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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Gavin Prince said:
I'm a little surprised Niedzwenka is even at the coronation to get involved in the negotiations. I mean, sure, she almost certainly got an invitation because nobody wants to risk annoying her by snubbing her. I just wouldn't think that as an ancient horror she'd care about The Man in the Bokha Palace enough to come.

But then I guess she did answer the call from Boris to join the Project, so there's probably a closer connection there that we're not privy to.
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Iirc she has a rather good opinion on Boris. She might've even come without the negotiations meeting.
 
Sparsebeard said:
Plus, Mathilde could use the favour to perhaps get a BOOK deal, Marienburg does have a pretty nice library...
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Yeah, Egrimm did complain about it. Having access to that library would make him happy.

Tobtorp said:
You'd be forcing a battle with every ship laying at ankor in Marienburg, that be a gamble I wouldn't take.
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Indeed, especially because it includes Asur ships.

Eisenhelm said:
does marienburg have a magic user tradition?
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Yep, it's the College of Navigation or something like that, so they're probably pretty good at Azyr and Ghyran. And there are Asur lecturers teaching there, so they're likely not to be underestimated.

Gavin Prince said:
I'm a little surprised Niedzwenka is even at the coronation to get involved in the negotiations. I mean, sure, she almost certainly got an invitation because nobody wants to risk annoying her by snubbing her. I just wouldn't think that as an ancient horror she'd care about The Man in the Bokha Palace enough to come.
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Yeah, no one want the Tzar's firstborn daughter to be cursed to sleep for a hundred year :V
 
deathofrats0808 said:
Sure but that effectively raises the rices of everything they import. Like, this hurts the Empire as much as it does Marienburg. Remember that whole access to the Reik is the key feature of Marienburg's trade, it does do trade with people who aren't the Empire. People don't go to Marienburg solely to sell or buy to Imperials.
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I really don't think it does. Sure, it is not the case that all of Marienburg's trade is with the empire, but it is still a significant fraction. Meanwhile the vast vast majority of the empire's trade is... with other parts of the empire.

Granted, it does probably hurt Altdorf Specifically more than it hurts Marienburg.
 
Tasoli said:
Think about it, Kislev trade from north canal, Tilea, Estelia, Araby trade via Barrack Varr so Marienburg is left with not much at all that Empire can't give up.
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The Empire could already survive without imports from Marienburg. That's why 'tough out the difficulties' was an option when the Chamberlain asked Mathilde's opinion on the canal project in the first place. Slapping an enormous tariff on Marienburg is less damaging after the canals but to pretend it won't hurt the Empire is just wrong. And that's without even getting into the fact that doing so might well cause a riot in Altdorf.
 
To be perfectly frank the loss of tariffs was quite likely a major component of the difficulties that would've been toughed out there in the first place. Not gonna say "oh it'll do nothing" but reducing trade via raising tariffs is still gonna have some people paying the new higher tariffs.

Let alone the option of selectively applying it to specific goods. "Yeah we're gonna set tariffs on elf goods so high you basically can't get elf goods through marienburg anymore. Fortunately there's also an elf quarter in newly-canal-connected erengrad, and don't you know there's a whole disconnected colony of elves north of Middenheim that ALSO has a new trade route set up.
 
I have a mildly stupid question that I'm pretty sure Mathilde has no way of knowing the answer to, but I'm willing to risk it anyway. Boney, does the Stirland Watch still make use of the Stirland Terrier?

EDIT: I'm really sorry if I've already asked this in the past, by the way. I feel like I could have before, but I can't really remember actually doing so.
 
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If the next everchosen comes through Kislev, that canal will be the best route to send cannons from the empire. That's good enough. Peacetime fleet stuff is going to be complex; military forces moving through your territory when they strictly don't need to is always a thorny topic. Trade stuff is secondary, just a way to keep canal maintenance alive until that time comes.

Edit: A thought. Are there such things as canal spirits?
 
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Curtains said:
Trade stuff is secondary
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I'm pretty sure trade stuff is primary, even to Boris who's really concerned about the next Great War, because he's putting his all into rebuilding Kislev economically and culturally, not just militarily. There's more to winning wars than moving cannon from place to place, you gotta build the cannon beforehand!
 
You know, once we've assigned AP to the 'obligatory' actions on the coming turn:

[ ] Waystone: Build a Waystone (whatever nonsense combination seems best)
[ ] Create Orbs of Sorcery solo

We could productively spend almost the entirety of the rest of the half-year in Marienburg:

[ ] Waystone: Nexuses—Marienburg (Drag Hatalath along, and only Hatalath)
[ ] Involve yourself in current affairs: Marienburg affair
[ ] Flex slot, probably something with one of our WEBMAT boys to stop them getting antsy

[ ] EIC: Insert agents into a particular province, cult, company, or institution to start gathering their secrets: Marienburg
[ ] KAU: Seek an exchange arrangement with another Library or a Karak's archives: Great Library of Marienburg

[ ] Eike Actions: EIC insertion
[ ] Eike Study: Creative insults for Marienburgers

(this is not a serious plan suggestion. It's just that it's remarkable how much stuff has piled up for us to do there, isn't it?)
 
Lonkas said:
I personally think your vastly overestimating the scale the canals with what they are. The 80km long Canal de Briare was constructed in the 1600s in France (One of if not the greatest European powers of its day). It was considered an engineering marvel and took over 40 years (with some mild interruptions to building). Many of its locks can fit 1 barge at a time and in a modern year it will have 200,000 tons of cargo travel its length, even after significant upgrades have been afforded to it over the years and it still frequently has/had traffic problems. If Riverine traffic in the Empire is so low that 1 barge at a time is not a severe limitation on traffic, when it was for a small region of France, then any embargo by Marienburg means almost literally nothing to the people of the empire and that the canals are almost superfluous simply because so few goods are transported through the Reik.

By comparison the total cargo transported along the Rhine (What the Reik is based on) amounted to 310,000,000 tons over the course of a year in 2017, more than 100 times the volume of the Canal de Briare. Even if we must acknowledge these are modern figures for both. But even if we say that a dwarves canal is arbitrarily 10X as effective as a human one, the trade volumes remain incomparable. You will not in any way shape or form be able to substitute trade through the canals with that going along the Reik. This is before even considering the fact that to reach Brettonia or Ulthuan you would first have to travel in the opposite direction to them for hundreds of miles against the rivers current in order to eventually start heading in the right direction again.
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Foreign trade passing through London in 1794 amounted to approximately 430,000 tons, involving nearly 14,000 vessels (quoting the Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Best Mode of Providing Sufficient Accommodation for the Increased Trade and Shipping of the Port of London, referenced by Katerina Galani's British Shipping in the Mediterranean during the Nspoleonic Wars).

London was hardly the only British port at the time, but it was (by far) the biggest and at the time Great Britain was already the world's foremost trade power.

A canal that manages an annual throughput of a few hundred thousand tons of shipping absolutely could handle a large amount, if not the totality, of the foreign trade of a polity like the Empire.

Depending on how big the dwarves built this thing and how difficult the maintenance gets, Marienburg should really be worried.
 
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It was mentioned that the Dwarfs build the canal large enough that two of their Monitors can pass each other without issue.
 
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Murazor said:
Foreign trade passing through London in 1794 amounted to approximately 430,000 tons, involving nearly 14,000 vessels (quoting the Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Best Mode of Providing Sufficient Accommodation for the Increased Trade and Shipping of the Port of London, referenced by Katerina Galani's British Shipping in the Mediterranean during the Nspoleonic Wars).

London was hardly the only British port at the time, but it was (by far) the biggest and at the time Great Britain was already the world's foremost trade power.

A canal that manages an annual throughput of a few hundred thousand tons of shipping absolutely could handle a large amount, if not the totality, of the foreign trade of a polity like the Empire.

Depending on how big the dwarves built this thing and how difficult the maintenance gets, Marienburg should really be worried.
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Ohhhh thats actually a really good source, thankyou for providing that, I've been needing some estimates for bronze age - early modern shipping for my Araby quest.

I will withdraw some of my objection based upon those stats, I really would have thought there would be substantially more throughput during that time. Though.. tbf to my own arguments he 200,000 ton stat was from the modern era after a lot of enhancements have taken place.

I do think the Reik would still see more throughput, simply through geography. The Thames goes through a decent chunk of central England, but doesn't really touch any major industrial centres save London itself. The second largest town it hits being Oxford...Whereas the Reik (and its tributaries) on the other hand touch pretty much every major city in the empire that sits on a river.

It also still doesn't solve the problem that if someone in Altdorf wants to trade in Brettonia while avoiding Marienburg, they would have to travel around a continent to get to their desired ports so avoiding the city would still be insane from a commercial perspective.

DXCS said:
It was mentioned that the Dwarfs build the canal large enough that two of their Monitors can pass each other without issue.
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Would be interested if that includes the locks which are the major bottlenecks on a canal, them being dwarves... probably.

Ultimately we'll probably get a much better view of the canal situation when Boney writes up the opening ceremony.
 
Murazor said:
A canal that manages an annual throughput of a few hundred thousand tons of shipping absolutely could handle a large amount, if not the totality, of the foreign trade of a polity like the Empire.
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The only problem that I can see is that the ships transporting that cargo are severely limited by size and weight of their loading.
The port of London as does Altdorf have a direct, uninhibited access to the ocean (not counting Marienburg as a direct obstacle here).
The canals will probably be able to take a good load but to reach the channel you still will need to navigate the other rivers of reik basin and that prohibits your size.
Hell the dwarf monitors themselves are just that, river monitors.
Their not actually that big iirc.
 
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Mopman43 said:
That is a low bar though.

Altdorfers will riot over just about anything.
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WFRP 4e: Altdorf - Crown of the Empire, page 15
1645 IC
The Riot of Ishak's Ears. The bat-eared witch Ishak Farizad overhears a servant laughing about him. He curses the town of Grabatz, causing the ears of its inhabitants to wither away. He is executed for sorcery, but amongst Altdorf's high society it becomes fashionable to trim one's ears. Emperor Dieter III imposes a missing ear tax to rein in the practice, leading to riots among Altdorf's fashionable set.
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So how much more Marianberg-fucking does Mathilde have to do before she gets a Great Deed? At this point it's starting to feel like she might have done enough for furthering the Empire's policy on foreign sexual relations.
 
Andres said:
WFRP 4e: Altdorf - Crown of the Empire, page 15
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WFRP 2e: Paths of the Damned II - Spires of Altdorf, page 9
New taxes tend to be announced on public holidays to ensure a workday is not lost to protests.

During any one year, the average Altdorfer might take part in the following demonstrations:
• Beer Riots: "A penny on the pint? Thievery!"
• Inheritance Reform: "My father's not cold in the grave, and them leeches want half his legacy!"
• Sewerage Levy: "Earnin's down the drain? Not in my name!"
• Flour Tax: "Will bread ever stop risin'?- think of the poor bakers!"
• Cess Riots: "The streets reek—when will the council do something?"
• Pie Tax: "A pie's a 'dorfer's right! Jobless Halflin's means more theft!"
• Street Tolls: "A penny to use the bridge? Daylight robbery!"
• Order Disorders: "I pay fer watchmen, an' all we get is riots!
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Looking at this, the thing that comes to mind is that this could make the Border Princes a more attractive region for settlement and development.

As per the wizard lady currently playing at nation building, the numbers almost add up, until you account for big ork invasions crawling out of the Badlands every so often.

If two or three of the harbours between Barak Varr and Tiles develop into proper port cities as a result of this hypothetical trade route... Well, it could make the general area less shit in the long run.
 
Tasoli said:
Think about it, Kislev trade from north canal, Tilea, Estelia, Araby trade via Barrack Varr so Marienburg is left with not much at all that Empire can't give up.
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It's a bit worse than just that, because being a trade-nexus is sort of a self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing prophecy; because there's a lot of merchants coming there, that makes it more attractive for merchants to come there, which in turn attracts even more merchants, and so on, and so forth.
The same is also true in reverse; if there's less merchants coming there, then that makes it less attractive for other merchants to come there, which in turn makes it even less attractive for merchants, and so on, and so forth.
Now, there's obviously limits and diminishing returns in both direction, but that still means that in case of a prolonged embargo/high tariffs, Marienburg wouldn't just lose out on the Empire's maritime trade, but that its own trade would suffer as well, as Merchants who'd normally seek out the city for its wide diversity of goods instead go to Erengrad or Barak Varr, instead.

reignonyrparade said:
Granted, it does probably hurt Altdorf Specifically more than it hurts Marienburg.
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This is kind of an interesting situation, due to Altdorf's geographical location on the site where the Empire's northern and southern river-networks meet. So, if traffic to and from Marienburg gets blocked, then yeah, Altdorf would lose out, since any trade that would normally go towards the south of the Empire no longer needs to go through it, though any trade going towards the north still would.
However, that would then change again once the Kislevites' canal would come online, since then Altdorf would suddenly become the point where northern trade (ie, Kislev, Laurelorn, Ostland, Ostermark, Middenheim, Talabec, Karak Kadrin, etc) and southern trade (Tilea, Estalia, Border Princes, Barak Varr, Wissenland, Stirland, Averland, etc) would meet, turning Altdorf into a new trade-nexus.
So, in the short-term Altdorf would suffer a fair bit, but in the long-term it would benefit substantially.
 
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