it not bad writing, but those Spoiler any progress is stopped by bellwood believer, and they kill anyone that try make any progress. so any great thinker, innovator, is hunt down but dont need to reply me considering what you want is to feed your ego that you are the truth and dont want to accept other people opinion
Same argument again. It doesnt work. In Alda territory this would have some merrit (but it would only explain a few millennia at best), but for Vida's races this is pretty bs. The Bellwood fanatics can't really touch them in their own nations.
progress is not the natural state of things. progress comes from a need or desire. if bouth are not really there, then progress won't happen. even evolution, the most basic consept of progress, is explained by the background radiation (and we don't know if something like that exists in Lambda) and therefore not something that happens out of nowhere. research is done with a goal in mind (if that goal is reached is a differend question), and not for the fun of it. there is also the point that the "main" god is telling them that progress is bad. a god who's existence has been comfirmed, has a lot more wight than one that hasn't, and you are able to see what the second one can do in our world. another point is that this is a pre-Renaissance time, people did not stand up and demand knowloedge and power. it is hard doing that when just one person on the enemie side is enought to wipe out all of your side. unless someone like Schneider stands up for the people, something like a Renaissance won't happen. and about research, it does happen, the problem the only once that are doing it are mages, and they keep the results to them self. do you know the rate humanitys knowloedge grows? it is expected to double in half the time it needed to double last time. we needed 5,800 years to get to industrialization and only from there you can say that progress is something everyone is pursuing, as everyone has a chance to actually fulfill their desire. if you have someone slowing it down or even halting it before that time, it is no surprise that they are stuck with no progress. what need would cause the Vida races to pursue progress?
Feng Tian is being incredibly rude, but he's right. Alda does not limit every single form of progress, but none is made anyway, and places beyond his influence also do not advance or even diverge. Saying that people don't innovate when there's no need ignores that A. they absolutely do because they want to make things easier and more profitable and B. these are nations and city states in a perpetual state of war. There is absolutely impetus to develop new technologies and ideas. Side note, but the tech level here is nowhere near something like ancient Sumeria or anything. It's clearly high medieval and in some aspects considerably better, such as blacksmithing and medicine. That's only five hundred to a thousand years in the past and with much better infrastructure and movement of goods and ideas. The silk road, for example, was a trade route that took years to move goods from one end to the other and involved multiple traders. In this setting people cross comparable distances in weeks or months and with no middle man worth noting. Also, the need for Vida's races in particular to advance is that Vida, Zakkart and the champions strongly encouraged such behavior. It's supposedly part of their culture.
Even worse. Its a cold war. In a hot war you don't have resources to throw around. Our cold war sent both sides into space.
It's not a cold war since there's no interaction possible between the two sides. The only people Amid fight are Orbaume and vice versa. Which is ultimately two groups of Alda believers fighting each other since Vida worship while tolerated is still no where near the majority in Orbaume. Since both sides of that war are Alda believers, of course there is going to be clamp down on progress. It's well known that Alda wants to revert the entire world back to the state it was in before the Demon King's invasion. Would devout followers of Alda go out of their way to create things that would not benefit that goal? The system already allows people to grow stronger in very visible and easy to understand ways. They don't need to try to create guns or other type of tools when the system already gives them what they need there. I'm actually surprised no one here has mentioned the system yet on how it's very presence changes the mentality of people drastically. Other things to note, dungeon appearances and runaways. It's hard to make progress when it's not a rare event that a dungeon could appear, spew out a horde of monsters and multiple towns could disappear over night. The way to combat that is again, use the system and leveling up to build up and have strong knights / adventurers around. They already have an obvious solution in front of their faces which decreases the likelihood of looking for alternatives.
Now its officially a pratt and not worth responding to minus calling it straight up trolling. Also google proxy wars.
How many 100 thousand year old civilizations have we humans known? How can we make assumptions on how one develops if we have no proper data?
We have data of hundreds of civilizations and none of them remained this stagnant. The ones which decided that being behind the curve is cool usually didn't even survive 100 years, nevermind 1000 times that. The problem is that the civs in Lambda are not developing at all.
We've known plenty that lasted hundreds of even thousands of years. Their technology typically spread via trade or conquest and survived the nation itself. America didn't have to reinvent the wheel, so it was free to invent fried Twinkies, motorized carts and more types of guns than there people in the world.
For Vida's races there are several points that could work: The population on Vida's side is and was incredibly low, and for Vida, the first 10,000 years, probably were devoted to recovering strength and using them to create new races and devices to bring the dead back to life, etc. also how many humans were alive by the end of the demon king war?. Also, Vida didn't really separate from Alda until the Vida vs Alda war broke down so those 10,000 years were also kind of there in the air with Bellwoods propaganda, Vida's races have a lower birth rate than humans, there is slower population growth. They have magic, so they have less need for technology, which promotes the creation of magic artifacts instead but with no high-level artesian or alchemist, there is no real progress. There was also lots of pollution, devil's nest, and dungeons to take care of, while the BMR evil gods were a handful with taking care of the fragments, so survivability was at an all-time low You could say that while we humans were on Normal difficulty, Vida's races were on Hard difficulty.
But what you're not taking into account two things. First is that what pushes innovation is NEED and not WANT and it's also largly due to luck. The second thing is the existence of magic stiffles the kinds of innovation our world saw WAY WAY mroe than you want to give it credit for. I think what a lot of you are failing to realize is they live in a world of giant fucking monsters that can wipe out cities. As a result a large majority of people get into the adventurer buisiness or the magical research or somethign along those lines. On that front they did innovate over the past 10,000 years. They had a solid understanding of the various jobs they know to exist, they know a lot about magic, and they have TRIED taming every creature they could think of. The important thing this means is that there are VERY VERY VERY few if anyone in this world that even has the time to think about things like the concept of mass production. Just because WE KNOW it's profitable in hindesight doesn't mean they'd be able to appreciate just how revolutionary mass production could be to a society and even if they did they'd need someone to figure out how to make it work correctly. Many of these innovations in our own history required countless people as well as a couple visionaries to make the idea materialize into reality. If a majority of your population is either picking up swords or staffs then innovation is going to naturally stall pretty hard on that alone. As for the races of Vida they tend to live in more vulerable enviroments meaning they have evern less time to invent. Now NORMALLY this extreme enviroment would encourage innovation. But the races of Vida tend to have powerful bodies so they get more guaranteed results simply training up their skills, level, and rank if they have that. Also most races of vida lived in isolated villages which tend to not invent much. Think about it does it make sense to try to invent a new weapon that may or may not ever work or to just practive swordmanship until you can cut a dragon in half? And this connects to the second point I made before. With magic you can short cut a lot of IRL innovation just enough to not especially need the innovation. Basically why bother to invent explosives when a fire mage can just do it? Why invent planes when possibly wind magic or at least flying magical beasts can just do it? But at the same time relying on limited things like specific mages or specific magic beasts prevent it from being as widely used as bombs or planes meaning society doesn't develop as ours did. But they still exist which makes it less likely someone with the time on their hands will think to invent it. The LAST thing I want to poitn out is the requirement of luck. Like take Microwave ovens. you know the ONLY REASON we have those things is someone stood next to a high powered transmitter producing microwaves and eventually a chocolate bar in his pocket melted? No one even thought of the concept of using microwaves that way until someone just accidentally noticed it. Meaning it's also possible we'd still not have microwaves if no one came up with the idea and mannaged to get it invented and popularized. Innovation is not as easy as some people seem to think and it wont just magically happen over time as if it's automatic. It's not it requires hard work and dedication to make happen and in a world where warriors is a main profession and a religious organization limits invention you can see why progess would stagnate so much. IN THE END does this mean there was no way for Lambda to innovate and invent? no of course not. There was always a window of chance for society to invent at least some things and always a chance those not following Alda's stupid rules would manage to get something out there. But it's at least understandable how a world like this could almost completely stagnate with little innovation that revolutionizes society. It's not the massive plot whole some are making it out to be.
Ugh... this one needs some self restraint but I'll be nice for my standards: At no point in that wall of text did you make any point that wasn't debunked by your own reasoning or the points made by the others and me. We are all dumber for having read it. Better formatting and much more concise. It even manages to make a new point but that doesn'tmake it a good argument. Population mechanics are indeed a factor, but in 100k years and with healing magic to prevent the worst of plagues (historically humanities own worst nightmare) this exponential function would probably rather break Lambda. The second point is moot. The specialists create a demand for whatever they do. Construction, alchemy, healing. Whatever. A demand without a sufficient supply hard boosts innovation. See the points about evolution and innovation when a need or demand exists.
Three thousand 'humans' aka humans, elves and dwarves. Three percent of them were turned into pure breed vampires or were direct descendants of the true ancestor. You can see how the populations could not have been horribly skewed right from the start, right? Because that's a hundred thousand scrub tier demigods and who knows how many ladies with tentacles and tails and whatnot. I mean, let's put it this way. Each race of beastmen was fathered by a different subordinate of Ganpaplio. So that's a lot of beastmen alone right there, you know? Currently, the human population increases at about 1% a year. Let's make that 1% of that figure and say there were, I dunno, fifty arachne to start. That is barely replenishment level numbers, honestly, but over a hundred thousand years you still end up with over a million arachne. There are only like five thousand in Zanalpadna, where there are no racist purges against them or anything. Origin is a clear sign that magic and technology actually progress together really nicely. It's a considerably more advanced world than Earth. You see the problem with scale here? The numbers are inflated to the point where they lose all meaning. Need and want both drive innovation. Humans are perfectly capable of surviving off of hunting and gathering, but it is easier to supplement that by growing crops. Then, you build a granary so that in the winter you have more to eat as well. Put up a wall to protect your stuff from other jerks and you have a city. All driven by 'want' rather than strict need. There is also no actual need for culture and record keeping to progress beyond oral tradition, but people want more permanent sources of information, so they invent a writing system. I mean, you might be taking offense at me saying this because it's obviously not what you meant (or so you feel) but if that's the case, please explain more thoroughly because it sounds like you are saying people only bother to be inventive when they absolutely have to be rather than just because it makes things easier for them or more secure. No one is suggesting they jump to mass production immediately, but there's no reason not to have developed chemistry and any intelligent and curious life mage would want to know more about how their magic works and why the same spell sometimes cures a cold and why sometimes it turns someone into a giant mass of tumors. Which is not hyperbole, mind you, this is a thing that is stated to happen early and is a reason given for why life magic healing is more limited than you might think. There's also the study of basic physics, which people study because both because it interests them and because they think it might help them make cool stuff. Cool stuff either makes them have to do less work to get better results or at least can be sold for cash. Chemistry, biology and physics are your basic foundation of the hard sciences. They feed off of each other and give increasingly impressive results. So, yes, it is a plot hole. The sheer scale here is incomprehensible. And blaming Alda doesn't solve everything because there are like ten nations that he has no influence over at all and a large human one where he is not the state religion.
Can we please stop arguing about a fictional worlds stagnation and start thoerizing about Vans shenanigans will be in the future for a bit?
That wasn't wants those were needs. humans are not capable of feeding a large scale population through hunting and gathering. It works okay for small scale villages and such but it doesn't work when the population reaches a certain point. that's why the invention of such things tends to ocure when the population reaches a certain point. Same with the issue of Oral traditions vs record keeping. Keeping proper records made things work better which was a need. It's a little hard to find the right words for but lets try this. People can TRY to invent things purely based on pure want rather than need. But it tends to not gain the traction it needs to get a result especially if it's not fueled by another invention that was based on need. Let me try giving an example we are all familiar with The Internet. Did you know the internet was origionally concieved as a purely military network so that bases could communicate with eachother through computers and share detailed information? The idea was in the event something like nuclear war happened we might not be able to call each other or send documents to each other. So there was a need for the military to be able to share such information even if they couldn't physically leave their own base. But then after it was invented it's funciton was expanded upon and introduced to the public market where it became the internet we know today. The point I"m trying to make is this shows why NEED is important for most inventions. I'm sure plenty of people WANTED to be able to send files trhough computers but only the military had the funding and man power needed to actually pull it off. Many of mankind's greatest inventions were similar. They required MASSIVE effort from LOTS of people all briging their knowledge together. In the world of Lamba a lot of that is ... tricky. With Alda limiting any efforts to industrialize you aren't going to see many large scale efforts on that front ESPECIALLY from the government who are either influenced by Alda's church or just don't want to cause social unrest oppoising them. With the monsters many people will be focused more on developing combat than anything else and with gun powder off the table (remember Alda is absolutely terrified of the stuff) this meant weapon development will never progress beyond cold weapons. This is the real limiter here as it's not that Alda is stopping ALL inventions but he's stopping a lot of the most critical ones. Without gun powder you lose all modern fire arms. Given Bellwood's love of the enviroment it's likely minning and using of fossil fuels are out which means there goes engines. The Steam engine might be okay but someone would have to come up with the idea first and with some other critical inventions blocked by Alda they may or may not be able to reasonable do that. Without any kind of engine there goes the train and with all that gone there goes the entire industrial revolution right there. See how it snowballs when you stop a few key points? Again this isn't to say ALL innovation would stop but a lot of the key points would and the rest is less important. At the end of the day remember the author is only human and he's just trying to write a story. He's probably not spending DAYS annalying all of human history to figure out what inventions would still be possible even with Alda's interference. I'm not saying it's bad to discuss such things. But it's important to keep in mind that in the end this isn't reality and we don't need to hold the story up to too strict a standard. As long as the explanation for why stuff isn't there makes decent sense that's more or less good enough. It might have some logical weaknesses but again it's just a story. But ending the discussion with "It's just a story" is a bit boring so lets put this discussion into a bit of a "what if" scenario. What I mean is we've already discussed at length possible reasons why inventions don't exist. But instead lets talk about what inventions could possible exist in 10K years. Especially those that would have revolutionized society? Remember most of Van's inventions rely on death attribute so basically everything he's done isn't an option unless there is a non death attribute option people could reasonably achieve.
Only among readers? Here a quote from chapter 200. When Vandalieu was talking to Heinz' party. “If I cannot avoid it no matter what, then I believe it can’t be helped,” Vandalieu said in a matter-of-fact tone. “In any case, Alda is fully intent on causing conflict between the races. According to Farmaun, Alda’s ideal is to return the world to the state it was in before the Demon King Guduranis appeared, where monsters or the Devil’s Nests and Dungeons that spawn them didn’t exist.” “Everyone knows that. The Church teaches you that while you’re still learning to read and write. The extremists even tell you that the Beast-people, Titans and Dark Elves should all be slaughtered,” said Jennifer. So yes, your attempt to dismiss my argument was flawed. Also Feng Tian, you're being really rude. I've only posted a few times in this conversation I think. No where near enough to be considered a troll.
Im impressed. You might even baffle the guys at Prager-U. This is only the second wall of text utterly divorced from reality and reason simply to recycle a mountian of pratts. And @xacual sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Repeating already debunked arguments doesn't make them any better and by the second time its either trolling or going full reddit. Pick your poison.
You never responded to the point about dungeon spawns wiping out potentially multiple towns worth of population over night if the dungeon that appeared was strong enough. Also you never responded to the point about how the system already provides a ready made solution for these problems thus eliminating a need to innovate to solve them. From my point of view, the person that keeps calling others incompetent and trolls is likely the actual troll.