View source for Why Conquest Does Not Happen

Six city-states, none of which can conquer another. The world has seen wars and has never had a world war, and it has never seen colonialism. That is not a philosophical achievement; it is arithmetic.

== The same weapons ==
Every city has the same weapons. Conquest in our world relied on one side holding a decisive technological edge; no city here has a weapon the others lack. Attacking [[Eldershore]] from [[Shining Reach]] would mean crossing thousands of miles of ocean without steam supply lines, against an ancient maritime tradition with an equivalent navy and identical guns. The result would not be conquest but a ruinous war with nothing worth fighting for at the end of it.

== The same latitude ==
The land runs east to west, and all six cities sit at roughly similar latitudes with comparable climates. Technology and knowledge spread evenly from early in the world's history; no one was ever isolated behind a climate barrier long enough to fall behind.

== The things that never took root ==
Steam-powered ships and trains that would make crossings fast and reliable for an invader never happened. Industrial weapons production never happened. Mass-produced hulls that would let a city build an invasion fleet cheaply never happened. Rapid-fire firearms were never made. People attribute the balance to the triumph of Reason and the Natural Order.{{Hidden truth|None of this failed to emerge. It was stopped, and is still being stopped, by the [[The AI|AI]]. Nobody knows this, or even that anything is being prevented. See [[What Is Blocked and How]].}}

== Nothing to gain ==
The agricultural rings feed the cities that own them and produce little surplus worth crossing an ocean for. The mines are already inside defended ground, because nothing on the [[The Frontier|Frontier]] can be prospected or supplied. What a conqueror would win is a city full of people who will resist as long as they live, at the end of a supply line that needs a Roedhaven every three days and an escort at every one. A conqueror would gain a city and a permanent siege with it.

== See also ==

* [[Why City-State Wars Are Rare]] — the same question from the other side
* [[The Pact of Reason]] · [[Warfare and Law]]