This is true and greed and decadence, not to mention something fitting “better” into their religious narratives could very easily be the Hegemony’s reasons for not doing a particular thing either. The fact remains that, whatever their reasons for not doing something, switching over to it is still not going to be easy.
Well you have to be as accurate as possible with the translation and if anything does come to a head in court the judges get the unenviable task of trying to “reconcile” the two versions, but by and large we’ve been able to make it work and well nothing will ever be perfect.
Well Havenstone’s equivalent of Stingers remark, plus Carles’ behaviour in-game are big hints.
That the Halassurqs want to puppet their long lost “kin” in Nyral and annex and enslave Erezza to plunder its mineral resources for their own industrialisation, plus rendering Shayard a backwards, pastoral and entirely unindustrialised neighbour are just my speculations as to their strategic objectives, likely to be shared by my mc once he can look at some maps and put some things together in-game.
That depends, I still think upper-class decadence consumes a not insubstantial amount and then there are the plektoi and above all the wards. All potentially entirely wasteful spending that can be cut.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented, real-life nations have also often mistrusted certain elements of their military and they’d hardly send their best and brightest to a backwards, backwoods and primitive region like Rim-Square anyway, so it could also simply be that the theurges initially assigned there were not particularly good to begin with, so they may be under-resourced. This happens even in the US military at times, right @cascat07? And the US military is by far the richest and most well-resourced overall on the planet.
See, this is where we differ, most of the wards, by area, guard the coast and are more useful to keep the Hegemony’s slaves in then they are at keeping anybody out. Of course this is a big point of disagreement between us. But if the resident Tiger was right then the wards may be a self-defeating gamble whose demise is inevitable anyway due to their interplay with the Xaos-lands and storms in the long run.
I largely agree, I think most of it by far goes to the wards, because they need stronger and stronger wards, because the Xaos storms keep getting stronger, because the two may somehow be connected and it is very much possible the Xaos storms somehow leech energy from the wards. I think it is absolutely right though that there is little initiative to keep expanding the population to increase the blood supply if most of that then needs to go into agriculture to maintain the expanded population.
Our glass agriculture can manage about five for certain fruits and vegetables though. There are experiments with airponics, but that would massively increase the volume, if as succesful as hoped, rather than the number of harvests. Still there’s more than one way to skin a cat and if we can make a breakthrough that increases the volume, such as making marginal lands productive then the number of harvests can stay the same or even decrease.
I don’t think an overhead that large is very profitable, given all the other disadvantages and social pressures overpopulation is know to cause though.
My best guess, given the Hegemony’s love of decadence is between 20 to 50%, higher ratio’s don’t seem worth it given the other concerns that come with overpopulation.