CCC Land Grab

[KathTheDragon]

That could probably be best handled by the owners of said cultures talking about it between themselves, then coming to announce it.

[clawgrip]

Ggazzei: Currently occupying both F-3 and F-4, so I'll just add one square to the existing domain instead of two. I will take F-5r with Ars Lande's permission. Otherwise I will take F-2. Ars, if you read this, please do not expand into F-4. It's a map error that the square appears unoccupied. But F-5r is of course negotiable because you have a lot of squares to add.

As a side note: I'm worried that pet cultures will hold the project back. None of the cultures stagnated or collapsed this round, probably because people would complain if their precious civilization didn't thrive. But obviously there have to be losers eventually. Maybe we should swap! Develop a culture in round two that is descended from a culture in round one, but not necessarily your own! I think it would really help the world become an integrated whole instead of a series of petri dishes. What do you think?

EDIT: also, at some point we will need to have some mechanism for civilizations merging, emerging, and collapsing, and voting may not be effective for this.

In a sense the Domun are stagnating. I consider this punishment for me having taken too many squares for them in the initial round. I was ready to kill off the Domun and the Ccuxu after the first round if no one voted for them (I thought a completely inexplicable, abandoned maze of walls in the arctic would have been pretty neat) but it looks like they were popular enough to survive.


I am planning to break the En Soki into two or three groups, so maybe someone could take over a splinter group if they want.

[CatDoom]

Considering that cultures at this point can be fairly dispersed, I'm assuming that each one could potentially give rise to any number of independent polities. I don't see why the political situation couldn't vary considerably in their degree of unity. For instance, the Dragolm might be a single monolithic empire of mind-slaves, while the Ngoor "empire" might be comprised of dozens or hundreds of independent communities bound together by a shared culture and system of trade (something like the famous kula ring of Melanesia). I'm not saying that's what I have in mind, but I certainly wouldn't object if somebody else wanted to start a Ngoor-descended empire of their own.

[clawgrip]

I'm planning to have the En Soki expand to P4, Or3, Pr3, P2, and I need to talk to Qiqqit about Pr2, because this would be the natural location of expansion for them. We'll have to work something out. That said, the En Soki is going to fracture probably into two major groups and perhaps several smaller central groups.

For Ccuxu I'm not sure yet. They will definitely take Cr12, and maybe Br12, but I'm not sure what else, since the rest of the arctic continent in that area is polar ice cap. I think the ice cap would be inhospitable even to golems because it's very hard for them to get rock for nourishment. If they ride an ice floe or iceberg out into the sea, the easterly polar ocean current is going to take them to the berserker golem continent. I can't imagine the chaos of having three different totally insane golem cultures all together there.

Edit: four golem cultures, counting the Nespek.

[Sakir]

Kyahida will burgeon a bit from -6Jr to -6J and -7Jr.

[ASWarwick]

Considering that cultures at this point can be fairly dispersed, I'm assuming that each one could potentially give rise to any number of independent polities. I don't see why the political situation couldn't vary considerably in their degree of unity. For instance, the Dragolm might be a single monolithic empire of mind-slaves, while the Ngoor "empire" might be comprised of dozens or hundreds of independent communities bound together by a shared culture and system of trade (something like the famous kula ring of Melanesia). I'm not saying that's what I have in mind, but I certainly wouldn't object if somebody else wanted to start a Ngoor-descended empire of their own.

Its sounds much like the Celtic culture that spread across much of Europe. While they did have lots in common, they weren't unified and weren't even all the same ethnic group from what I understand.

If you don't mind sharing with a lurker, I wouldn't mind having a bash at a play with some of the Ngoor. I've a bit of a soft spot for hyenamen/gnolls If I'm reading the map correctly, it seems the Ngoor are pushing into more semi-arid regions and will eventually hit desert down the island chain before long. It is the kind of place that the more disadvantaged Ngoor tribes may end up, which could be fun to play around with...

I have been following the CCC with interest. Reminds me of a project I took part in many years back (in the 90s actually) where we did something similar. Take a random world, populate it with stone age cultures and each of us posted 100 year updates of how the culture was changing. Sadly it died about 2000 years in after most of the others gradually dropped out

[CatDoom]

If you don't mind sharing with a lurker, I wouldn't mind having a bash at a play with some of the Ngoor. I've a bit of a soft spot for hyenamen/gnolls If I'm reading the map correctly, it seems the Ngoor are pushing into more semi-arid regions and will eventually hit desert down the island chain before long. It is the kind of place that the more disadvantaged Ngoor tribes may end up, which could be fun to play around with...

I don't have a problem with that at all! I'd be interested to see your take on the idea.

I've been figuring that the Ngoor have been spreading roughly evenly in all directions, though there's more land to settle in the southwest. Based on my limited knowledge of the subject, I think the fisheries are probably more productive in the north, so the population is probably densest on the major northern islands. The more arid southern periphery of their range probably would be a likely place for disenfranchised wanderers to wind up.

[ol bofosh]

Guom and Gaak cultures will be spreading, but there'll be little political unity. Dragolm will spread as an empire, but factions will be developing, which could be adopted.

I'm not interested in a monopoly, that would make this boring.

[CatDoom]

OK so I would like the kingdom of Nespek to expand west to V4, while many of the disgruntled ex-slaves who started the civil war fuck off over the sea to make a new settlement at C7, where the weather is more temperate and there are no golems.

Meanwhile the dragons also look seawards and eventually make a settlement on D6r, where the fish are a bit tastier.

Oh wow, I should have realized this before, but it appears that the Ngoor now have neighbors! We should probably try to coordinate to some degree for the next stage of our culture's history. Would you mind me writing in some conflict between your dragons and the Ngoor? The dragons who settle in D6r would probably have had to pass through Ngoor territory, and their similar subsistence strategies make it likely that there would have been disputes over resources, at least until the "present" cultural borders became established. I figure each side has it's own strengths, the dragons having superior size and maneuverability in the water, while the Ngoor likely have superior numbers, more dexterous hands, and probably more experience with warfare in general. They'd likely have to eventually learn to coexist, since neither has a decisive advantage over the other.

As for the Nespek rebels, I would assume that they've probably introduced a whole bunch of new technological innovations into the region. You wrote that the Nespek imported writing around the year 2100, but it looks like there isn't really anyone in the region for them to have gotten it from. The Apʰɯron have a sort of proto-writing, and the entry for the Č'irah described a treatise written "several hundred years" after 2500, so the development of writing probably isn't far off in the region, but if the Nespek have it then they might be the first.

Regardless, do you imagine that any of the Nespek settlers who crossed the sea were literate? If so, that could wind up being a big deal for the cultures in the region. In fact, if those settlers were merely to bring the concept of writing with them, it might ultimately trigger the development of a new writing system among them, the Dek'ame, and the Ngoor.

[finlay]

I didn't really think about where the writing came from, but given that I'm basically basing Nespek on Egypt-but-with-golems, I was thinking of a kind of mostly-ceremonial hieroglyphesque thing, probably only used by golems (so the golems probably imported it) and perhaps even banned for humans, except perhaps the kind of scholarly upper echelons, as I alluded to earlier. In short, no, the rebels would be illiterate, but might have had the idea of writing.

Like I don't honestly know if it's realistic for them to have writing at this stage, or if it fits into the world as is, but I like the idea at least.

As for the dragons, go ahead

[Mornche Geddick]

Getting lost might actually be the biggest problem. There's barely any light once you get down below about 600 feet, and none at all below 3300, so assuming golems' eyes function roughly similarly to biological ones, they'd be blind if they tried to cross the ocean floor. It doesn't help that the sea floor is mostly featureless once you get past the continental shelf; even if you had some sort of advanced light source, it would be worse than trying to walk across the Sahara with no clear destination in mind.

What makes it even worse is that a lot of the sea bed is sediment, anything up to several km thick. If a gloem tries to walk on the Abyssal Plain it will sink through the ooze until it reaches the zone which is compressed enough to be viscous enough to hold it. There it will be trapped (like a human in a peat bog) and, eventually, fossilised.

[Hydroeccentricity]

Guys, easy. Golems have an internal compass. Problem solved.

[CatDoom]

Guys, easy. Golems have an internal compass. Problem solved.

The thing is, once we start saying stuff like that, we might as well just declare that golems have built-in flotation devices and retractable rotors, so they can just cruise around the oceans at their leisure. Heck, why not give them random rocket jets, like R2-D2 in the prequel trilogy?

I know that slippery slope arguments like that are generally fallacious, but there's something to be said for not setting a precedent for golems to solve all of their problems by using never-before-mentioned internal systems.

[zompist]

I'd like to make a new map, but I still need land grabs from the following people:

Salmoneus - Lulweon
finlay - Dek'ame, Nespek
Mornche - Č'irah, Apʰɯron
Ars Lande - Ceson
Graute Bur - Zörachok
Ahzoh - Hašahkī

[CatDoom]

Mornche and finlay actually already posted their grabs:

I move to claim V6R and V7R for the Čirah and W6 and U4 for the Apʰɯron. (U4R if W6 is claimed).

OK so I would like the kingdom of Nespek to expand west to V4, while many of the disgruntled ex-slaves who started the civil war fuck off over the sea to make a new settlement at C7, where the weather is more temperate and there are no golems.

Meanwhile the dragons also look seawards and eventually make a settlement on D6r, where the fish are a bit tastier.

[zompist]

Thanks, Catdoom, I missed those somehow.

[Hydroeccentricity]

Clawgrip and I have decided to swap cultures (at least one of them). I'm going to develop Ccuxu up to 4000, and (s)he'll develop Ggazzei. Unfortunately, when I looked into the details I realized that nothing up in Ccuxu really works. Our climate map was never very accurate, but since I was in a desert area anyway I never spoke up. But Ccuxu was supposedly created in a tundra setting, and there's no way it could be. The latitude is about 73 to 80 degrees north, which puts it at about the same latitude as Ellsworth Land, which looks like this. It's covered in ice about a kilometer thick with only the highest mountains peaking out. Pretty much uninhabitable for golems. Plus, in winter the entire area would be covered in sea ice, which would make it harder to believe they couldn't just walk from Ccuxu to Mucun, and that's a pretty important piece of lore. Ccuxu needs to be about two squares south to be at the latitude of the Antarctic peninsula, which seems to be the sort of climate it was supposed to be.

What am I supposed to do here? Do we have some sort of warming magic at work on CCCP?

[Sakir]

*handwave*Ocean currents~ Woooo~*hadwave*

[Hydroeccentricity]

*handwave*Ocean currents~ Woooo~*hadwave*

That doesn't work. First of all, there isn't going to be much of a warm current in the area, and even if there were, CCCP will certainly have a circumpolar current as well. The northern coastal areas would actually be very similar to their Antarctic equivalents. There's simply no way to hand wave it away. Even in the warmer northern hemisphere of Earth Ccuxu would stretch from Wrangel Island to Severnaia Zemlja, and those places are barely tundra.

[clawgrip]

I'm not an expert but I want to make sure you know that there is an additional square and a half north and south of the main map we're using.

[ol bofosh]

I'm not an expert but I want to make sure you know that there is an additional square and a half north and south of the main map we're using.

Or even two wasn't there?
Yes, it was discussed when looking at the climate and also the terrible pinching once the map was globed.

[zompist]

Easiest thing is probably to move somewhere else where the climate is more to their liking.

[clawgrip]

Looks like he's right, even with the addition of the one and a half squares. Here's a comparison:



On Earth, the Antarctic sea ice cap goes all the way out to the end of the Antarctic peninsula in winter.

As far as Mucun goes though, they do think it appears and disappears (since it's actually a mirage), so that could explain why no one ever found it but didn't conclude it didn't exist.

[Hydroeccentricity]

I think zompist has the best idea. Ccuxu got two squares to expand to. Hopefully Clawgrip won't mind if I alter his selection slightly. Instead of expanding to B12r, let's say the golems expand to... X7. They still keep C12r.

[clawgrip]

Well I never intended them to expand anywhere else in the polar continent anyway.

One explanation might be that this planet is just slightly warmer than earth in general. Maybe the tail end of some sort of catastrophic global warming caused by the golem builders or something.