I also suggested formalizing our long present belief that cleanliness is how you avoid getting demons and decay is how you get it into a Purity spiritual value.
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
- Start date
- Original
Astra Stargazer
Comma Queen
- Location
- In a book, somewhere around here...
Eh, I think you're underestimating our culture's growth over the years. You're also assuming that cultural growth is more linear than it really ever has been.You know, between this, Veekie's suggestion that the plague itself might have come from a horse-based strain, and the fact that we have an open spiritual slot I feel like there is a potential lose-lose situation in the future (assuming we survive that long, of course)
Now pardon me for being pessimistic, but there are a few outcomes I can see happening:
-Civ dies from the plague, knowledge of where the plague came from is pointless.
-Civ survives from the plague, source of the plague is known and comes from horses: potential spiritual value / debilitating belief against using horses: gives us a heavily skewed and inflexible army composition
-Civ survives from the plague, source of the plague is unknown: potential spiritual value investing in superstition and away from Philosopher Kings, seeing as proto-empiricism couldn't find the answer.
Additionally, I feel like people's suggestions that the Ymmri are 18th century in terms of urbanisation and bringing up making attenuated vaccines without the help of microscopes, precise thermometers and volumetric measurements is a bit... frustrating. I know we like to stroke our egos and suggest that we created a "super-civ" that is centuries ahead of its time. Heck, it may be even true with regard to certain tech fields. However, through these tech advances we've also inadvertently caused our culture to develop a bit haphazardly. While this may be a bit of a hyperbole, sometimes I feel like we are looking at what giving an Iron-age civilisation (with their respective morals, norms, and culture) bits and pieces of advanced technology will do. While some good may come from it, there are also a slew of problems such as our relative ineptitude at espionage (why look outside when we clearly have the best tech?), the persistence of inter-clan violence (having been supplanted somewhat by the different social classes now, but in a way it's become just another extension of the clan violence), and the effects of a (relatively) sprawling empire (we have the people and power to take it, but we don't yet have the communication technology to maintain it, it seems).
Would these problems arise if we didn't focus on tech and agriculture? Maybe. There would likely be some similar problems, along with other ones as well, but I just wanted to point out that just because we gave cavemen steel tools and guns, it does not mean that they will somehow magically adopt Enlightenment/Modernist/Post-modernist Era thinking. That takes centuries/millenia of struggles and conflict (like this plague right now!) to cultivate.
TL;DR: Ymmri is still an Iron-Age Civ, don't expect us to leap ahead on the whole just because we have a few anachronistic techs.
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Let me be a little more optimistic and suggest that the trait might evolve toward a stance of humility. Something along the lines of "the truly wise know that they must admit when they do not know".
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
That takes centuries/millenia of struggles and conflict (like this plague right now!
Hey y'all, AN just insightful'd this...New social value:
Plague OCD.
Any member of the People who coughs, sniffles, or feels even slightly under the weather immediately places themselves under voluntary quarantine
- Pronouns
- He/Him
-1 What wealth generating actions, if any, will be valid to use next turn? What about the wealth generation policy?
-2 Thunder Speakers and Horse only had the base main action last turn, but this turn they suddenly have 2 main actions. Is that supposed to be a hint that they're lying to us about what they're doing, or do they + Txolla get to do something like our old "double main + secondary" thing?
-3 What level is the megaproject version of the ironworks worth, for things like the mass levy policy?
-4 Shouldn't we have gotten the Free City and maybe Mercenary legacies, with none of our neighbors urbanized enough for the first, and with the trelli newly dead for the latter?
-5 Does pilgrimage dominance provide wealth like the other trade goods? I'd been under the impression that it functioned as a luxury good for that calculation, and if so then we'd still be at +4 for luxury income. Of course, you've made several system changes since i remember that being the case, and of course trade income isn't active right now andthe situation will be much different by the time it is, so its not all that important right now
-6 This is really minor, but out of curiosity and my preference to include that info in the EP tracker, which of our provinces is the gold mine in? (Plus it might be relevant when it comes to parts of the civ breaking off...)
1. Depends on how this turn develops
2. Probably a mistake on my part, but I like that idea, and it may be something of a moot point going forward anyway
3. The MP version is Level 1. The hardest part of the first iteration was getting everything together and in one place for the first time
4. Yes, you got the Free City and Mercenary Legacies, I just haven't distributed them yet
5. Pilgrimage functions as a luxury good right now, but I may change it.
6. Gold mine is in Hatvalley
The religious fanatics don't
Nope! Close, but this plague could have been much worse, especially if you hadn't invested so much in public health.
Core will keep it, and Amber Road will keep enough that maintaining it would be an early project. With a temple and a library for the purposes of understanding the new forests they live near, they have that opportunity.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Geeze.
1. The Black Death wiped out approximately a third of Europe's population (number varies, but that's a good one to go for) either directly or through the famines and other things that came as a result of it.
How depopulated can we expect our region of not Mediterranean to be by the end of this one?
2. In the sense of the name of the plague (horseman's plague) is it called that because it was spread accidentally by horsemen, horsemen seem to get it more or something else?
I'm trying to see if I can guess where it originated from, my current bet is the Trelli, but I could be wrong.
3. Is memento mori artwork starting up especially since we have so much culture and mysticism?
Bet we end up with a Yamarin version of the Decameron.
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@Academia Nut
Can we get a preview of the new Academy action? You know, as something to hold onto in the coming phases.
Can we get a preview of the new Academy action? You know, as something to hold onto in the coming phases.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmmmm.... I've been thinking. This horseman's plague shares similarities with Y. Pestis pneumonic and septisemic plagues(the other two variations of the bubonic plague) and tuberculosis with a smattering of necrotizing faceitis. Thinking about the rural reservoir problems and the plague name I'm wondering if it might be coming from horse ticks.
Charcoalers were among the first case, and in our cities one of the few animals let inside are horses to haul fuel for charcoal manufacturing. Perhaps they were bitten by horse ticks. I'm not sure what horse ticks can spread normally.
Charcoalers were among the first case, and in our cities one of the few animals let inside are horses to haul fuel for charcoal manufacturing. Perhaps they were bitten by horse ticks. I'm not sure what horse ticks can spread normally.
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
I vote Study Health@Academia Nut
Can we get a preview of the new Academy action? You know, as something to hold onto in the coming phases.
I can't speak to the urbanization level (some people seem to be saying that's based on WoAN?), but let me see if I can explain why I feel that developing Sacred Warding further isn't completely bonkers. Specifically, I don't think attenuated vaccines are the likely path forward. (I don't think any kind of vaccine or inoculation is *likely*, but inactivated is much less unlikely than attenuated imo.)
The People have some notion that being exposed to lesser demons confers protection from similar, greater ones, and they have extensive records of the development of the Sacred Warding. It would be surprising to me if *nobody* in the national government suggested looking for weaker versions of the current plague.
If they start looking, one of the things they might find (depending on how good their notes are) is that people infected by eventual survivors are themselves more likely to survive.
That by itself is at least *something*, and could result in a small-scale equivalent of a somewhat attenuated inoculation.
However, @veekie has pointed out a couple major problems with using this as an inoculation strategy. One is that you need to infect people off of live, currently ill patients, so you better be damn sure which ones are carrying the lesser strain(s). The other is that TB (which AN may have based the plague off of) can go dormant for long periods and look a lot like it's been beaten unless you're using microscopes and bacterial cultures. This would mean that some (most?) of the people we use as inoculators will actually just straight up be spreading the plague more.
(Aside: maybe if we're SUPER CALLOUS, once we realize the immunity doesn't always take hold we'll learn to attempt to deliberately re-infect 'survivors' multiple times to check if they're *really* immune. Yikes.)
Getting around those issues is where a Hero Mystic might come into play with (what we today would call) an inactivated inoculation rather than an attenuated one. The necessary insight is the idea that we might be able to weaken the demons infecting the blood by various alchemical means. Between heating to various degrees for various lengths of time, desiccation to various degrees for various lengths of time, application of various chemicals in various concentrations for various lengths of time, and sundry combinations of the above, we'd be relying on luck plus a lot of volunteers to hit on a way to treat infected blood juuuuust right.
To be clear, I don't think this is likely. More standard approaches (maintain quarantine, kill the reservoir, let the plague burn out) are probably what will *actually* happen. But it's at least *possible*, and I'm holding out hope.
- Location
- Illinois
Huh, so would they take the plague as a sign that baths are godly, since our cities are literally the only place right now that is surviving the disease, or would they assume that changing our sanitation as we did brought the plagues?The religious fanatics don't
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Potential diseases of interest:
Anaplasmosis: "In horses, clinical signs of anaplasmosis usually appear 10-45 days. Fever is typically accompanied by limb swelling, and the appearance of small hemorrhages on the mucous membranes of the nose, mouth, eyes and/or vulva. Much less commonly, signs of incoordination, muscle inflammation or digestive tract pain may be observed." (Ticks and horses: what diseases affect my horse? : Horse : University of Minnesota Extension)
From Zoonotic diseases: Horses to humans:
Glanders: has cutaneous and pulmonary forms that are usually fatal to both horses and humans. Use of a mask is commonly overlooked by practitioners examining horses presenting with a cough and an elevated temperature...
Anthrax: ...local carbuncles and pustules in humans from direct lesion contact... pneumonia from inhalation of the infectious agent. ... Do not perform a postmortem examination of suspected anthrax cases as opening the body and exposing the organism to oxygen will cause spore formation. These spores are then released into the air, which significantly increases exposure potential.
Hendra virus infection in horses produces an initial respiratory infection and can progress to neurologic signs and total systemic failure. These clinical signs are mirrored in human Hendra infection. The three cases reported in humans to date include two veterinarians and a trainer, two of which died. Humans caring for infected horses are exposed to body fluids and excretions and can easily become infected. Severe flu-like symptoms quickly develop.
A final note from Horses | Healthy Pets Healthy People | CDC
The symptoms of anthrax depend on the type of infection and can take anywhere from 1 day to more than 2 months to appear
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Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Was it 'Much worse' for other people whose civilizations are not the Ymaryn?
- Location
- Illinois
@Academia Nut how bad exactly is this plague? Like, if you had to compare it to a historical plague, which one do you think would best fit in terms of how much damage it is going to do, both to us and the world in general?
- Location
- Reno Nv
Seems like we are the semi US when it was hit by the yellow fever, super mutated fever that happened in the trenches of a Great War that caused a lot of innovation to be made.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Currently the main comparison seems to be Spanish Flu.
Our Black Sea Colonies are at the limit of what they can provide and in WW's case, heavily exposed to the steppes.
The lowlands can easily feed a dozen cities and boost us to Chinas population levels if we actually started investing in the place.
And denial of that real estate means we can't bee overwhelmed with numbers. Which is our whole shtick already with the Myranyn Reforms. With more food, we can feed a whole lot more troops with which we can retake the Black Sea as they are also heavily exposed to our fleets once we build them. The return is true as well, but we have a drastic advantage in terms of infrastructure in our Core territory.
But ultimately, we want a diplomatic solution to reintegrate. Invasion just breeds resentment and destroys what we want. We are better served by appealing to mutual interest.
- Location
- Canada
If I remember correctly, we went and questioned, tested, and reaffirmed our smallpox inoculations on incoming Highland Kingdom refugees from way back when, and then we agreed that that was a pretty crappy thing to do and decided to just agree that empiricism was pretty good. Let's hope we don't get in another situation where we have to conduct these experiments for the sake of upholding our proto-empiricism. With that said however, I don't think there will be a necessary lack of volunteers: when we developed the smallpox vaccine it was hinted that many volunteered to be infected with smallpox just to be tested upon, so that the vaccine could be refined.
Inactivated inoculations however typically require adjuvants to artificially boost the immune response so that it can recognise the vaccine as a potential pathogen. Without this it is much less effective, and when we wonder how we get these adjuvants once again we get back into the issue of standardised measurements and optics being the limiting factors for scientific innovation. Like you said, it's not easy and not likely.
I think the best that we can hope for here is indeed the solidification of the social concept of hygiene (as suggested by Veekie) and preventative medicine. Technology is always great but without the infrastructure (i.e. societal drive and governmental centralisation in this case) to implement it, they remain selective and unable to affect a large enough population to be effective.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmmm... thinking on things, hard for me to say exactly. In some ways it's not as bad as say Justinian's Plague or the Spanish Flu of 1919, but in other ways it's significantly worse than either. Then again, outside the People it is basically collapsing large urban centers entirely, but the situation is just barely one where the protocols already in place are able to hold things off. If it were the Black Death there would be little to no hope, but as is the overall lethality is low enough that the People aren't sliding towards oblivion. Note that while statistically the lethality is low because there are a large number of cases that never reach the terminal stage, the vast majority of non-lethal cases are barely noticed and thus the disease seems much more deadly than it really is. It still has a ridiculously high spread rate and a high enough lethality that we're only talking 10-20% loss of population, but it's not Black Death or Columbian Exchange level apocalyptic.
Because there will be a massive rural labour crunch after this crisis for generations, which means that large numbers of iron tools to improve labour productivity will be in immense demand. The only place to get them will be the Ymaryn core.
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LuciDreamer
Maliciously Incompetent
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So there's hope for us yet!
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Evil always finds a way!"
And as the End Boss of this region it applies. From certain perspectives. For example the Trelli.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...Wait...you like the idea of the subordinates having something like the "double main + secondary" option, or you like the idea of them having been lying to us for generations about what they're doing? because one of those is much more worrying than the other D=
Also, while its similarly pretty minor and a bit of a moot point, but was it intentional that gulvalley didn't take its normal actions? Because i checked and Western wall took its normal actions during the turn we integrated them, instead of being reduced to their post-integration action count.
Interesting... What did the local population count look like before the plague, btw? Both the total area population, and the Ymaryn pop (i guess with that split into core + subordinates). Is the 10-20% population loss whats already happened, or what is projected to happen?
I'm confused as to your logic here, since the market wealth is cut off by the plague, and so aren't a solution any more than building more salterns would be...