[Tichy]

(Warning: more babbling about Plato, scroll down for Arco!)

-=-

Please stop sighing. I'm trying to talk about a fascinating and complex individual and you're going back to the sanitized heroic Plato from a thousand Phil 101 classes and then claiming that I'm giving the Popper Plato what leads to tyrants.

I said nothing about what Plato has "led to." It seems obvious that his ideas can be mined by democrats (e.g. his arguments against democracy likely influenced - by way of Rousseau - the arguments against the tyranny of the majority in the Federalist papers) as well as would-be dictators (oddly enough, again by way of Rousseau). What Plato himself was after is a separate issue entirely, and has to be understood not only by his own words, but in terms of the interests and the political players of the day, and the crises and recriminations associated with the end of the Peloponnesian war. Like any player in the polis Plato wants to claim the high ground here, as do his opponents, so we can't read any of their writing uncritically.

You're right that the Republic can be interpreted as an ethical analogy. When one does parts of it are second only the Nichomachean Ethics as the foundations of the whole discipline. The Laws, on the other hand, is pretty straightforwardly an account of the founding principles of a state; the Athenian Stranger repeatedly argues that civic life should be directed by those who know the Good, and not just whoever shows up to vote. Is that pipe-dreamy, dictatorial, or a recognition that the state needs a way to avoid tyrannical majorities? Open to debate, but not in a games-forum...though I have a feeling that our presiding educator-gamemaker doesn't mind that his game attracts debates like this.

(Ok, I'm really done now...unless there's more sighing.)

--=--

As for Arco:

Orieads are sneaky, versatile, seductive but fragile. With the sloth scale philosophers come out of the box with rp9, more than Oreiads, but Oreiads come with a lot more. (A possibility, however remote, for A4 or N4 out of the box...and awe, recuperation, sacred...)

I tested EA Arco with sloth in an SP game on impossible. It's not pretty. It may be different in MP or in a no-independents SP game, because vanilla impossible is all about dealing with massive amounts of chaff *now*. But I'd much rather have more strong troops for expansion and defense early and mystics researching until I can afford multiple Oreiads, than slightly faster research.