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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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[X] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)

Might change my mind later. For now, I'd rather bank points and do something interesting in the culture section.
 
[X] Suggest in the interest of authority and further warding against tribal violence that outposts in the unclaimed section be fully shared structures, staffed by personnel from both nations. (-1 WP favorability, -1 PT Favorability. Improved road defenses and further mingling and cultural contact. Better response time to incursions against the road.)
 
[X] Suggest in the interest of authority and further warding against tribal violence that outposts in the unclaimed section be fully shared structures, staffed by personnel from both nations. (-1 WP favorability, -1 PT Favorability. Improved road defenses and further mingling and cultural contact. Better response time to incursions against the road.)
 
Adhoc vote count started by EternalObserver on Sep 27, 2023 at 9:45 PM, finished with 200 posts and 103 votes.
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[X] Suggest in the interest of authority and further warding against tribal violence that outposts in the unclaimed section be fully shared structures, staffed by personnel from both nations. (-1 WP favorability, -1 PT Favorability. Improved road defenses and further mingling and cultural contact. Better response time to incursions against the road.)
 
MrRageQuit said:
Pretty sure we've stated for the actual Cultural section that it'll be a better place to focus on spending Favorability for our long-term goals.
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Our long term goals are:
  • A stable border
That's it.
Cultural exchange is only in service of that.
More security on the road gives direct stability, plus added stability from trade, plus added stability from cultural exchange.
 
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[X] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)
 
[X] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)
 
[X] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)
 
[X] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)
 
[ ] Suggest in the interest of authority and further warding against tribal violence that outposts in the unclaimed section be fully shared structures, staffed by personnel from both nations. (-1 WP favorability, -1 PT Favorability. Improved road defenses and further mingling and cultural contact. Better response time to incursions against the road.)

White Plume favorability Loss may be reduced on a roll in this vote. Success chances are...

Base 10%+30% Favorability+5%+5%=50% Success rate
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White Plumes: 3 (+1 Satisfactory security, +1 Heron General's Patience, +1 High Land Claims)

Polar Theocracy: 3 (+1 Satisfactory Security, +2 Historical Proofs, +1 Internal Concessions, +1 Tech Sharing, -1 Incomplete Hall, -1 Unstable Outsiders, -1 High land Claims, +1 Limited Military)

Ministry of Integrity: 2 (+1 Satisfactory Security, +1 Imperial Support, +1 Judicial Concessions, +2 Investigation progress, -2 Ignored Interests, -1 Uncivilized Mingling)
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It's the MoI that is most upset by cultural mingling; and who we can't afford to upset.
Luckily this slips under their radar, and only affects the While Plumes and Polar Theocracy opinions.
And we still have the possibility to negate some of that.
All the fearmongering and hand wringing over saving favorability for the cultural section, is not justified. If the MoI was upset then it would be valid, but they're not.
 
Killer_Whale said:
It's the MoI that is most upset by cultural mingling; and who we can't afford to upset.
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Polar Theocracy will demand certain accommodations during the cultural section, and just going along with them will tank our MoI score below acceptable. Our best bet is a compromise neither side is particularly happy with, but for that we need political capital on both sides, and thus can't spend PT one without care.
 
agumentic said:
Polar Theocracy will demand certain accommodations during the cultural section, and just going along with them will tank our MoI score below acceptable. Our best bet is a compromise neither side is particularly happy with, but for that we need political capital on both sides, and thus can't spend PT one without care.
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What are you expecting them to demand?
 
Can't speak for others but the PT and the MoI both seem to be very conservative organizations as a whole. The historical proofs being a bonus I think reinforces that belief. It's possible that the choices that would require larger drops of favorability would most likely be our preferred out come on either side. To me it looks like the WS would favor certain cultural exchanges not necessarily the PT. This is of coarse pure speculation as we still, in my opinion, don't know enough about the PT desires and goals to know what will set them off definitively during the cultural section and we have the unknown hot topic question of Hanyi's existence and what that means to them given the contention around it when we first traveled south.
 
PT I feel would probably give a similar proposition to what Voice of the Far Foothills (the tree woman that we spoke with way back at Turn 11) who wanted Hanyi to hang out in their jurisdiction for half a year. We deferred the choice to Hanyi (not like accepting was a choice btw due to cultivation) who said no, since she wanted to prioritize doing idol stuff in ES. They might offer a revised version of that this time. Also possible that Jaromila might offer a more vetted version of PT's version which could please PT slightly, but rub shoulders with MoI and WP.
 
Killer_Whale said:
What are you expecting them to demand?
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Temples. They are the theocracy, so I'm sure they're in charge of all the rituals and worship of their various deities. The MoI will of course hate the idea of foreign temples any where near the empire much less in a shared embassy. We can't afford to give either all of what they want. Also don't think we can push for no temples at all. Worship is important in Destiny world given those gods are very real and have a habit of actively meddling, so we're going to have to thread the needle somehow. I expect to loose rep with both PT and MoI during this section so we can't afford to spend any of our meagre buffer ahead of time.

Oh yeah, and Hanyi is going to be a big deal. No idea how that will play out, but I'll put a bet down for messily. She is I believe listed on the Ling Clan rolls, so any demands from the PT concerning them could go badly quite quickly. Literally all Ling Qi has to do is acknowledge Hanyi as formally being a Ling clan member and the empire will default to ultra defensive. Their quibbling over spirits is nothing compared to the thought of a foreign polity messing with internal clan matters, much less demanding a clan member be turned over.

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Much less certain, and not really a driving reason for this specific vote, but the White Sky seem to have even worse gender role segregation than the empire, where the men are kept away from any sort of violence. Heck, arm wrestling is considered pushing the envelope. This is going to run face first into the empires martial culture which seems to lean male (more so in the Celestial Peaks, maybe more female in the Thousand lakes). Avoiding splitting too many hairs, all nobles of the Empire are expected to be able to fight which and hold their own agency. This is entirely contrary to how the White Sky seems to do things. This will definitely become a contentious point and the Polar Theocracy, as the body of cultural enforcement, will have opinions. Now, I'm not sure if that issue will come up during this negotiation, or further down the line. My point is simply that we are going to have to deal with Polar Theocracy going forwards and their standing position is not going to be friendly towards us (just like the MoI but in reverse) so we want them to come out with as high a perception as reasonably possible.
 
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TedBear said:
Temples. They are the theocracy, so I'm sure they're in charge of all the rituals and worship of their various deities. The MoI will of course hate the idea of foreign temples any where near the empire much less in a shared embassy. We can't afford to give either all of what they want. Also don't think we can push for no temples at all. Worship is important in Destiny world given those gods are very real and have a habit of actively meddling, so we're going to have to thread the needle somehow. I expect to loose rep with both PT and MoI during this section so we can't afford to spend any of our meagre buffer ahead of time.
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If you go back a turn, our conversation with Dzintara about the Western Territories happened in a outdoor temple to Fryja. It was on their side of the Embassy and out of the way, but they've already made temples, and no one on our side even remarked on it.
 
[x] Suggest alternating road outposts along the unclaimed length. But allow basing for patrols at each other's outposts, for rest and recuperation. (Minimal contact, no favorability cost, due to successes thus far.)
 
Just to make it clear. This isn't about voting "wrong", both options are valid. This is about the price, if we are willing to spend PT and WP favor in exchange of greater safety for the soldiers.

Raids are going to happen. That's something literally everyone in the setting acknowledges and is preparing for.
Now, those raids will happen in either a safe arrangement or in a safer arrangement. The safer arrangement will suffer less damage and casualties. What would be the difference is that wasn't the case?

There has been plenty of good arguments for an alternate setup. Conserving favor for the cultural section, not rushing things and instead building a track record of cooperation on the embassy first, cultural friction due to the Polar Nation's culture about men soldiers and so on. Those are valid, well-founded arguments.
Saying that the alternate option may not actually suffer worse attacks compared to the safer option it's not.

The objectives of the Summit are to establish a stable, amicable border relation between the ES and the Polar Nation first; and to promote cultural exchange second.
The shared bases explicitely advances both of those goals.
If there is any moment in which spend the valuable political favor, it is this one, where the benefits are clear and numerous. Not less important protecting the lives of both sides's soldiers, which I feel should always be a priority.

I guess that my point of disagreement is how critical that single point of PT favor will be.
We are at the point we are now with them because Jaromilla won her bonus roll against them in the first section of the Summit. If she had lost, would we be now in a critical situation when we start the cultural section? I don't think so.
Thus, spending that PT favor now won't leave us in an unsustainable situation.

So to give up this chance to advance Ling Qi's core purposes for the Summit, just to better shore up some hypothetical PT/MoI vote in the future, seems counterproductive to me.
 
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Hoarding as many favourability points as possible until the last possible moment is how we come out of this summit with everyone loving us but having only achieved the bare minimum.

We're a cultivator! We're Emissary Ling Qi, sworn Retainer of the Cai Clan! We're supposed to shoot for the moon and land among the stars! Are we just going to stay home and play it safe every time it looks like we might lose some sort of point? We're probably even going to mitigate the point loss with the roll.
 
[X] Suggest in the interest of authority and further warding against tribal violence that outposts in the unclaimed section be fully shared structures, staffed by personnel from both nations. (-1 WP favorability, -1 PT Favorability. Improved road defenses and further mingling and cultural contact. Better response time to incursions against the road.)
 
If all we get out of the summit is a stable, amicable border then it's been a huge waste of time and we've essentially failed.

The summit should be the first step in establishing Ling Qi's political capital. By the end of it, ES and WS should both be heavily invested into the project, ideally with their own objectives, mediated by our fief and the Embassy. Both parties should want to pursue further contact, either to get advantage over local rivals or to simply expand their own power.

The way to do this for the next 100 years will be through culture. Why? Because WS and ES are separated through a vast distance and dangerous terrain. Any commerce in physical goods will not be viable for a long time, unless they are of very high value. High value physical goods carry with them their own risk, mainly in that if they are lost during transit you lose a ton of resources.

This basically leaves information as the only good that can be traded since it's so cheap to transport and duplicate. It's also extremely valuable and potentially dangerous. Various parties have already expressed interest in acquiring specific info: the ith, general history, scientific matters, cosmology, techniques, crafting, etc. I'd guess most of these fall under culture for the purposes of the summit and that MoI and PT will heavily oppose the desires of WS and ES, since it directly threatens their power base.

Commerce and infrastructure are obviously very important, and I think they should be worked on right now since they'll be the money maker medium to long term, but to get the short term buy-in info > physical goods is the strategy. The cost of the info trade is way lower and the risk is all in the other party using the info against you.

I have to say, it's very annoying we don't have a list of proposals. It makes the summit feel disjointed and it's hard to build an overall "summit strategy" when we don't even know the next points of discussion. Obviously it could shift, but it'd at least give us an idea of what's coming up.
 
Mr.Kittens said:
If all we get out of the summit is a stable, amicable border then it's been a huge waste of time and we've essentially failed.

The summit should be the first step in establishing Ling Qi's political capital.
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Could you imagine negotiating stable amicable borders between Russia and Ukraine? Because what LQ is doing is on that level. This is already the largest expansion of the Empire's borders in a previously hostile direction since the addition of the Western Territories.
We already have "yes" amounts of political capital from it.
 
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