Aside from that though I'll dust off a point I made a bit ago, I think a March or Colony would act pretty much the same in the beginning. Lots of fortifying, lots of defensive wars, lots of forests if we can get them to do it.
I think my choice of a Colony over March is in the long term since I see turning them into a Colony as tempering their more martial and grudge holding cultural aspects. I think it will take a very long time to change those traits, even with Influence(which is one of the most awesome actions ever), so with a March we might start seeing grudge based CB wars which are what the Lowlands Clusterfuck ran on for most of it's history.
I hope my logic is making sense, I did just wake up.
Reminder however, that Colonies are allowed to have their own provinces. Converting PTSD-chan to a Colony basically means that they'd start growing in land area over time, which means additional work and regular integration of excess 'rear' provinces is needed to keep them culturally unified.
Hmm interesting thought! I am all for getting meditative traditions, I mean we probably already have some form but formalizing it would be cool.
I am not so sure on reducing the potency of the gasses as more people breathe them in, but I ain't quite a chemist so I ain't sure. I mean it makes sense but I feel the floor space limit is a better point for saying why they were limited though. Oh! If we want a good example of the inside of the cave's effects on people we can look at one of the updates near the beginning, though I sadly can't remember it's name.
I also want to build temples at the cool holy sites because, holy shit, some of them are awesome.
I don't think it's anything to do with gases. Our priests have been in those caves, and other than low moisture and potentially depressed oxygen levels if you build fires in them, the biggest thing is the sound effects.
And the sound effects is the magic of it.
Echo chambers amplify the impact of chanting, with unsteady light sources producing shadows causing the mind to wander and enter a suggestible trance state.
What would be a good way of avoiding the commodities fraud?
We have several achieveable ones:
-State warehouses linked to the tally-clerks. A sufficiently large central warehouse allows you to pull goods off the market when they are cheap, and refuse to buy when they are costly, allowing the state to exert it's own market leverage to normalize supply and demand. This is how the Storehouse helps incidentally, a small one lets us normalize gold, silver and iron prices, a large one can extend it to grain.
--This is also vulnerable to truly large agents or stock market panics, but we're still in the Palace Economy era, so no individual trader has enough supply to flood or depress the market longer than the Palace can counter it.
-Static Contracted rates. Set up a 10 year contract with suppliers, the government will buy a fixed amount of supply, or sell a fixed amount of supply at a fixed rate determined at the start of the contract, to be renegotiated at the end of the term. The supplier gets a guaranteed market, though not as profitable as speculative trading, the government gets stable prices. The drawback is that invariably you're eating some inefficiencies here, somebody is going to end up with more or less than they need and that goes on the open market.
-Get in on the game. The government has the advantage of speculative trading in that they have better couriers, deeper pockets and better prevailing condition(i.e. weather, plague) prediction than any merchant family, and can thus compete with them head on in such trading if they have the state warehouses to handle such. Drawback is that...you're incentivizing the state and the merchants to keep secrets from each other. That's not healthy.
I'm still kinda impressed by the sheer amount of ass whooping the RB seem to be able to unload. They've been instrumental in three massive turn arounds/victories.
Lets assess them in terms of various qualities.
The Red Banner are a primarily elite heavy infantry force, backed by compound archers with cavalry scouts. They do not pack the heavy chariot archer complements common in the Northern force, in favor of a more all-terrain solution
-Tactical Mobility
--Low. It's a heavy infantry force. It's not moving anywhere fast, especially with the chariot based elites of the lowlands.
-Strategic Mobility
--High. Mercenary company means that they bring their own logistics tail with them, supplying off the local area with purchase or plunder as necessary. Still not as good as Nomads though.
-Defense
--Very High. Iron scale mail and shieldwalls makes them functionally unstoppable to lowlander forces, their ranged weapons lack the penetration, their yeomen/levies/freemen warriors with stone, bone and wood spears can't get through, so it's down to the bronze wielding elite chariots, particularly with maces to actually do damage...and they're outnumbered.
-Offense
--Very High. Volley fire Iron arrows with our bows are going to give us two extremely deadly waves of shock fire, punching through all but their bronze armored elites, before they hit us, and we can maintain arching fire on their back ranks while their front are stuck in.
-Skill
--High. Possibly not as high as their warrior elite castes with warrior elite cultural traits backing them, but we recruit only the best of the best and this is a full army of what's to them, elites.
I'm remind you that even with 2 main province war missions and one main war mission from hatvalley, the Highlanders were pushing Hatvalley back through their defensive lines a couple turns ago, and then when we sent the red banner to teh west they even started to break through in the east; we were applying enough pressure to push for concessions, but we certainly weren't doing well enough to justify "oh a secondary war mission is enough to stop everything", in my opinion. Especially since against the TH and Swamp folk, our marches can't help, so its just our missions, the red banner, and our iron-less, likely chariot archer-less, much less organized, lowlander vassal fighting. Especially given what AN has said about widespread iron usage completely changing warfare, i have to assume that everyone else's armies arejust way bigger, or have more effort invested in them, or they go all in on war missions, but whatever it is, we're not dominating as much as you and others (and myself sometimes) like to claim
You forgot that they have something like 4 thousand years of war and martial traits. All we have is Honorable Death, We Have Reserves and Best of the Best, the latter two of which don't even affect the combat so much as the buildup to it.
For the highlanders in particular, they also likely have way more province actions to throw at us, in exchange for being less centralized.
But yeah, one of these days someone else is going to figure out iron, or get a large enough supply of bronze to equip entire armies with it, and we're going to be in a rude awakening...
Noting that it had been mentioned that decentralized states have more difficulty leveraging all their provinces at once.
Huh...you know, on the subject of siege warfare, i'm a little surprised we didn't get an action to build more siege hammers; they're expensive enough for even a handful to qualify as a full action, and they're powerful enough they should count as a proper unit especially since they would likely "come with" some heavy infantry for the initial assault once the gate goes down...
@Academia Nut while i doubt we'd take it in the near future, is that something we'd be able to do at some point? Also, is the Hammer that broke Xoh open part of hte Red Banner, or part of our main forces, and is it actually being deployed at all? ...in particular did the Highland kingdom see it enough to have an idea what it is and how it works?
I'm...not.
Battering rams are generally assembled on site, you can't bring the full ram-and-shed contraption to a target with any kind of speed.
All you need to make them is to have the ram heads premade from iron and bronze, carted down along the supply train, then assemble them on site.
That folds right into Expand Army's base cost with Honor of Elites.
I can't think of any reason as to why the HK would have seen our battering ram, since Ork King used it on the Xoh, which is on the opposite side of the Lowlands, and the fact that we didn't siege any of the HK lands, making it a pointless decision to send it down there.
I can't think of any reason for our provinces to use it against the HK, and I also don't see any reason for us to use it in our current war, since I'm pretty sure the Swamp Folk don't have a True City and the TH have their cities outside of our logistical reach.
I don't think anyone alive who isn't Ymaryn had actually seen the ram itself.
What they saw was:
-Ymaryn moves a hut up to the Xohyr gate.
-There is the sound of thunderclaps, over and over, before the gates fell down.
-Ymaryn move the hut away and the warriors go in.
To the Xohyr survivors of the sacking, it's basically Jericho.
Hey, we didn't actually destroy the wall, did we? Could we claim it and get the per-turn diplomacy bonus? Or tear it down and honorably inter the skulls?
@Academia Nut?
It's a brick wall with skulls baked in. A sufficiently large fire(like a burning city) would probably shatter a lot of it.
I agree that people holding shields above their comrades heads while they're swinging a wooden trunk is possible, and that if the shields are covered with bronze it would be difficult to set the people below on fire by pouring oil and melted pitch onto them then throwing down torches.
Actually, the mechanical issue is much harder than that. A hand carried ram brings maybe a quarter to a fifth less force than the Siege Shed mounted hammer. This is because the shed lets you suspend the ram's weight itself, supported by the shed, allowing you to add the full muscle power of every rammer to the ram's motion, whereas the hand ram wastes most of the energy in vertical wobble.
And of course there is no gaps from which an attack can get through the roof.
Ha. Yum yum.
You keep providing excellent picks Malevolo! You don't disappoint!
I dunno about the Trelli. Recalling veekie's Prevailing Winds Effortpost I think the Trelli should be getting moist air from the Not!Black Sea and Not!Mediterranean. They might go bust, but I don't think from arable land issues.
The Xoh is feasible we just have to occupy the Thunder Horse and Swamp People for long enough, and then when they come back we've basically preformed necromancy. I figure you'd like that you fuzzy abomination.
Metal Forger is a toss up.
That TS thing may actually be doable. I dunno though.
Trelli should be fine water wise. Their position makes the weather equally moist no matter which way the wind is coming from...but the storms fucking with trade probably did a good number on them.
