I hope to do more digging and build off other people’s comments later in the week, but my preliminary/solo answer would be:
Grainhoard and plagueproof in all three provinces.
On the basis that:
Doves in the previous year strongly predict global plague and weakly predict local famine; also, a crude “ignore every predictor, just look at average output of response variables lol” approach suggests that stockpiling grain is the highest-EV intervention.
However . . .
I haven’t been able to figure out how pillaging works at all, and I really doubt it’s as random/irrelevant as it seems at first glance. I guess I’ll have to rely on my neighbours being too sick to bother attacking.
Spend most of the money on earthquakeproofing all nine provinces (including the six we don’t own), to greatly decrease the probability of black dove sightings (doves and quakes correlate super hard for some reason), so they can’t predict plagues, so no plagues happen.
In addition to this being inherently ridiculous, it’s rendered extra-implausible by the fact that:
Doves seem to have been getting slightly more common over time, but plagues (and for that matter every other omen and disaster) haven’t, suggesting that causality doesn’t work that way.
I hope to do more digging and build off other people’s comments later in the week, but my preliminary/solo answer would be:
Grainhoard and plagueproof in all three provinces.
On the basis that:
Doves in the previous year strongly predict global plague and weakly predict local famine; also, a crude “ignore every predictor, just look at average output of response variables lol” approach suggests that stockpiling grain is the highest-EV intervention.
However . . .
I haven’t been able to figure out how pillaging works at all, and I really doubt it’s as random/irrelevant as it seems at first glance. I guess I’ll have to rely on my neighbours being too sick to bother attacking.
Insane, unendorsed bonus plan:
Spend most of the money on earthquakeproofing all nine provinces (including the six we don’t own), to greatly decrease the probability of black dove sightings (doves and quakes correlate super hard for some reason), so they can’t predict plagues, so no plagues happen.
In addition to this being inherently ridiculous, it’s rendered extra-implausible by the fact that:
Doves seem to have been getting slightly more common over time, but plagues (and for that matter every other omen and disaster) haven’t, suggesting that causality doesn’t work that way.