Not even just the near area, it sounds like we hit the nomads so hard that these guys, who are from damned far away, noticed the decrease and decided to send an expedition to see what was up. That's... wow.
Well...wouldn't you if you heard of some Nomad hero father and son pair passing through and picking up all your local Nomads
without attacking you?
Everyone neighboring them would be pretty alarmed, because what if, after they crush whoever ticked the Hero, they came around for you next? Even if the Hero is dead by then, a fragmenting Horde generally annihilates everything in the area like a clusterbomb.
Had they had anything other than two heroes leading them, you would have won decisively. Had anything other than two crits happened, you would have mostly preserved your forces. As it was, you still caused sufficient damage that you made continued fighting against you nonviable, but that nomad attack was a perfect storm of fucking your shit up, and it still basically created a dead zone in the steppes like a thousand kilometres in radius.
I have to ask.
@Academia Nut
Spirit Chief & Admin Chief: How did we deal with the absolutely monstrous amounts of corpses scattered across the Stallion Tribes? Did we develop particular funerary practices to avoid disturbing the dead or did we just leave all the nomads for the crows to feast upon?
building aqueducts everywhere. We could use the econ and population boost far more than the extra salt. We already produce more than we need and can trade. Anything more and we risk flooding the market.
Very unlikely that we can produce enough salt to flood the market. It's just too useful and too valuable. If we get too much we can make salt glazed pottery instead and sell that. Our iron furnaces should be at the kind of temperature you need.
Though to be fair building aqueducts is still better, but not because flooding the salt market is possible at present. Even in the early modern age people still fought wars over salt.
Yeah, but the original hero was most likely a admin/martial hero. He came into this hoping to profit off the trade routes by destroying our access to the MWs, but he seems to have lost sight of that by the time of the second invasion, since he completely ignored the stallions and the coastal settlements to get the loot from the softer north provinces. There was, as far as I can tell, no real strategic damage done, to the point where we literally shrugged off all the damage within one turn. He gained nothing except a bit of prestige from the fact that he was able to wound us ever so slightly.
He only died last turn, he was still in charge at the time of the second invasion. And the second invasion accomplished literally none of his original goals.
Actually, from my guess it's like:
-Original Intent: Gain control of metal trade route by destroying coastal trade posts or intimidation, profitting him greatly so he can invest into legitimacy artifacts and carve his name into nomad history.
-However, when we refused to bow, he took a hit to Martial Honor, he HAD to fight or lose the respect of his men.
-When he LOST after the big fuss he made, it was a direct hit to his prestige and legitimacy, he was forced to subdue the other tribes to form a bigger force than ever, but he could not find a decisive edge beyond numbers.
-When he lost AGAIN, with his son accruing all the glory of the one successful raid, before running for it...well he's out of history now, but for the biggest horde in history so far, they didn't get a lot done except subjugate the Metal Workers.
You don't need electric telegraphy. Just semaphore towers. Simple concept once you know of it, but it's very advanced tech.
Pretty big advancement really. IIRC the system got started at sea, as ships had difficulty communicating due to great distances, but simply using flags of various eyecatching colors allowed for messages to be relayed.
How is building a March a negative? How is beating back the SW twits a bad thing? This was about directing people into doing something productive. You simply can't leave that many highly trained, heavily armed people sitting around doing nothing for a decade.
They were going to do something. To believe otherwise is just terrible understanding of mass boredom. This is why i said event roll. The reason the March was an option was that they were already complaining... if not as personally annoyingly to the king as the shamans currently are.
Actually, remember our culture, it's a cultural compulsion to work hard. Excessive warriors doing nothing but training probably means they'd start looking for ways they can do 'work'
Well, it started off as a strategic effort and then evolved into basically pure spite/legacy.
History of war.txt
To be entirely honest, what I figured you guys were going to do was take the Tribute option, grab iron, and then kick the nomads teeth after a turn or two when they no longer had a hero leading them and you had iron while they had stone. I did not expect at all that the thread would collectively go berserk.
It was suggested that they might not stop even with tribute, since their proposed goal was to burn the March.
Part of scarring them is that by taking the stability hits the People demonstrate a psychotic tenacity to win that would leave lasting scars in the social psyche of those it was directed at. It's not enough to just throw lots of Martial actions at them (although they will be talking about this fight for centuries to come), it's also about throwing everything at them.
The men are attacking. The women are attacking. The children are packing slings. Hell even their
chickenscows are attacking!(just looked it up, chicken doesn't exist in it's current form yet)
It's because the Expansion Issue *spits in disgust* is Polarized between Steppe vs Lowlands. Both are hideously icky clusterfucks. The Steppe is a very resource poor area, like on terrain classifications a steppe is not far above a desert in human habitability rating and has Nomads all over the everything. The North Lowlands below the East hills are about as fertile as Stonepen and Northshore were before we moved in, but risks the fighting.
Both sides need the same prep anyway: Standard city walls. Really need them. They can be deployed well before forests will be.
Also, this animosity to the Thunder Horse confuses me a little now that I think about it. They have never explicitly attacked us, just their idiot vassals. Why not trade with the Thunder Horse and make them our friends so we don't have to worry about fighting them?
Threat, not history. They are a militaristic, centralized culture with access to advanced metalworking. Historically those are the most dangerous civilizations to be neighbors of.
You seem really knowledgeable about situations similar to the one we face right now Deadly. Care to detail why the hills to the east are probably our best bet, even with the Thunder Speakers out that way?
Mostly native defensibility. Walled settlements on hills can't really be cracked without massive military superiority. Walls built with iron tools will be far higher and more solid than existing walls, I can easily say they'd be higher than the Skull Wall now(which incidentally if it was US vs them now, iron shod rams under portable cover could probably plow through without too much trouble if they could get there clear).
Just you know, we need those damned walls first.
I think its more going to be the nomads end times myth, with the People being the crazy psycho destroyers faction. That or a Jason like horror movie Slasher... it won't die and it never stops coming until your dead. For The People its more a matter of how war is done. The People are thinking its not over and the nomads think its done with so they picked a new target. The nomads are also small enough the March, mark 2, plus whatever may over run them out of nowhere in a turn or two.
Mythologically I think it'd be like so(keeping in mind nomads will be depleted for multiple generations, so when they return in substantial amounts there will be no living memory):
-Ymaryn - The demons came upon the people in their madness, in a storm seeking blood and fire. The People joined hands and formed a wall of living stone, casting the demons back into the void as one, screaming and wailing. The demons returned once more as a tide, and The People joined hands once more, but they slammed through the gaps in our unity tearing us apart at the seams. And then our will as steel, we sealed the great walls shut and stars fell like rain, casting the wild demonds forever. And that, is why you should never make use of shoddy construction.
-Metal Workers - From the sound of it, they fell/capitulated rather swiftly, so the mythology would vary depending on whether they assimilated the Nomads, or cast them off.
-Nomads - Probably something about how the weak but endless hill demons slew their ancestors, and the blood debt must be repaid...but first, get really swole and fight everyone so you can march back into heaven and cast the demons out.
-Thunder Speakers - "Help, help I'm getting sacrificed!"
I'm not sure that there is a relatively pacifist nation that goes berserk if you attack it anywhere else on the planet. That alone is a legendary beast race waiting to happen.
WWII America. They fought nothing big for a long time, was isolated by geography, and had limited military tradition at the time. But they had enormous economic power, which they churned into war power over the course of a generation to show the Axis that you can kill ten tanks but there's an eleventh getting rolled out.
Similar to our situation basically.
You haven't tested yourself against them with the new iron weapons, but you feel confident in your ability to kick in the teeth of anyone, and somewhat confident in your capacity to take on any two at once and still prevail. If the Thunder Horse were able to hit you with everything you suspect it would be a hard fought thing, but as it is you would have difficulty projecting power. In defending your core territories of Redshore, Sacred Forest, and Valleyhome you have no doubts that there exists no known enemy that can crack your defences.
Nifty. Though Southshore could come at a bad timing still, and I expect once we actually test ourselves against the other cultures they're going to get their ass in gear FAST. Warfare being highly competitive.
