Boy, that was an interesting night I slept through apparently.
So to sum up the arguments for Defense/Offense, and then split them into good(legit), speculation and bad(i.e. false) ones:
Offense
-Good
--A full mobilization of our provinces is more likely to convince the Khemtri that this fight isn't worth it.
--The King's poor Martial will make him less effective at raising and organizing armies even with the Excellent War Chief in field command.
-Speculation
--A full mobilization of our provinces will end this war rapidly.
--Defense Policy will prioritize Massive walls to cover 1-2 settlements rather than Significant Walls or Watchtowers over all of Hatvalley.
--If we hit them hard enough we can try to Terrify their Colony into submission.
--We'd be losing Martial from this fight, so Offense won't cause over-martial woes/we don't need to care about over-martial while at war.
-Bad
--The Royal army will be led by our poor Martial King <- Explicitly wrong, Word of AN has it that the army will be led by the Excellent Martial War Chief. That's his job.
--We will sit here and let them take the initiative <- Explicitly wrong. Players intend to send at least a Main War Mission, potentially a Double Main if Defense won.
--We cannot win with good walls <- Explicitly wrong. We've actually beaten Nomads on Defense before, though it was long ago. If you run into a lot of significant walls, then it simply makes taking the territory far too expensive.
--Defense policy means risk losing land <- Explicitly wrong. It just sets the build queue and reduces the risks of losing land on a failure.
--The Trelli Mercenaries can be easily bribed away from us because the Khemtri are richer. <- This is hard to believe, we can afford to double their pay indefinitely if we wanted.
--Walls and Towers won't be built in time for the war <- We already know Walls and Towers will be built by the mid turn. We've done this before.
--Defense Policy won't be able to protect farms, roads and mines. <- AN had mentioned that such defenses would be showing up soon if we built any walls. We already have the Mortar to make them affordable. And also Watchtowers DO protect them.
Defense
-Good
--Hatvalley lacks any towers or significant walls. Filling them in is strategically important.
--Population Explosion allows us to pay for the expenses of Defense, while reforming True Cities and triggering Explosion->Colony if it results in LTE loss.
-Speculation
--The Khemtri homeland is too far away to possibly hurt them bad enough to give up.
--We will push heavily into and take their colony's land on Offense leaving us with even more land to protect.
--Offense policy will strip our provinces of their garrisons to the Southern front. This is based on extrapolation only.
--Defense policy is needed to reinforce our backrow against Hero Bullshit if we call up all the dudes. This has historically happened once, but it was kind of freakish events
--Offense policy will generate excess martial once all our dudes are committed, giving us red martial problems.
-Bad
--We need Defense Policy to fortify our other fronts <- Explicitly wrong, since the only exposed front to anything is Hatvalley
--Offense Policy will corrupt our culture <- We'd need to commit a fair chunk more than just a Policy for this.
--Offense Policy will send out crappy provincial war chiefs instead of using the Excellent Martial Royal War Chief <- This guy is going out there regardless.
So you know, pretty crappy arguments all around
Both sides have the about same number of objectively true and reasonable speculations, and then the rest was padded out BOTH WAYS with bullshit.
I may have misused the name a bit, but mandala is intended to be the next step from palace. Another term was thinking was three spheres.
The idea is that there are multiple centers, each with their own subsidiary orbits, with the capital being the primary center.
Three Spheres made me think Three Spheres Catacalysm
Wouldn't a better description be Orbital?
The King as Sun.
The Provinces/Subordinate States as Planets.
The Settlements as Moons.
The Nomads being the goddamned Oort Cloud maybe
And in the Chinese model the government have been providing aid to farmers because revolt of 5-20k strong aren't fun to deal with. Chinese merchants on the other hand just stockpile and rise the price 10x.
So i viewed manor as model steps closer to the individual provinces' treasury that they manage.
Early European economy model and early Chinese economy model translate poorly.
The big difference between the Chinese political/economic model and the European one is that the State has more teeth and overall control over local administrators.
Why would he be willing and able to help? In a feudal system the upper levels of the priesthood came from the same social strata as the nobility. Thus the priest's capacity to help would be inversely proportional to his power to do so.
Recall that our priesthood isn't drawn as heavily from the nobility, and preferentially picks from the outcasts, nerds and other weirdos.
Though, wasn't that a consequence of the European nobility routinely using the priesthood to vent their non-inheriting heirs?
@veekie you might be asleep but at least from my skimming you seemed to be the centerpoint for arguing for defensive policy, so id like to point out:
Hatvalley has at least 2 significant walls already, maybe more from what others have said about AN saying that their settlements already had walls fromthe Hatathyn. I think AN just forgot to update the wall listing, since the number of settlements didn't change either. Combined with our defense policy, and the possibility that when we change economic systems we'll have an extra policy we can set to defensive if needed, and i think we'll be good on that front.
Not that it matters right now, but in that case AN needs to do some rejiggering of wall levels!
That said the Khemtri are liable to be somewhat annoyed at EVERY podunk settlement having some walls
@Academia Nut
Effectively, are standard arms and armors still provided by the state? Are bows and new crossbows considered standard issues?
Are arrows and bolts standardized shape and weight?
Do we have universal weight measurement?
Didn't see AN answer this, but we know from before:
-The state provides full basic equipment for warriors and yeomen on 'permanent loan'(i.e. they keep it, they use it, they maintain it but technically it belongs to the state).
-Due to Best of the Best, the warriors often privately pay the difference to upgrade their equipment or to purchase additional equipment.
-An explicit example of this is that there is some kind of minor competition for yeomen paying with excess grain income to have their daggers reforged bigger and longer, to the point that they're becoming proto-swords.
A unit doesn't lose veterancy benefits with no veterans on the front lines. Some of them stick around as trainers and leaders.
Also, AFAIK our yeoman are only our archer contingent. Charioteers and frontliners are permanent military. I think skirmishers are too, but they could be a lowly-trained role suitable for yeoman (since they were originally used for training.)
We have Blackbirds as well, they're archers.
Facing ninjas in forested hills is fun for us.
Our military lineup is:
-Massed Yeomen Shieldwall led by Full time Spearmen
-Massed Yeomen Archers led by Full time Archers
-Elite Blackbird Squads. Not used in formation, but used to strategically take out enemy leadership by sniping, spying on enemy positions and generally making their lives hell.
-Elite chariot warrior and chariot archer squads. Not significant in this fight, wrong terrain
-Auxillary Carrion Eaters mixed with every units as comissar/medics
-Auxillary light cavalry scouts and messengers
However, Yeomen only counts for 5 Martial in all. This is not reflective of their numbers, but of relative impact.
Why in the world is size winning for crossbows? If we want them to have an impact in this war we need to be able to either make lots of them or have the ones we do make count for something. +1 size isn't going to turn them into really serious siege engines and sticking them on boats won't matter for this inland campaign. I'm pretty sure any other advancement is better??
The argument is that our primary archer complement comprises of farmer-yeomen, and no matter how fast we scale the crossbow production, they won't begin to be a significant force in time for this war, considering the Yeomen DO have the time to practice with bows and lack the means to maintain crossbows.
So practical gains isn't in rate of fire or volume of use, but in range and power. Our crossbows are currently more likely to be used by Blackbirds as sniping weapons(bigger or more powerful crossbow has a good chance of killing the target even through bronze armor) or on our walls and ships as defensive siege gear.
Massed crossbows really kicked off with greater urbanization, but for now our yeomen are going to render them irrelevant in quantity AND quality.
Why would we dedicate effort to tracking the goods entering and leaving a city through a thousand roads when we can just figure out who's doing it by tracking customers and word of mouth w/ our blackbirds?
Tracking at end users requires astronomically more blackbirds than we have. Tracking goods at traffic chokepoints is far easier than tracking by roads, and tracking by roads than tracking by end users/suppliers.
There's much fewer chokepoints than roads, and much fewer roads than users.
I am very doubtful the the Terrify action would be effective against one of the most powerful nations in the known world, especially one that we can't even invade the homeland of.
Terrify is an action meant for nations that believe that we are more powerful than them, and that are close enough that we could burn their entire nation to the ground.
Terrify could however, potentially work on their Colony, especially if it's far from royal support.
They have to attack Txolla (always laughing on this word because it sounds like a brazilian slang for dick) first, because they will be at their flank if they aren't dominated first.
It sort of looks like dick?
added 2 it
does this mean we still have catamarans and just updated our longboat sails?
why do we not have such sails/this boat type listed?
It happens below our visibility level, theres too many minor boat innovations to track, probably the same as why we don't track minor metalworking techniques(speaking of which, we should be able to produce anvils cheaply soon if we aren't already).
It's not like we have Clinker construction listed. Or Oar banks if we ever go with Triremes(I suspect we won't, with Triangle Sails and Catamarans the Trireme's approach of lots of rowing dudes is both more expensive AND slower)
It was pretty commonplace; people who refused to were the exception rather than the rule. Urbino's mercenary prince, Montefeltro, was actually quite renowned for not doing it.
Extra history did a 1shot on him that covered the issue briefly. Basically, most mercenaries are mostly loyal to coin and not dying. So if you look like you might lose, and swapping sides is safer and more... rewarding, they mostly would.
Generally this relies on how they assess the strategic situations. Mercenaries on strong walls generally were much harder to bribe, especially if they are further backed with state militaries.
Yeah, and that makes significant walls more important...but it makes the massive walls defensive policy is likely to make a little pointless outside of really important cities; after all, if they have enough of an advantage to siege down significant walls (that is, to set up, move slow siege equipment into play, keep the garrison of amazing archers with iron locked down, etc), then they have enough of an advantage to lock down (if not siege) the massvie walled city, and just take out all the stuff around it. We're a relatively urbanized civ, but we're still very reliant on the rural areas for stuff...especially food, stability, and so on, and especially outside of the capital province. If nothing else, if they've got enough of an advantage for massive walls to be important, they could certainly take one of the iron mines in hatvalley and get that upgrade, or the silver mines and crash our economy. If defensive policy would stick to making watchtowers, it wouldn't be too bad (though it would still make us use our king actions on war missions instead of trying to uptech to steel or supporting gulvalley), but as is its likely to spend at least half its actions on a set of massive walls that wont help much, and that will cost a significant chunk of econ and econ slots that we need, especially if the baby boom downgrades or goes away as the war gets worse and disease sets in.
Just an FYI, supply chains are a thing and siege camps were notoriously difficult to supply and maintain. Massive Walls can be the difference between being overrun quickly by armies with siegecraft, and being costly enough to break that they couldn't convince their warriors to be the first to die to break it.
Which means that they camp around the city, and then you call up your own army to either cut off their siege supply line(which is long and vulnerable), or to pincer them between the walls and your reinforcements.
Fun think:
Khemtri colony passes through the valley system.
Meaning there is a portage route from Khemtri to Hatvalley.
Methinks the Trelli aren't going to be very happy with whoever grabs both ends of the valley system!
