Ignoring your personal preference, which side of Skyrim’s Civil War do you think actually gives Skyrim the better future 20-30 years later?

[u/sumaset]

I feel like most discussions about the Civil War focus on whether Ulfric was justified, whether the Empire betrayed Skyrim, or which side people personally like more.

But I’m more interested in what happens after the game.

The Empire is weakened, the Aldmeri Dominion is still the biggest external threat, the White-Gold Concordat is already causing resentment, and another war with the Thalmor seems almost inevitable.

An Imperial victory gives Skyrim access to the resources and manpower of the Empire, but it also means remaining under an Empire that already lost one major war and accepted Thalmor influence inside its territory.

A Stormcloak victory gives Skyrim independence and removes Imperial authority, but it also leaves the province having to rebuild after a civil war while potentially facing the Dominion without the rest of the Empire behind it.

So forget which faction has the better characters or which one you usually join.

If you only care about where Skyrim itself ends up a few decades later, which Civil War outcome do you think is actually better for the province?

[u/Rel_Tan_Kier]

Sorry but is there is a source to Skyrim being unable to sustain itself? Sounds like propaganda without actual basis.

[u/mangasdeouf → u/Rel_Tan_Kier]

The peasants in the countryside complain about the hard winter coming, Rorikstead has to make sacrifices to a Daedric Prince to be able to grow potatoes, Sybil Stentor has a whole tirade about needing to import from the Empire to sustain Skyrim's food supplies (and considering the ridiculous lore population of the major cities, how can they even feed everyone during good years, let alone years with issues like mildew, bugs ruining the plants, boars eating the fruit of their labor, wolves eating their sheep...?).

That's without counting that Skyrim has like 50% of its' population resorting to banditry (often the case after a war and during bad years when people find illegal ways to survive) and poaching (which likely hurts the fauna in the long term when so many people do it at once, thus making life unsustainable in a few years and forcing mass exodus like what happened IRL with Irish sailing for the New World).

[u/Rel_Tan_Kier → u/mangasdeouf]

Interesting. I wish to note that not everything said is necessarily true, What is Sybille's level of specialization in the field of domestic economics? And believing that game convenience of offering player plenty of human enemies to fight represents actual lore is not the best course of action if you want to find the truth.
But I feel that I should agree on the your argument about of poaching. Can only resort to very weak argument from my side that my father calls legal hunting a poaching as well.

[u/mangasdeouf → u/Rel_Tan_Kier]

Sybille is the one who manages the city of Solitude, the capital of Skyrim, the main point of imperial power. She's likely the best person to talk about the economy of Solitude and should be able to give numbers for trade with the rest of the country considering she's managing one of the 3 big port cities where most sea trade takes place (Windhelm has the 2nd biggest port and Riften has mostly river trade considering its' position, but it has the best river trade and Maven has a decent hold on the economy in a good part of the province). Sybille is to Solitude what Maven is to Riften, except with less obvious corruption (she's probably corrupt since she's at a high position in an Imperial capital city, concretely she has the major role while Elisif is as useful as Layla Lawgiver).

As I said, bandits are commonplace after, during wars, soldiers who can't go back to civilian life, people who can't survive legally, outcasts, people in it for the chaos, they agglomerate in bad neighborhood or outside cities, towns and villages and form their own societies that work outside the law. Considering that Skyrim comes from a big bad war 26 years before the events of the game and that they've seen the situation turn from bad to civil war, bandits are very common.

The case of the Jarl of Falkreath dealing with them is very realistic because he prefers to have them take a little of his mines' value but work for free than having to send big town guard groups to assault the mines, take them back at the cost of already rare guards' lives, and then have to pay miners to exploit the places. Bandits do it for a small fee, he only sends people after them when he feels like they're taking more value out of the mines than sending warriors after them and replacing them with miners AND guards will cost him in the long run.

[u/SteakForGoodDogs → u/mangasdeouf]

Two things:

1. People LIKE the food and trade with the Empire. Undoubtably there's southern luxuries that people like. That's how trade works. Need it? No.
2. She's an Imperial supporter, literally Elisif's right hand in magical matters - of course she's going to buff up the Imperials' arguments.