Take the distant continents right off the table – the only way they’d ever show up in game is in a G5 epilogue where you abandon the utter chaos of your home continent and join some Qalsa explorers to go find a new world. I’m afraid the only area in your known world with a sizeable food surplus following a Hegemonic collapse, other than Shayard, will be Halassur.
This is to some extent going to happen no matter what…but without Theurgic military support, these human waves would before long be mopped up and seve as large-scale fuel for Halassurq reprisals.
Giving the foragers/refugees military support – trying to launch a full-on invasion of Halassur from your failing empire as the Wards fall – will be an option. I’ve always said that throwing the starving masses into a scaled-up war will be one (horrific) way to deal with the crises of Hegemonic collapse.
But even for a COM 6 MC, that war can’t end with the conquest of Halassur – the empire is much too big for that, and your capacity to govern the hostile territory you conquer too limited. Meawhile, the more effort and resources you throw into prosecuting a war in the east, the likelier it is that the west will fragment behind you. You’d probably end up with your capital in Moncesano, ruling a crusader state that includes a newly annexed chunk of Halassur, but with limited (at best) control of lands west of Avezia.
Most Nyr would sooner consider an unarmed invasion of Shayard or Karagon than move onto land exposed to the Dead. And Ghaesh isn’t going to make a deal with you to encourage settlement in his neighborhood; he prefers his hinterland to be sparsely populated, not intensively settled and cultivated.
You’re correct. It’s not even close. As ever, the numbers I’m about to share are subject to change until publication… but here’s how things are looking on the current world model.
If you want to push your crops to full growth over the course of one week (which is how the ever-busy Theurges do it), getting one extra grain harvest using non-lethal Theurgy would require either 23 alchemically processed blood donations or the sustained attention of 7-9 self-cutting magi per hectare (an average small yeoman farm would generally be around two hectares).
For those 7-9 magi, the week’s intensive effort would push their aether levels low enough to have them falling unconscious if they tried to use Theurgy in the two months after that, or for anything moderately substantial in months 3 or 4. Depending on the land quality, the yield from their week’s effort would feed an additional 2-8 people for the year.
Local self-sacrifice Theurges would probably mostly choose to apply their power more gently over an eight-month period, speeding two grain harvests by boosting the plants just a bit each day. During that time, they’d still be able to spend blood on some other small-to-moderate stuff, or on somewhat more costly Changes if they were ready to accept a delay in the harvest. The ultimate outcome is the same whether you do it over a week or a full growing season – 7-9 local magi producing a year’s bonus grain for 2-8 people – but the latter approach doesn’t leave you with so many months where you can’t use your Theurgy for emergencies.
As this illustrration suggests, while “organic Theurgy” can marginally increase production by farmer-mages, the industrial agriculture that has boosted the Hegemony’s population by producing massive surpluses relies on using aether in greater quantities than self-sacrifice Theurgy can really muster. Even if you set loose a million or two trained Diakons on the best farmland in the Hegemony, they would at present be lucky to produce enough extra grain to feed just themselves, let alone millions of other hungry people. You’d need to explore other improvements to significantly increase average yields per hectare in the Hegemony (as the Diadoch is currently doing), not just mass education and dissemination of the Theurgic secret, before self-fuelled Theurgy could add enough grain to support urbanization and populations at anything remotely close to the current Hegemonic scale.
[Edit: worth noting that this is why the Abhumans won’t just shrug off the loss of the Hegemonic grain trade and just call up their own wheat fields. The self-sacrifice Theurgy they practice is good for lots of things, but large-scale agriculture isn’t one of its strong suits.]
What about donations? If you had a “blood tax” system where everyone was drained 9 times a year (the maximum that allows them to still be good for other work), you’d need to perfectly tax at least 52m adults to magick up enough extra grain to feed all 50m potentially starving people in the nightmare scenario. (Children’s extra aether is in their brains rather than their literal blood, and the low volume and increased risk of bleeding kids means that you should expect your tax system to focus on people over the age of, say, 13.) The total population above age 13 in Shayard is around 40m. And taxing a large-scale population isn’t remotely as simple as it may seem to us heirs of centuries of state formation, especially in a sprawling empire with low literacy.
The Hegemony is currently struggling to render its aristocratic and merchant population fully legible to taxation (combined total: 7.8m people over age 13). Throw in other relatively easily blood-taxable groups like the households of priests, Alastors, and conscripts, and Hegemony-wide, that gets you to about 20m people of taxable age. So the only way to tax enough people to fully feed the whole empire would be to extend the capacity of the state into the least state-legible social classes to a greater degree than any contemporary gameworld nation.
As I’ve noted before, that’s going to be hard to pull off in an imperial collapse, even for a low-anarchy player. And logistically, a system that has to take and process around 500m donations per year is a lot more challenging than one that has to carry out 3.6m executions a year. It will also be even more decentralized than the current system, multiplying opportunities for skimming off aetherial blood.
Yes, it’s possible to declare a state monopoly as a way of increasing money for your regime. There is no tobacco in the gameworld, but the others would be possible.
Theurges have developed various tools that let them make accurate maps based on aerial surveys. They’re trying to regularize land records on that basis – a slow and costly process, as we’ll see in the upcoming chapter.
Yes, it would be possible for an MC to order the printing and public dissemination of maps and the limited amount you know about your population, as well as your own plans and whatever accounts you manage to produce. But I can’t emphasize enough that early modern states had significantly less statistical capacity than even the world’s least developed states do today. You won’t have a lot of national statistics to share; and no province, let alone the whole empire, has ever had what we’d recognize as a national budget.
The Thaumatarchy invests a lot in its spies – mostly internal, but also in foreign lands. This is an area where it’s unllikely that you’ll be able to match, let alone improve upon, the empire you’re destroying; intelligence networks are hard to restore during/after a period of institutional upheaval and widespread anarchy.
He will – and also on what can’t be done or shouldn’t be tried. Him and the Diadoch both. How many of their ideas you’ll agree with, we’ll see in G3-G4.