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Paths of Civilization

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Wiadi said:
Okay, I said I was having fun here and I still am, but it's getting a bit tiresome to have to keep repeating the same points. I am not advocating for micromanagement from the central government, because that would turn into the sort of bureaucratic nightmare you're describing. I am advocating for a system whereby the central government sets down rules for provincial governments to follow, which in turn establish standards for communities within those provinces, and so on. This is essentially an evolution of the same system we have now, just with the addition of child-rearing to the responsibilities of the local communities (and thus the addition of its regulation to the responsibilities of the higher levels of government). Adding roles to the government will, of course, always somewhat increase the demands on the bureaucracy; however, I do not see how incorporating a single new area into the state's remit will inevitably result in a massive increase in corruption and inefficiency.
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This contradicts your earlier post:
Wiadi said:
You're creating a false dichotomy between "micromanage everything" and "hold no control at all." The central government would delegate child-rearing to smaller communities, to make things practical, but regulate such communities to ensure that none have more resources for child-rearing than the others. Combine that with communication of any new techniques developed, and even if every community individually works only for its own children, the baseline provided across the state is consistent because the best of one community is identical to the best of another.
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You said that your system will eliminate unfair advantages that some communes have over others, not to set minimum standards for everyone. I am getting tired of this back and forth. You are promising the Moon, and yet are refusing to acknowledge the inherent problems people keep pointing out.
Wiadi said:
If you want to fiat that it's impossible to develop social values such that people legitimately don't favor their biological descendants, then fine, make it so they don't even get to know who their biological descendants are.
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You are immoral and unworthy of my time. This conversation is done.
 
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Wiadi said:
If you want to fiat that it's impossible to develop social values such that people legitimately don't favor their biological descendants, then fine, make it so they don't even get to know who their biological descendants are. Children are taken immediately from birth to be raised by the community, with parents at best being able to guess based on visual resemblance who's actually related to them. If you think that guessing would be too much of a problem, then have nearby communities transfer children among themselves so that parents do not have access to their offspring at all. Each of these steps somewhat increases the challenges of implementation and so should not be introduced immediately, as I don't believe it's as impossible as you claim to overcome the relevant challenges without them, but if they prove necessary solutions are available.

"Complete overhaul of our society" is in fact part of the game plan here; you may have missed it but I stated that the system I want would most likely be possible to implement only in the wake of a societal collapse, preferably engineered by us to maximize the odds of a suitable successor state emerging. This also provides an answer to your concern about our social-engineering capabilities - while our precision may be limited, repeated "generations" of civilization should allow us to achieve our desired results through trial and error.

While I agree with your goals, I do not think the argument is irrelevant to our current actions because I am in favor of other steps for which the rest of the thread does not seem to share my desire. For instance, I consider it a necessary priority to curtail the power of the Patricians even at steep cost, so as to prevent them from entrenching themselves so deeply that they are even more trouble to uproot when the time comes.
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People revert to the most basic forms of society when major civilizational collapse occurs, and family is the most obvious and basic form of society. The sort of cyclical civilizational selection you propose won't work, because each "generation" of civilization would slide increasingly towards very primitive and durable forms of society, which would naturally include a focus on the family. The chaos of a civilizational collapse also causes us to lose resources, legacies, and power. If we collapse too many times we will cease to exist as a meaningful entity and the Quest will either end or we will get shunted to a different successor state and be back at square one.

If you really do want to make communal upbringing a thing, you want to avoid collapse, not encourage it.
 
HanEmpire said:
This contradicts your earlier post:

You said that your system will eliminate unfair advantages that some communes have over others, not to set minimum standards for everyone. I am getting tired of this back and forth. You are promising the Moon, and yet are refusing to acknowledge the inherent problems people keep pointing out.

You are immoral and unworthy of my time. This conversation is done.
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"Establish standards" does not refer exclusively to "minimum standards;" my phrasing changed but the intent was the same. I also made the intervening layers of hierarchy more explicit (central -> provincial -> community) but those are just examples; the actual number of layers would have to be chosen to fit the size of the territory governed, to avoid putting excess workload on any one layer while not creating ones with no purpose. The central idea is still the same: regulate but do not micromanage. Why is this so hard to grasp? Do you consider all regulation to be micromanagement?

As for your last point, I would appreciate it if you would at least try and explain what about my proposal you consider immoral. If it's just "it makes me feel icky" then, well, I guess we won't be able to have a productive dialogue, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have a moral system in mind here that you can actually articulate and defend.
Janadus said:
People revert to the most basic forms of society when major civilizational collapse occurs, and family is the most obvious and basic form of society. The sort of cyclical civilizational selection you propose won't work, because each "generation" of civilization would slide increasingly towards very primitive and durable forms of society, which would naturally include a focus on the family. The chaos of a civilizational collapse also causes us to lose resources, legacies, and power. If we collapse too many times we will cease to exist as a meaningful entity and the Quest will either end or we will get shunted to a different successor state and be back at square one.

If you really do want to make communal upbringing a thing, you want to avoid collapse, not encourage it.
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The cycle is perfectly viable so long as the interval between collapses does not contract. I do not believe that a post-collapse civilization is worse off in terms of values, legacies, and resources than one that has not even been established yet; consequently, a cycle with a consistent(ish) length of survival for each stage should not experience your hypothetical bleed of material and immaterial resources. As to "reverting to the most basic forms of society," I am suggesting that we engineer these collapses with an eye to preserving particular community-oriented values (which we must work pre-collapse to develop) that would encourage treatment of a larger group as part of the effective "family unit;" building up from such a society would give the best possible opportunity to institute the sort of system I describe.
 
I think traditional family unit (parents and offspring(s)) and extended families will become less important as the technology progress makes living easier. Single parent family is unthinkable mere 100 years ago around the world, but it has slowly became possible and even acceptable. Good or bad i have no idea tho.
 
Wiadi said:
The cycle is perfectly viable so long as the interval between collapses does not contract. I do not believe that a post-collapse civilization is worse off in terms of values, legacies, and resources than one that has not even been established yet; consequently, a cycle with a consistent(ish) length of survival for each stage should not experience your hypothetical bleed of material and immaterial resources. As to "reverting to the most basic forms of society," I am suggesting that we engineer these collapses with an eye to preserving particular community-oriented values (which we must work pre-collapse to develop) that would encourage treatment of a larger group as part of the effective "family unit;" building up from such a society would give the best possible opportunity to institute the sort of system I describe.
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Impossible, their is simply no way to organize via large group functions when the society the largest of group functions collapses.
 
Wiadi said:
The cycle is perfectly viable so long as the interval between collapses does not contract. I do not believe that a post-collapse civilization is worse off in terms of values, legacies, and resources than one that has not even been established yet; consequently, a cycle with a consistent(ish) length of survival for each stage should not experience your hypothetical bleed of material and immaterial resources. As to "reverting to the most basic forms of society," I am suggesting that we engineer these collapses with an eye to preserving particular community-oriented values (which we must work pre-collapse to develop) that would encourage treatment of a larger group as part of the effective "family unit;" building up from such a society would give the best possible opportunity to institute the sort of system I describe.
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Three points:
  1. We cannot engineer collapses to keep values, because the situation will be too chaotic for us to predict outcomes with sufficient accuracy.
  2. You are not accounting for other civilizations. If we fall apart, they will seize the opportunity. If we fall apart often enough, they will subsume us entirely.
  3. You are not accounting for the progression of time and the interference of other issues. We will not have an indefinite amount of time to run these cycles, because technology will advance outside our borders and other issues will demand our time and resources.
These cycles will not work. There are too many interfering factors and insufficient time to create a useful pool to select from, and again, each cycle makes a success increasingly less likely.
 
A few observations I've generally been keeping to myself, since I don't follow the quest to vote due to the headache-inducing format of choices;

1. You are not even remotely unique in holding land as the property of the State. Egypt and Mesopotamia both held all land as the property of the King ruling as proxy of the gods, and taxed the harvest to directly distribute to the rest of the economy. The Mesopotamia polities generally went further, developing more elaborate rules for taking the harvest but in both cases they were on first glance a primitive command economy with the great temple complexes as nerve-centers. The entire "Bronze Age Palace economy" really was something of a centralized command economy that kept production of finished goods at the disposal of the ruler, who distributed them along with the grain. We don't know if the Minoans and Myceneans did the same thing in terms of control of land, but they certainly centralized all other production with a palace bureaucracy. The Ymaryn economy is basically the same thing as the Late Bronze Age, except where AcademiaNut has dragged you all kicking and screaming into more flexible forms of production and trade.

2. You are all astonishingly incurious about other cultures and civilizations. That is a break from the Late Bronze Age, where the rulers of the Near East participated in a whirling exchange of correspondence, gifts, and marriage alliances. Indeed "gift-giving" was often a proxy for the exchange of desirable commodities, especially gold and copper but also artisans and skilled craftsmen, since the primitive command economies kept "trade" as a state function. The Ymaryn have the Games, but aside from that seemed almost allergic to interacting with foreign civilizations or exploring around. The lack of knowledge presented a major issue when, for example, you all ran into the Khemtri and failed to understand the norms of the international milieu around you.

3. You really have no idea what is going on in the countryside where 90% of the population lives. You say yes, you understand that, but then you go on and on about the urban population and the elites as if they are the only actors around. There are certainly ways you could find out, for example, just how land is actually being redistributed by the patricians in the countryside- frankly just asking AcademiaNut some questions might suffice. That's also why you miss stuff like how the collectivist ethos gets applies when dealing with people who categorically cannot contribute productively to society, or the ways in which the various vassals were drifting away from the core. @Cetashwayo is absolutely correct you're behaving like Mandarins in the Imperial Palace working from a totally abstract and theoretical model of society based solely on your ideals, while unleashing all kinds of social chaos and violence on the basis of utopian schemes that are either not even implemented or are implemented in ways which surprise serve the interests of the people implementing the policies.

4. More broadly still it just seems like you all don't understand that you aren't controlling everyone like puppets. You almost never try to imagine the perspective of the particular classes, or the peasantry supporting the country, or even that of enemies and foreigners you need to interact with. You spend pages and pages and pages trying to make math work without ever even considering what the math actually means. The closest you come is abstract concern about the "narrative" or "synergy" without trying to break it down to "how does this work." That's what led to the nasty surprise that (finally) forced you all to take a Distribute Land option, and which will continue to throw up crises you barely survive thanks to highly convenient "crit successes" or enemies getting "crit fails" or a Genius always showing up, or at least AcademiaNut finally stepping in exasperation and giving you a choice to "do X thing" or "suffer Y consequence."

So maybe ask yourself from time to time "why would anyone go along with our next random anachronistic or radical policy" and figure out an answer. Most of the time it's going to be "because they've figured out an angle to benefit themselves at the expense of someone else." And sometimes, like with taking children to redistribute, it'll be "fuck no they won't go along with this and we are going to burn society to ashes if we try."
 
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SpeckofStardust said:
Impossible, their is simply no way to organize via large group functions when the society the largest of group functions collapses.
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I...what? This makes no sense. "Well, your house got hit by a tornado, so I guess all the wood is just gonna discorporate into its component molecules now." Like...societal collapse does not mean "all organizational structures abruptly cease to exist," it means Ymaryn civilization undergoes severe fragmentation. There's no reason that fragmentation has to be all the way down to the level of individuals.
Janadus said:
Three points:
  1. We cannot engineer collapses to keep values, because the situation will be too chaotic for us to predict outcomes with sufficient accuracy.
  2. You are not accounting for other civilizations. If we fall apart, they will seize the opportunity. If we fall apart often enough, they will subsume us entirely.
  3. You are not accounting for the progression of time and the interference of other issues. We will not have an indefinite amount of time to run these cycles, because technology will advance outside our borders and other issues will demand our time and resources.
These cycles will not work. There are too many interfering factors and insufficient time to create a useful pool to select from, and again, each cycle makes a success increasingly less likely.
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Okay, in order:
  1. I agree that we cannot guarantee that we will keep particular values, but we can set things up to maximize our chances of success. With repetition this is sufficient. Of course, your next points challenge the plausibility of that repetition, so I will have to address those.
  2. Some of our fragments will likely be consumed by other civilizations, but if I understand AN's comments correctly, we will still have a choice of successors - whether this means controlling a vassal state or a fragment that is left to its own devices for long enough, I don't know, but either way the result is still workable. As for your "often enough" point, that simply means we need enough time between collapses to re-establish a sufficient base to survive the next one.
  3. The advance of technology is actively helpful to us in implementing my desired system. We will have to ensure we keep up on that front, but our civilization is already well-tuned to absorb tech from neighbors; so long as we work on preserving those elements, it should be possible to recover our techbase from whatever damage the collapse inflicts with relative ease. You are not wrong that other issues will demand our time and resources, but I do not see how this prevents the cycle from being executed; it merely slows it somewhat.
I am still unconvinced of your claim that each successive cycle will somehow decrease the chances of success. Do you seriously believe a post-collapse Ymaryn offshoot will be in a worse position than the Ymaryn were at the start of the quest? If so, why?
 
@Wiadi what exactly are the benefits of the system you are arguing for? I mean, establishing a merit based system of government that also allows for high levels of social mobility is great, but when that requires extensive state control of large portions of the population, immense expansion of the central state, drastic changes to the culture that would make PiA and Joyous Symphony seem easy to obtain and keep, it's insane to even contemplate it.

So what are we going to get put of this that will make it all worth it in the end?
Cavalier said:
4. More broadly still it just seems like you all don't understand that you aren't controlling everyone like puppets. You almost never try to imagine the perspective of the particular classes, or the peasantry supporting the country, or even that of enemies and foreigners you need to interact with. You spend pages and pages and pages trying to make math work without ever even considering what the math actually means. The closest you come is abstract concern about the "narrative" or "synergy" without trying to break it down to "how does this work." That's what led to the nasty surprise that (finally) forced you all to take a Distribute Land option, and which will continue to throw up crises you barely survive thanks to highly convenient "crit successes" or enemies getting "crit fails" or a Genius always showing up, or at least AcademiaNut finally stepping in exasperation and giving you a choice to "do X thing" or "suffer Y consequence."
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This was actually recently brought up, and you are correct. Many people had assumed that we had direct control over the King as well as whoever else might be needed to implement a policy.

And honestly, while we do often focus too much on the math, we do try to take into account the ic point of view. It's just hard for us to do so, because we have so little clue of what happens at anywhere other than the highest levels.

So while we'd love to be able to consider what the urban poor or Patricians think of something, we all too often lack the info to actually put together the pieces ahead of time. (Which, as far as I am aware of, is a feature of the game, not a bug)
 
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Citino said:
@Wiadi what exactly are the benefits of the system you are arguing for? I mean, establishing a merit based system of government that also allows for high levels of social mobility is great, but when that requires extensive state control of large portions of the population, immense expansion of the central state, drastic changes to the culture that would make PiA and Joyous Symphony seem easy to obtain and keep, it's insane to even contemplate it.

So what are we going to get put of this that will make it all worth it in the end?
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I mean, "what we're going to get out of this" is what you mentioned at the beginning of your post: a merit-based system of governance that allows for high levels of social mobility. I don't see expansion of the state and its responsibilities, as well as drastic cultural changes, to be such massive evils as to make the endeavor not worthwhile. Why do you think that they are?
 
AN has one time and again said that we LACK information because the sources of it are:
1. Centralization
2. Intrigue
3. Inter connectivity
 
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I mostly stopped asking because the quest was too complex and assuming IC society is like x on pure assumption.

HanEmpire said:
How does our judicial system look again? Who are the judges? Do we have separate police force?
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Part of the governing structure with BB as sort of corruption catcher. No separation of justice from government position.
 
HanEmpire said:
How does our judicial system look again? Who are the judges? Do we have separate police force?
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heh...
hehehehahahahahaha

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

Sorry, but, it's just, yeah. I think it's time for me to give you some unfortunate news here.

Laws are made by the king and enforced by the patricians using local warriors that are more than likely loyal to them. If someone disagrees with a patricians rulings they need to take it to the King's court for an appeal.

Yes, no matter where they are, that's how you overturn the ruling. At least roughly as of last time we asked, and we have only seen evidence to support this is still the case, which was pretty recently (a few turns ago we saw the king complaining about the increase in appeals because proto lawyers are coming into existence).

Wanting to advance the legal system is not just idle talk here. We really want to do it.
 
VoidZero said:
Part of the governing structure with BB as sort of corruption catcher. No separation of justice from government position.
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So that's why we keep getting rumblings about ruler-subject disconnect from below.
bluefur87 said:
Wanting to advance the legal system is not just idle talk here. We really want to do it.
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Oh sure, I just want to keep the judges separate from the patricians if possible. Perhaps a royal patronage for the promising sons of half-exiles?
 
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Wiadi said:
I mean, "what we're going to get out of this" is what you mentioned at the beginning of your post: a merit-based system of governance that allows for high levels of social mobility. I don't see expansion of the state and its responsibilities, as well as drastic cultural changes, to be such massive evils as to make the endeavor not worthwhile. Why do you think that they are?
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Several other people have pointed out why the things you would need for this system to work would be problematic already, but I'll try to clarify my own thoughts.

So, first. Communal childcare. So, as far as I am aware, this has never been successfully implemented except during time of extreme societal duress, in which there is literally no other option to do this. Should we try it, we'd have to go against a core part of human nature, which, while possible would not be fun to implement. I personally do not think this is possible in the current Ymaryn incarnation, and believe that it would require the complete collapse of the Ymaryn as a civ, which would be a near apocalyptic event in and of itself.

Already, we have the problem that your plan requires societal collapse, which would almost certainly lose us centuries of technology, damage or destroy many of our cultural values, and take all of our legacies. So we would likely lose PiA at the very least, considering how delicate that value is.

But let's say we pull it off. Ymaryn have collapsed and reformed with a communal childcare value. Yay. Well, now you want to educate the population, right? Well, there's a couple problems with that as well. The big one is mass education is expensive. Like, this will cripple the economy of any classical age economy expensive. Even modern governments, which are countless times more wealthy than any classical age civ would be, still consider education a significant investment, even when they have all the infrastructure in place, an already educated populace, and cheap methods of teaching (aka having cheap books).

those two things alone have many, many points of failure in them as well, which means we'd have a lot of work maintaining them. And then we come back to my question. What does this system give us that makes such an investment in time, resources and effort worth it?

Would all that effort that your system would require give us a significant advantage? With only a fraction of the effort, we can create a meritocracy styled system with middling amounts of social mobility, which gives us most of the advantages of your system, but at lesser cost. The saved effort and resources can then be used to do things like advance the sciences, promote our people's wellness, or whatever else we want to do.

Tl;dr your system is too costly for not nearly enough rewards, even if it is possible, which we aren't sure if it is.
 
Wiadi said:
I...what? This makes no sense. "Well, your house got hit by a tornado, so I guess all the wood is just gonna discorporate into its component molecules now." Like...societal collapse does not mean "all organizational structures abruptly cease to exist," it means Ymaryn civilization undergoes severe fragmentation. There's no reason that fragmentation has to be all the way down to the level of individuals.


Okay, in order:
  1. I agree that we cannot guarantee that we will keep particular values, but we can set things up to maximize our chances of success. With repetition this is sufficient. Of course, your next points challenge the plausibility of that repetition, so I will have to address those.
  2. Some of our fragments will likely be consumed by other civilizations, but if I understand AN's comments correctly, we will still have a choice of successors - whether this means controlling a vassal state or a fragment that is left to its own devices for long enough, I don't know, but either way the result is still workable. As for your "often enough" point, that simply means we need enough time between collapses to re-establish a sufficient base to survive the next one.
  3. The advance of technology is actively helpful to us in implementing my desired system. We will have to ensure we keep up on that front, but our civilization is already well-tuned to absorb tech from neighbors; so long as we work on preserving those elements, it should be possible to recover our techbase from whatever damage the collapse inflicts with relative ease. You are not wrong that other issues will demand our time and resources, but I do not see how this prevents the cycle from being executed; it merely slows it somewhat.
I am still unconvinced of your claim that each successive cycle will somehow decrease the chances of success. Do you seriously believe a post-collapse Ymaryn offshoot will be in a worse position than the Ymaryn were at the start of the quest? If so, why?
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  1. No, we really can't. The chaos and fighting will break and alter society in ways that we can't predict, and you always risk losing seriously important traits that are necessary for our continued survival.
  2. Other civilizations and other successors will not necessarily share our communalist values. Ineed, since they conquered us, they may be actively trying to snuff it out. As for "often enough", I would like to point out that it took from the beginning of the quest until a few updates ago for us to get "City on a Hill", which is the trait that ensures we have a successor state. Building up the kind of base you are talking about takes an extremely long time.
  3. Again, if we keep collapsing, we will become a technological backwater, becuase political instability puts a major damper on innovation. That makes us less likely to achieve your plans and more likely to be eaten by neighbors.
I am getting the feeling that you don't quite grasp the enormity of a civilization collapsing. Look at the fall of Rome.

Do you think that is at all a sustainable pattern? How many times do you honestly think we can repeat that?

bluefur87 said:
Fair and true.

If we were to fix this issue I'd say we should put together a comprehensive list of where our knowledge is lacking and start pestering AN continuously about these things.
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Or maybe we could swap out Infrastructure passives for more narratively interesting choices, like Diplomacy or Sailing Missions.

If we want info, we should take actions that give us information. If we pester AN for info he's just going to tell us "you don't know anything about that".

Malevolo said:
AN has one time and again that we LACK information because the sources of it are:
1. Centralization
2. Intrigue
3. Inter connectivity
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We lack information because we weren't willing to trade away immediate mechanical benefits for intangible benefits.

This has been a problem for some time now.
 
You know... the decrease in Cent from Wild Cat activation is sort of like forming company town for the new mine, we assumed the newly established mine is under state control, but is it really? Are we setting up powerful families without realizing the leak of government resources and authority?
 
OliWhail said:
Damn, that's really fucking dark.
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Well, I guess the Ymaryn have actually been a Lawful Evil empire disguised as a Lawful Good one the whole time.

Literally everyone is an asshole, everyone is treated like shit, even if they are fed, the worthless are executed or made to kill themselves, religious slavery was a thing until a few turns ago, and likely is still a thing literally everywhere that isn't a True City, and it goes on and on.

Kind of reminds me why I got burned out on this quest in the first place.
 
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