Really hoping someone will pitch the co-op idea to my mc, even once theurgy is no longer a deep state secret small time (family) farmers would be unable to afford the services of the top agricultural theurges but that could change if they adopt to co-op model. Plus my mc’s instinct already is to favour the smaller independent yeoman farmers here. At the same time my mc is also someone who is reflexively opposed to no limits laissez-faire as that would mean (plantation) slavery would continue in all but name.
As unlike Mao and the people who built the Soviet Union of our time my mc has already been personal withness to the failures and indignities of large, plantation style farming, which is one key difference he has with many of our real world socialists.
Plus of course in my own country those farmer co-ops did a lot of nation building for us and eventually helped move us away from the “golden age” nightwatchman state.
The primary objective of a co-op is to sequester more market power in a “union” of small producers. I’m not sure that does anything to resolve the inherent production and transportation shortfall caused by the fall of the Hegemony’s grain, helot, blood triangle trade. Any food producer will have tremendous market share, but only through the ability to get it from where it is made to where it is needed. I suspect rural people will probably fine in terms of food, it will be the urban populations that starve. Co-ops seem like a way to make the cities starve harder with better returns for the farmers.
The Hegemony’s population is huge, and partially specialized away from agriculture. In terms of arable land I think it is more akin to Mao’s China which then suddenly experiences a fertilizer deficit of 80% or so.
I think it is possible to minimize urban hunger by exchanging urban industrial goods for rural agricultural goods through some kind of buy-in system. It would also be possible to link unions with rural education and democratic autonomy.
While both of those things are certainly laudable in the longterm I don’t think it will have any significant bearing on destruction of the Hegemony’s political order ripping the guts out of its grain/blood command economy. Even a rebellion in the Hegemony’s image won’t control the territory necessary to transport agricultural products into cities on the other side of the empire. That’s to say nothing of the blood shortage and war reducing the annual harvests from 7 to 1 if we are lucky.
Another thing to consider on the war dimension, since Shayard is the breadbasket of the empire every helot of a grain plantation you conscript or kill reduces the productive capacity of that breadbasket. Unlike IRL with a summer fighting season as plants mature, the farms in the Hegemony harvest and plant all year.
Well, I said minimal because that’s exactly what you’re concerned about. As long as there is unrest in the rural areas, there will be some kind of starvation.
I’ve reached the unenviable conclusion that famine is an inevitable and necessary prerequisite of the abolition of Helotry and the transition to an economy not based on constant brutal human sacrifice. It’s not good at all, but once you free yourself from the Gordian knot of keeping the Hegemonic grain trade intact (impossible, unless you recreate Hegemonic structures at least in large part) you can start looking at how to soften the landing and minimize the damage, something that I see as more reasonable.
(Again, this assumes a radically emancipationist rebellion aiming to shatter the slaving blood economy. If you are a cowardly collaborator without conscience person willing to preserve the greater part of the Hegemonic system, famine circumvention may be possible.)
Something I’ve always said is that my MC doesn’t really have a grasp of the issues so far and doesn’t want to openly commit to anything other than, “The Hegemony must change.”
Trying to pin down what these changes should and will be isn’t really their concern right now. There’s not a single part of the Hegemony we control, we collect no taxes, do not support a standing armed forces, or have any permanent structures.
The Seracca, probably. I’ve increasingly come around to the idea of restraining the revolution to Shayard despite my MCs cosmopolitan inclinations. I don’t really want to run another empire, and am starting to believe that the Hegemony is effectively an unnatural beast that never should have grown in the first place. I’d rather build a more constrained and effectively governed state within Shayard that can serve as a revolutionary beacon for the rest of the continent. Hopefully that state can ally with others cropping up in the Hegemony, and form a revolutionary alliance of sorts (probably cribbing a bit from the Koinon). In the mean time the Seracca are ideologically compatible, so I’d like to enter into mutual agreements there. The Hallasurq will probably advance into Erezza a fair bit, but hopefully they can be held back from going all the way. It’s another “necessary sacrifice” choice that I’d like not to have happen, but that’s probably going to.
IDK how possible this is in @Havenstone’s vision, but I’d love to be able to build a state on Cosmopolitan principals that isn’t trying to recreate the Hegemony or cover its borders. Possibly looking to shift things west to a union of Wiendrj with the Rim/Southriding/Westriding. Not quite sure on precise borders.
The other other problem is that the theurgic agriculture practices are exhausting the soil. The Brecks are a hint at the unsustainable future of continuing those practices. Part of the root cause of the blood shortage is the demand for more and more blood each year to return the same yields. Part of the reason our rebellion succeeds where others failed is that the entire system is already in terminal decline.
Precisely. It’s not sustainable and it has to come down at some point. The best thing you can do (besides sticking your head in the sand and perpetrating the system further) is a controlled demolition that kills as few people as possible, ideally.
Based on fossil fuels? Probably assuming the physical and geological history of the XoRvers was similar to ours, but a lot of the precursor research and technology were skipped in favor of theurgic tech. Much like the population of economic understanding we possess of this system from the outside, for the characters internal to it it isn’t even possible to know. Many of the necessary priors haven’t been developed yet. Humans are pretty adaptable, but I think the larger problem is that your adversaries are probably happy to take advantage of your refusal to fully exploit theurgic tech.
Hmm, what is the level of science and technology in the empire? Also, how far is the capital accumulation of the empire? It will determine your success. Also, in relatively sustainable fields, it may be better to use theurgic technology in combination with the blood tax system.
Probably hard to draw a direct relationship, indefinitely floating a palace for example is well beyond our most exquisite tech today. I think early modern is probably roughly equivalent so pre-civil war US or post Napoleonic GB, maybe.
Capital accumulation is quite significant. With 224m in population and a standing military in excess of 1.5m you are looking at stats in striking distance of the modern US or Soviet Union at its height in terms of military power to economic power ratios.
I tend to agree at least in terms of the player’s lifetime. I don’t think setting theurgy completely aside is a viable strategy.
Something I said before and just want to put into IRL terms was. Hera was Alexander the Great- she embarked on this brilliant campaign in which she used her personal might and talents to conquer vast swathes of territory. Like Alexander she basically “Crossed the Indus” and hit a wall. The Empire managed to develop a response to Hera’s strategic military advantage by replicating the Harrowing process and because not inconsiderable amounts of Hera’s troops were tied down holding her conquests down, liquidating rebel pockets, and also growing old and fatigued she was unable to keep the momentum going.
She most likely returned back to the Capital to begin consolidating the Hegemony and during this period she was assassinated. A period of instability erupted when her generals and daughter fought over her throne and the Second Thautmarch locked the Hegemony down. Not to mention, the Xaos Storms by this point probably proved to be a significant issue.
The Second Thautmarch was never able to gain a strategic advantage over the Empire, but most likely gained some small conquests here and there.
Shayard alone is not very viable as an empire in the mc’s era. At minimum you need the resources of Erezza too in order to remain a great power and remain competitive with Halassur as the world increasingly enters an industrial era.
Without those resources Shayard alone will just be a large, poor backwards backwater.
European empires for the most part extracted those resources to fuel industrialization from our colonies but why go searching to found distant colonies or find gullible trade partners on other continents we know nothing about (yes, my mc would be curious to explore or rather commission exploration of the rest of the world post game 5, but that is different) when in Erezza we have our own Siberia right next door?
Besides if we don’t claim it we will risk the rich resources of Erezza being used against us by Halassur.
Giving this some thought, I think theurgy powers up the individual where “great man theory” is basically irrefutable. @Havenstone has hinted at it before but one Archmage with sufficient blood is capable of feats that tens of thousands of lower skill theurges working in combination cannot replicate. The skill and education of an individual takes on obvious strategic impacts that we might reasonably debate wrt to irl history. Was it really the brilliance of Alexander or the confluence of tactical innovation and historical trend? I think we can say indisputably Hera’s invention and implementation of mass aetherial blood extraction and manufacture was decisive in the Hegemony’s rise. She was personally indispensable to that history.
