So...we know that the Yeomen dislike cities because they lose power the more people move away from farming.
But power is only a means to an end. What do they actually want it for?
If every city were dissolved, and they had more power than every other faction put together, what would they then want to do? Forests? Expansion to new settlements?
If we can work out their end goal, maybe we can give them what they want without needing to wreck our cities for it.
@Academia Nut?
The whole purpose of power is to ensure that ALL their interests can be met. Most of the uses of power happens below our visibility level, it means on the day to day level, if they want something, they generally can get it.
In the bolded case? They become Patricians, we transition to Feudalism as the power shifts away from the clerk-patricians to the rural landholder warrior-patricians.
An idle thought about factions: factions have different "class" associated with them:
Idea of mine is to account for it when looking at their powers: so, ideally, lower class factions are a bit more powerful than higher class.
So, if, for example, our Patricians, Priests and Guilds are high class factions; Yeomen, Traders are middle class; Urban Poor are low class.
So if Patricians have 6 power, other high class factions should have approximately same power (5-7 range) and lower classes should be in 6-8 range to account for class power.
Or at least sum total of lower class powers and higher class powers should be relatively equal.
Class only acts as a tiebreaker. Lower class means they must organize a group effort to enact change. Higher class means they have a lot of individual, personal power.
As such we SHOULD have the following class order:
-Patrician(Bureaucrat + Military) - Ruling class. Artificially elevated due to government system and continuity. Normally the ruling class are Warrior or Priest based who pick up bureaucracy out of necessity.
-Priest - Nominal equal to the ruling class as the spiritual class.
-Guilds - Organized production class. Artisans are individually low class, but their collective bargaining power can be substantial when represented as Masters. Artificially elevated due to our economic system, normally at a lower class.
-Yeoman(Agriculture + Military) - Rural ruling class. Has control over food production and military power beyond the state.
-Trader - Commerce class. Has power through personal wealth. Artificially lowered due to our legal system.
-Urban Poor - Organized Masses. Has power through combined effort.
-Rural Poor(Unrepresented) - Disorganized Masses. Has no power.
But noting that the order can always change, except the Urban Poor are always at the bottom.
Also noting that AN said the class divisions are not a given. As society changes new classes form or dissolve. The priests may eventually split into Intellectuals and Priests for instance, while for many smaller states the Bureaucrats aren't a class at all, much less the ruling class.
And once mass media arises the Media will become a thing.
One constant is that the ruling class generally contains the warrior elite however. Any ruling class without direct personal control over their military soon ceases to rule.
