I wonder what the dam narrative will be.
"Uvothyn took a long walk as he thought and thought about how to solve the river travel problem, and when he leaned on a wall to rest, he fell into a secret chamber full of extremely old parchment and stone tablets. On one wall he could see, in archaic ymrysh, "Projects We Haven't Gotten Around To Yet." He immediately yelled for a guard and some priests."
Thousands of years later in the Valleyhome Museum of Ancient History:
"The ancient Ymaryn were well known to keep good records, often only failing from old age, neglect or disaster. The perhaps oldest continuous record in Ymaryn history is the planning for the Cataract Dam. It's references to advisors, kings and Patricians give us incredible insight into the Ancient Ymaryn governing structure as early as the late Stone Age, where the first construction drafts were created."
AKA: The Dam was never forgotten. It just kept being punted around various departments and has a whole part of a library for itself documenting the whole bureaucracy to get it finally approved.
I'm torn between making the dam face a big art piece with prayers to the spirits and gods, or just replicating every single bit of the dam design process on it's face in ceramic.
I'm imagining some clerk going "A dam? I'm sure I've read about a dam before" and then finding a millennia-long line of notes and plans on dams.
"The wise Myranyn reigns as I study these ancient plans of ages past ..."
...
"Great Yshuyn, I implore you to read these humble propositions handed to me from my predecessor ..."
"Wise Hertythyn leads the People as I write plans for a great work that will surely ..."
...
"Desdydyn, my old friend, I have come across the an interesting collection of old writings ..."
...
"While that mad nomad Phygrif is off on his insane quest for Xoh, I have been scouring the old writings, and have found something most fascinating concerning the flow of the our rivers ..."
...
"Rulwyna, daughter of Rulhythyn, I urge you to read these plans ..."
...
"King Gonwyllmyn, with the Temple nearing completion, these old plans may be of interest ..."
...
"... water ... calming the rivers ..."
...
"With the Magwynan System many ancient writings have be rediscovered, like these plans for a dam ..."
...
"Twythulmyn King Water Wall River Many-Grain ..."
...
*A clay tablet with a drawing of a river bisected by a line*
I hope this shows up when we start it. It'd be amazing.
Also you forget how every time we invent a new material or construction method we ALSO have said how it makes the dam easier to build so:
"With the development of the ironworks, diagram B-54 includes how a dam can be used to pump the bellows at a regular controlled pace, refer to diagram A-18 for how the volume of water flow can be used to change the speed."
"With the development of the hammer mills, we propose new regulations on the use of the dam to prevent the ash and vitriol of the bloomeries from tainting the waters"
"With the new waterwheels, we can see that the dam can be extended with secondary reservoirs at higher elevation which the flow of the river would fill and drain to maintain a safe water level, and ensure vast amounts of grain can be ground to flour"
"With the use of the dragon vitriol technique we can seal together fired brick and stone to make a wider, stronger dam."
*Diagrams of arches and how they can support a higher dam*
*Early scribe writings on the miraculous starmetal and how it makes the dam cheaper*
*A clay tablet with the symbols of rock, fire, spade, wall and water*
I'm kind of pissed that Freehills ended up taking Trelli. If they end up actually at war with the HK or Khemetri, can we make sure to take it from them?
We
gave it to them. This would have happened eventually, the plague just sped it up.
2. We've just contacted not-Chinese trade goods. Historically, Chinese silk and porcelain were one of the reasons Roman economy collapsed - patricians sent millions of coins to the east, collapsing monetary system once mines went exhausted. Conversely, in medieval and Renaissance reverse happened, eventually forcing China to crack down on imported goods. I want some trade good that China does not have. They are a source of cotton here, it seems, so that's out. We have not seen dyes in their goods, so it is an option. Another one is just being better than them at manufacturing finished goods from their materials (as per
@maximillian , that's what did, say, Florence in Renaissance - sold China clothes from Chinese silk), but still.
The finished goods route is very risky due to the silk road being super vulnerable to disruption.
Glass, porcelain and dye are probably our best bets there.
3. Cash crops are a good that, as far as I know, requires a lot of unskilled labour. I am not sure I want to encourage that or go too fast with them.
Pretty much all cash crops do that. Saffron, Opium, Cotton, Hemp, Tea, Rubber, etc all require fine delicate processing work which can only be done with fingers and a brain at the current tech level(heck, even at the modern tech level), which do not produce significant edible elements to feed the laborers with.
Opium and Saffron(plus Frankincense, Cinnamon and Myrrh) have the advantage of being high density value, so the same amount of wealth takes less people to make, allowing them to be paid more...well if anyone ever WANTS to pay more.
Let Tinshore do it, they are closer.
Look, we are barely scraping by actions to keep western subordinates from rebelling. If we conquered Trelli that time several turns ago, I am sure that they would be rebels by now, with Trelli as a nexus of power with its defensible position and whatever. It's going to be good when we can integrate it, but before that it's as much a source of trouble as it's a boon.
Definitely true. I don't think we could have kept Trell in the wake of the plague
It would not make the river fuller than before. Water is trapped by a dam and released at a lower level than prior due to increased evaporation & absorption around where it was trapped. It would make the area prior to the dam more full, that area being the badlands i.e. not the best place for farming.
It would make the flow more stable, however. Which doesn't really increase EE other than maybe if we redo all our irrigation with the knowledge that it's less likely to be damaged. But that's a kind of marginal improvement if we're any good at irrigation, and we are.
Like, it will increase EE. But since we're building it in the badlands it won't increase it much. The canal might increase EE, but since it's drawing water from elsewhere it won't increase it much.
Aquaculture is the big thing here. You an grow a hell of a lot of fish and aquatic crops in a dam. Also we had it clarified before, the badlands are
dry. That's their only problem. They'd be as fertile as the lowlands if they weren't, especially with black soil to speed it along...which the dam would trap a lot of the rich black soil runoff silt normally going downstream to the HK, which we can dredge up to build our own chinampas.
Going to have to go back over and edit a few things because the actions are a mess. For the next time the actions come up, I will be compressing a few things:
1.) There will be a singular 'Support Holy Orders' action
2.) The various cash crops will be reorganized, into three broad categories of 'Luxuries' (incense, spices, wine, etc.), 'Drugs' (pretty much just poppies at the moment), and 'Textiles' (hemp and cotton).
3.) There will be a couple of other actions collapsed as I comb over the list
@Academia Nut
1) This covers Blackbirds, Carrion Eaters and Spiritbonded right?
1.1) How would the Cavalry stat increase in such a case? Or does the cost just rise to cover them all at higher action efficiency?
1.2) Is this along the route to update our holy orders to the Spiritbonded quality?
Also, a RA decreasing action would be just great. I imagine Suppressing the Priest faction would do it as a hidden effect, but ever since the gods smote the Thunder Horse we've been bumping against the limit.
We're no longer bumping the limit once Palaces started lowering it(should have done what the clerks recommended). We just need to take advantage of RA cap raisers where we can. Like the current quests.
And there has been a noticeable group of voters who want to take a couple Black Soils to force the half-exile system to the spotlight and give us a reformation option. While I'm not a huge fan of that idea, it's very much something that I'm not adverse to triggering while we're at 3 or 4 Stability and no immediate major crises.
We still lack the tools to make it happen unfortunately. More mills, more kilns, more roads and more palaces to make such a reformation remotely enforceable.
How do we encourage the budding lawyers we have developing in the cities
@Academia Nut
Historically the steps needed would be:
1) Increase educational availability(prereq step) to generate idle academics
2) Increase bureaucratic complexity to create the demand
3) Encourage debate and evidentiary trials to promote this as an elite activity.
We already got 2 and 3. We just need people to do this who aren't already busy doing something else.
I suspect building enough Academies will cause Mysticism to spawn an Intellectual substat.
You never see a 10/10 strength banner company because we haven't made one yet.
Merc Companies max at 8/10 strength.
To get a 10/10 strength banner requires a double main raise army.
Noting that
our merc companies max at 8/10 strength. During the Khemetri war we learned that the Trelli mercs at the time were at LESS than 8/10. There are some other hidden factors in play.
@Academia Nut what disease is the Horseman's Plague? The closest I could think of was Pneumonic Plague (
Yersinia pestis) but that doesn't
quite fit the symptoms or transmission. TB as well, I suppose, but again, doesn't really fit the symptoms or apparent transmission. Hemoptysis isn't a terribly common thing for infectious disease.
It's not too atypical for a first generation species jumper to do this. Most infectious disease rapidly evolve away that sort of symptom because it kills too fast, the only way such a disease can work is a ridiculous population density.
Building a dam fast isn't a terribly good idea, IMO, and we do desperately need that influence action. I haven't caught up enough to really get back into the math of it (plus, why are some of these things in fractions?? What's the overflow chart look like now?) But I'm reasonably sure we can afford it.
We asked AN before. He said that we can't really 'rush' a dam at the timescales we are playing at, but if we Kicked a dam, there may be interesting rolls to see what happens.
And that went...I am not sure how to rate that one.
We saw no immediate returns. We found out Monotheists were a thing, but if we had not sent our mercenaries over, we would not have "caught the bug" so to speak.
Turn later, it did infect them with the Horseman Plague, so...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Net plus really, the monotheists would have been FAR FAR worse if they were were in control of a well fortified mountain kingdom which escaped the plague when the plague happened.
On top of what BungieONI said, Intrigue, Naval, and Light Calvary are derivative stats. They are more specialized versions of their base stats and more powerful because of it. Intrigue for Diplomacy and Naval and Light Cavalry for Martial.
To elaborate on it. We test them BEFORE we test the main stat, excluding the advanced stat specific stuff like running intrigue missions or blockades.
E.g.
Before you roll Diplomacy, you roll off Intrigue to determine what you know about their situation and what they know about your situation. Success gives you a large advantage towards diplomacy and trade because you know whats important and they don't, or because you've bribed their emissaries/traders to give you a better deal than what should be possible. Thus, engaging in diplomacy with an information disadvantage is a demonstration of asskicking.
However, if you have shit diplomacy, your intrigue won't save you. It only determines prevailing conditions.
Same goes for Naval, it determines how easily you can deploy and supply your land troops. Losing naval dominance means it doesn't matter what troops you have because they can't get there, but godly Naval with no Martial means you still lose.
A scenario of Good Naval Bad Martial vs Bad Naval Good Martial is a horrible stalemate because the Good Martial can't get to the scene and the Bad Martial can't actually change local superiority into overall superiority.
Cavalry is not quite that bad, but you need Martial to actually take and hold strongholds. All you can do with Cavalry is burn, not even loot much.
