Sounds reasonable. I’m rather fond of celibacy myself as a tenant but this sounds like a good system. It doesn’t account for closed polycules sadly but neither do most religions irl.
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You’ve stolen mules from them already. G3 may give the chance for more engagement, but I don’t think they’ll crop up in G2.
To be fair to Al Gore, I think there are some pretty big differences between those projects, and that the failure of one didn’t obviously doom the other. 
Public choice theory paints an equally unflattering picture of risk-averse bureaucrats who value budget maximisation more than public service. It’s worth remembering that the real flaws inherent in “market” solutions don’t in themselves prove that they’re worse than the alternative.
In general, I think these simple models aren’t adequate even to the realities of our time, let alone earlier eras. As Karl Polanyi reminds us, for most of human history people have taken for granted that people value lots of things in balance; the autonomous “private sector” focused on profit to the exclusion of all else is an invention (and myth) of modernity.
The problem I have with the USAID reforms is less the involvement of for-profit actors (especially the ones whose organizational culture and leadership valued excellence or effectiveness above short-term profit) and more the institutional setup that abandoned competition and accountability.
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True but there’s a lot of cases where the alternative has proven generally more effective in practice.
I’ve been toying with various ways to ask this and I’ve come up short with them all. I’m pretty sure it can’t even be answered, but I’ll ask anyhow.
Due to a mixture of your being a Rim-dweller and so lacking connections, and since your rebellion both for Doylist and Watsonian reasons can’t be too large… is it probable that we’re gonna have to accept being a lieutenant of a larger group?
As… I can see how your PC’s skillset would be more suitable to a follower than a leader, to be honest. A COM main PC acting as a superior’s right arm, an INT main in cooperation with Cerlota providing the ‘artillery’ and R&D of the movement, and a CHA main’s utility (especially if you’re toying with religious reform too) is obvious.
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You definitely can be a contender for the throne; Havie has said as much.
Now, how easy that will be is another question.
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Is it likely that our current game one lieutenants will form their own bands(or some more coherent units if we form actual military force) later as the rebellion grows? If so, would such groups still maintain a chain of command and be under orders of MC or some of his subordinates?
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Yeah mid level management in any organization have a tendency to prioritize them not getting in trouble over broader goals. It’s just worth noting that when market efficiency is talked about that you can only be efficient at a goal and the purpose of a private company is to generate profit for shareholders.
You see it a lot in my country private companies get given public jobs and then simply pocket money given to them by the state to do those jobs. Lately we’ve had to deal with cancer screening companies that downgrade equipment so it can’t catch diseases until they reach the point of being untreatable as well as water companies that refuse to maintain infrastructure not to mention that one time they got caught dumping raw sewage in the drinking water
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@Havenstone you may not be ready to answer this, but how insestuous is the merchants guilds and the Hegemony elite in the imperial core? I know you mentioned the more developed parts of the empire are industrialized after a fashion. Are we talking fascist corporatism, a command economy, or something more medieval?
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As a noble you can, I have my doubts about the helot mc, at least if we’re talking the Laconnier version of the throne.
Might makes right is probably always an option, but you’d be more of a warlord than a king in practice and of course my alternative schemes to bring about a Koinon organised more like the Holy Roman Empire with an elected emperor, a position he hopes the snatch for himself.
The Gameworld has moved beyond medieval in its developed parts, so if you do that it would mean regression, much as the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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The only practical difference is the hat. Medieval kings ruled in the same way as warlords and legally the office of king devices from ownership of the army
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technologically maybe but the governance seems to be very much at that level. The Wiends even still use a clan based system. I’d also argue that it doesn’t make sense to say a society has regressed or progressed as that assumes that society is actively heading in a direction which there isn’t much to support
No. Exceptional leaders emerge from backwaters all the time, especially during times of social upheaval. A rebellion that starts at the periphery isn’t doomed to stay small or disconnected; and you can still use it as a launchpad in various ways even if you end up abandoning or losing control of the Rim Commotion.
There will be plenty of good reasons for you to accept a role as kingmaker or lieutenant by the later games, but I don’t intend for it to feel like the most probable outcome or the one the game steers you toward.
Any group where you exercise a chain-of-command relationship will still count as part of your faction. I’m coding the game to track up to three actual splinter factions, if you end up having them, as well as the K faction or S faction led by whichever one didn’t join you in G1.
The efficiency of a system can be very different from the efficiency of its parts. The goal of every political party is to take and exercise power; yet a functioning democracy channels the efforts of its participants into a system where power alternates, despite that going against the narrow goals of the individual actors. Any market is a complex system with rules both explicit and implicit, and without buying into Adam Smith’s vision of laissez-faire (let alone the even simpler version proposed by many of his successors) I think he’s clearly right that individuals and institutions pursuing self-interested goals can still end up “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”
As do public sector workers and institutions, sadly. Any system of public service delivery needs to include robust accountability measures to punish rent-seeking by providers – whether those providers are formally profit-making or not. I’m against any form of naive privatization that thinks the government can roll back accountability measures because for-profit actors are somehow naturally self-policing (e.g. talk of “market discipline” withhout any serious attention to the competitive conditions under which a market can impose any form of discipline). But I’d say the same for naive socialization that assumes the public sector somehow naturally pursues the public interest, just because that’s in a written mission statement.
The question of whether a given public service can be improved by introducing competition among profit-making providers (or alternatively by moving it to the sphere of tax-funded state provision) is one that I don’t think has a single answer. Many services have an element of natural monopoly and/or monopsony that makes private sector provision less likely to work – but sometimes a mix of public and private can work well even in those cases.
In the provinces, the empire’s policy of rule through the local nobility has locked in the power of a lot of aristocratic institutions and prevented the merchants/bourgeoisie from getting as strong as they were in early modern Europe. In Karagon itself, though, the power of the Syntechnia is much greater, and the tensions with the traditionally dominant landowning/military class more acute, with the Theurgic elite having to manage increasing strife between the two. I’m not ready yet to say which of the models you outline it comes closest to, though.
I don’t think we are, though – the question was about being the head of your own successful empire-building rebellion, rather than a lieutenant to one of the Big Three. The options there are of course not limited to successfully becoming monarch of Shayard; an HRE-esque koinon is totally on the table for the end of G5.
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Bonaparte! A barely noble like aristo MC.
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This thread talks a lot about the political aspects of rebellion, but I think army-building is also going to be really important for anyone looking to become one of the leading post-Hegemonic rebel states, and I think it will be an issue because the two main ways I see of getting a powerful army is building one from the ground up with helots and yeoman and the like, or coopting existing Hegemonic units. There doesn’t seem to be like, nomadic or tribal groups you could use to start playing Ghengis Khan or Nader Shah (or maybe setting details are slipping my mind), so I think finding some way of appealing to at least low-level Hegemonic officers is going to be important.
@Havenstone , what all does Combat cover again? Do the higher levels get into army-building and organization?
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yes but when the private sector does it it’s because that’s their entire purpose as an organisation. There is a difference between individualised theft by public service workers and a private sector institution taking taxpayer money and simply keeping it.
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Not really. Quoth Jerry Pournelle:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
Hence, “individualized theft”, if not controlled, becomes the purpose of the public-sector bureaucracies just as much as it is the purpose of private institutions being fed taxpayer money.
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yes but the purpose of the bureacracy and the benefit of the bureacracts find themselves pulling in the same direction with the private sector which is away from public benefit.
Back when the water for example was in the public sector for instance there were issues but no one was pumping raw sewage in and lying about it
we haven’t seen much of wiendry but the rural areas might have tribal groups based on the way they talk about clans. The nobility also seem to have household guards which I would assume the hegemony allow to grow to at least moderate size as they would supplement slave management
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Can we talk about how this title came out, and its forum is still buzzing like crazy? 
A great game, but im honestly shocked that the forum is still going strong.
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I think it’s the world building that keeps it going.
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