Neo-Silk Road?
I am talking about the Salt Road to the East controlled by the nomad King.
Granted, it doesn't seem to make sense we will sell our salt to the nomad King to have him trade the salt with the Salt Sea people...It's weird.
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
- Start date
- Original
Neo-Silk Road?
I am talking about the Salt Road to the East controlled by the nomad King.
Granted, it doesn't seem to make sense we will sell our salt to the nomad King to have him trade the salt with the Salt Sea people...It's weird.
- Location
- Staring into the void
Even if we can't sell salt that way, we have multiple other trade goods that we could sell.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Salt road goes east, located in about OTL Silk Road, when/if it forms it will probably take a similar route. Good prep for it.
10- is IGNORE, not REVERSE.
I think 4, but I could be wrong.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. As far as I'm concerned, it means that we should deliberately take a different approach (not necessarily its complete opposite) to the one being proposed.
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Also, please don't shout at me in the future.
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Every province on a coast has one for instance. I'm not sure about every settlement, but I believe the next step is going to be about stacking Mains rather than about building many
We don't actually want cotton THAT much. Its valuable, but its basically vast amounts of unskilled labor to process the cotton bolls, even more half exile labor to make the black soil to rejuvenate the damage...well, overall it'd be one of the bigger forces towards social inequity for a long time.
Not that Opium is that much better, since milking poppy sap is also labor intensive in unskilled labor, but it's more...concentrated value, so you get more money out of the same amount of unskilled workers.
Dye is our biggest trade to the I suspect. Its the one trade good trying to imitate us is largely futile because we have farmed Tyrian Purple AND alchemical dyes which are very difficult to copy.
But opium is also a major trade good to warrior cultures. Having it at all is a massive boon to surgery development and survival.
Also hell the fuck yes. 10 means the priests say whatever the hell they want. Its not opposite land, it's Politically Biased Prophet.
Ignore and business as usual.
10 can mean things like "Suppress Monotheists" or "Ban slavery" or "Plant more trees" or "The gods say more observatories are awesome". This does not mean doing the opposite is a good thing.
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- Location
- Staring into the void
All the benefits of Center of Trade/Rule of Gold, with none of the drawbacks?
- Location
- Austria
Ookkkkkaay, thanks.
New tentative idea for next turn.
Variant 3: Address Connectivity, food supply to capital, government upgrade
Main - Dam - addresses connectivity with Lowlands and food supply to Valleyhome;
Main GH Expansion
Secondary GH Expansion
Secondary GH Expansion x2
Secondary Roads/Docks - addresses connectivity and, to a degree, disloyalty; (warning: wealth! for docks)
Secondary March Thunder Speakers (this one is mandatory IMO and addresses NOMADS)
Guild Main Plant Cotton
Guild Main Expand Snails
Guild Secondary Build Docks
This gives us government upgrade, Dam start (because it addresses a couple of urgent concerns - food and connectivity) and another anti-nomad step in march.
Why Snails? I am unsure about narrative of double main cotton. If they are safe, can change back to cotton for curious effects of Double Main and wealth boost.
@Academia Nut , what does our king think of mass planting cotton? What are the effects on labour demand? What are the effects on the soil? Can he predict any obvious troubles from the too much too fast planting of it?
Coastals maybe (although there should be some more settlements I guess by this point, or existing-but-too-small-for-docks could grow), but we have pretty lively rivers at this point, I think.
Plus again, as long as we have an option to build docks, there is little reason not to. It's like roads, but for food and wood.
Thirded
That sounds a bit extreme, I don't think it will do that much. Maaaybe one or two of those, I don't think all three.
That sounds much more likely. I can buy that being it.
I'd like to see about sneaking a Main Influence on Greenshore in there if possible. I know, it would be a stretch, but I value that more than Docks or Roads at this point. Yeah, I know, it's important to get them, but that second influence is even more important unless Greenshore quiets down and increases Loyalty for some reason.
Cotton wrecks soil, and we will never want to double main it most likely. As in, I think it will get rolled into a catch all 'cash crops' action by the time we have the means of growing it safely enough to just spam it to an immense level.
Simplest thing.
Why do we only profit from external trade? We're HUGE, big enough that our internal markets are the size of some regional markets.
I believe the Bazaar would unlock Internal trade income. Probably a less potent formula than external trade of course, but less vulnerable to external issues.
We have the docks all the way up the black river. I don't think we have them in Sacred Forest or Valleyhome though.
The soil damage is really quite irrelevant to us, as long as we can and do produce and use fertilizer in the form of Black Soil. Its bad, but greatly exaggerated by modern activists(to be honest the big problem is WATER, which isn't as dramatic, but cotton are thirsty plants).
For us we'd be seeing the social consequences of cotton long before the environmental ones.
- Location
- Austria
In all honesty, I am slowly coming to a line of thought that a longer-term solution to subordinate woes is stronger shared culture and identity and religion. That is, temples, theaters and arts. And influences are a bit of stopgap measures compared to having strong enough cultural glue to tie us closer.
That being said, yes, follow-up is necessary becase, again, those are steps for 10 turns ago, not when we are on fire. If we do have 4 wealth up for use, we can go for secondary Influence.
To balance all that...how about this?
Version 4: Address connectivity, food supply to capital, government upgrade; temporary because I do not know what wealth will we have.
Main - Dam - addresses connectivity with Lowlands and food supply to Valleyhome;
Main GH Expansion
Secondary GH Expansion
Secondary GH Expansion x2
Secondary Influence Subordinate - Greenshore
Secondary March Thunder Speakers (this one is mandatory IMO and addresses NOMADS)
Guild Main Plant Cotton
Guild Main Expand Snails
Guild Secondary Build Docks
Yes, it will not raise loyalty, but it's still something to address cultural drift.
We still need to do some theaters/temples, I think. If we can reach some even greek-level or so cultural identity, this all will become more manageable IMO.
Problem: this drops Martial to 2. We cannot both Raise Army and Influence Subordinates; and I am 90% sure we need March up and forting up ASAP, while nomads are friendly and are not trying to raid it.
- Location
- Huezil
Most of it is because of pesticides, but if we build a few wasps colonies close to the cotton fields i think even the pests would be solved, because wasps LOVE COTTON PESTS.
Distillation, at least for wine, doesn't require that sophisticated a temperature control. Even (small) modern distilleries heat with wood, which is not exactly known for precise temperature control. And they are all made out of copper for heat transfer.
For alcoholic distillation, it's enough to keep it below the boiling point.
What they will need to learn is to separate the first output as that consists of the most volatile compounds and is the stuff that causes blindness. But that is fairly easy to do by smell* as that stuff smells like nail polish remover and certainly not like something you'd want to drink. You don't really need glass at any point in the process. Maybe a tiny window, but that's it.
*I mean this literally. Most just wait a couple minutes with a bucket and take an occasional whiff of the distillate and once it stops smelling of nail polisher, they wait another minute and let the rest run into a barrel. For our purposes, the first part is still great for the alchemists. Even better, you can make the distillates from waste products. The yeast at the bottom of the fermentation barrel, the pressed out grapes (just add some water so the remaining sugar ferments) and generally spoiled fruits. If there's sugar in it, you can still make a distillate from it.
So with the alembic and the idea that things can be separated with differing temperatures, we have all the tools needed for hard liquors.
Also of interest for the Cotton discussion:
We can create a cotton gin if demand forms. Mechanically, simple variants are not that hard and we already love water powered everything. So Plant Cotton may get a tech cost at some point if we keep refusing them cheaper work. The soil depletion remains an issue but again, Black Soil is the big game changer here.
A much bigger problem is irrigation. But the real damage is nigh impossible to cause without modern technology.
But even that can be mitigated by spreading it out a bit.
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
I'm sure the people stuck picking the cotton would appreciate that
- Location
- Staring into the void
I'm sure the people stuck picking the cotton would appreciate that
We might get an upgrade here if we do that.
Eh, again, it's exaggerated and partly due to lax standards. Wasps are indeed a fantastic pest control system, but the damage done by modern cotton production is the infamous Button smashing that is more pesticides (there is little incentive to be more careful if they have to compete with places like india). We will simply have to accept lower productivity.
We won't have issues with erosion as the modern troubles stem from herbicides to reduce competition. To achieve similar levels of cleaning up, we'd need to regularly plow the soil, which is just unfeasible (for comparison, the same was done for wine 70 years ago).
The soil depletion as said is handled by Black Soil.
The issues of the ground getting salty is when you pump out big lakes. We simply can't do that with our tech.
And if all else fails, we look for other cash crops that don't give direct Wealth, but offer up other stats that we can turn into Wealth via Overflow. It's not quite as reliable, but if we need to avoid social landmines, something we can do.
Btw, has anyone an idea how long our Iron Mines will last? Our Mercury mine was quickly exhausted, but the stuff is rare. But if we keep spamming ironworks, sooner or later the iron source won't be able to keep up.
The bigger problem is monofocusing on a single cash crop to the point of double maining it period. It's bad for the environment because you want a mix of plants to serve different roles, and though I didn't mention it, it's bad for economy because you suddenly flood the market or are entirely reliant on a single thing.
Just because we can fix the issue with black soil doesn't mean we should stress our black soil production so we can afford to do it. We can instead put all that black soil to other things like terraforming.
My biggest problem isn't 'a lot of cotton' it's 'a lot of cotton in one turn so we suddenly have problems all at once rather than adapting to them.' That is not something I want to deal with now.
Looks good to me (assuming math works out, and considering how much of a pain that has become due to the importance of order of operation, ugh...), and I agree with the need to get the March up ASAP.
- Location
- Austria
That's a worryingly good point at *some* timeframe, 1 or 100 turns.
New important-not-urgent problem: we do not know how long will the mines last
Every actions seems to pursue Important/Urgent goal or provides funds to do so next turn, so not much to do about it.
Cooould delay annexes and do a survey, but....
That's a worryingly good point at *some* timeframe, 1 or 100 turns.
New important-not-urgent problem: we do not know how long will the mines last
Every actions seems to pursue Important/Urgent goal or provides funds to do so next turn, so not much to do about it.
Cooould delay annexes and do a survey, but....
Nah. Iron is common enough. They will last a long time. I'm more worried that their output can't keep up with demand.
It's not like we can do open pit mining and pull out thousands of tons a year.
Granted, with our economic power we can import the ore (or the ingots), but we'd be a trade disruption away from really, really awful times.
Still, even in such a case, it probably just means that the Guilds start complaining about needing more mines and to go look for them. As the entire redhills area is full with deposits, it shouldn't be too difficult. The stuff is very common, after all.
Problem is bulk transport of ores, as redhills are dry hills.
DocMatoi
Theoretical Lover of Girls
- Location
- within 2 hours of the White House
- Pronouns
- They/Them
necessity spurs innovation: we might end up with some kind of primitive rails for carts
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Invested Action: Survey, perhaps? I know we have a lot of possibles but it would be good to have a background survey going for shiny things.
- Location
- Austria
If we have Invested Actions as a thing, forests and expand econs are badically nobrainer picks IMO. Which leaves not much actions to work with already.
Survey is still an option, yes.
Also, another note on snails: dye can be a visible cultural artifact. For example, our ships fly red flag. A minor thing, but still handy.
Romans used wine as such unifying "a sign of true Roman" foodstuff artifact. It won't be decisive, but it does play a role.