Been a
bit since I last chimed in, and while I'm not even going to try to properly engage in the dozens of pages of conversation, there are a couple of points that I feel are being neglected.
Regarding the chances of blockade-busting escalating to a full-scale war between the Karaz Ankor and Ulthuan:
To pull up a post on the matter that I feel has not gotten the attention it deserved:
On the subject of a second War Of The Beard
People seem to be under the impression that the War of the Beard/War of Vengeance was fought between Ulthuan and the Karaz Ankor. While this is true in the legal sense it is false in the military sense. Pre-Sundering the Asur had a vast empire. Most of the Old World is covered by 'elven ruins' that were once Asur cities. It was these colonies that bore the brunt of Dwarf vengeance while the elves on Ulthuan were stabbing each other over whether Malekith was an arsehole or a Royal Arsehole.
While the War of Vengence officially ended when the Dwarfs kicked the last loyal elf colonies off the continent the fighting didn't actually stop. While Ulthuan and the Karaz Ankor are not at war various groups of elves have been fighting various groups of Dwarfs on and off ever since.
A conflict in Marienburg cannot trigger a second major war. Even ignoring that minor conflicts happen all the time and that neither side wants it, they simply aren't capable of it.
The Dwarfs do not have the naval capacity to transport their armies to Ulthuan, any more than they could assault Skavenblight. The Asur on the other hand cannot gather spare enough forces from their many other commitments to threaten a major Hold. Both sides are massivly stronger on the defensive and they both know this.
The worse case scenario is a rise in tension and thus a delay in reconciliation. Which while bad isn't remotely the cataclysm people seem to fear.
Let's say we take the blockade action and the rolls
do go poorly, that Marienburg never backs down, that Dwarves go in, and that the denizens of the Elf-quarter of Marienburg - who, as a reminder, do not live on the central channel and are out of the line of fire should the blockade-busting go hot - decide to fight back, leading to a Misc Elven House vs Karak Varr fight.
Then we will be in a situation where Miscellaneous Elven House and Karak Varr are fighting, which is to say, a group of Elves is fighting a group of Dwarves, which is something that already happens in the setting
without, apparently, triggering a full-scale War of the Beard 2 between the whole of the Karaz Ankor and the whole of Ulthuan.
Because Finubar, the guy who leads Ulthuan,
is not a war-hawk, and is, in fact, interested in
reestablishing diplomatic ties to the Dwarves. Even if the Elves on the ground make a fight of it, Finubar's incentive is to exploit every conceivable deflection/loophole/technical fulfillment of terms/etc. that he needs to to prevent a polity-scale war, because he
very much does not want to deal with that shit.
So if you think the Elves on the ground alone would make a blockade-breaking ruinously costly, well, there you go, that's a fair counterargument. It's certainly not guaranteed that things reach that point, but it's not exactly a black swan, either.
On the other hand, the idea that we would need to worry about Ulthuan itself, headed by Finubar, sending a significant portion of its warfleet against Barak Varr for the purposes of escalating hostilities between them, when they could instead do
anything else - nothing at all, tacitly acknowledge the local Elves' right to fulfil their obligations to the "Marienburg Allies" after they'd already started doing so, sending, like, one guy who's really just trying to prevent the Marienburger and local Elven forces from getting too stupid...
It's a bit of a reach.
Regarding the "costs" of the trade option:
The issue isn't that the Dwarves will be beggared by this; they have the cash. The issue isn't that Dwarves will die in droves for this; there will be casualties, to be sure, but caravan guard duty isn't a death sentence and the Dwarves who would be assigned to such a job probably weren't working the safest of jobs anyway.
The issues are two-fold - first, even if the Dwarves aren't being committed to the most dangerous lines of work, they are still being committed. Perhaps this means that they will be unavailable to defend Dwarven holdings that are constantly under assault, perhaps there will be fewer to participate in regular military actions against Skaven, greenskins, and the world's other assorted gribblis,
certainly there will be fewer of any major ongoing or planned offensives (which would especially be an issue if the stubborn Dwarves decided to go forward with their plans
anyway), and there will be fewer available reinforcements should a more serious assault befall the Karaz Ankor.
This isn't great, and does account for some of the blood that will be spilt by the Trade option, but it, in my reckoning pales relative to the second issue -
The Empire's
notorious unreliability.
We've just recently discussed how relatively little central authority the Emperor has in-thread, but it feels like the thread is treating this choice like an event in a grand-strategy game, like we'd be clicking a button in EUIV that imposed a 20% Trade Income and Manpower penalty for 5 years and calling it a day.
This ignores the fact that if the Emperor makes a choice that starves the Elector Counts' provinces of the weapons required to defend them for five +/- a bit years, that the Electors might decide to get together and say
no - and Marienburg, of course, would cheerfully help make that happen:
Another factor to consider regarding the Trade Compensation course is that no matter what we do, Marienburg will be running intrigue actions against us unless we capitulate, so we'll need to keep that in mind as well.
Direct sabotage actions against the canals are the most obvious choices, but I expect most of the Marienburgers to realize that the Dwarven workers are not the weakest link in the arrangement. I imagine those who fail to realize this will be allowed to accomplish whatever they can and then cheerfully offered up as scapegoats when it all comes crashing down around them.
Similarly, intrigue actions against Dwarven interests in the project are unlikely to bear fruit, and while intrigue actions designed to sow discontent amongst those shouldering the economic cost could probably have some effect, we just briefed the Chamberlain about how unlikely that would be to lead to the decisions of the higher-ups being overturned. The weak-points in the arrangement would be, as ever, on the Imperial side.
One avenue open to Marienburg would be to sow discontent. Agitating peasants against a deal designed to enrich nobles and burgers at the expense of the little people is, uh, not difficult, and arranging for """unfortunate accidents""" to befall the replacement overland trade routes would only exacerbate the issue. Peasant discontent wouldn't be enough to stop things on its own, of course, but it would increase the pressure on the various ECs to say "no".
Alternately, Marienburg could genuinely increase the local demand for, say, military equipment beyond available supply by increasing the local "banditry" levels, or, depending on how spicy they wanted to get, bribing and supplying as necessary to increase greenskin/beastmen/cultist population. I don't think they'd be stupid enough to try the latter, but it is money that's on the line. (And, if we're unlucky, we could see perfectly natural upticks in those threats which would serve the same purpose.)
Another option would be to bribe the shit out of the internal trade partners to kick up a fuss to the nobles, ensure their own shipments go "missing", or otherwise make a nuisance of themselves. We've already seen the less-than-stellar moral fiber of Talabecland when it comes to trade, and they are, presumably, not alone.
And then there's direct bribes campaign contributions favorable future trade agreements that could be offered to nobles up to and including ECs to stonewall the issue. Ultimately, while the Karaz Ankor can provide monetary compensation for lost trade, they can't fully eliminate the impacts of the lost trade routes, so if the political will to take those costs on the chin can't be mustered Marienburg wins.
Of course, the Empire does have the Grey College to fight these fires, but the fact that Talabecland is not currently perfectly behaved and bereft of half of its nobles and merchants shows that the Grey College can't be everywhere and can't deal with these problems instantly. While the Empire is not helpless to Marienburg's intrigue apparatus, Marienburg could certainly do damage with it, especially with the power of their infinity^2 money.
If a majority of the Elector Counts are subjected to sufficient short-term pain or bribed with enough long-term gain that they refuse to cooperate on the canal projects, well.
The purpose of the canals is to facilitate trade with the Empire. That falls apart if the Empire isn't cooperating. This would also do bad things to relations between Dwarves and the Empire, which is why the Empire doesn't want to do it.
An option that costs more political will than is available is not an option that can be successfully taken, and if unlucky greenskin attacks, machinations of Chaos, or good old Marienburger intrigue eats through the political will required to maintain support in the Empire the Chamberlain will find themselves very quickly needing to find an alternative strategy to handle Marienburg, except this time the Empire and Karaz Ankor will be short a substantial portion of their wealth and soft power.
And then, of course, there's always the chance some ECs just get rolled by a Waaagh while weakened, but that's not very high up my list of concerns and others have made the point for me many times over. I'm just far less convinced that the Empire will win in a war of economics and intrigue against Marienburg, even with the wealth of the Karaz Ankor backing them.
Which brings me back to the Blockade option, because it's much harder to bribe a dreadnaught than a human.
