North King
blech
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2004
- Messages
- 18,165
Lurker's comment: Not to provoke you or anything, but how does the state pass any laws or decisions when they usually have to agree about a subject, not vote about it? People don't usually agree about their nation, especially not spoiled aristocrats.
It worked for Novgorod. And by worked I mean it eventually failed miserably and pathetically, but the boyars there sure had it good while everyone else was too weak to harm them. Poland-Lithuania did have voting and also the liberum veto, which is pretty awesome in that if you and you alone do not agree with the decisions (and are a member of the Sejm), you can just put your foot down and keep everyone from getting any work done out of sheer spite. It went well. Also: the British Cabinet, though that required giving the Prime Minister more and more power to force through a consensus.
Consensual oligarchy is a pretty awful way of actually running a state, but can be a very nice political compromise, and as long as there are some recognised common interests it is possible to make it work, if squeakily.
It actually did work in the case of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation.
I honestly keep forgetting what country Kal'thzar was playing in the first place was called (Duroc?), but its language should do fine for this, if not quite as well as Arabic did for Islam or Latin for Catholicism.
Thearak. The issue is not that languages are hard to learn, the issue is that no one language is already spoken across a wide area. Christianity had an easy time because huge numbers of people spoke Greek and Latin, and thus translated texts could be rapidly disseminated. The Arabs were ruling the Muslim world, so people were picking up bits of Arabic already; the jump to learning the religious lingo wasn't that difficult. Otherwise, religions that face language barriers have a hard time traveling quickly: Zoroastrianism was confined to Persia; Buddhism took centuries to spread anywhere outside of Magadha, etc. Religions in this NES will probably follow that pattern.