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Paths of Civilization

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Academia Nut said:
Just so you know, the reason the weights went away was that the break swept away a lot of inertia. There will probably be some degree of weighting once again as new inertia builds up.

Anyway

[X][Ambition] Unify the Yllthon Coast
[X][Fuel] Sale of academy space to foreign nobles

Congratulations on picking one of the more synergistic variations, as well as picking the option to catalyze towards a modern university system.
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YES!
 
Horologer said:
We've seen some pretty outlandish stuff, we've witnessed extremely unlikely events, we've certainly been bizarrely anachronistic ourselves, and the Ymaryn themselves definitely believe in magic. That said, the evidence for magic is pretty thin. We haven't seen anything that's undeniably magical. We've got astrology, which A: is vague at best and B: has a rather checkered history. Then we've got Yenya "predicting" the meteor hit, which is certainly unlikely, but not as improbable as it seems.

Obviously, I can't prove a negative, but if there were magic, I'm pretty sure we'd have seen someone use it by now. It's the Age of Exploration; if people had magic they'd be busy trying to conquer the world with it.
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Again, depends on how exactly magic would even work in this universe. We have not even the slightest idea on what would and would not work.

@Academia Nut Since we are racing through this, would you mind clearing it up?
 
Raichu1972 said:
Who knew that having a multi century timeskip that is almost entirely out of the player's hands would create a Ymar whose inertia was not generally in line with the desires of the playerbase? :V
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That inertia was based on prior player decisions up to that point. Like, you always choose to ignore the outside world in favour of your own issues unless it literally comes up to bite you in the ass. There was essentially no will whatsoever to deal with anything external in the first round, which while it may have been a bit confusing the exact scope, mostly I was just judging the initial mood and going "Yup, as expected they are going to focus inward on tech and stability and internal development for the next thousand years as expected, let's skip forward to the next inflection point."

Those initial weights came from the society the players have been crafting in-universe and in-thread up to this point.
 
Academia Nut said:
That inertia was based on prior player decisions up to that point. Like, you always choose to ignore the outside world in favour of your own issues unless it literally comes up to bite you in the ass. There was essentially no will whatsoever to deal with anything external in the first round, which while it may have been a bit confusing the exact scope, mostly I was just judging the initial mood and going "Yup, as expected they are going to focus inward on tech and stability and internal development for the next thousand years as expected, let's skip forward to the next inflection point."

Those initial weights came from the society the players have been crafting in-universe and in-thread up to this point.
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Well, if nothing else, my idea when voting for that was that the Ymaryn already had diplomatic relations, no matter how scarce, with most if not all of their immediate neighbors. There were Nomads from the steppes who were always a threat (and the focus was based on what we constituted to be a "threat" iirc) but other than that the Ymaryn had no general direction to really worry about.

We had also been repeatedly told about our crumbling and under performing infrastructure, as well as our lack of cultural unity within the Ymaryn, and thus I had thought of those as the largest priorities.

I had never thought "internal focus on infrastructure and culture" meant "literally ignore the filthy barbarians and savages for a thousands years", especially since we did have passive forms of diplomatic interactions with other nations in the form of the Games.

It was mostly the xenophobia that surprised me more than anything else, since while there was an undercurrent of it in Ymaryn society, I had thought we were making waves in the opposite direction on that particular issue.
 
Maybe it was just me, but I saw that more as "we're almost falling apart right now administratively, we need to do something". We still had constant contact via the Games and immigrants, and we needed to make sure we didn't die due to administrative failures. Our tax code was in dire straits, our roads were outdated, we just introduced a parliament with all its attendant Division of Power complications, and we were in the middle of an industrial revolution where we'd get ridiculous excess stats as soon as we could build a few more palaces. If we didn't get things set up to handle that, we were going to explode. At least going by my feeling as a plan designer with the former mechanics.

Having that shift from "we're about to explode" to "so stable we're stagnating" in a single 1-hour vote seems... strange.
 
notgreat said:
Maybe it was just me, but I saw that more as "we're almost falling apart right now administratively, we need to do something". We still had constant contact via the Games and immigrants, and we needed to make sure we didn't die due to administrative failures. Our tax code was in dire straits, our roads were outdated, we just introduced a parliament with all its attendant Division of Power complications, and we were in the middle of an industrial revolution where we'd get ridiculous excess stats as soon as we could build a few more palaces. If we didn't get things set up to handle that, we were going to explode. At least going by my feeling as a plan designer with the former mechanics.

Having that shift from "we're about to explode" to "so stable we're stagnating" in a single 1-hour vote seems... strange.
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Tbf, from the outside, we've likely always seemed absurdly stable. We just get the front row view to the times that it starts to tremble.

Think about it, over a 4 thousand year history, we hadn't a grand total of 0 civil wars.
 
Academia Nut said:
That inertia was based on prior player decisions up to that point. Like, you always choose to ignore the outside world in favour of your own issues unless it literally comes up to bite you in the ass. There was essentially no will whatsoever to deal with anything external in the first round, which while it may have been a bit confusing the exact scope, mostly I was just judging the initial mood and going "Yup, as expected they are going to focus inward on tech and stability and internal development for the next thousand years as expected, let's skip forward to the next inflection point."

Those initial weights came from the society the players have been crafting in-universe and in-thread up to this point.
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Wasnt one of he main benefits of the international games that it provides a steady supply of international diplomacy?
 
Academia Nut said:
There was essentially no will whatsoever to deal with anything external in the first round, which while it may have been a bit confusing the exact scope, mostly I was just judging the initial mood and going "Yup, as expected they are going to focus inward on tech and stability and internal development for the next thousand years as expected, let's skip forward to the next inflection point."
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That's always been Ymaryn, at least as far as I can tell. We've always tended to prioritize our own internal development over conquest, and that is what the other options sounded like ("Focus on threats from the west or the east or the south...").

What I don't get, and what really seemed to come out of nowhere, was the sense of isolationism and xenophobia that you inferred from that choice. As is, the most heavily weighted 'gunpowder' option was "ignore it, those barbarians don't know anything." That's never been Ymaryn. This thread has worked really hard to incorporate foreign insights and cultures into our society, sometimes at our own expense. That's why we have the 'Pride in Acceptance' trait.

Just because we weren't an expansionist power, why should that make us ignorant of the world and totally insular over a thousand-year timeskip? The first Lightning Round literally said:
Academia Nut said:
There are threats from within and without, where did the People focus their attentions when not forced otherwise by circumstances?
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We never got invaded? We never had an ally ask for help? We never had an unstable neighbor? We never realized that a hostile Trella could threaten our heartland, and decide to take over the Not!Bosporus? At no point did circumstance drive us to focus our attention on the world around us?

Likewise:
Academia Nut said:
Pick a development focus
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We voted en masse for 'Infrastructure' and 'Culture', largely because those two pretty well define Ymaryn society. We build things, and we believe things strongly. But our infrastructure includes the Sacred Forest and the great Dam -- it allowed us to build the earliest True Cities in not!Earth's history, and feed more people than any other region of the world, and build some of the finest walls in the world. And our culture explicitly included 'Philosopher Kings' and 'Divinely Glorious Elites', both of which prioritized education, excellence, and a love of knowledge and learning. I kinda took for granted that developing Ymaryn culture would automatically increase our tech base as well, or at least our readiness to embrace new tech. But instead we stagnated for 1000 years, and by the second Lightning Round, it had become nearly impossible to pursue gunpowder tech -- our own science base was so poor, we would have needed to steal gunpowder from not!China in order to realize its value.


Ymaryn died before not!Genghis ever showed us. It died off-screen, during that first thousand-year timeskip.
 
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Yeah, the quick voting phase did more to destroy my interest in this quest/world than the months long hiatus did. I mean what drew my to this in the first place was the petty unique culture of the Ymaryn and their atypical behaviour and most of that seems to have been lost (though in some ways that was admittedly simply an continuation of trends that were already present in the quest). And while that may be realistic, indeed perhaps far more so than the culture remaining intact/static for thousands of years, it is simply not that fun or interesting to read about, at least to me.

I mean what is the point of continuing with the civilization of you more or less destroy all that made it so special in the first case? I mean if you/the GM is tired of its characteristics or think that the development has reached its end wouldn't it far better to simply start with a new civilization rather than try and continue with the old one.

Really this feels in many ways like a low-quality sequel in a book or movie franchise which is sad since this was in my opinion one of the more interesting stories on this site...
 
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Raichu1972 said:
It was mostly the xenophobia that surprised me more than anything else, since while there was an undercurrent of it in Ymaryn society, I had thought we were making waves in the opposite direction on that particular issue.
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Not...exactly. We were pushing back against the "foreigners are impure and should be shunned" idea, but we passed up the opportunity to completely tear out Purity in favor of going for half-exile reforms, and even our more open & charitable efforts toward refugees often had an air of condescending magnanimity to them. Ymaryn "Strong Opinions about Farming" were amusing, but also indicative of a sense of cultural superiority that was a major component of the problem.
 
Honestly the time skip was a pretty terrible idea in my opinion, it skipped some of the most interesting eras in history.
No rise of some sort of empire to the west, no wars for control of the Mediterranean.
No actual exploration, or interesting interactions with new cultures.
 
Wiadi said:
Not...exactly. We were pushing back against the "foreigners are impure and should be shunned" idea, but we passed up the opportunity to completely tear out Purity in favor of going for half-exile reforms, and even our more open & charitable efforts toward refugees often had an air of condescending magnanimity to them. Ymaryn "Strong Opinions about Farming" were amusing, but also indicative of a sense of cultural superiority that was a major component of the problem.
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I agree that there was an in general sense of "we are better than you" in Ymaryn culture, but the Ymaryn also didn't shy away from taking the innovations from others and using them for their own purposes.

An example of this is King's Iron, which was made from a combination of Ymaryn, Freehills, and Storm Ymaryn work. There was no shying away from the technology, nor any sort of trepidation that foreigners were involved in its creation.

Part of the Pride in Acceptance, which seems to have been modified through the stagnation, was that while we sent all our innovations out, we also got the innovations of those around us. The gunpowder lightning round seemed to indicate that while the Ymaryn still leaked innovations like crazy, they stopped taking in the innovations of others, for some reason.

You would think that even a culture with strong feelings of cultural superiority would still take in things of others, if only to improve upon them and show that they are the best.
 
NavySeel said:
Honestly the time skip was a pretty terrible idea in my opinion, it skipped some of the most interesting eras in history.
No rise of some sort of empire to the west, no wars for control of the Mediterranean.
No actual exploration, or interesting interactions with new cultures.
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The problem is AN wants to continue the quest, needs to rework all of the mechanics for being too complicated, and wants to get to the space age asap.
 
Wiadi said:
Not...exactly. We were pushing back against the "foreigners are impure and should be shunned" idea, but we passed up the opportunity to completely tear out Purity in favor of going for half-exile reforms,
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At the time i thought aknowledging the half exiles being abused were a problem and fixing it was part of changing purity to something else but the event chaon just stopped and nothing else came of it. :confused:
 
Nianque said:
The problem is AN wants to continue the quest, needs to rework all of the mechanics for being too complicated, and wants to get to the space age asap.
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I'm an outsider here. I've never participated and only normally read the threadmarks. But what these last updates actually read as is @Academia Nut, wants to burn his quest down because he's angry (about what I've no way of knowing).

You don't really get suddenly 1500 years of isolation unless the GM both doesn't care, and is pissed off. Frankly, a never-ending hiatus would probably have been kinder.

EDIT: I mean, I'm vaguely unhappy about it and I only read the threadmarks. I can't imagine what it must be like for you guys who cared so much that you spent two hundred pages arguing over boats.
 
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Wiadi said:
We were pushing back against the "foreigners are impure and should be shunned" idea, but we passed up the opportunity to completely tear out Purity in favor of going for half-exile reforms
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As I recall, we kept 'Purity' because we wanted to develop it along the lines of disease prevention and sanitation, not because "eww, barbarians." I mean, we cured smallpox during the Bronze Age -- that's got to be worth something.

Look at the front page, and compare the two relevant traits:
Academia Nut said:
Pride in Acceptance
The People see not outsiders but fellow humans in need of assistance, and are always willing to offer aid, knowing that even when friendship is uncertain the act of offering is a cleansing one.
Pros: Enhanced absorption of new ideas, +1 social value from current or historical neighbours, whenever a neighbour suffers a stability drop have the option to also suffer a stability drop in exchange for a large boost to Econ and technological and social advancement by absorbing especially large numbers of people, the first Econ boost a turn is free and the second only has a chance of causing a stability drop rather than a guaranteed drop, massively increased inward tech spread, new CBs
Cons: Many think you weak, no longer have the option to turn away the first two boosts, sometimes you get values you didn't expect, increased outward tech spread
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Academia Nut said:
Purity
Only through physical purity can spiritual purity be attained. There can however be no mercy for those who would contaminate the pure.
Pros: Bonuses to resisting disease and foreign influences
Cons: The impure and unclean must be eliminated
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'Purity' was one of our values, but it was also a minor trait and was very much underdeveloped compared to our major ones, especially 'Pride in Acceptance.' PIA, on the other hand, was incredibly well developed, and was explicitly about our willing to embrace new ideas and foreign cultures, even when that 'foreign influence' resulted in a stability drop. (Considering that 'bonus to resisting... foreign influences' was one of the benefits of Purity, I'm inclined to say that this trait might have been developed to reduce or ameliorate that stability drop. At least, given the explicit parallels to disease, it should have made us more resistant to foreign influence that was incompatible with Ymaryn values...).

Either way, it's clear that Academia Nut had a very different idea of Ymaryn culture and values during the timeskip than the rest of the thread did.
 
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