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Paths of Civilization

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The expense of Free Labor is harsh, but the beancounters(including me) who ran the number said the numbers are doable and we can live with the expense, especially since it lit a fire on us to find as many as ways as possible to pay for ALL the things.

It will also force us to pursue mills much more aggressively once we have the income and it will also force our subordinates to urbanize because that is how they get markets to pay for everything.
 
Alratan said:
he lack of unfree labour arguably removes the temporary 'surpluses' required to be able to afford the upper classes that produce those innovations.
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I have no idea what "'surpluses'" you're talking about.
Innovations don't require upper classes, they require people who work with their hands looking at what they're doing in a critical way and then running with the idea. Obviously money helps, but inspiration and entrepreneurship matters quite a bit more.

Furthermore, they take people being invested in their work, having the pocket money to pursue their interests, and having a motivation to change things.

The ability to throw unpaid not!slave labor at a problem rather counters that.
 
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Kiba said:
It doesn't matter, because to prevent the abuses that had been going on, Ymaryn law required that half-exile must be paid. If that is the case, we might as well stick to the armies to build the roads for us.
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Weeeeell.

We could have POW as a separate, non-transferable and non-extendable status that was like being a half-exile but without pay. That minimizes the possible abuse by limiting it to foreigners, so we don't see a hereditary caste forming or anything like that.

On the other hand, that forms an incentive for us to raid neighbors...
 
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Alratan said:
Anyone that the Ymaryn have a valid cassus belli against. We can only go to war against people we think have violated the greater laws in some way.
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Not necessarily true. Consider the Intervention CB; fighting a war with someone doesn't become unethical purely because that someone is in the Games, it just becomes relevant to us. Or the old trade-based CB, which I for one was happy to get rid of.
 
Wiadi said:
Support Subordinate would help them get back on their feet, as would the Vassal Support passive policy. Besides, we only destroyed their military; any infrastructure they've built up since the Pure came through should be entirely intact. If anything I expect they'll be in better shape than, say, the Thunder Horse were when we first vassalized them.
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Most of their adult male population is probably dead. They're still a mostly nomad culture. I doubt they have any infrastructure. They were very likely semi-settled pastoralists and hunters, and we just killed the people that herd the flocks. That means their economy is probably mostly gone. Nomads and near nomads probably have something like Mass Levy whenever they go to war. They can hit so hard because they mobilise a ludicrous proportion of their population. That means that when they get smacked this hard they die.

Wiadi said:
From the relevant update:

Given that royal decree mandated the fair compensation of half-exile labor, it can be presumed that said royal decree included a standard for gauging what said fair compensation would be, which indicates at least a suitable minimum wage or equivalent. One that is actually livable rather than a pittance.

Basically, as far as I can tell, what you're saying here is "I know half-exile reform won't work and so I'm going to deliberately undermine it, then (presumably) crow about how I was right when it falls apart." Not cool.
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The definition of what's fair is very, very mutable. Fair could well mean just enough to pay for subsistence rations. That's one thing in the city, where you're fed for free. It's quite a different matter out in the countryside, where there is no Panem.

Half-exile reform can work in so far as you can make half-exiles stop being the source of unfree labour for the Ymaryn.
 
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Alratan said:
We had the option to continue the war rather than accept their surrender. Surrendering rather than running away is the usual way of becoming a PoW. A soldier that surrenders to their enemies after being defeated does not count as a refugee to my mind.
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They didn't have to surrender to us though. They could have ran away, splintered into a hundred small little raiding bands, and fled every which direction. We never once achieved a military victory against the pure. We did not force them to surrender.

The plague did.

What do you call someone who flees to another civilization due to a natural disaster? A refugee.

Had we actually tried to pursue them, we would have failed. That was the almost unanimous consent of the player base.

They surrendered to us not because we could have crushed them, but because our 'magic' was the only known way to hold against the disease.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Weeeeell.

We could have POW as a separate, non-transferable and non-extendable status that was like being a half-exile but without pay. That minimizes the possible abuse by limiting it to foreigners, so we don't see a hereditary caste forming or anything like that.

In the other hand, that forms an incentive for us to raid neighbors...
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Ah, yes, let's become Greek.
 
Kiba said:
The expense of Free Labor is harsh, but the beancounters(including me) who ran the number said the numbers are doable and we can live with the expense, especially since it lit a fire on us to find as many as ways as possible to pay for ALL the things.
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If it's affordable, then, basically, AN made it unrealistically cheap, and will need to rebalance the costs even more. Narratively, it's not something I think would be sustainable for a pre-late industrial society.

Umi-san said:
I have no idea what "'surpluses'" you're talking about.
Innovations don't require upper classes, they require people who work with their hands looking at what they're doing in a critical way and then running with the idea. Obviously money helps, but inspiration and entrepreneurship matters quite a bit more.
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Artisans are part of the upper class, as they're not the rural poor. Our urban poor are part of our upper classes, as they don't have to work to eat. I'm talking about surpluses in the Malthusian sense. It's the amount a society produces above the amount required for everyone to live a purely subsistence existence with all efforts dedicate to immediate survival. Innovations require people to have that surplus time and resources, as most attempts at innovation fail. You can get more people with sufficient surplus resources to do this by confiscating the share of society's surplus that would otherwise go to the less free workers.
 
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Alratan said:
They are the upper class. I'm talking about surpluses in the Malthusian sense. It's the amount a society produces above the amount required for everyone to live a purely subsistence existence with all efforts dedicate to immediate survival.
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Oh, right, I forgot about how everyone in our society had to burn their wealth and revert to being a farmer to counter the effects of needing to pay people. The loss of our wealth income along with the stat itself will surely suck.

Artisans are an upper class? Interesting. I would have called them Middle.
 
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Alratan said:
If it's affordable, then, basically, AN made it unrealistically cheap, and will need to rebalance the costs even more. Narratively, it's not something I think would be sustainable for a pre-late industrial society.
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China was able to survive without slaves or a slave like caste. It was sustainable, it was just hard to do without a mechanized workforce.

Consider, then, the fact that we have a good number of mills and massive industrial centers in several of our cities. We have burgeoning markets, massive amounts of trade and a complex beauracratic system in place to run it all.

We survive because our people long ago figured out how to reduce those costs.

It also helps that Life of Arete had gotten us used to most of our actions having a wealth cost, so when all the costs suddenly increased, we were mostly fine.
 
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Citino said:
China was able to survive without slaves or a slave caste. It was sustainable, it was just hard to do without a mechanized workforce.
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China made enormous use of unfree labour. It just had more subtle gradations of unfree-ness than simply the binary status of slave and free. For example, much of the rural population for long periods had a status akin to serfdom, where they were bound to the land and restricted from leaving it to work elsewhere or take other jobs apart from farming. I am deliberately talking about unfree rather than slave labour.

That's one of the potential outcomes for the Ymaryn rural poor I described before that could be how they resolve the unfree labour issue. The classical Chinese model is sustainable. It is based on unfree labour though.
 
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Citino said:
China was able to survive without slaves or a slave like caste. It was sustainable, it was just hard to do without a mechanized workforce.

Consider, then, the fact that we have a good number of mills and massive industrial centers in several of our cities. We have burgeoning markets, massive amounts of trade and a complex beauracratic system in place to run it all.

We survive because our people long ago figured out how to reduce those costs.

It also helps that Life of Arete had gotten us used to most of our actions having a wealth cost, so when all the costs suddenly increased, we were mostly fine.
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Didn't China cheat with virtual slavery? That is to say, grabbing peasants and making them do the work. I imagine most countries did at some point or another since it's a very simple cheat, specially for construction work.
 
Alratan said:
If it's affordable, then, basically, AN made it unrealistically cheap, and will need to rebalance the costs even more. Narratively, it's not something I think would be sustainable for a pre-late industrial society.
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It's still expensive as hell no matter how you cut it. Some of our actions are over half of our wealth cap alone. But with enough TCs, we can generate enough wealth that it won't matter too much.

And don't forget that we are the most industrialized of any pre-modern society except the Song Dynasty themselves.
 
Kiba said:
And don't forget that we are the most industrialized of any pre-modern society except the Song Dynasty themselves.
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Not anymore. We were at the start of the turn, but now we've lost half our cities.

Honestly, the constant ping-ponging of our various stats is starting to annoy me. Cities all come into existence at about the same EE, the caps on our stats are so low we can easily starve ourselves from max econ (we went down to like 3 econ before province actions last turn IIRC). One turn we have 7 cities and the next we have 3. It's not even like we're doing too much at once though, it's just that our caps and triggering thresholds are all very low.
 
Alratan said:
Most of their adult male population is probably dead. They're still a mostly nomad culture. I doubt they have any infrastructure. They were very likely semi-settled pastoralists and hunters, and we just killed the people that herd the flocks. That means their economy is probably mostly gone. Nomads and near nomads probably have something like Mass Levy whenever they go to war. They can hit so hard because they mobilise a ludicrous proportion of their population. That means that when they get smacked this hard they die.
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Even if that turns out to be true, which I'm still not entirely convinced is the case (they did spend some time settling down and focusing on trade), it's still no excuse to exploit their population instead of working to integrate them and raise their standard of living to at least acceptable proximity to the Ymaryn norm.
Alratan said:
The definition of what's fair is very, very mutable. Fair could well mean just enough to pay for subsistence rations. That's one thing in the city, where you're fed for free. It's quite a different matter out in the countryside, where there is no Panem.
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Half-exiles were already being fed; even those who wanted solely to abuse them for cheap labor would have to keep them supplied with food so they could continue providing said labor, to say nothing of the deep-seated Ymaryn taboo against starvation. Given that the reform meaningfully increased our costs, it is disingenuous to suggest that it did not include the requirement that half-exiles receive actual wages beyond mere subsistence, and bespeaks an unseemly desire to undo our progress to suggest that any wages beyond subsistence be revoked.
Alratan said:
Half-exile reform can work in so far as you can make half-exiles stop being the source of unfree labour for the Ymaryn.
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This is true but I will reiterate that we are under no obligation to replace them with another, and your insistence that we must is not being supported by anything but your own assertions.
Alratan said:
If it's affordable, then, basically, AN made it unrealistically cheap, and will need to rebalance the costs even more. Narratively, it's not something I think would be sustainable for a pre-late industrial society.
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Okay, I'm getting tired of this. Can you provide any actual argument or source for your insistence that what we are attempting here should be impossible, other than "I don't think it should be sustainable"? I will remind you that "historically it didn't happen" is not in and of itself sufficient, because plenty of ahistorical things have already happened in this quest as a result of various butterflies - for example, our society skipped entirely over bronze and straight to iron.
 
Citino said:
They didn't have to surrender to us though. They could have ran away, splintered into a hundred small little raiding bands, and fled every which direction. We never once achieved a military victory against the pure. We did not force them to surrender.

The plague did.

What do you call someone who flees to another civilization due to a natural disaster? A refugee.

Had we actually tried to pursue them, we would have failed. That was the almost unanimous consent of the player base.

They surrendered to us not because we could have crushed them, but because our 'magic' was the only known way to hold against the disease.
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I missed this before, but our gods cursed their leader to rot alive, in the parlance of the day. They were defeated by the superior magic/gods of the People, just as much as if they'd dropped a bolide on their heads, or had granted us victory in battle. That's still a defeat for the Pure by the Ymaryn (including their divine patrons as part of them).

Basically, I don't think they or the Ymaryn would consider this to be a natural disaster.
 
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notgreat said:
Not anymore. We were at the start of the turn, but now we've lost half our cities.

Honestly, the constant ping-ponging of our various stats is starting to annoy me. Cities all come into existence at about the same EE, the caps on our stats are so low we can easily starve ourselves from max econ (we went down to like 3 econ before province actions last turn IIRC). One turn we have 7 cities and the next we have 3. It's not even like we're doing too much at once though, it's just that our caps and triggering thresholds are all very low.
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You may be thinking of "urbanized"
 
Wiadi said:
Okay, I'm getting tired of this. Can you provide any actual argument or source for your insistence that what we are attempting here should be impossible, other than "I don't think it should be sustainable"? I will remind you that "historically it didn't happen" is not in and of itself sufficient, because plenty of ahistorical things have already happened in this quest as a result of various butterflies - for example, our society skipped entirely over bronze and straight to iron.
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If you're throwing out historical examples, then this is unanswerable, as we don't have a probably complete theory of economics to allow us to prove negatives.

Skipping the Bronze Age isn't historically unprecedented. Much of sun-Sarharan Africa seems to have gone straight from the Stone to the Iron Age.

Wiadi said:
Half-exiles were already being fed; even those who wanted solely to abuse them for cheap labor would have to keep them supplied with food so they could continue providing said labor, to say nothing of the deep-seated Ymaryn taboo against starvation. Given that the reform meaningfully increased our costs, it is disingenuous to suggest that it did not include the requirement that half-exiles receive actual wages beyond mere subsistence, and bespeaks an unseemly desire to undo our progress to suggest that any wages beyond subsistence be revoked.
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As an example, have a fair wage for them be based on a market rate determined by auctioning off their services on the open market to the highest bidder. That would fit some definitions of fair, and was what I was initially assuming would happen, with our poor connectivity, prices would vary wildly between regions.

When there isn't a local glut of half-exiles that massively increases costs. When there is one, it wouldn't.
 
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Note: If we want to go for straight mill actions, our wealth cap basically prevents us from taking more than three main mill actions, giving us 12 LTE at the expense of 24 wealth, nearly all our cap.

If we use the guild actions to recoup wealth, at most we can spend two main and a secondary on textiles. Two main actions will give us 14 wealth and a secondary will give us a total of 20 wealth. We will also lose -18 LTE in the process.

The trade is -4 wealth, and -6 LTE and a triple strength mill innovations. We are told that double main actions have disproportionate effects. Triple will be more so.

@Academia Nut What kind of innovations could we expect from a triple main mills action?
 
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