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The Ymaryn: Succession

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Fireiy said:
Condensing the Academy curriculum may be what we need to solve the problem in the longer term as well as the short term. Right now a big problem is that the Patricians are expected to be good at everything which is not a sustainable approach at all. I'd much rather have to rely on advisors and experts than continue heaping punishing amounts of responsibility on a select few elites.
And of course this might downgrade Life of Arete even further.
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The underlying problem isn't really one of your values, it's a question of economics and social organization. You essentially have five people competing for one job; there's no way to slice that knot unless you can somehow either reduce the number of people competing or increase the number of jobs available. Getting rid of Life of Arete entirely doesn't solve that problem and indeed, tearing out one of the three most central social values of the Ymaryn Kingdom will have profound side-effects. (The other two big values being Personal Stewards of Nature and Principae Philosophae.) Given Die But Do It and PP, removing Life of Arete doesn't even remove the inbuilt incentives for suicidal overwork, it just devalues all non-intellectual forms of labour.

The Kingdom was basically maxed out on internal development and complexity and while the Great Khan's war has killed a lot of Patricians, this is still a transitory state of affairs. Give it a generation and a half or so and the number of Patricians will recover and return to normal and all of the things Ydrys feared will return. The out-of-universe solution to this problem is obvious to us: industrial revolution. To the Ymaryn though who don't know about it, their options are much more limited. Condensing the curriculum is shuffling deck chairs. If you limit what subjects are on the exam, over time there will be an overcorrection and the standards for this reduced exam will simply get higher. It solves your problem right now in that it gets people across the finish line, but it isn't durable into the future because all of the same underlying incentives still exist. Patricians work themselves to death in school because if they don't succeed, it means poverty. That can't be changed by altering the exam.

It also has draw backs: the biggest being cutting military training. Your entire martial system is predicated on the martial training that Patricians receive. Even the Mass Levy depends on Patricians serving as squad captains and shock troops for the numerous levies raised from the cities. All of your generals were Patricians and received their education in the Academies. Even most of the regular army soldiers themselves had their start as Patricians or the sons of Patricians (though many are also legacy army brats).


I'm a bit surprised that people are so quick to let the Spiritbonded go without comment. They were a major symbol of the Old Kingdom before the collapse and their skills are valuable and irreplaceable.


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I think the spiritbonded can be used better under Western Wall anyway and hope that we can diplomatically reintegrate them later.

Condensing the cirriculum is definitely going to need extensive follow up to avoid the problems you mention. But right now we're on fire and putting it out is the highest priority. I don't want to entirely tear out Life of Arete, but I do want to downgrade it at least one more time to make the drawbacks more manageable.

And I certainly do want to get rid of Die But Do It (and Purity too) but I'm not sure on how we can go about doing that right now.
 
Honestly even trying to get rid of our best trait, hell the fact that it downgraded should mean that we massively fucked up, anything that makes our hyper competent upper crust (that we cannot fundamentally get rid of because until the industrial revolution they are the ones that are doing most of the work that isn't food) worse and weakened is bound to blow up in our face, a radical shift in culture from valuing intellectual ability and knowledge to not would cause a massive fracture in our society that would and SHOULD fundamentally collapse our nation, since were destroying everything that maintains it
 
Aranfan said:
DGE is the reason for the Collapse. The sheer arrogance it engendered is the reason we ticked off the Great Khan.
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It really isn't, the Khan was gonna eventually attack anyways for some other reason, AN was ending the game.
Edit: Like the Khan was fundamentally a rocks fall event.

Also, lessening this trait is also a massive debuff because it represents the faith in our leadership being lost so i wouldn't be surprised that the lower it goes the stronger a crisis that comes because of it.
 
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To be entirely honest, the Ymaryn stability is mostly the result of good choices in the stone and copper ages, and not the elitism of the post phygrif era.
 
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I'd argue that stewards of nature and cosmopolitan acceptance were Ymaryn's greatest strengths. And principia philosophiae is the value that emphasizes intellectual ability and knowledge, DGE demands the excellence of the elite in all things.
 
Aranfan said:
To be entirely honest, the Ymaryn stability is mostly the result of good choices in the stone and copper ages, and not the elitism of the post phygrif era.
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If i am being honest, i would call it the result of fiat more than good choices, our civilization only works because its maintained by narrative and mechanics of the game. XD
 
Sivantic said:
As in, it would be harder to convince people to rejoin?
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One of the unique mechanics of The Dissolution is that Legitimacy has been temporarily suspended and replaced by Legacy. Legacy is an important stat and you want to have the highest compared to all other Splinter States. The one with the highest Legacy gets bonuses as a result; you have it right now, but that can easily change. Since you're the Core, you don't really know what highest Legacy gives you until you lose it and you suddenly find yourselves in trouble.

If you want to figure out how Legacy works, spend some diplo actions to get more in touch with the Ymaryn sphere.

There are a lot of action chains out there that are gated behind ones you've yet to take. Not just diplo, but that and Learning-related tasks are the two biggest gatekeepers.

Aranfan said:
To be entirely honest, the Ymaryn stability is mostly the result of good choices in the stone and copper ages, and not the elitism of the post phygrif era.
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I think there were times that AN should've dealt with us like Ol' Yeller and we skated by on narrative convenience. To me at least, it seemed there were times he was psyching himself up to do it, but backed away at the last second because he knew the salt explosion would've been nuclear in scale. To be honest, I think that's the bigger part of Ymaryn stability than anything else. While the players at times made great decisions, they also made consistently terrible ones as well.

I also think you have to give some credit Elitism as well. Both the Quality and Quantity traits basically evolved in parallel with each other throughout Ymaryn history. It's really difficult to separate out the effects of each.

From where we sit, the unified Ymaryn Kingdom is the world superpower and there are no real comparable rivals. I can only think of three off the top of my head immediately and those may not exist. (I'm definitely going to be playing with the fact that 1600 AGF = 1300 BCE.) A huge portion of the quest is going to be intra-Ymaryn bickering and internal faction management.
 
Redium said:
I think there were times that AN should've dealt with us like Ol' Yeller and we skated by on narrative convenience.
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Just based on memory there are at least dozens of times where it felt like AN was building up to ram us up the ass with our mistakes before... nothing. We just kept going with no real problems despite the very real fractures this society has, it doesn't help that apparently some of the readers deluded themselves into thinking our people were super good guys if the reaction to how half exiles and foreigners are actually treated if everything doesn't go right are any indication.
 
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Aranfan said:
DGE is the reason for the Collapse. The sheer arrogance it engendered is the reason we ticked off the Great Khan.
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No. The Great Khan's the reason we fucking collapsed. Unless you are arguing everyone from the Khwarezmid empire, the Mamelukes, the Hungarians, the Tatars, the Polish, the Russian principalities, the Southern Spng, the Northern Jin, or basically anyone the Mongolians murder hobo'd their way had DGE.

We threw hands with the man who threw the most hands the world had ever seen. We fought what was probably the greatest mass murderer the world has seen or probably will see until we get our Napoleon equivalent. This is absurd victim blaming that ignores the fact Mongolian diplomacy around this time period doesn't so much have a word for peace as it does submission. It ignores and trivializes the deaths of tens of millions in OTL and here because clearly this is a consequence of one feature of our culture you personally dislike.

This is victim blaming tantamount to saying people's subjected to imperialism are at blame for the loss of life because they had cultural values and a sense of national worth to resist. It's horrifying and self-invalidating.
 
Karugus said:
No. The Great Khan's the reason we fucking collapsed. Unless you are arguing everyone from the Khwarezmid empire, the Mamelukes, the Hungarians, the Tatars, the Polish, the Russian principalities, the Southern Spng, the Northern Jin, or basically anyone the Mongolians murder hobo'd their way had DGE.

We threw hands with the man who threw the most hands the world had ever seen. We fought what was probably the greatest mass murderer the world has seen or probably will see until we get our Napoleon equivalent. This is absurd victim blaming that ignores the fact Mongolian diplomacy around this time period doesn't so much have a word for peace as it does submission. It ignores and trivializes the deaths of tens of millions in OTL and here because clearly this is a consequence of one feature of our culture you personally dislike.

This is victim blaming tantamount to saying people's subjected to imperialism are at blame for the loss of life because they had cultural values and a sense of national worth to resist. It's horrifying and self-invalidating.
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You may not see it but i am clapping my hands together very vigorously.


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DGE was and is a VERY good trait, its negatives just cemented the Social Stratification that would happen regardless and made it stronger, not that it'd matter because the reason for this stratification would happen no matter what because most of the population cannot stop working to study or chill out and study sciences, adminstration and math.
Like in this quest specifically, DGE and the associated traits have given the Ymaryn MODERN PROBLEMS despite not even being close to the industrial revolution yet, This is absurd and people are trying to crash this, your solution to the modernish problems we have by making it so were stuck back with the normal civilization problems instead of people being TO QUALIFIED and to NUMEROUS.
 
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Aranfan said:
To be entirely honest, the Ymaryn stability is mostly the result of good choices in the stone and copper ages, and not the elitism of the post phygrif era.
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Man it must be interesting ignoring how relevant a ruling class and bureaucracy is to the stability of its corresponding state. The roman republic for instance, had some fantastic generals and statesman because the state and culture gave them room to excel in service to the state and for a while cultural mores kept them from turning their skills and power against the state. Until those mores collapsed and then it took all of two generations for multiple civil wars for the republic to collapse into the empire.

Or how with the fall of Rome, the only educated class to be drawn on as a bureaucracy was the Roman church, and that forced it to fulfill a plethora of state roles that increased its corruption and limited the complexity of any state depending on it. How that scenario only collapses with the protestant reformation and tens of millions dying in religious wars that displace the church from their traditional roles and totally *unrelatedly* we see the emergence of more modern nation states and the rise of states training their own bureaucracy and administration. Or the Chinese exam systems designed to guarantee a state as massive as China had a coherent and culturally homogenous ruling class and bureaucracy.

But we can ignore that, because its not class conscious enough. Clearly the utility of a well educated, culturally indoctrinated ruling class to look to the extreme long view benefits wasn't an important factor in Ymaryn success. Why we voters, with our modern education and values that encouraged us to pursue long term benefits were! This is a ridiculous argument on every grounds- one that at best presupposes the irrelevance of the educated, philosophical elite ruling class because of a virtual educated, philosophical elite ruling class essentially playing a videogame.
 
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I am still not sure of the option to take for the crisis so decided to go trough the list.

[ ] Ydrys: Continue to respond to the Patrician Crisis
-[ ] Call back retired Patricians
Most are already working till they die so this will not provide the needed numbers.

-[ ] Condense and accelerate the Academies' curriculum
This will work but have long-term impact on our society as certain skills are no longer trained and as cutting parts was what saved the nation restoring the cut parts might be hard even after the numbers have rebuild themselves.

-[ ] Accept non-Patricians with on-the-job administrative experience as Patricians
This will work but might create holes elsewhere and the patricians will not like this.

-[ ] Try recruiting Mercenary Patricians?
Our government system is unique enough that i don't think there are outsiders we can hire who can do the job needed.

-[ ] Advertise among the other Splinter States and poach from them
This might work as the west submitted without fighting so if we accept all that failed under the old standards but passed under the new from there it might fix the problem without additional problems
It is a gamble if there are enough we can recruit this way but this is the best option if it works.
 
Which plan tries to poach from splinter states? Its the only one i can see actually doing the job without weakening our education system.
[X] Plan Poach
-[X] Private censure
-[X] Grant your blessing.
-[X] Ydrys: Continue to respond to the Patrician Crisis
--[X] Advertise among the other Splinter States and poach from them
-[X] Ydrys: Repairing Salterns (Influence)
-[X] Rhys: Investigate rumours of the Khan's generals.
-[X] Haul: Applying Current Telescopes:
--[X] (Army)
-[X] Prydyer: Evaluating foreign markets
-[X] Inato: Maintain this councilor.
-[X] Aderyn: Rebuild Neighbourhood Watches
(Authority)
-[X] Euryg: Strategic Independence Reform
 
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From a game mechanics point, we know that DGE was not that important for the long term stability of the Ymarin state, because it only showed up at the very end.

The update in which it was unlocked was the final update before the lightning rounds. At the time that DGE was voted upon, the elites in question were even threatening a civil war if they did not get what they want, which was privatizing land ownership under their control. So, in the short period that the Ymarin actually had DGE, they were more liability than benefit.

Then, in just the second vote after the lightning rounds, the weighting as a result of Divinely Glorious Elites prevented peacefull relations with the Khan, and caused the current cataclysm.
 
10ebbor10 said:
From a game mechanics point, we know that DGE was not that important for the long term stability of the Ymarin state, because it only showed up at the very end.
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DGE is just the latest evolution of a trait we've had longer than that.
We've had large emphasis on our elites and such for at least 3 other trait evolutions, and it was already fact that the Ymaryn were arrogant even before DGE procced

Hell the Private property demand wasn't even that bad because it just makes a de facto situation de jure.
 
Ghostdevil said:
DGE is just the latest evolution of a trait we've had longer than that.
We've had large emphasis on our elites and such for at least 3 other trait evolutions, and it was already fact that the Ymaryn were arrogant even before DGE procced
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If you're talking about the rest of the trait chain, we also know that that wasn't that important either.

It gave us some slightly better military recruitment (never really a priority) and some extra resources (culture, tech wealth), which we were never really short on.
Joyous symphony and it's preceding ranks were more important, as that gave us frequent useful stability boosts.
 
10ebbor10 said:
If you're talking about the rest of the trait chain, we also know that that wasn't that important either.

It gave us some slightly better military recruitment (never really a priority) and some extra resources (culture, tech wealth), which we were never really short on.
Joyous symphony and it's preceding ranks were more important, as that gave us frequent useful stability boosts.
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We've had elite traits for a very long time, so i am unsure what your talking about. Narratively, the Elite trait was extremely important, mechanically, it was a cascading benefit that was a Win Harder trait.
 
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