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Paths of Civilization

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ctulhuslp said:
I mean, one thing we should pay more attention to is "always ask yourselves how it would work with people as opposed to mechanics or even what narrative you can glimpse", but that was a pet peeve of many of us for quite a while, so.
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Yeah, that's a shame really.
ctulhuslp said:
This sentiment is not news either; our backlog grows faster than we are going through it, and it's most likely intentional. What can ya do but face things as they come and try to snatch long term and non-mechanical improvements when we can?
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Start by asking exactly where the problems are, what our current checks and balances for them are, and think of how likely they are going to be to fail soon. If we can just delay one crises by pre-empting it, then we won't have to spend twice the amount of effort fixing it when it would have normally triggered. Likely during another crises with our luck.

This may give us as little as one extra action that we otherwise wouldn't have had. Or maybe only save us a few stats. But it will certainly make us happy and smug for stopping yet another complete cluster fuck from happening, and let's be honest, morale is one of those things this thread could need more of.

So, some problems?
  • Distribute Land is coming. What are the range of failure states that this could create and how can we respond to them? We have spent some intrigue to make sure we can do this better, but what dilemmas is that intrigue likely to bring up? What are we likely going to have to do to solve them?
  • We have someone that is very close to an idiot king coming in, and are unlikely to be able to fix the situation. What can we get done before he comes into office? What actual useful things can we get him to do for the likely 4-5 turns he'll be in office? Keep in mind that while he is a heroic culture, he is one with a military bent so any culture he does will likely follow his concept of military based art. Can we turn this to our advantage at all? Perhaps we can try to create more local martial arts that villages can practice to be more prepared for the next invasion or to just improve their health? Perhaps the ideas of honor in warfare can be advanced, thus making us less likely to do abhorrent things in war, which we know we still do even if they're not at the same level as others. Something else?
  • We're working really hard on increasing connectivity. We do know, however, that this is going to start opening up cans of worms as we start seeing things we didn't see beforehand. What are those things likely to be and what can we do alongside putting down more roads to prevent them from being as bad as they would otherwise be?
  • Our festivals used to be things that teach people the laws, or at least one of them did. How is that holding up? If it isn't holding up, what would we have to do to have people learn the laws again? It sounds like Proto Lawyers are coming around, perhaps we can use them somehow? How so and what are the likely problems that will arise from that?
  • What's the state of our military? Is it safe? Are they overly loyal to a faction we don't want them to be? Who do we want them to be loyal to, and how would we fix that?
  • Obligatory get more cavalry for the inevitable nomads here.
  • How is the rest of our army balanced? Is there anything we can do to increase it's effectiveness?
Some things to start the discussion. Because things aren't quite on fire currently, and we really should figure out what we need to do to have the next inevitable fires be less than they otherwise should be.

That said, there is one question that is absolutely the most important that we aren't really asking because we're too focused on the current fire and general advancement of society when we have the chance.

What is the next crises going to be?
  • Nomad invasion? (They went away for a few turns, about how many is that going to buy us?)
  • Attempted rebellion? (Ask who would rebel, why they would rebel, and what we can do to stop it.)
  • Forced Social Reform? (This one actually sounds pretty promising with the distribute land coming up, but what is it likely to actually be and how serious?)
  • Epidemic? (Always a constant threat due to cities. Should we put study health on repeat? Perhaps even be willing to give the priests power by making it one of their dedicated actions? It was a study health roll that saved our asses last disease in our crit fail.)
  • Highlander Kingdom will absolutely declare war on us if they get wind of any of this and it's severe enough. How do we prep for that? (This is a forgone conclusion, we all know it.)
  • Not!Greece invading? (They're awfully close and have even managed to let pirates into our sea. This seems like it would cause us problems at least.)
 
Citino said:
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'.
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And you are either ignoring my point or have completely missed it (if it is the latter, that might be my fault because in hindsight, I don't think I explain it that well). I think the extremism is bad and the extreme pressure to be the best as you can is a bad thing because of how affects the way that Ymaryn society and I from what I can tell, the more we advanced the pressure to be the 'best', the more evil the Ymaryn are becoming.

So while it might be mechanically good, I consider it to be narratively crap. "Our new trait just means that the Patricians have enough support from other classes to be able to resist suppression" only works if you works if look at what is clearly stated and not at the implications. Which we have just have several people coming in and pointing that out the players in general aren't looking beyond what can be immediately seen in how the Ymaryn do things.

Sure Moloch Calls is more obviously worse, but our elitist traitline is more insidious to my perspective. Of course, how bad it is depends on what you want the Ymaryn to be like. I want the Ymaryn to be the good guys and even that is impossible in our era, I still want the Ymaryn to be clearly the morally best around. A more realistic version of wanting the the Ymaryn to be 'the brightest beacon of humanity' as some have put in the past. If you don't care about the Ymaryn being evil and instead, for example, just want them to be the top dogs, then sure, Glorious Divine Elites is a good trait. But if you want the Ymaryn to be the good guys, Glorious Divine Elites might be the trait that cross the line into a extremism elitist collectivism that we can't turn back from without a collapse or a similar earth-shaking event that will reform society.

So just as the Moloch Calls was the value that pushed the Dead Priests past the moral event horizon, I'm worried that the Glorious Divine Elites might be the value or the precursor value that will push the Ymaryn past the moral event horizon. Of course, I'm might be completely wrong and honestly, I truly hope that I am, but until AN answers how Glorious Divine Elites as shaped Ymaryn society, I'm not going to be convinced that Glorious Divine Elites doesn't have the potential to morally destroy the Ymaryn just as Moloch Calls did the the Dead Priests.
 
Malevolo said:
So okay, what's the plan for the decentralization? Because we need to decentralize, but at the same time create the conditions where the King chooses the province governors, and at the same time guarantee the patricians their pipe-dreams of "my little fief".
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Slash the big government positions like provincial governors into triples, one managing money, another food, and last one law. While maintain King's control over the army. This would hopefully make sure the bigger political players are locked into eternal struggle.

But the other problem is our faith system, no oversight over the watchers and that is letting the unsavory ones run wild.

Of course that is only possible if the King in rein during law reform is capable of seeing the problem and able to fix it.
 
fictionfan said:
Why?
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The idea is that the state is becoming too big for a centralized government to govern it all. There's just too much information in relation to the number of government overseers, so there are growing gaps of oversight where unsavory elements are digging in. Since we don't have the technology to make the administration more efficient (better roads, postal services, paper, armies of clerks, etc), we should just divide the duties.
Not sure I like the idea myself, I tend to hate small governments as a rule.
 
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HanEmpire said:
The idea is that the state is becoming too big for a centralized government to govern it all. There's just too much information in relation to the number of government overseers, so there are growing gaps of oversight where unsavory elements are digging in. Since we don't have the technology to make the administration more efficient (better roads, postal services, paper, armies of clerks, etc), we should just divide the duties.
Not sure I like the idea myself, I tend to hate small governments as a rule.
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We have just invented paper. That is a force multiper for admistration.
 
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veekie said:
Uh, the knowledge wasn't really lacking. Individual players have put the pieces together, raised it repeatedly...and simply got tired before the players with much more persistence and/or free time proceed to repeat the same points a few dozen times.

I've personally done quite a few of these, but its really impossible to have a even moderately complex reasoned analysis be noticed when its ignored and drowned out by much simpler ideas and slogans.
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Maybe all these questions have been answered before, but as someone who has only recently caught up with this thread I have to say that a lot of what I read in the last ~10 pages was quite a surprise. Most of the darker stuff is nowhere in the threadmarks. And I'm guessing the same is true for quite a lot of other information, including information rather relevant to decision making. And you really can't expect all of the newer or old but inconsistent participants who may have missed new posts for long periods of time to shift through 5642 pages looking for each and every unmarked WoG or insightful player analysis.
Until we get threadmarks of all the stuff that we actually know in character, or until someone writes everything deemed relevant in the wiki (It already has a few links to un-threadmarked sources that are quite insightful), you will have this same problem come up over and over and over again.
I mean just to give an example, the whole forced suicide thing that has now been added as a "funny" tag by a mod was afaik literally only mentioned by a poster who happened to learn it from a private conversation with QM AN and relayed it to us once he thought it relevant. We don't know when this conversation took place, nor do we have any direct quotes from it, or even a clarification by the poster as to what was directly stated and what he inferred from there.

@Cetashwayo Could you actually give us quotes of the info in question, seeing how it is treated as relevant enough that it should be informing votes?
 
Malevolo said:
Still bad, the messengers take one month from the east frontier to the core, and don't even get me started on the west frontier problem. We need to delegate, and we need to make the King more of a oversee and less of a central nexus of government.
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The western frontiers should be on capital's figurative doorstep, given that we have catamarans.
 
Malevolo said:
Still bad, the messengers take one month from the east frontier to the core, and don't even get me started on the west frontier problem. We need to delegate, and we need to make the King more of a oversee and less of a central nexus of government.
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A better way of thinking of it would be to how can we keep the central government effective. Because we aren't really going to be decentralizing so much as adding another layer of bureaucracy to the table. To put it in game mechanic terms, our goal is less to lower centralization and more to safely raise Hierarchy.

I get what you mean, and you are right in the thrust, but decentralization would specifically mean giving far swung territories rights that are usually reserved for the central government where as hierarchy means that we delegate the stuff we want the central government to do to the local authorities, but retain the ability for the central government to legally step in and change things.

We probably want more rights for the far flung groups too, mind, and we're almost certainly going to lose centralization when we gain hierarchy in order for it to work, but I feel the subtle difference in emphasis between wanting to decentralize and wanting a more effective hierarchy is important to note.

Rafin said:
Maybe all these questions have been answered before, but as someone who has only recently caught up with this thread I have to say that a lot of what I read in the last ~10 pages was quite a surprise. Most of the darker stuff is nowhere in the threadmarks. And I'm guessing the same is true for quite a lot of other information, including information rather relevant to decision making. And you really can't expect all of the newer or old but inconsistent participants who may have missed new posts for long periods of time to shift through 5642 pages looking for each and every unmarked WoG or insightful player analysis.
Until we get threadmarks of all the stuff that we actually know in character, or until someone writes everything deemed relevant in the wiki (It already has a few links to un-threadmarked sources that are quite insightful), you will have this same problem come up over and over and over again.
I mean just to give an example, the whole forced suicide thing that has now been added as a "funny" tag by a mod was afaik literally only mentioned by a poster who happened to learn it from a private conversation with QM AN and relayed it to us once he thought it relevant. We don't know when this conversation took place, nor do we have any direct quotes from it, or even a clarification by the poster as to what was directly stated and what he inferred from there.
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I feel you. I'll say that the thread figured out the suicide thing long ago, very close to if not when we got honorable death. It's description was rather telling in that people were looking for honorable ways to die, and we quickly came to the conclusion that death through overwork or risky work was going to be a thing. We also had many people sacrifice their lives in experimenting to find a cure for a disease one time. Most of us frequent participants have just forgotten that this sort of thing is common knowledge, because our way of confirming that it's still there is to see that the honorable death trait is still there and that there is nothing offsetting it.
 
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Rafin said:
@Cetashwayo Could you actually give us quotes of the info in question, seeing how it is treated as relevant enough that it should be informing votes?
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You'd have to ask AN for the direct quotes, we talked about it on discord back when the divine glorious elites crisis was going on. I honestly regret bringing it up since I don't know if AN wanted that information out explicitly, and wasn't aware it was something players didn't know already. I assumed since he was talking about it there was enough obvious implication that it was just a blunter restatement of already available info. I've lurked the thread for a while (so has Cav) but I don't follow everything.
 
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Cetashwayo said:
I honestly regret bringing it up since I don't know if AN wanted that information out explicitly, and wasn't aware it was something players didn't know already.
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We surely did knew, that 5000 thousand pages are literally discussions upon discussions upon discussions, we reached a point where when someone ask a question people simply quote a message they did long ago as answer.

We all knew the problem with Jantenloven could happen, so we did go in the other way fully... and reached the same point by going overboard and creating a nega jantenloven.
 
Malevolo said:
We surely did knew, that 5000 thousand pages are literally discussions upon discussions upon discussions, we reached a point where when someone ask a question people simply quote a message they did long ago as answer.

We all knew the problem with Jantenloven could happen, so we did go in the other way fully... and reached the same point by going overboard and creating a nega jantenloven.
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Yeah, but I'm talking to someone who says they didn't know :p
 
Cetashwayo said:
Yeah, but I'm talking to someone who says they didn't know :p
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Where do you think the insane amount of salt comes from? We have like a... domestic Thorium reactor here basically, because people come, post, them other come screaming from the netherworld... and them manus comes, people go silly, salts starts building up... repeat.

Hell, we did have a nearly fight because of the Charcoal x Coal debate, or Boat debate...
 
bluefur87 said:
Hey, if you want to be the next person to write up a detailed reply on what the stats are and how they work, I'm not going to complain. We find ourselves having to catch new player up all the time.
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>takes a look at the civilization sheet

nah...nah i think i'm good

Anyways, if the issue is information asymmetry then it probably makes sense for AN to be taking a hiatus to revise the system. Since it's clearly somewhat impenetrable or at least difficult to navigate by sheer volume. I've always lurked but never been able to participate because of the vote system.
 
Cetashwayo said:
Anyways, if the issue is information asymmetry then it probably makes sense for AN to be taking a hiatus to revise the system. Since it's clearly somewhat impenetrable or at least difficult to navigate by sheer volume. I've always lurked but never been able to participate because of the vote system.
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What specifically about the vote system stops you from participating out of curiosity?

Is this a staff thing I am not aware of or is there something about how it's set up that makes it so you can't participate? I'm always looking for ideas on how to improve how voting is done in quests.
 
Cetashwayo said:
>takes a look at the civilization sheet

nah...nah i think i'm good

Anyways, if the issue is information asymmetry then it probably makes sense for AN to be taking a hiatus to revise the system. Since it's clearly somewhat impenetrable or at least difficult to navigate by sheer volume. I've always lurked but never been able to participate because of the vote system.
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Well, you don't need to do that because @Kiba has already done that.
His herculean job among others has all the information compiled on the wiki Paths of Civilization Wiki
 
Cetashwayo said:
>takes a look at the civilization sheet

nah...nah i think i'm good

Anyways, if the issue is information asymmetry then it probably makes sense for AN to be taking a hiatus to revise the system. Since it's clearly somewhat impenetrable or at least difficult to navigate by sheer volume. I've always lurked but never been able to participate because of the vote system.
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I'm pretty sure a lot of the information issues come from the fact that every update has an immensely unreliable narrator.

Many of these deeper issues, like the fact that Priests kill those who refuse to commit suicide, are literally never mentioned in the updates themselves, and people have to either infer that such a thing will happen, or AN has to come out and say it during the thread discussion.

This causes a lot of people to have a different idea of the Ymaryn than what they actually are, because they trusted that the information given in the updates is mostly truthful and unbiased when it is in fact not.

A good example of this I think is the whole situation with Phygriff, where we voted the Nomad in to be King. The option of the ruthless administrator was what AN expected us to pick, but because the narrators of the update, the Patricians, hated the idea of him being King, they painted him in the worst light possible. So because we believed in the information given to us by the narrators, we ended up choosing what was in actuality one of the least palatable candidates, considering that he then enacted a genocide a few turns later.

I don't think that even a system update can truly resolve that issue, but who knows?
 
bluefur87 said:
What specifically about the vote system stops you from participating out of curiosity?

Is this a staff thing I am not aware of or is there something about how it's set up that makes it so you can't participate? I'm always looking for ideas on how to improve how voting is done in quests.
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It's not a staff thing. I'm posting here as a user.

When I see a vote like:

[] Art Patronage
[] Black Soil
[] Build Chariots
[] Build Docks
[] Build Glassworks
[] Build Goldmine
[] Build Mills
[] Build Porcelain Works
[] Build Theatre
[] Build Wall
[] Build Watchtowers
[] Change Policy
[] Develop Intrigue Web
[] Distribute Land
[] Efficient Charcoal Kilns
[] Enforce Justice
[] Expand Economy
[] Expand Forests
[] Expand Snail Cultivation
[] Expand Vineyard
[] Hunt Troublemakers
[] Found Colony
[] Found Free City
[] Found Mercenary Company
[] Found Trading Post
[] Influence Subordinate
[] Integrate Colony
[] Integrate March
[] Integrate Vassal
[] Invite to Games
[] Improve Annual Festival
[] Launch Intrigue Mission
[] More Blackbirds
[] More Carrion Eaters
[] More Spiritbonded
[] More Warships
[] New Settlement
[] New Trails
[] Plant Cotton
[] Plant Hemp
[] Plant Poppies
[] Proclaim Glory
[] Raise Army
[] Restore Order
[] Retraining
[] Sailing Mission
[] Salt Gift
[] Study Alchemy
[] Study Health
[] Study Metal
[] Study Stars
[] Survey Lands
[] Support Artisans
[] Support Subordinate
[] Support Faction
[] Suppress Faction
[] Terrify
[] Trade Mission
-Target Options: Highland Kingdom, Thunder Speakers, Lowland Minors, Tin Tribes, Trelli, Swamp Folk, Renegade Kingdoms, Storm Tribes, Northern Nomads, Mountain Horse, Into the Wild (Eastern Sea), Into the Wild, Khemetri
[] War Mission
-Target Options: Northern Nomads, Eastern Nomads, Storm Tribes, Pirate Clans
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I get information overload. In general these kinds of complicated votes obviously favor plans, and plan voting benefit a small group of high-information players over others. I never did plan votes as a QM in Magna Graecia and never saw the need; it tended to complicate things unnecessarily on my end and on the end of the voters. Some people like them, I'm not a fan, because the time it takes to plan things out and analyze options is far beyond my willingness to participate. That's just my opinion, though. I don't take it as a huge complaint against PoC. It's clearly popular.
 
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Cetashwayo said:
I get information overload. In general these kinds of complicated votes obviously favor plans, and plan voting benefit a small group of high-information players over others. I never did plan votes as a QM in Magna Graecia and never saw the need; it tended to complicate things unnecessarily on my end and on the end of the voters. Some people like them, I'm not a fan, because the time it takes to plan things out and analyze options is far beyond my willingness to participate. That's just my opinion, though. I don't take it as a huge complaint against PoC. It's clearly popular.
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But this quest doesn't use plan votes? AN has forbidden voting by plan.
 
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