Well I guess we now know the bad aspects of getting really high hierarchy.
Not sure whats being referred to here. Thats our new Honor trait at work, since the old chiefs were elected from those who had gained glory and attention from war, and their ancestors were those who caused the high chief circus, it stood to reason under the new culture, they now seemed to be part of the problem.
Hierarchy actually helped, since it meant we had Working Man chiefs of subdomains set up, giving an alternative pool to elect from...with the drawback that these specialist high chiefs were bad at things outside their domain.
Germ Theory is that there are small tiny things that infect people and cause the disease, rather than disease being a result of intangible demons or the spiritual corruption of the person in question. So developing Germ Theory means that people understand that diseases are transferred through contact and can be fought through hygiene and sterilization. You can approximate most of the same effective habits that GT provides through rituals and superstition, but the lack of a unifying theory makes that difficult and flimsy. These rituals would also involve less helpful stuff like censers of smoke near a sick person - for all that smoke chases away insects it's not useful v disease, and can clog your throat.
Inoculation is just that if you encounter one disease that's similar enough and get infected by it, you're inoculated against other diseases. Our people are inoculated against smallpox because cowpox is similar; and you yourself are inoculated against flu strains that are similar to ones you've caught in the past.
FYI, the smoke driving away insects also helps reduce secondary infections, and the presence of ongoing fires often meant that recently boiled waters was used for cleaning and drinking, as it was convenient, compared to using long standing water in buckets or waterskins.
While smoke was aggravating for certain respiratory infections, it presented a net improvement, especially in heavily forested or tropical regions, where insects were very common.
A nice boon to hygiene and health would be the invention of soap. Soap is actually really simple to make, and you only need stuff that the People have plenty of, namely oil/fat/grease and ashes/potash/lye.
I have no idea how someone would discover it though.
Surprisingly common actually, but we hadn't discovered lye yet, and our garbage disposal via incineration and our hygiene methods made its chance discovery difficult.
Well, actually the world as a whole is rapidly progressing toward the copper age and possibly has already reached bronze, depending on what buttons the metalworkers have been pressing. But having sailboats already is quite impressive, I agree.
The canal is sort of ~ It takes a bunch of effort but the Pyramids are roughly equal.
You'd be surprised at the sheer gap between the Stone age and Copper age, and the Bronze age.
Copper was accessible long before smelting due to native copper. Bronze required copper, tin and smelting, followed by refining chance discovery from certain copper ores.
Two points in a single turn sounds a touch ridiculous, not to mention that there is also compelling evidence to the assumption that the Administrative genius who built the settlement caused it to pay out on the first turn, instead of on a delayed clock.
In either case, you are right about the other settlement coming into it's own this turn, and my point about the primary weight of this megaproject falling on our shamans rather than our granaries combines to still solidly support the idea that we will be fine economically by taking the boat action.
Noting that our new settlements in areas with forest, like Newnet, immediately pays out Economy from automanaged forest on the turn after.
Its really annoying that the DP have the river that has its source in the SP lands flowing through their lands if it was the other one we could have been sneaky and damed up their river the prevent them from having any water and defeated them that way.
Hence the long and increasingly frustrating process of explaining that a dam would primarily screw the WC.
Even if the river keeps flowing, the annual floods they depend on would just....stop.
There is no evidence to support the idea that settlements pay out multiple times, nor does that particular settlement have much reason to pay out multiple times or in great excess since it was already there, we just organized things officially, nor does the working definition of economy support that idea (Economy being a roughly permanent ability to allocate manpower and food to endeavors, a definition at odds with the idea that a settlement (again, especially the river confluence which was already fairly populous, we just organized it) can repeatedly grant additional economy).
I'm pretty sure we don't get econ from the minor settlements outside centralized control due to our government model
