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habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Yeah, high up Reems dudes take a shot at the Commonweal, and miss badly. Contains a scene where Halt rolls up her sleeves, and then entirely extirpates every single Reems dude who had anything to do with the assassination attempts.

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habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
The thing to remember about UOB is that the viewpoint character had their brain melted shortly before the opening of the book. It's a bit jarring because Eugenia is pretty jarred. Once she gets to the point where she's entering the Line, I feel like it was more cohesive.

e: Wanted to add a couple quotes from SYD per my last post:

Safely You Deliver Chapter 35 posted:

The distant shrieking’s not stopped, faded, just a bit, and Halt’s formal beaded shawl’s been set on the howdah, Halt’s started undoing cuff buttons.

Blossom’s eyes widen, Blossom pales a little, watching Halt’s sleeves start being rolled up.

As a reminder, Blossom is a nascent Goddess of Destruction. She also learned at Halt's knee.

Safely You Deliver Chapter 36 posted:

“Was the Reems attack especially foolish?” The proverb cites the worst fencer, whose conduct skill cannot predict.

“Desperate, perhaps,” Wake says. “A formidable ritual, long-prepared, and likely planned to overcome such resistance as could be imagined. It is strange that it was expended with such unclear targets.”

Chert’s lights coalesce to one and move left, back to the start of the sequence. “How tough was this first one?”

“Between eight hundred and a thousand, and well-provided.” There’s the particular emphasis on well-provided that means “lots of mind-bound subsidiary sorcerers.”

“So about Rust?”

“No.” Wake is definite. “Five hundred years of open publication have improved us.” Wake’s wry shrug swirls immaterial smoke. “More than we may realize by few examples.”

“Rust displayed no sign of difficulty with any Reems sorcerer on the March.” Annotation, not argument, and Chert’s brief nod takes it that way.

“Would it work on Rust?” It is on the ceiling in swoopy lines and a broad white bar for “certainly dead.”

Wake nods. “It would work on me, accurately directed.”

As another reminder, pre-Commonweal Wake was strong and talented enough to leave the field of battle in good order after fighting Halt/The Empress.

Safely You Deliver Chapter 36 posted:

“And your interpretation of policy?” All the invading sorcerers over an arbitrary output labelled “two hundred” are to die, in preference to troops, if you can’t get everyone. Been formally like that since the Year of Peace Fifty, and practically since Year of Peace Eighteen, the first time anyone got away. A long generation’s embarrassment’s delay to formality.

“Applied to the ritual and only the ritual, General.”

“Which you got?” Chert’s not expecting to like the answer.

“From Edgar, quite entire.” Halt smiles. “No reaching out for it.”

I share a glance with Chert. Dead and disintegrating hundreds of kilometres away and neither of us doubts Halt could have pulled those echoes out of the world.

Would almost rather Halt had.

Chert’s sword hand twitches, once and twice. Halt thinks their Staff Thaumaturgist token is an excellent jest, yes, but not the job or the Commonweal or the Peace, somehow, and never mind how many joints in the limbs in the shadows behind Halt.

“It was no more than it needed to be, General,” Halt says, “if somewhat showy.” Halt produces an honestly amused smile. “It was not only in the Commonweal that sorcerers heard perish in flames, and I wished to maintain the theme.”

“A somewhat threatening theme.” Chert doesn’t approve. Threats are a form of conquest.

“If policy demands deaths, survivors may fear.” This smile’s not amused. “Yet fear was not the purpose.”

Chert tries to nod, fails, makes a two-handed “it’s nothing” motion.

Chert hasn’t had much practice talking to Halt.

I’ve read the initial reports, dashed shorthand and incomplete sentences about burning things tall and terrible looming over mountains. Uncomfortable guesses at height and distance and how far above the air were made. Rigid duty noting that the apparent twisting motions cannot be explained by the physics of heat.

Chert was hurrying east, and saw Halt’s wrath rise up over the rim of the world.

If I'm the First Commonweal, I'm probably nonplussed over this event.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jul 6, 2022

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

LLSix posted:

I just finished the second book, "A Succession of Bad Days." I really like the ending. I really, really like the ending and the point it drives home. I felt like it could have gotten there faster and my eyes glazed over during the canal building. Usually I like hard science sections, but there was nothing in that section for me to grab hold of and provide context. Maybe canals are just too far outside my experience in a way that needing air to breathe on Mars isn't.

I really, really like the introduction of the legal policy of "Justice adds no harm to the wronged." The way it's applied is magnificent. I wish we had something like that.

The canals are what hangs up a lot of folks. It doesn't help that it's all in Edgar's kinda stream-of-consciousness pov.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
It is something that does become apparent, eventually. It's neat, but I concur that it threw me for a loop at first.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I think Safely You Deliver occurs when the Second Commonweal is still acting under emergency law, which relaxes the strictures on "how much can an independent work and to what effect." The part about essentially capping pay for work is, and correct me if I'm mistaken, about what to do in "normal" times.

They really couldn't have told the class not to work, it was their working that prevented like 40,000 people from starving and from an entire valley getting washed away in a flood. So they kludge it. Which strikes me as realistic, the modern world is built on kludges.

e: When did you realize Constant was borne of the Dove/Edgar consonance?

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jul 26, 2022

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
You will most likely similarly enjoy the rest of the series! I also liked that the main conflict of the book was really just a prelude to "oh poo poo, we've got to create a whole new polity and the defeat of Reems merely gave us space to do that."

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Ccs posted:

I just want to read very detailed summaries of these books because i love the idea of them but I can't get through them.

Well poo poo, we can do that. It's too bad we had to nuke the old thread, because we had some of those.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

LLSix posted:

What? I genuinely have no idea what you mean by this. Maybe it's just too early here for my brain to be working.

I think they mean that the Captain knows pretty much immediately that there's a huge problem if Parliament is sending him Halt and Rust... and everything the Captain does from there on is predicated on "we must absolutely annihilate whatever Reems is sending our way." I could be misreading the OP. The other option I can think of is that they mean the Captain is extremely deadly. Which, also true.

Danhenge posted:

I don't think gender is actually a total mystery box, it's just considered linguistically impolite to use gendered language with someone you aren't personally close to. Something like tú vs usted in Spanish, but stronger.

It's also I think a little more unusual for the Creeks because sex and gender are almost totally decoupled but I don't think that's true for all the ilks.

I don't think it's entirely decoupled, but they have genders that don't cleave along what we'd immediately recognize as "gender" - IIRC Chloris is the first place we see the Creek gender/orientation along "monogamy/multipartner" lines. Chloris is upset when realizing, because of the suggestive effects of power and the risks associated with losing control in an intimate moment, there will never be another night at the Tavern with a bunch of beefy stevedores. Chloris starts off in the "heterosexual/multiple partners" quadrant of creek gender, while Dove starts off in the "heterosexual/single partner" quadrant. Things then get weird because of the power, Dove wouldn't usually be attracted to a non-Creek like Edgar. Our dude doesn't even have a prehensile dong!

This does bring up a question I'd love to have asked the google group, which is what does population growth look like in the bad old days or before the Commonweal showed up and instituted the mandatory annual "peace-abiding" vaccine/booster shot/contraception dose. Probably some rough population cliffs in bad years, or you just never got organized enough to not have an exceedingly high mortality rate from critters and weeds to match the high birth rate of no contraception. And if you were organized enough you were probably under the thumb of some power user who was exercising dominion and thus there was a different set of constraints on population growth.

Danhenge posted:

Re: Grandma you can probably just think of it as a translation for "Your mother's mother." The Creeks don't formally recognize fathers so you've only formally got relations on your mother's side. Nobody has a paternal grandma.

I read it as also being that Halt's glamour is intended to present an image that just about anyone would recognize as an archetypal grandma. Even the Captain, who as a graul wouldn't have that type of relationship to kin and is operating off of (admittedly long and well observed) familiarity with other ilks' customs.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Dec 15, 2022

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I'm re-reading The March North for what must be the fourth time, because there's really nothing else quite like these books, and noticed something that I'm not sure I had grasped on prior re-reads. After the first encounter with the Road of Concentrated Despair there's a discussion between the Captain, Blossom, and Halt about how long ago Reems started using the physical embodiment of despair from millions of people (or hundreds of thousands, made to feel utter despair multiple times). They're sure it's taken well longer than the six years since Rust comprehensively crushed the Archon at Meadows Pass. They guess that Reems is under threat from something even further north, and thus being pushed towards the Commonweal at Meadow's Peak and across the sentient terrain. They consider the possibility of a major summoning having gotten out of Reems control/turning against Reems and that being a cause for Reems moving south (and creating a ready source of despair).

Spoiler warnings for all the later books from this point on.

So... who was smashing up Reems from the north? Was it the Sea People? I thought they were coming from across the southern oceans, not that it precludes them landing on the northern shores of the Commonweal's landmass. And was the Worse-than-a-Marid already rampaging about Reems at the time of The March North? It's about a decade from The March North to Under One Banner, so that'd mean it was running around eating Reems for roughly two decades before it gets to the Eastern Wastes. And you don't jump straight to using something like that unless you've got no other choice, so they must have been invaded some time before that. But Reems was still an organized polity a couple years before Under One Banner during the events of Safely You Deliver, and able to launch a major magical infiltration and assault (the plague, the demons sent after Halt and Wake, the construct sent after Dove and Edgar - after they'd already lost a Full Mighty many-centuries old sorcerer and his large retinue). Am I missing something or did the final collapse of Reems happen real quick between 543-545 Year of the Peace Established after twenty-ish years of war and destruction?

Also, every time I read these books I find all my writing for a few hours after becomes etiolated - full of asides, fragments, and inconsistent punctuation. Curses, I've become a poor model Graydon again!

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
It's not that much of a spoiler to say that the Commonweal's tactical advantage relies on winning without the invaders knowing what hit them. They're not big enough (about 7.5m people versus Reems' ~50m in The March North) to fight a long, knock down drag out fight against a major power that's given a chance to figure out how the Standards work. By the same token, you don't want anyone observing the area to see a bunch of variously mighty sorcerers zipping about on broomsticks or what have you.

Also, at least in the old Commonweal, they had the Hard Road. Which is never explained, but appears to be at least in part a rapid transit system.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Dec 31, 2022

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Isn't the Line outside of the Peace Established? So you can't really borrow platoons from the Line to do things like transport goods and people from place to place.

e: the line does build roads, as I recall, but those don't give you actual speed without using the Standard to hasten the march.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Dec 31, 2022

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
That's a good point, the Captain mentions very early on that the Creek reservists are amazingly good at fine control since they all work together using civilian focuses - they're able to keep the Reems scouts from swallowing their tongues without chipping any teeth or breaking any jaws and a Regular Line file wouldn't be able to manage that.

Also, did we ever conclude how Wapentake is pronounced? In my head it's Wah-pen-tah-kay, but I know it's of Anglo-Saxon origin and not east coast Native American.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Pretty much all of the weird titles in the book come from old English. Gerefan (reeve), gesith (companion to a noble, comrade), fylstan (verb for aid, support, help, protect), larhus (school), galdor (magic/spell) etc. If you see something outside your linguistic ken, it's probably old English related.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I do really like the use of the French Republican calendar. It's similar enough to what we know to figure out, but foreign enough from our experience to make it seem like a different world.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
The more talented Independents also tend to create alleged horses and/or Eustacean and/or enchanted howdahs for long distance travel.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I've just gotten past that part on my re-read, and apparently the swamps are awful because seemingly every-other Bad Old Days ruler was afraid of slave rebellions being based out of the swamps. Hence why there's so many varieties of venomous, carnivorous ducks.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I really feel sometimes like I'm wandering about the internet going "Frodo lives!" with my evangelism for these books, and they don't make themselves the easiest to read.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Kestral posted:

Goon Commonweal mapping project? we have enough people in here who have read the books repeatedly to be able to fact-check it, I imagine.

Hmm, I would be somewhat interested in this.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Yeah, I think that'd make sense. Basically get a big list of locations and how they seem to be positioned to each other. I've looked at the map that cultureulterior did years ago plenty of times, and IIRC other than needing to be flipped east/west it's a good starting point.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Ok, started scratch notes in a google doc from where I was in my reread. Can anyone guess what part I just started?

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
I've completed my re-read of A Succession of Bad Days, and in doing so added everything I could find about places to the google doc notepad. I'm very confused on precisely how many canals there are in the Creeks. The joke about their being a parliamentary riding called the Western West West-East Canal was good, though.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
book 2 had:
* Edgar (brainwormy, previously dim, had a parasite that kept him from developing his talent - and intelligence - until just before the 2nd book began, unhatched horror from beyond the universe whose hatching and aftermath thereof is the end of book 2);
*Dove (brainwormy's crush, returning character in The March North as a platoon leader, the strongest student by some distance, in her mid-30s and thus the oldest student by about a decade, and possessed of unconquerable willpower and determination);
*Chloris (Death, very prim young Creek who struggled to come to terms with being a necromancer because of the social stigma and legends about necromancers, and also because her family were lovely, toxic, emotionally abusive assholes); and
* Zora (2nd weakest of the bunch, most traditionally sane of the four, still a teenager, life-mage, likes to create illusory butterfly wings, almost kills herself by doing a massive working inside an already big working that cooks her brain right under the nose of one of their teachers).

Book 2 also started with Kynefrid in the class, who was a bit weaker than Zora. Kynefrid dropped out of the program because he couldn't get himself to believe that it could actually work and it wouldn't just end up killing him. So he left to try to succeed as a traditional student.

Book 3 has a fifth member of the team introduced, Constant, who is a whole... thing. And not very well explained. Constant was not in the 2nd book outside of what I think is a glancing mention here: "[Dove and Edgar's] full coherence creates a third distinct mind, there are three of them at that point in time, there might be an entire intermittent personality."

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jan 20, 2023

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Yeah, Kynefrid is a gay dude. It's just that the Commonweal folks don't refer to non-intimate partners with gendered pronouns in general. I only used male pronouns for sake of clarity because "they couldn't get themselves to believe" might have indicated more than just Kynefrid's belief.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Kynefrid does have blue hair, though. Also tall and thin, and gets cold very easily.

e: not sure how I missed the mention of his blue hair in the last post.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
There aren't any great guides in part because there is a lot of explanation spread throughout the series. If you have questions you should ask them and if they can be answered without big spoilers we'll try to answer them.

Glad you liked the March North, though!

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
1. Not a full answer, but you can't fit everything into the standard because there isn't room. The Captain mentions that "you’re not expected to have guests, or at least not more than one or two at a time." The space for the dead still attached to the banner is not for living folks, generally, or for storage. e: The space inside a standard is extradimensional, you can walk into it if you have the Standard Captain's invitation. The other Standards recognize Blossom as a standard, which is very much not normal and is part of why the Captain calls Blossom an existential threat to the Commonweal in his report to General Chert.

2. You need to build the road as you march or you'll run into things or off of cliffs at high speeds. Reems built their road to prevent the Northern Hills from shifting around, rather than move quickly.

3. Worried about the former, certain about the latter. And no means of communication or transit that would be safe. Hard to have a representative government if you can't get your elected representatives to parliament.

4. Yes and no. It's the overarching enchantment that enforces rules on those sworn to office and Independents. If you're just a random citizen you can still lie to folks about the size of the fish you caught.

5. Signas and Pennons are types of Standards, the former for brigades and the latter for a general. Gesith is an Old English word for "companion, fellow, comrade; companion or follower of an athel or king" and are essentially government Departments or Ministries in the Commonweal (e.g. the Lug-Gesith, which handles transportation, or the Line-Gesith, which handles equipping the Line)

6. You essentially have this correct. The Captain figured out how to change what he did in the past while fighting the Hell-things from the Paingyre. "Really a pity you have to spend a continuous month in the focus and cursing your bad decisions to figure out how to do it. More of a pity that the reach back isn’t very deep."

7. The artillery are more like electromagnetic railguns than regular gunpowder cannon. The red/black indicates whether there's any magic involved with that part of the shot or not. I can't recall what the order is for the three, but the first is "type of boom" with black being the pure kinetic energy of the shell, and the second two being "guidance system" and something I can't recall off the top of my head.

8. Depends on the battle. Most of the Line who died perished in the battle after Reems' road exploded. Those primarily were killed in hand to hand combat with Reems berserkers because it's difficult to fight while feeling the effects of pure, material despair.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jan 23, 2023

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
e: it's not on the post i thought it was.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

There are also other standards than battle standards, for various industrial purposes.

They call the focuses for other jobs just focuses. The Standards are their own thing, and more than just the focus (although that's the thing that gives the Line its ability to stand up to Bad Old Days sorcerers.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Ed does tend to wrap themself up in side thoughts and digressions within the same sentence. Zora isn't as bad when we get their perspective in Safely You Deliver, and Grue is downright straightforward.

As for Ed and weeding, well... Ed does figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't terrify most people, but is fundamentally similar to what Laurel did to Wake and Halt and the rest of the 12, so that definitely puts Wake off his whole 'benevolent bricklayer' equilibrium for a bit. It's a very good bit.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

habeasdorkus posted:

2. You need to build the road as you march or you'll run into things or off of cliffs at high speeds. Reems built their road to prevent the Northern Hills from shifting around, rather than move quickly.
Realized in my reread of Safely You Deliver that the Standard also compresses the space being travelled so it's not just being able to move more quickly.


Lead out in cuffs posted:

8. In the first battle, the most casualties were taken mainly from the solid despair evaporating all over them like a chemical weapon. Otherwise, sorcerers, the swords of berserkers, etc. The Captain single-handedly slices up 220-some dudes with a sword in the first battle. A bunch of the weapons of the main Wapentake/short company are melee weapons, they just have some ranged weapons they use first. (Also, from the Captain's POV, the last battle involved a lot more magic/demons/ichor, whereas Blossoms end of things probably got a lot messier once the enemy were inside arty range.)

Spoilers for The March North only:
I think the despair didn't necessarily kill them, so much as make it impossible for them to fight back. They lost their latch on the platoon focus, so they were a couple hundred soldiers stuck just fighting a few thousand berserkers (who, being berserkers, were insulated from the despair) instead of being able to use the tricks the Standard offers. The March North does detail how many die at each point, though. Less than half the Wapentake and Experimental Battery make it back to Headwaters, 278 hale or wounded versus 297 dead. Something like 200 of those deaths happen when the Despair pops off. Most of the troopers who went with the Captain into the fortress made it back, but the Experimental Battery and Dove's Third Platoon had ~60 more dead after that fight and took most of their casualties from the spine beasts.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
At one point Mulch gives Zora the name of Pelorios's ancestor species, which helped me get an idea of what they looked like. Also, very funny naming a unicorn Enormous.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Ruud Hoenkloewen posted:

'a heroic, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at pretending to be written in English'

That's the phrase I keep failing to remember when trying to sell people on these books!

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Greydon as a Homestuck fan would be about the most against type thing I could imagine.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Saunders is also regular at Charlie Stross's blog, and I believe Stross acts as one of his alpha readers (which is pretty neat, since Stross is a solidly successful author).

I'm about done with my most recent re-read and am really missing the google group, I have a number of new questions that I'm forgetting as time goes by! Also, man, on my first and second reads of UOB I was definitely too sanguine about Grue's potential long term survival.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Apr 1, 2023

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Spoilers for Book 4:
One: The Reems folk who are able to summon the Thing That Ate Reems are two armies large, and about 50,000 people. They're chasing 30,000 or so refugees, and the Last Archon escaped inot the swamps below the Edge in the Commonweal. How did that conflict end up happening? DId someone summon the bigger-than-a-Marid as part of the power struggle after the death of the Archon at the hands of Rust in The March North? Did they do it while fighting the Sea People who landed to the north? Did it happen much earlier than that and that's part of why they had so much despair they could make a magical road out of it?

Two: If they have this beast that was an actual threat to Blossom, who's got so much natural talent she disproved long held theories about how strong a single person could be and who is as strong now as people who in the past set up global imperium, why aren't they currently ruling over Reems instead of chasing after some foot-sore refugees? Does the pact with the Thing require them to summon it regularly and feed it entire cities at a time? Is the Thing still not enough to beat whatever the Sea People landed up north?

Three: Crow got sent to the Second Commonweal by the First Commonweal to give the Second Commonweal a heads up that the Line of the First Commonweal was gearing up to try to solve the Paingyre problem. Shimmer successfully cast Confuse on the Paingyre monsters, but the attack never happened, and the question that both I and the leaders o the Second Commonweal have is "did the First Commonweal get attacked by the Sea People?"

Spoilers for Book 5:

One: What's up with the City Stater remnant/refugees at the bottom of the Second Valley? They've been milling about there for over 2 years at the time of the battle with the Sea People, and it seems like an unresolved question as to what's going to happen there.

They're not offering the City Stater's a place in the Commonweal because the City Stater's invaded and killed 9/10ths of the Cousins, and because the City Staters have slaves. And the Independents are stationed there because the lower Second Valley is unsettled and thus a place that the Independents can go wild if that's where the Sea People return. But that's a long time to have the Goddesses of Victory and Death along with Shadow and Constant and flippin' spend time watching that area, especially since the City Staters themselves aren't powerful enough to overcome the only Commonweal citizen they've seen - and that's Pelorios. So... what happens after the big battle?

Two: Shortly before the big battle, Chert says they'd been thinking about how they'd report to the First Commonweal and its Line. The way it sounds, Chert doesn't believe the Second Commonweal abides by the Peace and says "Too much economy gone to militant purposes." Am I reading that right? And is the Second Commonweal's economy really that stressed by raising 7000 or so soldiers out of a population of 600k in the Creeks?

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Olesh posted:

The Line being what it is, manufacture and outfitting multiple Standards can be assumed to be more involved and resource-intensive for the general population than just rounding up 1% of the population.

I considered that, but at one point they they mention that the stable number is 1 in 50 people serving in the Line, and they're going for artillery batteries because they don't have enough people for the necessary brigades. They also take a long time to stand up military formations - It's something like a decade (not décade) since the 1st Battalion was founded by the end of AMoGaS and it would still not be considered ready for service by Old Line standards. The Captain says something like a new brigade not being deemed operationally fit for 20+ years after founding - and since Line enlistments are for 20 years, that's the entire length of their founding troopers careers.

I might be underestimating how long that would take to establish without an already existing military tradition and regular formations since there's only 300-400 survivors of TMN and a lot of them don't join the new Line due to PTSD or maiming. But the United States in 1860 didn't exactly have a large standing army, saw I think a majority of it's officer corps turn traitor, and by 1862 had a very capable army. OFC, they did a lot more fighting than the Line did, and didn't have to work out how to use battle standards. The Captain notes to I think Slow or Duckling that they've actually fought more in their service time than most veterans of the original Line between the March and the Fight Below the Edge since the original Commonweal was pretty unmolested until the Iron Bridge collapsed and the hell-things got unleashed.

quote:

Except avoiding starvation isn't enough - the worry is that defense costs, and the minimum input into the economy is a slow death if the Second Commonweal doesn't grow faster than the costs associated with defending it.

Right, various people mention the Commonweal needing to grow pretty quickly (getting from 1m total people at the very start to 4m in a century or so) to be viable. Going for artillery and introducing pointy sticks as a primary part of brigade doctrine is also a lot more costly in materiel than an old style brigade would be. The Commonweal needs to make immigration viable - there were accession procedures in the First Commonweal where tiny sorcerer dominions would decide that joining the Commonweal was a better risk than going it alone on regular basis per the Captain... and Hakarl notes that they wish they'd known that the Commonweal existed and could have been joined just by asking for their entire life - even if they're the only significant talent of the Cousins who survived the Shape of the Peace when presented.

OTOH, they have all the Standards they need made - enough for a full army in the Wapentake - and have since Blossom made them all in a big rush with Fire's Team in the first year or so after the second Shape of the Peace was established. And the food issues were sorted and in the rearview mirror because of the work done in connecting Old Lake by canal to the rest of the Commonweal, and the large scale terraforming of the Third Valley. So I'm wondering if Chert believes that the Second Commonweal has given itself over to the rule of sorcerers (or the establishment of slavery of those sorcerers) because of their reliance on independents to do all the above and more (like Tiggy's team of Independent Students creating their fantasy nuke stockpile) in about a dozen years. On the third hand, it's noted that parliament had ended the State of Emergency that had been in effect from the start of the Second Commonweal.

quote:

And merely defending the Second Commonweal isn't enough - if attackers are merely fended off and permitted to retreat, they can gather their forces and inflict damage and losses at a time of their own choosing, which can be devastating in a way the Second Commonweal may not be able to defend against or recover from.


The Line makes the point that the goal isn't Victory, it's Victory and Enough Left In the Tank to Win Next Time Too. Which is why the big fight in AMoGaS ends with a non-nuclear winter from all the megatons of hot red shot used that wipes out the Commonweal's harvest that year and makes the next year's harvest poor.

quote:

The later books also subtly go into this a bit more - one of the reasons why the Commonweal does not engage in wars of conquest (and implied to be part of why both Commonweals are able to identify pending invasions far enough in the future to do something about them) is that the act of empire building and performing large magical works in the aid of conquest is extremely visible, sorcerously speaking

I read that as more the work of Conquest makes you traceable because you you have a connection with the area/people conquered - but yeah the Commonweal would prefer to just seem like a blank spot on the map. Unfortunately, now that they've stomped out Reems several times and two Sea People incursions they're a blank spot on the map that eats armies.

fake edit: Oh, and there's one point in Book 5 near the start of the 2nd Battalion's training where someone mentions that Fire and Shadow got ambushed while picnicking - who attacked them? I think I originally assumed this to be when Fire made their unplanned metaphysical tradition but that was several years earlier and they weren't Fire then, they were still Dove. So do we know from whence harked the poor dumbass who took a shot at the Goddess of Victory and her babby entelech consort?

fake edit 2: Also, book 5 makes it pretty clear that Duckling at least believes that the Peace does not actually bind Halt, Blossom, Fire, Shadow, Constant, and Dust. And probably Wake. I think the rude and not brave enough Clerk-in-training she talks to at the Tavern is not incorrect to be concerned about that.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
The area the First, Second, and Fifth Battalions are drawn from are strictly the Creeks, and doesn't include the Folded Hills. The heavy line battalions of Creeks have 300 files, which are 8 people each. That's 4800.
The Artillery Battalion only have two of its five batteries (Scarlet and Ochre) currently formed, and those batteries have 6 tubes at 7 files per, plus the ~40 files in the Battalion Color Party, for another thousand. So I overcounted by about 1200.

e: the old style battalions had 228 files, the new ones are significantly larger and because they're Creeks they have the same output as an old style brigade.

habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Apr 1, 2023

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.
Would be pretty funny if the Sea People, tired of getting mulched by the two Commonweals, decide to try a third way in and run straight into the hell-things.

habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Where was the reference to the Sea People landing up north? I think I forgot about that part.

I think it's supposition on the part of the Second Commonweal, who are reasoning that invasions from the sea can come from anywhere there's a suitable landing site.

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habeasdorkus
Nov 3, 2013

Royalty is a continuous shitposting motion.

eke out posted:

no idea when the next book comes out but it might legitimately be the fantasy novel i anticipate more than anything else

particularly because, if past is any indication, he's going to make a hard turn and it'll be about something radically different than the two extensive military-focused ones we got most recently

I think the working title was The Work of the Year and it's set at least in part about 20 years after the big fight with the Sea People.

I am also extremely hype for it.

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