands, and because we actually fertilize the soil.
And then there's the animal biome. By now, most large predators in the forests are deliberately adapted to human presence. Predators which target people are going to be picked off by hunters, and generally underpopulated compared to the prey animals we harvest.
Overall if we collapse to the point where we can't sustain the Sacred Forest, it's going to be spectacular while it rebalances.
My whole point is we have no reason to do either immediately. I get that mercenary companies have advantages, but we don't need those advantages right now. Why not just leave it as martial until we actually have an immediate reason to make a company?
Because red martial(such as that caused by integrating the Stallions), will cause things like "your army went out to attack someone on it's own" when our stability drops.
Which would be a MAJOR problem now that we've stuck our dick into the lowland clusterfuck, because that's a good way to overstretch admin or lose martial.
Integrating the Stallions and then immediately budding off a Mercenary Company helps in that we can lend aid without committing more actions.
Probably a chariot or cavalry band though.
