@Redium
How close to inventing writing are we (if you can tell us)
I'm going to have to invoke S.13 for this ("right against self-incrimination").
So what exactly will domesticated Orker do for us, and is it locked in as a surefire thing? I'm assuming that we can likely turn some of them into pork or domesticated livestock, with the others being raised for use as cavalry, though I don't think the terrain here suits them for that.
Pork is the big thing. Orkers are
massive, they can weigh more than a thousand kilograms. Modern bulls are noticeably smaller than orkers. They're also going to be extremely effective beasts of burden once you figure out how to harness them (and not get gutted by one of their tusks).
Actual domestication is based on 1) the passage of time and 2) periodic hunting actions.
@Redium With two of these conditions met now, what exactly will losing semi-nomadic mean for us, and what will it be replaced with?
Semi-nomadic is better than settled at your current level so it's a bit of a downgrade. What being fully settled gets you is that it uncaps your organization tier. Right now you're locked to settlements. Now that you're settled, you can progress to provinces and other larger agglomerations.
Damn, it's going to suck for whoever faces us in combat, that's for sure. How exactly did we domesticate them anyway, asides from finding those juveniles? Also, has anyone else done anything comparable to us in this regard?
Honestly, you were literally lucky enough to find new piglets. The hardest part with domestication is training the small initial population to trust humans. Once you have that, you can allow them to interbreed with the wild population to increase your numbers over time. There's actually an enormous amount of gene flow in tamed and wild populations.
The other way to domesticate, is to do it slowly over time by feeding the animals. Eventually they learn that humans mean food. This means that animals who acknowledge that tend to survive, then then take on more and more pro-human genes over time until they allow their feeding and reproduction to be fully controlled by humans.
How exactly did we gain that prestige anyway?
Utterly trashing South Lake in combat.
Is our medicine far enough along that our warriors were able to survive these losses? Either we've traded enough with the Peace Builders to get enough medicine, ore we've picked up some of the plants they've used I'm assuming.
@veekie touched on it already; frostbite is an incredibly clean way to lose limbs as long as you don't let the dead tissue remain on the body. The Frost-Scarred actually recommend a 'hair of the dog' style of treatment for frostbite if it's severe. Instead of warming, they say you should expose it to
more cold. This, paradoxically, makes things better. Mild and moderate frostbite can be recovered from with only minimal treatment or difficulty. Severe frostbite tends to require amputation and cleaning.
Extreme frostbite on the other hand tends to autoamputate; affected digits will literally 'fall off' of their own accord without any treatment or complications.
So they're not completely struggling. But I'm guessing they are struggling more than us right? Considering they don't have brick homes to keep away the elements like we have, nor do they likely water grass to rely on.
The Island Makers have more food than you, but they are suffering from the weather more.
What exactly would us wiping out the South Lake Tribe accomplish? That's what I'm wondering because right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive for it mechanically.
A big bundle of prestige. Destroying a faction completely gives a fraction of all the prestige they have.
The benefit of allowing South Lake to continue to exist is that they're now a thorn in the south's side, distracting them from you.
I'm just curious to know what are warriors are kitted out with specifically. Such as do they use warclubs, blackswords, bone armor or wood armor?
How are warriors trained anyways?
This is going to be changed with a future decision point. Training is currently ad hoc so you'll get some choices in the future. You could make it so that
all warriors need to be a member of a Holy Order, warriors are designated by the Big Man, their Slate, or on a longhouse basis.
Right now, the Holy Orders have first pick of candidates. The Ember-Eyes usually pick first since they start youngest, about 6-10 years old. The Fangs start recruitment from 10-14. The Frost-Scarred picks recruits from 14-16. Each Holy Order trains based on their particular mysteries; i.e. pyromania, woodcraft and working with dogs, and endurance/cold weather acclimatization. Holy Orders are basically meritocratic.
If an individual is not picked up by a Holy Order, they tend to start training to be a warrior at age 16. There's not really a system for that, though. Generally warriors train whomever catches their eye, treating them like an apprentice. This obviously causes problems with nepotism, but there's also important elements of politics involved as well. Being the trainer of a promising young warrior is a large prestige boost. If anyone is good at war, they'll be picked up for training by someone. There's often not enough of 'the best' to completely fill the demand for warriors, so the rest are 'good enough' recruits and tend to be family members of individuals with important family connections.
All warriors are expected to be proficient in unarmed combat, archery, spears, knives, and the blacksword. The bow is the number one weapon of a warrior. For melee, the blacksword and the spear are generally the weapon of choice for a warrior. Blackswords are obviously more popular, but also more difficult to make. They're mostly the domain of more experience or more senior warriors. Young ones tend to get spears.
Why exactly would this drive anthropologists nuts?
@veekie answered this one again. Most Neolithic cultures tended to be very concentrated. From Hill Guard to the Fingers, you're roughly 3 times the average geographic size and that's deeply unusual.
Are there any other changes we should be aware of, considering how you've altered this world in order to give you more freedom, such as with the Orkers?
Nooooooooo......
/s
How so? In terms of material wealth, or in terms of food?
On that note, if you had to rank the civilizations in the region, how would we stack up against the rest? You know like those periodic lists that popped up in Civ games that show how you compared to your neighbors.
Wealth. Food wise you're behind most people; the difference is your food source tends to be more reliable than everyone except the Island Makers.
I'll think about ranking civilizations in the future. A leader board would be pretty useful.
