A Hegemony that dropped the City-Wards and (say) all but 3 of the Border Wards, as well as letting the Floating Palace crash, would be saving 130,000 lives every year…i.e. about 3.6% of the current harvest.
Urban sanitation and public health (including fire prevention) actually runs fairly cheap–as long as the aqueduct and sewerage systems stay intact, keeping the water supply clean and ample and snuffing out epidemics uses less than a thousand full-time Theurges across the Hegemony, and sacrifices only about 6,000 people a year. (You could manage it with blood donations from a population of about 700,000.) As long as you maintain a blood economy of any significant scale, and your watsan infrastructure isn’t wrecked by war, chaos, and Xaos-storms (a big if) this one should be manageable.
Agriculture is the real killer. Keeping harvests at current levels uses over a third of the Hegemony’s Theurges and blood, and requires the annual sacrifice of about 1.3m people. (To produce enough food for 80m additional people–so from the Ennearchs’ perspective it’s a good bargain.)
If you wanted to do that Hegemony-wide by blood donation, you’d need to nonlethally tax nearly 300m people. Current Hegemonic population: around 225m.
Like @Sowe said, the richest nobles tend to be the ones pumping out food from their land. Split those estates up and give them to people who can’t afford to keep the Theurge coming, and you’ll solve few problems – your peasantry won’t thank you for their patch of desert.
By how much would the population decrease if we kept only the public health system and abolished the food system?
Also, what is the economic strength and growth of the empire? (I expect both to be fairly low, as the empire is highly oppressive and not fully centralized and bureaucratic, but am I correct?)
Cooperatives could be part of the solution here and they had a significant impact on the development of my own country. That, plus self-sacrifice magic for the little stuff should go a long way.
Of course famine will be inevitable to get the population to a more sustainable level but on that my mc actually mostly agrees with Kalt here in that we’d potentially be making big sacrifices now to protect future generations and keep them free from harrowing:
With one or hopefully more of these other factors in play to avert the total nightmare scenario:
Maybe, I don’t really see any other solution that wouldn’t cause a significant drop in efficiency of these big farms - as dividing the land between helotry or yeomantry inevitably would.
The drop would only be temporary our cooperatives got really efficient to the point where to this day agricultural organisation is stronger than industrial organisation ever was.
And breaking the power of the established “nobility” is to my mc very much a feature, not a bug.
Will it be possible to keep the secret of how to make Xaos Storms from spreading? I’d like to have it as something I keep in my back pocket as deterrence and adding diplomatic weight rather than getting to Game 5 and we’re all spamming them at each other.
On the other hand, having a trusted cadre of Theurges who can make them will make it extremely risky for enemies to make large troop concentrations which should in turn make going to war with me less appealing.
A “temporary” drop is still going to rocket your anarchy into the stratosphere with millions of starving ex-helots. And the noble class probably isn’t big enough to provide all the blood you’ll need to ease the transition (plus, that causes another form of anarchy - if you implement Harrowing of “reactionaries,” you have basically guaranteed that your revolution will literally eat their own a bit down the line).
It is very interesting the moral questions that come about from an absolute prohibition on harrowing. I generally view it as somewhat similar to real-world slavery from an economic perspective except harrowing is highly efficient in the way slavery is not so the utilitarian questions are far harder.
I wonder which is more righteous, to conquer the hegemony entirely, try to keep most structures in place, minimize turmoil, etc. limit short term suffering, even keep some harrowing potentially to increase the crops. Feels repulsive to me, particularly the full out utilitarian response of harrowing babies
The massive, temporary, unsustainable manpower “surplus” on the other hand from an absolute ban presents an entirely different quandary. If these millions of people are going to die anyway once the stores run out in a few years, why not launch a total war against Hallasur, another empire of monsters? Any loot and land you’d win could be used to feed the survivors. Might be out of the scope even of the sequels, but a full on lifetime of war and conquest first against the Hehemony and then against Hallasur would be something some of my MCs would probably decide to do.
Alternatively, we could try to reduce the population through strict birth control, which in my opinion is better than genocide or war, but the problem is that I’m not sure if this is feasible as I don’t know the Empire’s level of contraception and abortion technology and the resources they have to devote to it.
ADAT I announced my decision to rework Ch 2 as a week-by-week survival management game, rather than the much simpler series of winter survival choices I had originally offered.
This would end up adding many, many months of work and turning off quite a few readers, but on the whole I’m still happy with that direction and the complexity it added to the game.
I console myself with that memory as I slog through the tangles of what I’ve decided to do with Irduin.
I expect this is essentially how/why the Hegemony is prosecuting the war against Hallasur the way it is (i.e. as a forever war featuring human wave tactics). It’s both a population pressure relief and a means of conserving dwindling blood supply. I think as with most war unfortunately the enemy gets a vote and what was once perhaps a profitable pressure release is now an increasingly expensive quagmire that the Hegemony has no politically viable escape from. Once that happens political leadership start doubling down and playing for “the breaks.” That’s probably where the Hegemony is at already.
By the way, a longtime friend of mine has just published a terrific little sci-fi novel about a computer game NPC who becomes self-aware:
I loved it, and warmly recommend it – with the note that I wouldn’t like the ending as much if I didn’t know it was a cliffhanger and she’s working on the next part. It was more than worth my $3.99.
Roberta and I first became friends on a Robert Jordan newsgroup back in college where Becky from CoG was also active. It’s been fun to see more of us who used to just geek out about RJ putting our own writing out into the world–going beyond over-elaborate self-referential parodies of Ayn Rand.
I tend to think that it may be worth more to set a precedent of total ban on harrowing, even if it cost millions of lives, and institute bloodtax in place. After all - deaths that would come from this abolition through famines and else would still be smaller than decade or two of continous harrowing of current system.
Only the way the Hallasurqs do it…the way the Hegemony does it is grossly inefficient and brings with it all the problems with slavery and not just any slavery the slavery system in the Hegemony is most closely modelled after the helotry of ancient Sparta, which was particularly vile even for an ancient state. Sparta was one of the most vile states in the ancient world, why it is lionized to the degree it is in modern media I’ll never understand?
If you wanna harvest people efficiently you harvest babies, anything else is not remotely defensible even from a utilitarian point of view as slave labour is less efficient than free labour and brings huge additional social costs to maintain the slave system to boot.
That assumes control of the entire hegemony I think it is somewhat doable in the western option and anyway my mc will not continue the slave system nor bow to slavers ever again and unfortunately centuries of theocratic propaganda nonsense make the widespread (temporary) adoption of Hallassur’s method a non-starter.
Yes, one of the few points where my mc actually agrees with Kalt and the only way out is through here.
Did dutch agriculture cooperatives actually improve yields? I can see how they redistributed the gains toward small farm owners and operators and away from large land holders, but from my cursory research yields seem to stay the same or drop slightly at least back in the 19th century.
Hm, I now wonder - do Hallasurq utilise such extensive theurgic agriculture too? I imagine they must to in order to sustain their very pro-natalist society, especially considering that they probably lack agriculture rich regions like hegemonic Westriding. I wonder if they’re railroading themselves into soil degradation problem too. @Havenstone Can you say something about that?
I agree though it’s likely politically unsustainable to say “40 million people will die even with the blood tax. We’re not going to do anything to prevent that.” A war / mass migration becomes politically necessary in that scenario. The Germanics didn’t just sit around and die when they got pushed westwards. They took over the Celtic lands. I wonder if the abhuman federation is the “right” target. If I remember right, their lands aren’t efficiently farmed, so taking them and farming them might get the new empire to food sustainability
Yes, I agree it will be hard to pull off and I imagine most pro-rebel factions will oppose such idea. It will be probably impossible to enforce a total harrowing ban continent-wide and pretty hard to defend your realm if you do it on smaller scale and only internaly. I just imagine it is the sole solution to Harrowing problem, even if still very cruel.
My MC current plan would be to get most of Shayard on his side and then protect it from hungry masses + maybe provide spare food to allies abroad, we’ll see in future games how viable that plan is. Of course in meantime
And about abhumans - I imagine invasion is big no-no, considering even Hegemony at its prime did not dared to do it. If anything I imagine some abhuman clans may start raiding us for food if their internal situation destabilize enough.
Yes, eventually particularly once they had their networks of schools and the two universities in place. It required a couple of decades though and of course land reform in the former Hegemony needs to be far more comprehensive, so the growing pains will be bigger too. It is worth it in the long run though, imho, even if the group who stands to benefit most from it are the yeomen who are already somewhat educated farmers.
And of course necessity is the mother of invention and the small family farmers basically had to make much more efficient use of their smaller plots compared to the huge absentee landowners.
They were also more motivated as they worked for themselves and their families and others mostly like them with the co-ops, not for the profit and glory of the absentee landowner.
Also eventually over here the co-ops bought out a lot of the large landowners.
The situation in the Hegemony may be worse than it was for us in the early modern era but I do firmly believe the benefits will eventually outweigh the downside and in any case it will be vastly superior to the current huge slave labour and harrowing driven plantation economy where all the benefits accrue to foreign overlords and their native quislings.
