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Paths of Civilization

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fictionfan said:
It is interesting by building tall instead of wide we have created a nation with huge income, but low stat caps. We regularly fill and empty our stat caps in a single turn. Contract that with neighbors that built wide. I expect that they all have much higher stat caps, but much less income.
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Of course, the really funny part is we ate our main wide building neighbor, the Thunder Horse/Xohyr Empire. All of it as of this last war and grabbing the Mountain Horse territory. So really, building tall is relative here. Of course, it collapsed before we ate it, but still.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Remember when the patricians were supporting the traders and threatening to prevent their quest from being fulfilled? Spite quests are born of an inherently self-sabotaging mindset so I would not bet on the factions working to fulfill them.
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They were supporting the traders so that they'd generate the most powerful spite quest possible, and they'd then intervene in subsequent turns to make sure that said spite quest was impossible to succeed at, so we'd be smacked by the greatest possible negative consequences.

It's because this kind of thing happens that we need to be able to suppress factions as cheaply as possible to kill quests or break the power of dominant factions.
 
Alratan said:
The upper classes usually instigate class wars, and they usually win. We don't want to reinforce class divisions any more. Division of Power, narratively, sounds an awful lot like classical privilege.
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Nooot really? It is a value we got from our early republic/democracy Freehills neighbour (so the background of "do not let too much power into one hands"), and goes like this:
Academia Nut said:
Division of Power (PiA Linked)
By preventing the accumulation of power into any single person or faction, the damage of someone throwing a tantrum is mitigated... although it also makes breaking up widespread support harder.
Pros: Faction quest failures have a free negation, requiring two completed quests or Support Faction actions to reset. Unsuppressible failure states become Suppressible
Cons: Addition -1 Stability when suppressing factions
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Like, it is explicitly about "no one faction should be too powerful". I do not understand where you are getting what you are getting, seems like a pretty reasonable "power should be distributed to prevent one (bunch of) asshole(s) fucking up everything forever" value.
 
DragonParadox said:
Remember when the patricians were supporting the traders and threatening to prevent their quest from being fulfilled? Spite quests are born of an inherently self-sabotaging mindset so I would not bet on the factions working to fulfill them.
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Yeah, spite quests will be worse than ever with the factions gaining so much power.

I really think we need to either a) invest heavily in good working relations with the factions, so they stop their spite quests and actually do what needs doing; or b) repeatedly stomp on all of them until we move to a more centralised government system. Option a) has far more potential power, and Joyous Symphony means it should be possible.
 
Alratan said:
I think that we're moving to a system where the factions will have their own actions so will be able to work to complete their quests, spite or not, whether we want them to or not, unless we're able to suppress them and get rid of the quest.

We won't be able to get rid of the value right now, but this isn't a vague notion of the future, this is the fact that the guilds can probably directly use their actions from next turn onwards to screw us up to achieve their spite quest, and suppressing it is unnecessarily expensive.

The benefit of being able to ignore a quest without consequence is pretty meaningless if the factions will just complete the quest anyway.
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What sort of spite quests are you envisioning here? It's not like there are a ton of actively detrimental things our factions want/can get, so my expectation was that it'd likely just be extremely exaggerated demands with no reward and a nasty failure penalty (e.g. Stab hit, possibly multi-point) - in which case the factions would have a hard time getting it done on their own, and even if they somehow did it wouldn't be an especially bad thing.

More generally, I expect that quests going forward will be calibrated to require some amount of our involvement to make happen - the point is that they aren't just what the factions want in general but what they are specifically asking the king to do. Their broader priorities are already well-known.
 
Alratan said:
We're reaching the point where we may well want to get rid of Division of Power, as factions are going to complete their quests with their own actions unless we intervene, and we will sometimes really need to suppress them to do that, and really don't want to pay for the extra stability. THe government change really turns the cost-benefit against that value.
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Keep in mind that we are only seeing the lvl1 version of the value; it will undoubtedly get better as it levels. And there is the narrative stuff, as others have mentioned.

fictionfan said:
It is interesting by building tall instead of wide we have created a nation with huge income, but low stat caps. We regularly fill and empty our stat caps in a single turn. Contract that with neighbors that built wide. I expect that they all have much higher stat caps, but much less income.
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We've built pretty wide too, you know. We are currently at seventeen provinces, which is actually five over our soft-cap.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Nooot really? It is a value we got from our early republic/democracy Freehills neighbour (so the background of "do not let too much power into one hands"), and goes like this:
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Early republics are notorious for being oligarchies. They're pretty much the opposite of what we'd understand as democracies. The classical political concept of the republic is a kind of opposite to a democracy. They're a study in contrasts, not synonyms.

ctulhuslp said:
Like, it is explicitly about "no one faction should be too powerful". I do not understand where you are getting what you are getting, seems like a pretty reasonable "power should be distributed to prevent one (bunch of) asshole(s) fucking up everything forever" value.
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In an interdependent system, it very easily comes to mean that rather than having one bunch of assholes can fuck everything up for ever, you have lots of different groups of assholes that can fuck everything up forever unless everyone cooperates every time, and no one ever defects when they play the game.
 
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loserthree said:
Can someone catch me up on the too-much-econ thing? Are the free cities despawning? How is that being prevented?
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We don't have too much Econ, we have rather a lot of Econ Expansion. Which represents, basically, vacant land, which attracts people away from the cities. Also, if there is a lot of unworked land, it typically means that we're short on food, which makes city living unsustainable. So, cities pop as people return to the countryside.

We counteract it by using up the land (converting Econ Expansion into Econ).
 
PrimalShadow said:
We've built pretty wide too, you know. We are currently at seventeen provinces, which is actually five over our soft-cap.
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On the other hand, a less centralized government system would probably have a higher province cap, since our main constraint there is managing all of that territory.
 
Alratan said:
Early republics are notorious for being oligarchies. They're pretty much the opposite of what we'd understand as democracies. The classical political concept of the republic is a kind of opposite to a democracy. They're a study in contrasts, not synonyms.
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An oligarchy is perfectly serviceable. What we understand as a democracy is such a distant ideal at this level of development that we may as well hope for cold fusion.

I agree division of power has its issues but to me they look like the sorts of issues we want to evolve past not "kill with fire."
 
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ThrawnCA said:
We don't have too much Econ, we have rather a lot of Econ Expansion. Which represents, basically, vacant land, which attracts people away from the cities. Also, if there is a lot of unworked land, it typically means that we're short on food, which makes city living unsustainable. So, cities pop as people return to the countryside.

We counteract it by using up the land (converting Econ Expansion into Econ).
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A) Thanks, but the fluff wasn't unclear.

B) Are the free cities going to despawn?

C) How, exactly, are we planning on stopping the free cities from despawning?
 
loserthree said:
Can someone catch me up on the too-much-econ thing? Are the free cities despawning? How is that being prevented?
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We currently have 29 Econ Expansion space. This makes people leave the cities for the countryside, destroying all our cities except for Redshore. To prevent this we need to reduce our EE by 10, getting below 20.

However, we would like to pass the Urban Poor quest. This requires freeing 2 cities next turn. This is only possible if we have those 2 cities online before then. This can be accomplished via double-main Expand Econ, which would reduce our EE by 23 (-28, but +5 from refunds), putting us below the critical value.
This will turn on three of our cities (including Valleyhome), letting us free Sacred Forest and Blackmouth.
 
DragonParadox said:
What we understand as a democracy is such a distant ideal at this level of development that we may as well hope for cold fusion.
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I don't know of any actual democracies in the 21st century. Australia, and the USA, have democratic elections every few years, and the rest of the time the populace isn't part of governing.

I make no statement about whether that is positive or negative, but it isn't actual democracy.
 
ThrawnCA said:
I don't know of any actual democracies in the 21st century. Australia, and the USA, have democratic elections every few years, and the rest of the time the populace isn't part of governing.

I make no statement about whether that is positive or negative, but it isn't actual democracy.
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That goes down the route of debating semantics which is never a fruitful one in my experiance.
 
notgreat said:
We currently have 29 Econ Expansion space. This makes people leave the cities for the countryside, destroying all our cities except for Redshore. To prevent this we need to reduce our EE by 10, getting below 20.

However, we would like to pass the Urban Poor quest. This requires freeing 2 cities next turn. This is only possible if we have those 2 cities online before then. This can be accomplished via double-main Expand Econ, which would reduce our EE by 23 (-28, but +5 from refunds), putting us below the critical value.
This will turn on three of our cities (including Valleyhome), letting us free Sacred Forest and Blackmouth.
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The urban poor quest is to get five free cities, right?

How is that going to happen if the free cities despawn?
 
fictionfan said:
I don't think we are going to manage the urban poor quest.
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We know exactly how to. Double-main Expand Econ on the midturn, and 2x Free City during the main.

We almost certainly will have [PSN] available to us, covering one of them. The other one will hopefully be a [React] option, though we sometimes have other actions during the midturn that we could use instead.

It's no guarantee, and we might decide some other crisis is more important, but it is highly likely to be an option we can take.

loserthree said:
The urban poor quest is to get five free cities, right?

How is that going to happen if the free cities despawn?
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Preventing the free cities from despawning happens at 20 EE. Getting the new free cities requires use to be at 10 EE. Which we can get to if we double-main. Whether that's what we'll actually do is another question, but it is likely (though not guaranteed) to be available on the midturn.
 
DragonParadox said:
That goes down the route of debating semantics which is never a fruitful one in my experiance.
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Well, you could in theory devise a system where the population votes on every major decision. It becomes much harder with a population of millions, but the internet makes it not impossible if you really wanted to do that.

There are arguments to be made about whether this would be good or bad, whether it's more important to have universal participation or to elect the best decision-maker you can find. Not going to wade into those. But regardless, it's not the system that any large nation currently has.
 
Repeatable (Kings) Action Clusters Take 3: Hopefully for real this time.
Basically, this is, "What two or three mains would we benefit from happening every turn?"

Cluster 1: Wealth Generation Complex
Plant Cash Crops-Textiles
-5 Econ, -5 Econ Expansion, +7 Wealth, +2 Diplo with boats, +1 Culture, +1 Econ next turn, other effects

Then either:
1) Internal Reorg
+1 Econ and Mysticism, increases Econ Expansion, +2 Province progress
Net: -3 Econ, -3+? LTE, +7 Wealth, +2 Diplo, +1 Culture
Kinda sad that building new settlements is one of our only two ways to get Mysticism.
(Can only be done three times)

2) Expand Forests
-3 Econ, -3 Econ Expansion, grows forest, +4 Econ next turn if in settled and controlled territory, improved odds of success, other effects, +1 Sustainable Forest
Net: -3 Econ, -3 LTE, +7 Wealth, +2 Diplo, +1 Culture, +1 Forest
-Advantage over adding black soil too-gives forests, less harsh on econ
2a) EF and Black Soil
-2 Econ, 1 Forest Slot Consumed, -1 Tech, +6 Econ Expansion, other effects
Net: -5 Econ, +3 LTE, -1 Tech(Refunded), +7 Wealth, +2 Diplo, +1 Culture, +1 Forest(Used)
-Advantage over just forest-EE gain instead of loss

Combo this with Build Mills (-8 Wealth, - 1 Tech, +4 Econ, increased potential for innovation x2), Support Artisans (-1 Econ, -10 Wealth, +5 Tech, +1 Culture, higher chance of innovations x2) or wealth-spending repeated of your choice, or just rake in the wealth.
A different cash crop would give similar results (Drugs is +1 Econ, +1 LTE, +1 Mysticism, -2 Diplo, -1 Culture to each net, Luxuries is -1 Econ, +1LTE, -1 Wealth, -1 Diplo +1 Culture) and are both options, but the narrative for textiles is the best imo. (And the best replacement, drugs, is kinda sketchy, narratively).



Cluster 2: Roads are the new dam
Build Roads
-3 Econ, -4 Wealth, -2 Tech, +2 Centralization, +2 Diplo, other effects
Trade Mission
-2 Diplo, -1 Econ, additional effects depending on target, +1 Wealth, +1-5 Wealth end of turn
Net:
-4 Econ, -2 to +2 Wealth, -2 Tech( 1 refunded), +2 Centralization, connectedness and diplomatic relations.
Not as happy with this one, but to generate wealth without losing tons of EE, trade mission is our best bet. The centralization is worrisome, but there is really no other option if we want repeated roads.
 
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