Abolishing the food system would be the real killer. That would put tens of millions of lives at risk across the continent. If plagues in the cities knocked out a quarter of the Hegemony’s urban population, that would be only eight or nine million – and you’d probably see significant deurbanization before death tolls reached that level.
The Hegemony is definitely struggling economically. The tax rates that sustain its institutions of social control (Alastors and Phalangites, mainly) and keep the urban poor in bread are crushing, even before the underfed Alastors start extorting extra to make up for it. The merchants and yeomen in particular are hungry for more autonomy and less oppression, as the Irduin chapter will hopefully make clear.
That is an interesting question. 
The strategy currently being pursued is building a scaffold of Theurgically reinforced steel underneath, so that the palace can be allowed to settle at roughly its current altitude. While pretty blood-intensive, that’s seen as being the most economical and lowest-risk approach to no longer having to put blood into keeping it afloat.
Probably. Depends on how close you keep Cerlota. But some of your potential rivals know the secret already or will be able to figure it out once they see it used.
Their population is also reliant on Theurgically boosted yields, yes.
The Abhuman lands south of Shayard start as desert and move into semi-arid plains, before eventually you get to forest and jungle. I agree with those who’ve said that any immediate post-collapse attempt at mass migration into the Seracca lands would die out before it put down serious roots – the arable land is too far away, and starvation/desperation/a collapsing empire doesn’t make a good staging ground for a migration push. There also (crucially) isn’t the massive military tech gap that allowed European migrants to run roughshod over so many other parts of the world; as @apple said, the Seracca would have a decisive military advantage over a desperate wave of starving migrants.
I don’t know about answering, but there will be a bunch of places where it asks it in a more structured form.
@mshan95032, I’m not at all sure that Cerlota would endorse a crusader-state Erezza under Shayardene elite control. Her top priority is keeping the Halassurqs out, but that doesn’t mean she’d easily be convinced by a homelander MC that putting Shayardenes in charge was a good idea.
She’s going to be carrying it out in strict secrecy and close enough to be in full control of the project–so near Aekos, rather than with remote workers who can inconveniently betray her and run away with the results.
@apple is right that men are only expected to let others “do the work” if they’re absent on the front. Men who do that when they’re physically present are going against social expectation, and will be seen as dishonored.
I know you were joking, but for the record: as Amartya Sen taught us, famine is almost always a result of distribution/access inequalities rather than lack of the aggregate calories to keep everyone alive. People are generally unwilling to let their kids/family/clan/clients/army skip that third meal a day, even when better sharing could keep people alive. (Hell, we don’t even share well enough to keep everyone from starving when it doesn’t require anyone skipping meals, just skipping e.g. a PlayStation game.)
Also, as @Sowe noted, the gameworld’s agri-Theurgy isn’t just yield-boosting but operation of a massive canal network to bring grain from surplus areas to deficit ones. Shayard doesn’t have non-Theurgic tech to do that at anything resembling the same scale, even if there weren’t any breakdown in the trade system due to war and political instability. The collapse of long-distance trade across an integrated continent (or inland sea, as the fall of the Roman Empire exemplifies) can lead to a catastrophic decline in prosperity and push millions into starvation, even if yields weren’t also dropping.
Depends mainly on the scale of your blood needs, and the Theurgic capacity of your neighbors. We’ll see when we get to the G5/6 game if there are raid-only equilibria to be found.
Fair suggestion, but as I’ve said elsewhere:
I’ve not included that so far, but I’ll roll it around in my mind and see how it feels as a possibility. Thanks!
Ask Pakistan. In places where electoral democracy came before the power of the aristocracy was eroded, the local lord has always tended to hold tremendous power in elections – either to win themselves or to ensure that their favored client won and governed in their interests.
You can declare that secret ballots are the law of the land… but without a revolution in state administrative capacity, you won’t be able to ensure that all (or even most) of the local power-holders comply with that law rather than hovering at the shoulders of their tenants, retainers, and dependents as they vote. You might even find it’s better for public voice votes to be the law, village-moot-style, since those aren’t as easily “fixed” by the local power-holder amending ballots during the counting process.
Are you thinking here of “lots of literacy, state capacity and a mass press”? None of those can be conjured up Theurgically, I’m afraid. 
I’m liking it! Thanks for the suggestion.
My first reaction is no, because I’ve seen firsthand how incredibly hard it is to transform the police from an extractive institution into a law-enforcing one. But I’ll read up more on how Napoleon did it and see what I reckon in light of that example.
I’d like to add a map to Stormwright – possibly not a whole gameworld map, but one of the Rim, Southriding, and a bit of Xaos – and I think the world map will be a hard necessity from G4 if not before.
Both! (Initially the former.)
I’ll look at doing that when I next make some tweaks to Uprising, thanks for the suggestion. @Sowe, I think I’ll make it possible to donate multiple times, but making the threshold explicit would be a little too immersion-breaking for my tastes. (How does the MC know at what donation level the priests will start loving them?)
I don’t see this happening – not because it’s not a good idea, but because it would require excessive rewrites and blow holes in the strategies that people have so painstakingly worked out for G1.
Pretty sure this is impossible now, mon frere–in at least some of our key markets, the achievement list is set when you first submit the game for publication, and can’t be altered thereafter.
Finally: I missed the ADAT on this, but a decade-and-a-week ago I wrote an explanation of what the anarchy stat means that may be of interest and is still relevant today.