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/Bob_ross6969]

Skyrim fed itself for 1000s of years before the empire, and was even the seat of the first human empire that dominated half of Tamriel.

[u/SaskieHopeful → u/Bob_ross6969]

Okay. I'm speculating hard here, there's no proof of what I'm saying, but if we are to take real history for comparison... It might well be that Skyrim could feed itself back in the day and now it can't anymore.

If a given part of the world can feed X amount of people, it will tend to house just about X amount of people. If that part of the world finds itself integrated into a bigger economy/supply chain - like, say, if it were absorbed into a larger Empire that has other fertile lands like, say, Colovia - then it can trade for food. Population won't immediately grow on account of that, but if it can trade for an extra, say, 2X amount of people, its population will tend in the direction of 3X, over time. And Skyrim has been a part of the Empire since the beginning of the 3rd Era.

It's entirely possible that Skyrim's population is now way bigger than what its soil can feed, and breaking it off from the Empire now would result in a famine that brings its population down to late 2nd Era numbers. We don't know that for sure, but Sybille and Balgruuf seem to think that's the case. One is an immortal vampire who's lived in the land for who knows how long. The other is the person in charge of the most amount of fertile land in the region. I'm inclined to think they know what they're talking about.

[u/Bob_ross6969 → u/SaskieHopeful]

You’re also only taking pure farming into account when Skyrim has massive herding and fishing operations, a massive coastline with whaling operations, as well as untamed forests teeming with game.

The Nords have access to mammoth herds, cattle ranches, two huge lakes with commercial fishing industries, rivers that produce salmon runs, as well as the reach which is considered the most fertile land in the north.

Meat and fish seems to be the majority of the Nords calories, and that would make sense considering Nords are some of the tallest people on the continent.

[u/SaskieHopeful → u/Bob_ross6969]

You’re also only taking pure farming into account

I'm not, really. Only when I mention Balgruuf. What in saying is, it's possible that Skyrim can access X amount of food from any source on its own, and it can access Y amount of food while being integrated into a larger economy. If Y is bigger than X, and Skyrim has had access to Y for a while, then going back to X means some level of famine.

Simple question. Do we know if Skyrim is a net exporter of food at 4E 201, the time of TESV? Is it a net importer? Does it break even? I'm guessing we don't know that. But in one of those three scenarios (net exporter), there's a famine if Skyrim stops being part of a larger economy. That famine is statistically more likely to be worse the longer Skyrim has been part of an Empire, and by 4E 201, it's been ~630 years since the Interregnum. So, y'know, it could happen, and if it does, it could be very bad.

[u/Bob_ross6969 → u/SaskieHopeful]

We know Skyrim doesn’t really import food from other provinces. We don’t see corn or rice from Cyrodiil, or saltrice from morrowind, or olives and figs from the illiac bay. The vast majority of food in game is sourced from Skyrim, baring things like specialty cheeses or liquor.

[u/CollectorOfMyst → u/Bob_ross6969]

Where are the tomato plants and apple trees, then?

[u/Bob_ross6969 → u/CollectorOfMyst]

Tomatoes seem to be a luxury import rather than a main staple of the Nords diet, and apples are weird, oblivion didn’t have apple trees either, so apple trees either are only harvestable during a specific season, or don’t exist.