@Redium
What if we have the Fire eyes proslytize at the Soft Hearts? We could incorporate their settlement as well.
You could and the Ember-Eyes are preaching to them now that you're looking at it. It's just never been an issue before since they didn't make a big deal of it. You were giving them food, so if you wanted to talk at them while they were eating, they let you. That was part of the reason the Soft Eyes fractured away from the Mountain Clans.
Thought so. I guess the Peace Builder Skalds got away unnoticed because they tended to preach communal values while we preach individual values which fed their underclasses and gave form to discontent.
The Peace Builders have never interacted with the Island Makers to the best of your knowledge. They're simply too far away; it's the journey of the better part of a year to travel to and from their main settlements.
[ ] [Tree] Increased Food Production (Staples: Apples, Nuts, Persimmons) [Moderate]
Note that this is not going to be nutritionally significant in terms of calories. Makes great 'lesser' luxuries and keeping health up.
Not important at present.
This I'm going to dispute. I've done a little bit of research, and arboriculture is comparable in effectiveness to regular agriculture. Currently, your best method of farming is a corn monocrop with squash planted along the edges of the fields to deter pests. On a calories-per-acre basis, corn isn't that much better than apples or walnuts. In fact, corn is worse in many respects than walnuts; it's lower energy, bulkier, and requires a lot more processing (smashing nuts is easier than husking, drying, and grinding cornmeal).
You're also not dealing with modern corn. The crop the People actually grow is closer to wheat than it is to corn on the cob. Currently, your 'corn' plants look like thickened stems of grass with a dozen or so hard brown seeds in a cone shape at the top. The yield is pathetic; the walnuts the People have recently acquired would be more-or-less recognizable to a modern person and produce a lot more calories as a result.
You still need both, but Arboriculture is just as adequate a food supply as farming is.
So it's not like a brewery requires too much extensive infrastructure to set up, but the act itself is resource intensive?
Yeah.
So the other tribes have started calling themselves distinct names other than The People? Have we as well? If yes, what and how do our people interpret the meaning of our own name? Did the two recently integrated tribes popularize their former name(s) for us?
The other tribes are sort-of differentiating. The Island Makers refer to themselves as the People who Tend to the Earth-Mother's Chorus, but that's a mouthful. They refer to themselves as 'the People' internally, but there's a growing identification of themselves as being unique from other, outside tribes. The Island Makers along with the Peace Builders are some of the most culturally and religiously developed civilizations (other than yourselves) so their identifications tend to be grander. Most tribes and civilizations still refer to themselves as 'the People', but they're the People are of something.
The Soft Eyes are the People with Soft Eyes, the Cracktooth would be the People who Break Bone, the Cateye are the People of Split Gems, etc.
You're still known primarily as the Two Soul tribe and that's how your traders and warriors would describe you to outsiders: 'We are the People with Two Souls' since that's what outsiders call you. You wouldn't really identify with ethnic, cultural, or linguistic groups yet.
Now that at least one of our holy orders has started independently sending missionaries, how is the state of doctrinal differences regarding the believes of the orders? Back when I asked many turns ago you said our religion wasn't developed enough for those to matter but I've got a feeling that things changed.
There's a continuum. The Frost-Scarred are on one extreme with the Ember-Eyes on the other. All of your Holy Orders believe in your central Values: Might Makes Right, Natural Mastery, Familialism, Elitism, etc. What they differ on is the things that are encoded directly in those values, or they debate on how best to express those values.
The main differences are in materialism versus aestheticism. They also diverge of patience, the Frost-Scarred are a lot more impatient than the Fangs or Ember-Eyes. The last difference is Extroversion; the Frost-Scarred are introverted, preferring converts be scouted ahead of time or come to them, while the Ember-Eyes are gregarious and preach to all an sundry, or offer to sell some of the various magical wares.
For example, to express Elitism, the Ember-Eyes cover themselves in jewelry, fine furs, dyes, and other fancies. They believe in being absolutely identifiable and distinct. The best fancies are the things that an Ember-Eye has crafted themselves; pretty stones, feathered headdresses, etc.
The Frost-Scarred on the other hand, disdain those things; if it's not part of your physical body, it doesn't count. They value scars, both regular ones but also those attained ritually. They value overcoming adversity and simple trophies; the teeth of a slain enemy, a stone from the top of a mountain, bones from a cunning beast. The Frost-Scarred are very much ascetics.
Each order also emphasizes different traits most heavily. The Ember-Eyes prefer Elitism and Mastery of Nature, the Frost-Scarred Ordeals and Might Makes Right, the Fangs and Vendetta and Familialism. Every Order values every Value, but some are pre-eminent.
The disagreements aren't about the 'divine truth' as it were, but in how that should be shown.
Does Jeree being a mystic hero mean he has actual insights into other order mysteries and secrets? Or just a better understanding of their common teachings.
Jeree knows, or at least has a very good idea, about each Order's mysteries. He primarily practices those of the Horned Riders, but could serve as a member of the Fangs in a pinch. He knows the mysteries at the Heart of the Star Shaman, but he also knows that to perform those magics would kill him. He is incompatible. For the Frost-Scarred, he likes his fingers and toes attached to his body too much. The Ember-Eyes' bore him; Jeree doesn't want to spend hours setting up a reaction chamber in order to do proper magic, or measure out specific quantities of reagents. He'd much rather run free in the wild.
What do the Star Shaman spend their day to day with (in practical terms) that they believe protects The People from The Hole? And how does it look when they try to "research better methods"?
The Star Shaman are ritualists to the utmost degree. They chant, meditate, they draw diagrams pleasing to the spirits, brew potions or make medicine, and they offer sacrifices (animals or property). They watch the skies for auspicious dates and keep track of the solstices and equinoxes across seasons since certain rituals need to be done at certain times. They're the foremost experts on the weather and other grand natural cycles. Ordeals are a big part of their training; fasting, exercising, etc.
Did the Mountain Tribes split over the question of whether to accept food or not? We're there additional reasons beyond that? How are the relations between the three successor tribes nowadays?
Mostly over food. You have great relations with the Soft Eyes, cordial relationships with the Stoutheart and no relationship with the Hard Foot. The way the territory works out, you only actually border the Soft Eyes and Stoutheart.
How do the Horned Riders compare to the Fang when it comes to medical knowledge?
Both are honestly not that great. They have some, but if you want a good medic, you're better off served by one of the Frost-Scarred (for injuries) or Star Shaman (everything else).
What was the role of the non-horned rider shamans in the North and did the Horned Riders adopt any of those now otherwise extinct practices before joining us?
Not really. Aside from the Horned Riders, the Northlanders didn't have too much that was unique to them. They were supposed to develop more religious traditions in the future since they were a Theocracy, but you cut them short by absorbing them. Since they were a lot further north than you, they had a significant debuff in the very early game they didn't manage to recover from.
@Redium Are we essentially making
all of our dogs into herding dogs? If yes, when will having multiple different breeds of one type of animal be an option? Personally, I want the production/war split to happen as soon as possible with all of our domesticated animals, be it herding vs killing, hair and trade vs cavalry or tonnes of meat vs living siege engine.
To be honest, actually
voting on a type of development is ahistorical. Before the agricultural and scientific revolution, people
didn't systematically study the natural world, at least not in a way we understand. People weren't stupid; if they found something that worked, they would do that, but the deep seated need to know
Why? and to test each possible hypothesis before rejection wasn't done. Scientific, technological, or social progress was a lot more ad hoc and a lot more scattershot.
There was no overarching goal in domesticating plants or animals. It happened because people had control of those things' reproduction and sometimes promoted certain characteristics; intelligence, strength, food, etc. It wasn't until the Agricultural Revolution that people realized that you could breed specifically for certain traits. The realization that you could - for example - split your herd of cattle in three and only permit the best third to breed was revolutionary! It staggeringly increased the size of animals or the amount of milk they produced. Chickens increased their average body weight three times over during a fifty year span, for example.
What the People are doing is pushing their dogs to herd and those who can't do it simply die. The selection pressure isn't that great because the People haven't twigged onto the fact that if they increased it massively (i.e. only let the top 25% of herd dogs breed), they would get faster results. No one is tracking bloodlines to obtain best results, they're not objectively assessing anything, they're just allowing the dogs who can't do the job to fail at it.
So, yes, you are making all of your dogs into herding dogs, but that's only because the People don't realize they
can breed an animal for a specific task yet. You haven't discovered Artificial Selection, you're operating almost exclusively on Natural Selection which is much slower.
I'd imagine though that boosting Raven's intelligence should be considerably easier, given they arguably have a more "advanced" brain than we do as humans, as they don't have the restrictions on higher level thought our cerebral cortex does, thus allowing them to pack 2-4 times as many neurons as humans in the same area. What they're lacking is just the overall size of their brain, which is comparatively far simpler to breed, and with their brain architecture much more effective than doing the same procedure with other animals. From a quick googling their mating habits should also make selective breeding easier to record and manipulate, with them generally being monogamous and mating in the same location.
It's remarkable as it is how intelligent they are given how tiny their brains are, I wonder just how far you'd be willing to take long term breeding with them.
One of the issues with breeding 'intelligence' is that it's often hard to define intelligence. There's no single one 'thing' that intelligence is. It's a multitude of factors. Look at dogs: they were bred to be smart (socially responsive to humans), but compared to wolves, they have terrible problem solving abilities. They also tend to have problems with anxiety.
Is our salt surplus big enough to export any of it further? If yes, do we get any profit from it, seeing how we seem to be buying it at double the value IIRC.
You do export salt, primarily to the Island Makers and Soft Eyes. You're not really getting a huge benefit from it; you sell so much that the salt trade is sucking 'money' out of their economies and preventing them from buying other goods. If you sell more salt, they buy less of something else.
Does it seem like the Pearl Divers are selling their salt to any to us unknown neighbors of theirs or are we still their only human contact as far as we know?
You can't really tell. Since all of the non-you neighbours to the Pearl Divers would also be on the ocean, they could simply make their own salterns. You don't know.
Does No Export regarding slaves mean that we still import them? How does that look? Do the Peace Builders and Mountain Clans bring us product from their slave raids which we shruggingly accept and pay for, then convert into Debtors and put to work under Pareem supervision for an arbitrary amount of time before adopting them into our clans?
You don't import slaves right now since no one is really selling them. If the (say) Hard Foot started selling slaves to the Stoutheart, who sold them to the Soft Eyes who sold them to you, then you would get the option to start buying slaves again.
When the People purchase a slave, that slave becomes a Debtor with their debt being equal to their price of purchase. They then follow the same rules that a normal Debtor would when it comes to paying off debt.
Our economy is still considered an internal gift economy despite things like weregild, distinct clans and personal property existing. Could you comment on any overt changes that happened to our People's daily economic life since the days of Aeva?
Also how does taxation work now that settlements don't have a centralized leadership anymore.
Weregild is a gift. You're giving someone a gift of food, property, or luxuries in order to make up for an offense committed against them. It's fully compatible with a gift economy.
The economy mostly functions the same, but you've devolved a lot of central control to more local economies. Aeva could basically tell most of the People what to do, even if she had to do it indirectly; that doesn't happen any more. Most of the actual movement of goods occurs locally now. People give gifts to the Pareem who gives those gifts to other Pareem in exchange for gifts they can give back to their clients.
Your concept of personal/clan property is odd. If something is your personal property, you can't do whatever you want with it. Your clan gets some amount of claim on it. Property exists on a continuum between an individual, a clan, and he People as a whole. There's no sharp divide on where a single bit of property belongs to any one group. Ownership can change based on something's use, available resources, the time of year, etc. It's hard to describe because it's a complicated situation.
Taxation used to involve turning over a rough portion of your work to the central council. That's gone. What happens instead is that Pareem turn over a certain amount of goods, labour, etc. to the central settlement council to hand out. The Pareem that provide the most gain increased prestige (Elitism, Ordeal). There's an incentive for Pareem to squeeze their clients for additional tribute, but that's counter-balanced by the fact that clients can simply walk away and get a better Pareem.
The Consequentialist Punishment trait's effect still refers to Big Men. What is its effect now that Big Men have less power and the Pareem decide stuff collectively?
Replace Big Men with Pareem council. That's all that changed.
The way you often describe the favored subjects of a Pareem as 'clients' makes me see them as often having a lawyer-adjacent role in society. How far off the mark am I?
Pareem serve as lawyers, but that's not their purpose. Pareem basically operate Patronage networks; they organize people and goods, trade favours, etc. I'm using client in the old sense here, Patron-Client relationships.
Are you keeping the fluff descriptions of the Holy Orders in their original form on purpose for historic reasons or have you simply not gotten around to updating lines like "Based out of the Shrine of the Fingers,"?
I should update them at some point.
What needs to happen for the Horned Riders and/or the Star Shamans to become official traits in the list of traits so as to upgrade Collection Most Holy?
Resolve your issues with over max Religious Authority. Your religious situation is unstable and you could have a religious blow out. If that happens, you could lose a Holy Order easily.
Is the Mastodon still hunted so rarely it doesn't warrant being listed under Prize Animals?
It should be listed there.
Who is trying to take ravens, where'd they get the inspiration/incentive from and since when is this a thing? I have to admit that while I do read all of your posts I often only skim over the rest whenever I've been absent for a while.
This goes all the way back to turn 1. When you picked The Beasts as your food source, it's given you a hidden, mechanical bonus when it comes to domesticating stuff. That's why you've got the opportunity to pick up ravens. The Hunt has also played into it because ravens are intelligent enough to start to operate within the system and help the People maintain it in such a way that they benefit. Somebody eventually recognized that the ravens were crafty buggers.
I see that we have progressed on the wheel despite many cultures not discovering them till much later (especially on this continent). What is guiding us towards it? A combination of learned mystics using cavalry and dog sleds in a non-snowy environment and us having developed dedicated and unusually (for the stone age) well travelled trails?
More trails.
We don't have a salt surplus - in fact we do not produce any salt at all. On a related note
@Redium, what effects does trade dominance have at our level of economic development?
Currently, trade domination doesn't do too much. You really need some type of bulk transport in order to take off. Maintaining trade dominance is extremely important then and it could require fighting wars.
It does give you Diplo benefits when interacting with trade partners and it gives you a (small) chance to tech steal each turn.
Some transposed messages from IM questions:
If limiting preaching to only occurring with the Pareem's permission wins, you're going to have to take some time to get the shaman under control. There's going to be years of conflict between the Pareem and shaman who want to preach anyway, regardless of permission. The reason you're losing Stability in that option is because of the resulting crackdown and that's going to take time to shake out.
You can start preaching again after the Pareem gain control, but not in the meantime since that weakens the Pareem's attempts to control the shaman.
Arboriculture is more about offsetting the Staples cost of Forestry actions. Currently, it actually costs Staples in order to manage forests. It's not a huge amount, but it is noticeable. Once you get in basic Arboriculture, it becomes Staples neutral, freeing up a significant amount of food that can be reused. More advanced Arboriculture techniques are necessary to creating more quality timber, charcoal, food, or sugar.
For example, the currently being voted on Food improvement, will make each Forest-type building produces as much food as a Farm. Since you're currently paying, for Forests, it's a huge improvement.
The limiting issue is more clay than lumber in keeping brick housing. You now produce enough - but only on the eastern edge of your civilization. The soil to the west of Hill Guard/Crystal Lake/Cave of Stars, is simply clay-poor. Given you don't have docks and longships yet, there simply isn't a way to reliably transport bricks in the numbers needed from the Fingers to the west. You were short before, period; but now you're only short in certain locations.
After you get control of the preaching shaman, you can send them against the Island Makers. You just can't try to get control of them and have them preach at the same time. You can't double-dip on this action because you lack the administrative sophistication to differentiate those who have permission and those who don't. You could next turn redeploy the shaman (provided something unforeseen does not happen) next turn without issue.
I've done a bit of research and from what I've read, it sounds like apple orchards and corn fields have a roughly equivalent calorie production per acre. Now, corn is much easier to keep and preserve than apples are (though the People can preserve apples by slicing and drying them), but that's a separate issue.
Walnuts (which you have) are actually about 50% better on a calories per-acre basis compared to corn and walnuts keep very, very well.
veekie was right when he declared coppicing to be the basis of really advanced arboriculture techniques. Hybridizing, grafting, and splicing species all grew out of coppicing as a practice. Grafting can be really useful in mixing-and-matching aspects of certain trees. If you want strong roots, disease, or pest resistance, you can combine that with a fruit-bearing tree that would normally not have any of those benefits.
Is it worth it? It's hard to say; grafting is likely to be a Hard or Very Hard development to pick up after coppicing, but it's quite useful.
Coppicing is also useful in that it greatly slows down ecological damage from over-foresting. That's not a huge concern right now, but it's much, much, much better to develop good ecological practices now when it doesn't matter than to get yourselves in problems later on once demand for charcoal skyrockets.
The decline of forests is a very slow process and if you're not careful, the People will destroy them and hardly notice.
It's not the frontier they have problems, so much as the western half of the People. 'Frontier' settlements in the east (Fingers/Arrow Lake) use bricks, but central settlements in the west are finding it hard to source bricks at all.
The biggest way to fix this is to either discover find a new clay deposit (Explore actions) or try and rush Copper Smelting + Copper Tools and Masonry (Study: Stone and Study: Fire). There's simply not a good answer to this type of local resource scarcity.
AN: It's Thanksgiving this weekend and I am going to be visiting with family. I'm not sure how much time I will have available to update. As such, if anyone wants to change their votes based on the answers here, the Vote is still Open.
