Talk:Crystal Empire/@comment-6364123-20130705180417/@comment-10390252-20130705195253

A lot of the backward nature of countries like North Korea are a result of thought control - the government strictly limiting what areas of scientific enquiries were permissible and often even mandating cripplingly unrealistic engineering standards because of some whim on the part of the leader.

There are two things to remember here:

1) Made-to-measure cities exist in all political philosophies - look at Brazilla, the capital of Brazil.  That was designed laid out based on a central plan even though Brazil is a democracy;

2) The Crystal City itself was sealed off from the normal flow of time for 1,000 years.  Anything outside the city limits would have been destroyed by 1,000 years of glaciation and neglect.

What really matters is the nature of the rulership under which the Crystal Ponies lived before Sombra. The size and beauty of the Crystal City suggests to me that it was an open and almost renaissance Europe-like civilisation. If so, then there was probably a lot of advanced magi-tech and pure magic as proven by the Crystal Heart, an artifact as powerful as the Elements of Harmony. The question is how much of it survived Sombra's insanity.