Why not both?
It seems as though we only ever see the negatives of these traits, with the positives mentioned relatively rarely.
Like, everyone gets fed, but people are basically treated as a spoke in the wheel to fuel the Empire.
People sacrifice themselves for good reasons, but are also killed if they no longer have a use.
The Nobility are good at what they do, but are also more assholish then they were already.
It just gets rather frustrating after awhile.
And yeah, I know, Classical Age, Good is impossible, accept that the majority of everyone in existence is going to be an asshole, yada yada.
Edit: Sorry if this sounded rather hostile
@Citino , as I'm just frustrated with the way things are going.
My apologies if I got too heated.
We see the positives all the time though. Thriving cities when most other people just have large towns. Famines reduced in severity to an almost unheard of extent in the rest of the world. Massive infrastructure projects that have and will last centuries, or even millennia.
All that is only possible because we took our civ in the direction we did. Our nobles are assholes, but they are also assholes who are competent, which is honestly better than a lot of ruling classes right off the bat.
Our people commit suicide to preserve food, sometimes unwillingly, but also sometimes because they wish to help their loved ones prosper.
Like, you can look at this and only see the bad or ugly that a modern person focuses on, or you can look at why they would do this.
When an old man suicides, does he do it out of bitterness? Or does he look at the world around him, and see a dead tree that he can remember planting, and see not that it's a lifeless husk, but that it nurtured new life all its own. Small animals, fungi, and who knows what else now thrive through the trees death, and in the same way, that old man knows that his death will aid his village as well.
Even the dark parts of our civ are not fully dark. These aren't things we want long term, but our people have reasons to do them.
I'm not saying that collectivism itself is evil. I'm saying that the particular elitist collectivism that the Ymaryn has become so extreme that I consider it evil because it doesn't care about those who can't make it all the time or burn out. As I said before, I'm worried that Glorious Divine Elites is going to the Ymaryn's Moloch Calls.
its really not even close. DGE is just an extension of what we already have, one that we picked st a particularly inopportune moment. The trait connects what we had already going, the idea that each person should strive to be the best they can be, and brought it to the obvious conclusion. If you want to be perfect, then you must ensure that everything that supports you is perfect.
So now a patrician has a reason to ensure that the people who serve him are of the highest caliber, that they have the best training and talent they can possibly have. While it separates the classes more firmly, it also ties together their strengths and ensures that the higher classes want to invest in the lower classes.
Combine this with LL and Symphony, and you've got strong ties to work with that will increase innovation.
Moloch Calls is infinitely worse than even the most pessimistic view, on the other hand. Our new trait just means that the Patricians have enough support from other classes to be able to resist suppression. Moloch Calls was literally 'you fail diplomacy forever, lol'.
