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Paths of Civilization

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Candesce said:
In exchange, we'd introduce a nasty source of internal disruption that'd do damage to most of our valuable traits.

And as it happens, we've historically been a lot more likely to break from internal problems than external enemies.
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The closest we ever came to losing was the Horsemen of the Pure.

And the Ymaryn's traits should make conquest and assimilation much easier for them than it does for others. The traits shouldn't be damaged, they should evolve. Being able to accept your enemies into your People is, for example, an even greater form of acceptance than it is to accept helpless refugees.

Just look at how they managed to accept even the hated nomads without breaking. We've also since developed the social tools to manage dissident religions.

agumentic said:
Conquering HK right now would probably be too much - even after braving the walls, we'd still need to deal with population with xenophobic religion.
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I don't think we know that they have a xenophobic religion. The fact that they're going out and aggressively converting foreigners strongly suggest that it isn't xenophobic at all, very much the opposite.
 
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Alratan said:
The closest we ever came to losing was the Horsemen of the Pure.

And the Ymaryn's traits should make conquest and assimilation much easier for them than it does for others. The traits shouldn't be damaged, they should evolve. Being able to accept your enemies into your People is, for example, an even greater form of acceptance than it is to accept helpless refugees.

Just look at how they managed to accept even the hated nomads without breaking. We've also since developed the social tools to manage dissident religions.
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Tax Crisis and Palace Crisis beg to differ.
I doubt we would have survived the latter without Rulwyna doing her magic.

There was also climate shift thing.
 
Alratan said:
I don't think we know that they have a xenophobic religion. The fact that they're going out and aggressively converting foreigners strongly suggest that it isn't xenophobic at all, very much the opposite.
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WoAn, their religion is heavily tooled toward 'resisting outside influences'
 
Alratan said:
I don't think we know that they have a xenophobic religion. The fact that they're going out and aggressively converting foreigners strongly suggest that it isn't xenophobic at all, very much the opposite.
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Xenophobic is probably not exactly the right word, but it's very focused on "us-vs-them" and superiority compared to heathens, which means it would make adherents resist foreign conquest more than usual. Nothing completely overwhelming, probably, but sure adds to the hassle.
 
agumentic said:
Xenophobic is probably not exactly the right word, but it's very focused on "us-vs-them" and superiority compared to heathens, which means it would make adherents resist foreign conquest more than usual. Nothing completely overwhelming, probably, but sure adds to the hassle.
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That is pretty much the definition of xenophobia, fear and hatred of that which is foreign.
 
Alratan said:
I have to admit I'm a little confused about the location of the dam and proposed canal. I thought we were building them to bypass the cateracts around the headwaters the western river, the one that passes through the core, so that river becomes navigable from the core down into the Lowlands. That's the same river that the Highland Kingdom controls at least the west bank of.
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Part of the western bank, they were driven south by circumstances and you took over part of it.

veekie said:
Wrong way round. We're building the dam at the cataracts, then extending the canal eastwards, which would incidentally turn all the shitty dry badlands of Txolla into prime agricultural land and give us a river route to the eastern river.
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The canal would run on the west side of the river to the south, bypassing the cataracts.

veekie said:
-A canal to route due south makes no sense. It irrigates nothing, and you can replicate the same effect by either sailing through the spillway or using waterlocks to raise/lower ships via pumping. You don't need a dam to build this.
-A canal to route east would ease shipping goods to Forhuch, irrigate the dry, steppe like northern portion of Txolla and provide ease of shipping from lowlands and Redhill to Valleyhome. You would need a dam to build this, because otherwise you can't get the water there.
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There is no canal east. You currently have no water routes available to connect with the Forhuch. If you can kick the Highlanders out you could send ships down the Great River, through Harmurri territory, across the coast of the sea, and then back up the eastern river. Integrating Txolla might allow you to build a canal crossing the two major rivers.

The dam is needed to regulate the water, because the route to bypass the cataracts needs to start further north of them to only cut through a reasonable amount of hard rock, which requires the water level to be much higher. If you wanted a shorter canal that required no dam to safely traverse it would probably cost ten times as much in iron and labour.
 
Alratan said:
I don't think we know that they have a xenophobic religion. The fact that they're going out and aggressively converting foreigners strongly suggest that it isn't xenophobic at all, very much the opposite.
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I am pretty sure that they are basically going to be our Israel, only harder to convert, if we try to.

Mind, I think we should bite the bullet and do it regardless....or rather I did, and then you reminded me that most of in-thread pro-war voters drastically underestimate or even don't think about what happens after conquest and that holding, not taking, is the hard part on the timescales we are operating on.

Other pro-war voters in thread is by far the biggest reason I am against wars.
 
Academia Nut said:
There is no canal east. You currently have no water routes available to connect with the Forhuch. If you can kick the Highlanders out you could send ships down the Great River, through Harmurri territory, across the coast of the sea, and then back up the eastern river. Integrating Txolla might allow you to build a canal crossing the two major rivers.

The dam is needed to regulate the water, because the route to bypass the cataracts needs to start further north of them to only cut through a reasonable amount of hard rock, which requires the water level to be much higher. If you wanted a shorter canal that required no dam to safely traverse it would probably cost ten times as much in iron and labour.
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Ah okay. Good to know. Integrate Txolla next.
 
DocMatoi said:
WoAn, their religion is heavily tooled toward 'resisting outside influences'
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Do you have the exact quote?

DragonParadox said:
That is pretty much the definition of xenophobia, fear and hatred of that which is foreign.
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A xenophobic idea would hate the idea of conquest, as it would more contact with the feared and hated Other. It certainly wouldn't want to spread the word of their religion to said unworthy Others.

ctulhuslp said:
I am pretty sure that they are basically going to be our Israel, only harder to convert, if we try to.

Mind, I think we should bite the bullet and do it regardless....or rather I did, and then you reminded me that most of in-thread pro-war voters drastically underestimate or even don't think about what happens after conquest and that holding, not taking, is the hard part on the timescales we are operating on.

Other pro-war voters in thread is by far the biggest reason I am against wars.
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I've thought about what happens after conquest. They're an expansionist theocracy that is investing significant cultural capital in the concept of conversion at sword-point. That's likely to be unstable, and take a massive knock to its legitimacy as a doctrine if we conquer them. The social tools required to justify and motivate conquest are not well adapted to dealing with being conquered yourself. They've also just undergone a social revolution with the decapitation of their old government and its replacement with a theocracy, which will also have been destabilising. This is the best moment we're likely to get to assimilate them, rather than them remaining a perpetual thorn in our side. We're dominant in pilgrimage, we have high religious authority, and we're experienced in assimilating hostile religious groups that have just suffered a crisis of legitimacy (as we just did with the Pure).

We can be pretty confident that they've not formed an ethno-religion like the Israelites, as if they had conversion wouldn't be on the table.
 
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Alratan said:
A xenophobic idea would hate the idea of conquest, as it would more contact with the feared and hated Other. It certainly wouldn't want to spread the word of their religion to said unworthy Others.
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Sure if you far enough down the rabbit hole you can get xenophobia that strong. The Highlanders are not there yet. Greed for foreign lands, slaves and wealth is enough to drive them to expansion still, as long as new conquests are made to conform.
 
bluefur87 said:
Or, maybe the stat that can't be overflowed into, is a more focused form of another stat, and costs said stat to build, is like the other stats we have seen in this area.

You know, the ones that matter at numbers as low as 4 or 5 at the moment?
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Of course it is more concentrated then other stats. But our current intrigue is THREE which is the lowest it has ever been. Even if we let ourselves recuperate to 5 in a turn and a half, it will still merely be the Intrigue value we started with.

bluefur87 said:
Trying is not the height of arrogance. Not trying when the costs are so low and their attitude towards us pretty much already determined is the height of arrogance. We have barely anything to lose, and the ability to avert or dominate an upcoming war to gain.
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On failure, we lose two points of Intrigue, nine normal stats, and a Main action. That is not "barely anything". To put it in perspective, that is about as much resources as we would need to build two Lvl1 Marketplaces right now; i.e. it is worth 4 income a turn. Those are not small stakes.
 
DragonParadox said:
Sure if you far enough down the rabbit hole you can get xenophobia that strong. The Highlanders are not there yet. Greed for foreign lands, slaves and wealth is enough to drive them to expansion still, as long as new conquests are made to conform.
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That's not xenophobia then. That's just perfectly normal period appropriate cultural chauvinism. The concept that foreigners are qualify as people sufficiently to become proper parts of your polity and religion is actually very xenophilic for the era.

If they were exterminating the people they conquered, as the Pure were, that would be xenophobia.

Somebodynobody10 said:
Let me guess: never played Stellaris?
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And how's that relevant, to, well, anything?
 
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DragonParadox said:
Sure if you far enough down the rabbit hole you can get xenophobia that strong. The Highlanders are not there yet. Greed for foreign lands, slaves and wealth is enough to drive them to expansion still, as long as new conquests are made to conform.
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I think even the Imperium of Man is only touching the kind of xenophobia and only enough to want to kill em, so I doubt the Highlanders will reach it.
 
Glassware said:
That won't take all of Txolla, though. We don't have the administrative reach for that, most likely we would need the Dam and canal.
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This is something that has been confusing me. We have far less land, but we can't control all our periphery states. Worse, there are players that don't ever want to absorb all our periphery states. Yet, there are civs with far more land, but they don't seem to need the ridiculous amount of administrative reach we have. They can become incredibly huge, but no periphery state of theirs rises in rebellion for them to deal with.
 
agumentic said:
We'd still need a passage through HK-held part of the river, unless we want to dig through the entire region, which would take like 300 years.
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Depending on how much manpower we have access to and how many rivers there are, I don't think it will take 300 years to build the canal connecting both rivers.

Marlin said:
This is something that has been confusing me. We have far less land, but we can't control all our periphery states. Worse, there are players that don't ever want to absorb all our periphery states. Yet, there are civs with far more land, but they don't seem to need the ridiculous amount of administrative reach we have. They can become incredible huge, but no periphery state of theirs rises in rebellion for them to deal with.
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We lack paper and we lack canals. China had all of these.
 
Marlin said:
This is something that has been confusing me. We have far less land, but we can't control all our periphery states. Worse, there are players that don't ever want to absorb all our periphery states. Yet, there are civs with far more land, but they don't seem to need the ridiculous amount of administrative reach we have. They can become incredibly huge, but no periphery state of theirs rises in rebellion for them to deal with.
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Kiba said:
We lack paper and we lack canals. China had all of these.
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He is not trying to compare us to china. The comparison is with our neighbors.
 
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