Maybe cultural innovation would improve the "everyone thinks we're weird" thing.
Not likely. We have perpendicular cultural values to the era standard. They'd always think we're weird.
-Personal Stewards of Nature - Obsessive about the land. Neighbors who acquire it lose it rapidly due to the difficulty of holding said land over the long term, and furthermore the environmentalism angle makes breaking into and expanding metalworking much harder than it has to be.
-Greater Justice - This is a rare value to retain because it goes against individual impulses. Not impossible, but outside of a communalist society the pursuit of Justice for the many rather than Privilege for the few is rare.
-Pride in Acceptance - Xenophilia. Anyone with this who's not also King of the Hill would rapidly have their traits eroded and replaced with foreign ones. And also accepting refugees when everything's fucked is how you break yourself as a country. Natural disasters are bad enough without martyrdom.
-Joyous Symphony - This one isn't THAT weird, but it requires continuity of state to be preserved. Anyone who suffers a social fracture(which is common), tends to lose it, because in the wake of civilization collapse strongman rule is the norm.
-Honorable Death - Somewhat uncommon, but with all the warrior cultures out there, not unknown.
-Philosopher Kings - Like Pride in Acceptance, this is a naturally deselected value. Most people prefer stability to a trait which threatens stability at random intervals.
-Purity - Ironically this trait actually makes us more understandable to people. Cleanliness is a common social value in an era where disease is a massive problem and xenophobia is a survival instinct.
Our Honor values meanwhile are shockingly normal.
I don't really know what culture even is... Our art is pretty cool... we could probably invest in theater more but I'm worried that it would result in our people watching plays instead of working their gardens.
If this statement is made unironically, then that kind of highlights the exact problem with our ability to push cultural values out there. For a communalist society, we don't really communicate.
We can just set up steles with illustrative pictures at various popular stopping points in the Steppes.
Men on Chariots look at Stele. Men on chariots ride to the forest. Men on Chariots get perforated by arrows launched by forest. Dead Charioteers rot on the ground.
Men on Chariots look at Stele. Men on chariots ride to the forest. Men on Chariots get perforated by arrows launched by forest. Dead Charioteers rot on the ground.
Men on Horses look at Stele. Men on horses ride to the forest. Men on horses get perforated by arrows launched by forest. Dead riders rot on the ground.
Men on horses look at stele. A red arrow points to the empty space next to the picture, where the war is usually depicted. The Ymaryn words 'You are Here' are written on it.
"Meh, we can take them"
OTOH, we've only just now discovered paper. Sure, we have clay and stuff to write down stuff, but our writing output is probably not that significant and 90% administration.
We had vellum for thousands of years.
I believe that if we put religious authority tolerance into narrative form, it would be how powerful the priests can get without having an adverse effect on our society. Things like zealotry, bigotry, fundamentalism, and narrow-mindedness are cancer to the intellectual powerhouse our country is in its current form, and the preventative measures, as well as the excision of those cancers are the general awareness and theological capability of our citizens. If we do not wish to become another Highland Kingdom, but still wish to continue benefiting from a powerful and well founded belief system, we need our citizens to be educated.
Thats about right, the Academy and the Palaces come from two different angles:
-Palaces makes the priests views more integrated with the establishment elite view, increasing state oversight on their activities and vice versa. This means both sides can exert subtle pressure before it has to get ugly with divergent opinions.
-Academies increases the public's ability to question and examine, which in turn forces the priesthood to engage more deeply with society and remain in touch with customs and trends(this would help avoid where you get ivory tower priests speaking out against the latest new thingy).
The very article you linked to makes it rather clear that evolution is denied not so much by religion itself but by evangelical protestants and minorities- the proportion for 'white mainline protestants' who give credence to the theory of evolution is in fact higher than 'unaffiliated' who presumably are not very religious. This indicates that evolution-denial is not really a religious issue as it is a cultural one.
And yeah, that puts aside that the fact that
most religions including Catholicism have no issue reconciling their religious doctrine with the evidence of evolution.
I don't mind quoting Isaac Asimov on this one: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Anti-intellectualism is a phenomenon that often uses religion to justify itself, but it is typically a cultural phenomenon moreso than it is a religious one.
Mixed complicated situation. The priesthood are
culture guardians. Ergo, they will naturally act to resist developments which potentially goes counter to tradition, myth and cultural values.
Observe how our environmentalism trait triggered social friction when we developed cavalry out of concern for animal cruelty, and how it triggered social friction when we delved into metalworking and it risked scarring the land.
These are both advances made POSSIBLE by our priesthood to begin with.
True, but I don't think we can afford wooden rails either. Something like that probably has a cost in Sustainable Forest slots and we're not terribly rich in those. The wood necessary to build rails has to be high quality; straight, heavy duty, etc. and that's not easy to find. Plus, wood left on the ground (even if it's laid on a bed of stone) rots extremely quickly or has termites get into it. It would be an ongoing expense in order to maintain it. We'd need some way to treat the wood to make it more durable to make this a lot more feasible.
Rails are not nearly as costly as you seem to think. Early rails were used for bulk, heavy goods usage, you can expect them to see uses in the docks and harbors, the ironworks, quarries and mines, where the sheer efficiency and labor savings are more than worth the continuous replacement.
The cost of producing rails is more to do with the cost and availability of metal. Even for wood rails, the replacement rate is still much less wood than is used for housing, shipping or even furniture.
Yeah that's about right. It was what I could find. /shrug. I would assume religious tolerance is a part of religious authority tolerance. Because for example: We have a really high religious authority and our priests are large and in charge, but they have a lot of religious intolerance(i.e they hate other religions) and so our society starts having stability issues because of them going on witch hunts. (This could be us hitting red RA). Increasing education so other people and other priests can bring forth arguments to talk down these ideas sounds like a pretty good explanation of increasing religious tolerance(thus gaining +1 RA cap) as these more moderate folks balance out the more extreme.
Hmmm. Okay. That makes sense.
Religious tolerance is more to do with social and religious values. We're Syncretic, so we're highly accepting, whereas by contrast Monotheistic would be more rejecting of other belief systems. Pride in Acceptance pushes for accepting, while Purity pushes for rejecting.
Symphony and Justice produces conditional acceptance, they both value differing faiths which make no trouble and improve the lives of the people, but they strongly reject any faith which causes friction in other ways.
New vassal! Loyalty makes sense given we just took it, but i'm surprised the dependency didn't start at 5 given it's army was destroyed and it was mostly just pastures i think...
We replaced the army with our Martial investment, and the Forhuch had spent several turns repairing the stuff the Pure burned.
Was "Bolt Thrower"
Wooo, better siege and heavy ranged weapons
Presumably some of the innovations on crossbows carried over to their larger cousins given time, since i dont think they'd be too useful in the nomad fights...
Much more than you'd think. Effective horse drawn ballistas like historical Alexander used are a functional(if not really effective) counter for horse archers because a ballista can always outrange an archer.
Which is a pretty big difference from "I can hit you, but you can't hit back". The range advantage helps mitigate the mobility lack, and REALLY helps for hardpoint defense.
Nomads are glory mad, but theres no glory is being shot dead from far away.
Note that level 3 will give another "stack" of the level 1 and 2 effects, not just the level 3. So with the policies building the lv 3 aqueduct we'll have:
+1 E/-1 EE/-1 T To every Expand Economy action
+2 Econ/-1 Tech to agriculture policies
+2 Econ Upkeep offset, -1 tech for city support
+1 tech/turn
*Mystery action cost changes, presumably/hopefully reductions*
With luck, those certain action costs will include reducing wealth costs for some things, but probably it'll "just" be reducing tech or econ costs.
Quite interesting, that.
Very useful; iirc the winning plan literally only uses build mills for the guild actions
Basically, with all the farmers and urban poor out at war, the artisans have to be willing to be levied by the state to build mills to keep people fed, or to survey in search of wealth to keep the war machine going. Gymnasiums are a little weirder, but i guess aside from their help with secondary martial limit, they narratively involve training commanders.
Gymnasiums are basically barracks I think, in their next iteration.
As for the mills...no idea how that works out narratively, and AN is apparently deliberately keeping it a mystery.
Ouch D= Sounds like the harmurri rolled poorly and/or the HK rolled well
Really wish they'd held together better...though i guess the double trigger of nomads, that we rolled no stab loss on, was nice to get given our econ situation
Narratively it sounds like a critfail on defense, causing their king to be caught in the way of murder.
Interesting. So still not technically at war with highlanders...though if we let them collapse the harmurri we can expect them to attack us.
Also noting that the Harmurri would make the ideal staging ground for invading Txolla.
Here's the problem with your analysis when it comes to ironworks. You've looked at the numbers and seen that there are stat problems related to it. There's two conclusions we can reach from this:
1) There's something we're missing
2) Ironworks are bad and we should avoid them
The problem with the second option is that it runs completely counter to history. It requires reality to say, you know what, we'd be better off not having more iron and steel. It's not worth the investment.
I mean, it's not like we didn't experience the exact same thing with:
-Panem
-Level 1 Ironworks
-Level 2 Ironworks
-Level 3 Ironworks
-Libraries
-Roads
-High level cities
-Governor Palaces
-City Support
-Influence vs Support subordinate
-Temples
-And now Academies
There are hidden factors which are deliberately kept hidden until we go and do it. Mathematical efficiency only leads to short term optima, which is important if we're say, nearly starving, but not nearly as important for long term success.
