While We Wait: Part 6

[North King]

I'm presently pondering how to model the Eastern Zhou king, who is pretty similar in some regards and less in others. IMHO the fact that the HRE was elective was not necessarily bad for the office, as it could be uplifted by the election of a suitably powerful monarch. Zhou has no such opportunities, and also has an increasingly impotent dynasty in power, though there were attempts to change it.

A dynasty could be revitalized by a suitably awesome monarch; that's pretty much luck of the genetic draw. Of course, you need a lot of luck to overcome the strong environmental conditioning in a palatial environment, but that did happen from time to time.

 

[Masada]

Bathing the court in blood is always a good way to start.

 

[Sheep]

Royal Marriages:

Your monarch has a limited number of sons and daughters which will be born at irregular intervals. Of course a campaigining monarch will have less time for his Queen and thus will have less offspring. The game effects is that sons and daughters may have Royal marriages.

Those nations that do not have a royal family cannot enter into a Royal Marriage.

A Royal marriage between two nations has three effects.

1. The two parties of a royal marriage are entered into a immediate military alliance, which will cause some instability if broken, but the fact remains that it can be broken.
2. Trade relations between the two parties are immediatley boosted, so long as the alliance is kept.
3. If a royal line in one of the two nations dies out, the other may try to claim the throne of the other Kingdom (in effect taking over the nation through Royal Union). The player whose nation has been taking over in this manner would become a native pretender to the throne and would have to try and win the throne back or lose his nation.

While some great benefits are opened up so are some problems, and thus you need to be careful as to who you join in Royal marriages, although a royal line wont die out easily, it is more likely to do in the midst of warfare.

Those nations without monarchs will have the trade relations boost trading with other government types of the same as theirs so as to not disadvantage them by denying them the Royal marriage option. The Pope and Dali Lama are special cases as it is in effect an Elected Monarchy although there is still no Royal family. Thus it has relations boosted with other Catholic nations and Buddhist nations repsectivley.

Royal marriages survive a 10 turn period before becoming obsolete.

I have added the royal offspring to the stats already.

New rules I just added to my nes.... any thoughts?

 

[Stormbringer]

The more formal rules there are the less flexibility the players have, which is unfortunate

 

[Sheep]

This does not prevent military alliances and other diplomacy being made outside of royal marriages mate.... it just means royal marriages will have these benefits and drawbacks.

It also allows for the possibilities of things like the Scottish Royal family taking the English throne in 1701 for example.

 

[das]

A dynasty could be revitalized by a suitably awesome monarch; that's pretty much luck of the genetic draw. Of course, you need a lot of luck to overcome the strong environmental conditioning in a palatial environment, but that did happen from time to time.

That's a given. However, the Eastern Zhou, unlike the HRE, also had a fairly fixed (and insufficient) power base. Either sweeping social reforms (read: what Masada said ) or successful expansion (possibly into Jin when it is collapsing?) will be needed unless the king tries to revive his authority by diplomacy alone, which will require all the strong states of the periphery to be much more respectful towards it than usual (might occur in case of either an exhausting stalemate or a truly powerful common threat, with the Zhou king acting as the judge or the supreme war leader respectfully; but when this situation and its immediate consequences will have been rectified he will once again need something more to stand upon).

 

[North King]

I don't think social reforms would work in that time period, for fairly obvious reasons. No, you'd probably need some kind of military, or at least violent action. Not sure what. I was more talking about the enabler than his methods.

 

[Dachs]

Violent action sounds right up my alley.

In other news, the University of Maryland sucks. They can't even make an interactive map that is correctly oriented (the top is to the southwest? lolwut) or that zooms adequately. This does not bode well for my impending attempt at transportation thereto.

 

[das]

I don't think social reforms would work in that time period, for fairly obvious reasons.

For a very broad sense of the term "social". It's more along the line of getting rid of the corrupt present elite, redistributing some of the lands amongst the poor to revitalise the economy and society and taking the rest for oneself to build up a state apparatus, then building up an army out of your new freemen and then doing what you said.

Or something similar but more conventional like what all the successful Chinese states of the time did, only with the Zhou seal of legitimacy behind it. Bonus points for adapting a version of Mohism and beating up the strong peripheral powers in the name of universal love that they clearly don't possess for the small states that are your natural allies.

That's just off the top of my head, ofcourse. The diplomatic tactics of the "Eastern Zhou Revival" depend wholly on the situation in China itself; basically it's a pretty good leader for the smaller central states, like what the (Shang-descended) State of Song tried and ultimately failed to be.

 

[foolish icarus]

Bonus points for adapting a version of Mohism and beating up the strong peripheral powers in the name of universal love that they clearly don't possess for the small states that are your natural allies.

This should be mandatory.

 

[Ninja Dude]

On a completly nonNES related question, why do people put their signature at the bottom of their posts, even though it's obvious that they were the ones who posted it?

 

[Symphony D.]

On a completly nonNES related question, why do people put their signature at the bottom of their posts, even though it's obvious that they were the ones who posted it?

Because they're not actually signatures.

 

[Thlayli]

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/02/the_navy_shows.php

And the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1q_rRicAwI

I know this is old news, but when and how will this be implemented in a military setting?

 

[sp1023]

Does anyone know a website that can successfully resize an image to be compatible with CFC? Imageshack is still too big.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Map for turn 5:

 

[sp1023]

Thanks, will keep that in mind. Have your cats been attacked by wolves? Just curious to those protesters.

 

[Thlayli]

Question for people that actually know stuff about economics:

The Federal Funds Rate is essentially the short-term interest rate that banks charge each other for loans, right?

So, if the Federal Funds rate ever goes to 0%, what is to keep banks from getting loans for near-infinite amounts of money? Also, if the rate is at 0%, why would banks lend each other money in the first place?

 

[Stormbringer]

I do not believe the Fed Funds Rate has ever been at zero. You have to keep in mind also that it is a target rate, not an actual rate, the Federal Reserve does not control the actual rate banks charge each other overnight.

Theoretically of course the Fed could flood the economy with enough money to force the Funds rate down to effectively zero, although I doubt that would happen.

When you get down the near zero interest rates the much more important rates to watch are the one that Fed pays on reserves held at the Fed, currently 25 basis points bellow the Fed target rate, and the one that Fed charges banks and other institutions for loans, currently 25 basis points above the target rate.

Now, if that last rate ever goes to zero, there would be nothing stopping people from borrowing as much money as they want, besides having to pay it back of course. But then again, the target rate is bellow inflation right now, so banks can borrow and then have to pay back less than they borrowed in real terms already. How much better can it get?

 

[sp1023]

Has anyone else noticed that right after the election, oil prices completely dropped?

 

[Stormbringer]

Hm? Oil prices have been falling since mid summer...