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Paths of Civilization

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FriedIce said:
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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Eh. Speaking as someone who has been following the thread, this was a long time coming. As for why AN did it like this instead of letting the game continue as normal, even leaving aside mechanics, look at all the salt that's been coming up during the Lightning Round. Now imagine stretching that salt over weeks or months as we play out the collapse of the Ymaryn in excruciating real-time. As is his stated motivation, I'm perfectly willing to believe that AN just wanted to get through the pain & salt all in one go so we can move on to more enjoyable parts of the quest.
Publicola said:
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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It's also clear that the thread has chronically maintained an overly rosy & positive view of Ymaryn society, brushing its failings under the rug & reacting with shock when more unsavory elements come to light. Hardly surprising that people would refuse to believe we could make mistakes or fail as a culture.
 
Sivantic said:
If we had to collapse, I would have honestly preferred a new start menu for 2050 and given us the option of Ymaryn traits and pick 3.
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Really? Why? We have more control this way, and it's not like pushing the events the timeskip is covering to the background would've made them not happen. Especially as at least some people would have wanted to know how we got from Point A to Point B, so AN would presumably have shared the details (likely in a more condensed form) of what happened over the entire timeskip anyway.
 
Erandil said:
I think that those two things stand in direct opposition to each other and I am honestly more than a little bit dumbfounded why AN would go this route instead of simply starting a new quest.
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From what he said, it's because he knows how the quest would unfold if he had left it alone for the next 3000 years or so. The space age, or the industrial revolution at the earliest, were apparently the divergence points, where things actually get interesting.

Don't quote me on that though, I'm not totally sure about what AN is planning.
 
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Wiadi said:
It's also clear that the thread has chronically maintained an overly rosy & positive view of Ymaryn society, brushing its failings under the rug & reacting with shock when more unsavory elements come to light. Hardly surprising that people would refuse to believe we could make mistakes or fail as a culture.
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I'm not talking about 'rosy' vs. 'unsavory'. I'm talking about things like, "Is Ymaryn society willing to embrace foreign ideas/tech or not?"

The answer, according to the front page, is: "definitely yes; Ymaryn eagerly embraces new ideas, even destabilizing ideas, it's one of their core traits."
The answer according to this Lightning Round has been: "not even slightly; given half a chance Ymaryn will retreat into a thousand years of isolation."

That's not so easy to hand-wave away. There is a fundamental disconnect between the society we knew, and the thousand years that we skipped.
 
Wiadi said:
It's also clear that the thread has chronically maintained an overly rosy & positive view of Ymaryn society, brushing its failings under the rug & reacting with shock when more unsavory elements come to light. Hardly surprising that people would refuse to believe we could make mistakes or fail as a culture.
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Yeah we should really have voted to work on fixing our cultural flaws.
 
A question to the thread:
Did anyone expect double internal+Culture/Infrastructure to *not* give us not!Inwards Perfection? Especially with how our traits were growing prior?
 
andrewopk said:
A question to the thread:
Did anyone expect double internal+Culture/Infrastructure to *not* give us not!Inwards Perfection? Especially with how our traits were growing prior?
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I didnt expect it to last over a thousand years, the quest was already planning to turn inwards for a bit to actually culturally unify our people and reduce travel time so we didnt disintegrate to cultural drift then get caught in a total deathmatch due to PSN refusing to accept any loss of land.
 
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andrewopk said:
A question to the thread:
Did anyone expect double internal+Culture/Infrastructure to *not* give us not!Inwards Perfection? Especially with how our traits were growing prior?
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Again, tbf, people didn't know that the top two options were being picked. They voted for what they saw as their #1 priority, not what they saw as the overall problems in Ymaryn society.
 
andrewopk said:
A question to the thread:
Did anyone expect double internal+Culture/Infrastructure to *not* give us not!Inwards Perfection? Especially with how our traits were growing prior?
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Impression from last update was that DL went in effect and everything was in disrepair. Soooo yeah we were completely uninterested in the outside world.
 
VoidZero said:
Impression from last update was that DL went in effect and everything was in disrepair. Soooo yeah we were completely uninterested in the outside world.
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Once again, I think I should specify that I was not uninterested in the outside world, but I was uninterested in the threats of the outside world.

A large portion of the later parts of the quest centered on how the Ymaryn were their own worst enemy, with the quest becoming more about managing the different factions and stopping ourselves from exploding than anything involving foreign invaders.

We had amicable relations with our immediate neighbors, barring the HK, and had only really had military concerns in the form of gigantic nomad hordes.

The HK were treated as a bump in the road because they were so in truth, not because we didn't care about the outside world.

I remember there being a decent push towards sending out trade and diplomatic missions to our neighbors before the hiatus, so it's not as though the thread wanted to go full Inward Perfection.


I know that there is the "stay home, go farming" meme in thread, but for a good chunk of the Ymaryn empire they were interventionalist to the point of their own detriment (see the Trelli War)
 
I can only hope we get another vote on restoring the Old Ymaryn Empire in the future. Perhaps during the Renaissance or something.

As to the direction the quest has suddenly gone... Eh. I'd probably be more annoyed if I'd been active on here for the past few months instead of away, but even then it's nice just to see some form of continuation.

Yes, the Ymaryn aren't the same as they once were, but then again, they were never as nice as we wanted them to be. The time skips can hide a multitude of reasons that people could create for why the Ymaryn stagnated as they did and fractured as hard at the end. As an example, put in a couple of centuries of Patrician dominance over other factions and stagnation seems far more likely.

I would have preferred the time skips to have lasted over a couple centuries at most, but I'm not the author of the quest. I'd have also really enjoyed a much longer account of the apocalyptic war against Not!Genghis, since it truly sounds like it would make for an epic story in it's own right.

The Not!Mongol negaverse must have been rather amusing, as they realised how batshit insane the Ymaryn are when sufficiently pissed off :lol
 
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All I'm getting from the last few pages of discussion....


...is that purity played a part in fucking us over.

Oh my actual god.

I...I have no words. Oh we can develop the trait, oh we can do this and that.

I KNEW NOTHING GOOD CAME FROM THAT TRAIT, NOTHING.:mad::mad::mad::mad:

/s (sorta)

Obv we couldn't have predicted that the lightning rounds would've happened or any of that, but I told you all purity was shit and should've gone to shit right there with phy-whatever his name was and our growing social stratification.

We became China. Now I'm hoping we go through the development into a global superpower like our China.

Except you know...with less...bad stuff.
 
Raichu1972 said:
Once again, I think I should specify that I was not uninterested in the outside world, but I was uninterested in the threats of the outside world.

A large portion of the later parts of the quest centered on how the Ymaryn were their own worst enemy, with the quest becoming more about managing the different factions and stopping ourselves from exploding than anything involving foreign invaders.

We had amicable relations with our immediate neighbors, barring the HK, and had only really had military concerns in the form of gigantic nomad hordes.

The HK were treated as a bump in the road because they were so in truth, not because we didn't care about the outside world.

I remember there being a decent push towards sending out trade and diplomatic missions to our neighbors before the hiatus, so it's not as though the thread wanted to go full Inward Perfection.


I know that there is the "stay home, go farming" meme in thread, but for a good chunk of the Ymaryn empire they were interventionalist to the point of their own detriment (see the Trelli War)
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We had reached a point where we were everything and outside had nothing except threats. Plus the whole Trelli shenanigan consumed majority of the will for outside world.
 
VoidZero said:
We had reached a point where we were everything and outside had nothing except threats. Plus the whole Trelli shenanigan consumed majority of the will for outside world.
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We had just conquered a massive section of land with a hugely divergent culture, and our western vassals were also taking any chance to try and secede, anyone who didn't focus inward after that would splinter anyway.

I'm pretty sure the main contention is that it seems to be total and last over a thousand years.

EDIT: though i must admit that not even over a thousand years of focusing on cultural unity and internal infrastructure stopped the western ymaryn from betraying us when things got bad is hilarious.
 
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Raichu1972 said:
Once again, I think I should specify that I was not uninterested in the outside world, but I was uninterested in the threats of the outside world.

A large portion of the later parts of the quest centered on how the Ymaryn were their own worst enemy, with the quest becoming more about managing the different factions and stopping ourselves from exploding than anything involving foreign invaders.

We had amicable relations with our immediate neighbors, barring the HK, and had only really had military concerns in the form of gigantic nomad hordes.

The HK were treated as a bump in the road because they were so in truth, not because we didn't care about the outside world.

I remember there being a decent push towards sending out trade and diplomatic missions to our neighbors before the hiatus, so it's not as though the thread wanted to go full Inward Perfection.


I know that there is the "stay home, go farming" meme in thread, but for a good chunk of the Ymaryn empire they were interventionalist to the point of their own detriment (see the Trelli War)
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Okay, but we didn't just pick emphasizing internal threats, we also picked exclusively internal focus for development (Infrastructure & Culture). There was a Diplomacy & Trade option there, you know.
 
Carrnage said:
Did the players decide that the Ymaryn would focus on 2 options exclusively for a thousand years?
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I feel like you're exaggerating here. It's not that we did literally none of the other stuff, it's that we emphasized the options we picked, because some priorities are going to receive more focus than others. There wasn't a "perfectly balance all of our conflicting desires & priorities" option because that's not a thing we can just do.
 
Wiadi said:
It's not that we did literally none of the other stuff, it's that we emphasized the options we picked, because some priorities are going to receive more focus than others. There wasn't a "perfectly balance all of our conflicting desires & priorities" option because that's not a thing we can just do.
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And what diplomacy did we do? what trade? what research? what exactly did we do that wasn't cultural and infrastructural?
 
Okay it Seems we are turning the Yllthon sea into our personal lake.
Good good.
And we unlocked Universities.
Which I don't know what that means because the stat system has been abolished.
Any generous souls want to illuminate me from my ignorance on its narrative effects?

Also Any chance we can still try and regain the old Ymaryn Empire?
Or have we locked away that choice by not picking it?
 
Carrnage said:
And what diplomacy did we do? what trade? what research? what exactly did we do that wasn't cultural and infrastructural?
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And what exactly did we do that was cultural or infrastructure development? The updates were so short and "empty" that I am really hard pressed to see any real development in any of the major foci we took...

Indeed you could argue that trade and innovation are a bigger focus point of the relevant update than either culture or infrastructure was. I mean if you look at the update without knowing which option we picked you can't really make out anything but an internal focus as well as stagnation...

Academia Nut said:
The Ymaryn found their attention increasingly drawn inward, only drawn outwards at times by the aggression of their neighbours. Those neighbours however found a hard core of loyal warriors supported by an intricate network of roads, walls, watchtowers, well tended and managed fields and forests, and a culturally and spiritually unified People. However, this all came at the cost of allowing the various tribes, kingdoms, and empires around them to grow and fight with each other. The People remained stable, prosperous, and safe as the world around them underwent various upheavals - usually kicked off by initial innovations pioneered by the People and then casually allowed to disseminate outwards. However, they were not the only ones out in the world innovating, and one day traders from beyond the Salt Sea brought with them tales of the alchemists of the Far East having produced new innovations with fire undreamed of by the People.
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keenscythe said:
Okay it Seems we are turning the Yllthon sea into our personal lake.
Good good.
And we unlocked Universities.
Which I don't know what that means because the stat system has been abolished.
Any generous souls want to illuminate me from my ignorance on its narrative effects?

Also Any chance we can still try and regain the old Ymaryn Empire?
Or have we locked away that choice by not picking it?
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No one really knows because we have no idea what the system is like or how long the timeskips will be.

I guess you could assume it will result in a spread of Ymaryn Culture (such as it is) and an influx of new ideas from foreign nobility, but as this point we can only speculate.
 
Carrnage said:
And what diplomacy did we do? what trade? what research? what exactly did we do that wasn't cultural and infrastructural?
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Well, for one example, there apparently were proper channels for trade with the nomads & so such trade was presumably conducted:
Academia Nut said:
the truly barbarous savages of the northern steppes remained an eternal issue. Sometimes they fought with the tribes, sometimes they bribed them into going away, sometimes they married the more successful figures into their noble lines or inducted them into their forces of knights. As such, when a new warlord arose whose offers for trade seemed a bit too much like demanding tribute rather than the proper channels, many feathers were ruffled by the affair.
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Beyond that, I see no reason to assume other such instances weren't glossed over during the timeskip; the description is the overall course of our civilization, not every single one of its specific actions.
 
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