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Paths of Civilization

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ctulhuslp said:
You forgot part of the sentence here.
And frankly, "we have a cap on how rich one can be" sounds like the kind of law which exists only on paper, because those in power are going to want power, and this law limits them. You cannot expect lions to support vegetarian laws or something along those lines.
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We have. They got around it by turning interpersonal connections into the 'real' currency at higher levels.
This means that nobody else can break into the patrician games without the favor network, but in turn also means that it is difficult for any given patrician to raise an army on their own, because they'd need to network.

...and if you have a large portion of your ruling caste pool resources to wage war, that's a dramatically different problem from personal armies.
ctulhuslp said:
Then they have no incentive to fight. Either you make it worth their time (making them want war), or you force them to serve like in (early) modern
militaries, which is about as easy to implement as progressive taxation and land value tax.

Like, you seem to think we can implement Roman army without incentive to serve. That dog aint gonna bark: you either give them sufficient incentive to serve (at which point they want war), or you don't and hope you can enforce the service, which is very doubtful.
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They're paid in food and coin. It'd have to exceed their pay for menial labor, but that's not very hard.
ctulhuslp said:
Given that you seem to be angling for a numerous army of them, more than enough. Otherwise we would still have aristocratic officer corps, and yet, as history proves, poor can advance quite high in ranks.
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Officer corps are still aristocratic yes, but again as history proves, the poor advancing via the military track is the exception, not the rule.

The typical crossbowman line infantry does not get any opportunities to demonstrate excellence tactical judgement or leadership ability. To demonstrate such would mean they are not excelling as a crossbowman. So they stay as a crossbowman.
ctulhuslp said:
There is no reason for us, players, to reassign land. For patricians, there is: greed/
Besides, what do you think bringing their power to 0 means? Rainbows and ponies? Nope, it means removing their ability to resist taking their land, because the only reason it is not take is that they are powerful and can protect themselves. Remove this ability, and they are done for.

And again, the more law limits those in power, the less likely it is to be followed. So I imagine province governors are, on paper (parchment?) indeed only hold lands as a part of state title, sure. On paper. In practice, reassignment of land to those "better able to use it" (read: friends, family, those who bribed him, for favours) is going to happen at least.
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Again, this is not true. Observe the Urban Poor who were at 0 and 1 previously. Everyone ignored them for the most part, but their quests made them powerful, and they climbed up the levels in fairly short order with a little state incentive. The Yeomen are the landholders. Patricians assigned to Yeomen level positions become Yeomen. Yeomen promoted to district level positions become Patricians. It's a gradual transition, and one which makes it difficult to keep them at 0, because they are a class of people who make a year's worth of money by working only half the year. Watch them convert military power to weavers, ashers, wineries and other industries which are CURRENTLY done in the cities, but far more efficiently done in the rural areas with the time freed up.

The thing here is that while the governor can reassign lands to demonstrate favoritism, it's not going to stay that way. The land allotments are fixed sizes and divisions, which can be issued to certain levels of competency.

You could reassign the Baron of Bupkus Village to Count of Nowhere Town, but the new Count is going to see Bupkus Village assigned to someone else, not added to his personal wealth and power.

This is the whole point of the way we rigged it. Hoarding favors and connections doesn't allow you to really take over the government outside of official channels. If they want to deploy an army, then they're going to be using said favors and connections, demonstrating they have the resources to be allocated, then bringing it to their superior to get it signed off...at which point if they had this much power gathered up in the form of favors and usable(in that the people who owe them favors actually go through with it)....then they can pressure the King into authorizing it anyways.
 
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Shard said:
Why did people not build roads? Sigh. One of Rome's reasons for success was roads.
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There is no magical "build roads" button where we get to choose between building roads and not, independent of everything else. Building more roads means we are passing on something else.

And what would you have use skip? Because if we are doing something inefficient, and doing it systematically, it would be valuable to recognize and correct. So if you have ideas, please voice them. But if you don't, then you are basically saying "Why did people not magically use extra actions we don't have? Sigh."
 
Revote

[X] [Reform] Begin Myranyn Reforms Event Chain
[X] [Reform] Begin Both (-1 Stability, Both Events Started, ???)

Approval voting. Myranyn must start, idc about the other. Nice if it does also

[X] [Iron] Upgrade Iron Blooded to Steel Blooded

I note that the combo of Extra Social value & getting a Social Value, will immediately put it into a permanent slot.
And proc PiA again.
 
Dutch said:
Keep in mind another issue of the Marian reforms.

Retirement.
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That portion is not in ours if you look at the update, because settling soldiers on land is a thing we've never done, and distributing land in general is a thing we don't want to do.

No doubt this would make Raise Army more costly since we'd need to pay a little better than the market minimum for unskilled labor to get the poor to sign up in sufficient numbers.
 
PrimalShadow said:
There is no magical "build roads" button where we get to choose between building roads and not, independent of everything else. Building more roads means we are passing on something else.

And what would you have use skip? Because if we are doing something inefficient, and doing it systematically, it would be valuable to recognize and correct. So if you have ideas, please voice them. But if you don't, then you are basically saying "Why did people not magically use extra actions we don't have? Sigh."
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[Infrastructure] Policy instead of [Defence] policy. More policies would be good.
 
Shard said:
[Infrastructure] Policy instead of [Defence] policy.
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Okay. That is an interesting suggestion, and I wouldn't be averse to it. But you realize that wouldn't have actually helped with roads, right? Roads are something that Infrastructure policy can build in theory, but in practice it spends its spare time building aqueducts and baths all over the place instead. That and GPs.
 
So we just need to get like ten passive infrastructure policies and they'll have built everything in a turn or two. Piece of cake.
 
veekie said:
That portion is not in ours if you look at the update, because settling soldiers on land is a thing we've never done, and distributing land in general is a thing we don't want to do.

No doubt this would make Raise Army more costly since we'd need to pay a little better than the market minimum for unskilled labor to get the poor to sign up in sufficient numbers.
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Not really what I was getting at. The Yeomen have something to go back to at the end of their service. The Poor have not. They rely on the Patricians (whether or not they were their commanders) to offer them some form of retirement after their time in the army ends. Patricians in turn increase their political support among the poor because of this.

They wouldn't even need to distribute land. They can just influence the land management system in order for their former men to be awarded farmland at the expense of others.

You're right on the second part. Aside from the grain subsidies, the new costs of the army were the largest expense of the Roman state. This strongly pushed them to conquer new lands so they could tax them to pay for the army.
 
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Dutch said:
Not really what I was getting at. The Yeomen have something to go back to at the end of their service. The Poor have not. They rely on the patricians (whether or not they were their commanders) to offer them some form of retirement after their time in the army ends. Patricians in turn increase their political support among the poor because of this.

They wouldn't even need to distribute land. They can just influence the land management system in order for their former men to be awarded farmland at the expense of others.

You're right on the second part. Aside from the grain subsidies, the new costs of the army were the largest expense of the Roman state. This strongly pushed them to conquer new lands so they could tax them to pay for the army.
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Currently I think the Dole covers the retirement plan element. It is indeed hideously expensive, but if you don't grant land you'd need some form of pension system, social services support, training in trades to retire into(which would annoy the guilds), to keep the retired soldiers in line or you'd have some trouble.

Not ALL of them of course, but some.
 
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Hmm, I think... if the Urban army vote wins, the event chain:

1. Manufacture weapons somehow?
2. Gymasiums >?
3. Main Raise Army

I assume the new Urban army will be like a Mercenary band
 
10ebbor10 said:
My guess would be getting more Baths, Econ and cities.
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Why would any of those be helpful for Urban Poor Armies?

Baths are things the Urban Poor might want, but they have nothing to do with organizing them into an army.
Econ is obviously something we need to not starve, but it doesn't actually matter much to the Urban Poor; they they get the Dole, and don't necessarily care about how the rest of the polity pays for it.
More cities would obviously give us a larger population of Urban Poor to draw from, but that doesn't seem like it should be a concern in actually implementing the policy to start with. Not to mention, we've got a LOT of cities already - it is close to what all of our neighbors have combined.
 
One can argue that the [Infrastructure] Policy is also very efficient in that it's literally a Secondary Action all by itself. The projects themselves are somewhat lackluster, but are necessary for our civilization to develop further.

At least when we're not dying of Econ/Stab drain anyway.
 
Kiba said:
E: We may want to raise our LTE sufficiently high so that we don't have so many god damn cities to deal with.
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Cities are still a net positive for us.

Each city grants:
  • -2 Econ/turn
  • +1/2 Culture/turn
  • +1 Passive Policy
  • -1 Max Centralization
One Passive Policy is worth 2 econ at the very least with a city-support policy, and for a number of policies significantly more. So Cities should be considered a good thing, overall.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Why would any of those be helpful for Urban Poor Armies?

Baths are things the Urban Poor might want, but they have nothing to do with organizing them into an army.
Econ is obviously something we need to not starve, but it doesn't actually matter much to the Urban Poor; they they get the Dole, and don't necessarily care about how the rest of the polity pays for it.
More cities would obviously give us a larger population of Urban Poor to draw from, but that doesn't seem like it should be a concern in actually implementing the policy to start with. Not to mention, we've got a LOT of cities already - it is close to what all of our neighbors have combined.
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I'd guess we'd need to end the plague to get the necessary numbers of urban poor, build gyms in every city that lacks one to train them, and MAYBE support artisans to crank out the weapons needed.

Then a Raise Army at the end.
 
Shard said:
One can argue that the [Infrastructure] Policy is also very efficient in that it's literally a Secondary Action all by itself. The projects themselves are somewhat lackluster, but are necessary for our civilization to develop further.

At least when we're not dying of Econ/Stab drain anyway.
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Yeah, this is pretty much the consensus as far I understand it.
 
Shard said:
it's literally a Secondary Action all by itself
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Actually it's quite a bit more thanks to the doubling. A secondary is worth 3 progress whereas a policy is 2, but the policy doesn't need to pay for anything. A secondary is worth roughly 3 stat points, and usually each progress costs 2 stats, so that's 4 points of stats saved. Add those together and each policy is worth 2 secondaries.
veekie said:
I'd guess we'd need to end the plague to get the necessary numbers of urban poor, build gyms in every city that lacks one to train them, and MAYBE support artisans to crank out the weapons needed.

Then a Raise Army at the end.
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That sounds about right to me. We end the plague next turn via Infrastructure Policy finishing the quest so that's pretty nice.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Cities are still a net positive for us.

Each city grants:
  • -2 Econ/turn
  • +1/2 Culture/turn
  • +1 Passive Policy
  • -1 Max Centralization
One Passive Policy is worth 2 econ at the very least with a city-support policy, and for a number of policies significantly more. So Cities should be considered a good thing, overall.
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I was thinking of reducing the amount of cities we need to support so that we can survive.

When we have enough econ income, we can start making cities again.
 
Kiba said:
I was thinking of reducing the amount of cities we need to support so that we can survive.

When we have enough econ income, we can start making cities again.
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If the goal is merely "to survive", we should be able to handle that by using our PSN actions to Expand Economy and our Reaction to Enforce Justice. Combined with Balanced Policy getting us another main Expand Economy, we should be able to handle things. It just means we are cutting things far closer than I would like.

That said - I wouldn't be opposed to swapping two of our Forest Policies to City Support; that should take the edge off of things, at least.
 
I think that we are going to need to convert most of our cities to free cities if we want to be able to deal with their upkeep cost.

Each free city provides (over a city)-
+1 econ/turn
+1 centralization max
+1 culture/turn
+1 passive policy
-1 subordinate slot
 
Next turn, I advocate this vote:

[][Main] Enforce Justice
[][Secondary] Enforce Justice
[][Secondary] Enforce Justice x2
[][Secondary] Suppress Faction (Traders)
[][Secondary] Expand Economy
[][Guild] Efficient Charcoal Kilns
[][Guild] Efficient Charcoal Kilns x2

+3~4 Stability, -1 Stability (Triggerring -4 Econ from Western Ymaryn, I understand), -5 Culture +3 Econ, -4 Econ, -4 Wealth, -2 Tech, -6 Sustainable Forests used.
Total: +2~3 Stability, +4~9 Centralization, -5 Econ, -5 Culture, -4 Wealth, -2 Tech

Guild Mercantile is kind of a really bad economic system to be having now, what with all the [Guild] eating up Econ points in some manner or another.

There is quite a nice narrative here with these actions, in my opinion, of enforcing the law (3 Enforce Justice and Suppress Faction), and using that authority to force the traders and guilds into making the economy not implode (Expand Economy, Efficienct Charcoal Kilns x2).
 
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