Only if you want to order everything. Then the King is the bottleneck.
No, the way to administrate large tracts of land is to:
"You, take care of it. General policy is as such"
That's how it is done in modern nations anyway.
The prime minister/president does not order every school/road etc build.
He has people do it for him.
The King sets direction. The governors try to fulfil the vision
We don't have the social, cultural or administrative technologies to make it happen yet. Remember modern nations have
many layers of checks, oversight and division of powers.
People, especially people who seek(and thus people who gain) power are selfish. The common outcome of saying "You, take care of it as per general policy" in the Iron Age was the local governor taking the bare minimum effort to look like they are doing what you asked, request additional resources, and channel those into their personal projects or wealth.
Similarly, in the short term of an individual's lifespan, being part of a greater empire is mostly inconvenient. You pay taxes, you listen to someone else...for what? Nothing much.
Nationalism is a fairly recent concept.
This topic aside, I think we should at least try at some point to combine Support Artisans and Expand Economy and see if that doesn't provoke some mechanization. Same for Artisans + Mills to get windmills or sawmills, which would give us another leap in output.
Uh...you do realize that's what the increase in Expand Economy's power is from right? Better tools go from: Bone blades -> Stone blades -> Iron blades -> Iron sickles/axes/shovels(we are here) -> Mechanical tools.
We hadn't hit saturation on the amount of iron tools we can supply to the country yet, so there's been no impetus to invent harvesting mechanisms yet(and it'd drive up the Tech cost of expand econ further).
For windmills however, you're looking at Build Towers + More Boats + Build Mills. Boats to trigger the wind power idea, towers to figure out how you get more wind(note that medieval windmills were as tall as early iron age towers). That said windmills are much more useful on the steppe/lowlands. In our core the amount of forestry would make it so that you aren't getting much wind except over the cities(where you have the heat island effect pumping air).
Sawmills should be just spamming Mills and Ironworks.
They don't separate the society from war. To assume that they do would be to assume that they separate themselves from society, which is ludicrous. The wealth, prestige, and status they gain from war gives them benefits within society, which encourages members of said society to promote warlike pursuits in the hopes that they can gain wealth, prestige, and status for themselves.
The big reason to integrate mercenary companies is that they take up subordinate slots. The less slots that are taken up, the more powerful Vassal Support becomes in regards to promoting Loyalty and spreading our culture to our other subordinates.
Completely wrong here.
Our mercenary companies do not seek war because they get wealth and status regardless of whether they fight or not, so long as they qualify for, and continue to qualify for the company. If they fight, they are making a loss, because dead mercenaries have to be replaced and reequipped at their own expense.
The Martial score you are looking at however, are comprised of people who
pay themselves to train and equip themselves to fight. If they don't fight they are making a loss on investment.
This is what a professional army is about. When we chose "Increase professionalism in the military" the result was "form a new mercenary company". Because when you pay people to fight, they don't want to fight. When people pay themselves to fight they want to fight.
I already covered that. And we barely used it because the anti-justice veekiewagon was strong enough that it just didn't happen.
Oi, it was the pro-road argument and it was validated because we did trap ourselves into being unable to build roads.
I think what Dakka is trying to say is that Mercenary Companies are professional state armies.
Yep. Mercenary companies under permanent crown employment are state armies. Though historically it was rare to stay that way, because one way or another someone would think "These guys are expensive and we aren't fighting any wars recently, we should fire them", and then you have a roving band of warrior-bandits in the area.
The Varangians are one prominent example, and under our mechanical conversion, the personal guard/retinue of feudal nobility are deployed much like mercenary companies.
I think we should ask AN to clarify when he comes back on. If Double Main RA really does nothing more than give us a strength 10 mercenary company, I'd be surprised considering how seemingly sub-optimal that would be.
That is because standing professional armies were absurdly expensive to maintain, but VERY powerful to deploy. They were hilariously optimal.
There is a reason nearly everyone used massed levies and/or warrior nobility instead.
Why? Quality.
Lets say we have Martial 30. Each secondary war mission commits
two Martial. To deploy our whole Martial 30 takes 15 Secondary actions. or 7.5 Main actions.
This army takes multiple phases just to arrive at the theater, as we have seen in the Khemetri war, both them and us spent the first two phases doing nothing but skirmish and push our main force closer, before the third phase happened and an ENORMOUS bloodbath happened as they arrived separately, which basically means AN rolls order of operations repeatedly, runs clashes with the increased manpower and then repeats.
Lets say we have 3 mercenary companies. As a free action, they commit their full
10 Martial
each to the field in the first phase. Unfortunately they have lower numbers due to being pure elites, so they take double losses, but they automatically replenish their numbers without actions taken by us.
As such, your definition of sub-optimal is sub-optimal.
We would, literally, have died and broken up without the 3 mercenary companies. We very nearly did do so even with them.
The push against the militarization of the Ymaryn right now is inherently ridiculous here. We're at the
lowest point of militarization in recent history.
-We have put our line army out of the hands of people who like to fight into the hands of people who gain nothing from fighting.
-We have broken the political influence of the Yeomen warrior class.
-We have begun demilitarizing our Patrician class, their iconic Chariots are becoming obsolete and replaced by Holy Orders.
-Our naval warfare capability is such that a far smaller power dependent on us thinks it can and should blackmail our traders at sea.
Yeah. Fucking rural middle class.
Better give it all to the Patricians. No way they will misuse their power.
Technically we've been taking that power and giving it to the Guilds and Urban Poor. The Urban/Rural divide is VERY uneven now.
We got an extra secondary from the new province, taking us from:
