Well, perhaps, but people aren't voting to raid or do anything proactive, they're choosing to sit back and wait for an attack to come. It doesn't matter that we could have the initiative when we're ceding the initiative!
And we don't know enough to assume that they don't have professional warriors and levies.
Well yes, but people aren't voting to raid or do anything proactive, they're choosing to sit back and wait for an attack to come. It doesn't matter that we could have the initiative when we're ceding the initiative!
You jumped at me telling me we'd be slaughtered, I'm just arguing for why that isn't the case.
If they ever united, then yes they might be the problem you fear, but them uniting isn't likely. In the meantime. I support raiding them over sending a diplomat, but neither are likely given the current votes. So I'm just working with what we have.
Well, perhaps, but people aren't voting to raid or do anything proactive, they're choosing to sit back and wait for an attack to come. It doesn't matter that we could have the initiative when we're ceding the initiative!
And we don't know enough to assume that they don't have professional warriors and levies.
I think the idea behind raiding is to slow or stop any growth in our direction, and to trim their massive population a bit.
They have a shifting seat of power, as the ~6 powerful clans that make up the lowlands fight each other.
If we raided one or two, I think their inner conflict would shift in such a way as to keep things in balance, such that the ones we weaken team up to put the other ones down to keep their position stable, or perhaps they get overrun by their neighbors costing hundreds (thousands?) of lives in pitched battle and giving us new targets.
I don't think we'd do anything so stupid as attacking all of them at once when their division is our biggest advantage over them.
So you're voting for the goddamn bandwagon even though you don't actually support it because you don't think the bandwagon will be toppled, thus making it even harder for the bandwagon to be toppled.
I have certain priorities. In the event that my most favored option is impossible, I support my secondary objective.
I mentioned in an earlier analysis that integration and dealing with the lowlanders are mutually exclusive.
If we aren't dealing with the lowlanders, then I'm voting to support integration as the most beneficial option.
Since I'm voting for integration, then I feel like I need to vote to do nothing, because integration comes with a slew of problems that distractions will only make worse. You follow my logic or do I need to quote the relevant posts?
They're not going to get weaker. Their constant internal conflicts will give them plenty of opportunities to hone their military edge while our warriors stagnate. They might not be as prosperous and well fed but their numbers are still growing.
Not quite. Their numbers replenish faster, but their maximum is lower than ours. And again, we have a strong defensive bonus, AND all the techs and environmental conditions to move to simple fortifications.
There's very little raiders can do against so much as a 5ft high wall of logs and clay, though I'm not sure we can work stone fast enough to factor it in a large scale, we DO have experience of erecting walls from our irrigation efforts to basically fence off our villages so that everyone can pull back inside when raiders come so only warriors have to fight..
Their warriors are experienced to be sure, but their land is only growing less and less fertile while they kill each other over the best remaining parts of it.
It's more relating to our Military being a strong homeland defense force, but completely green when raiding and fighting in enemy territory is concerned. We built it that way.
Not a conflict in our favor, because they lose less when their guys die in raids than we do in the opposite.
They're both fragmented, and they lack a warrior culture. They might have more veterans, but their fighters generally spend the majority of their life farming rather than training and fighting.
The fighting they do partake in is spread between the different tribes and strung out over years, so any one particular fighter might have survived a handful of conflicts, but still wouldn't be as hardened or well-equipped as our own warriors.
Uh, I don't see where you're getting this. From the previous update we've learned that:
-Their core culture are slaver-warriors who raid others, take all the young men, all the women of childbearing age and kill the rest.
-Their actual farmers are slave workers under threat of violence.
-They spend a lot of time raiding each other, so their warrior class spends most of their time training or killing each other.
They have a warrior culture alright. A larger one than ours, since it's their ruling class.
However, failed raids will hit them hard, because they need their warriors at a certain ratio to keep their leaves in line. If we do enough damage to a raiding force that particular sub polity will fall apart.
Equipment is another matter, and I dare say we're probably superior in that regard, since we've started onto stoneworking. We have more wood, more crafting techniques and all that.
And yes, they have a large population and it'd be bad if they united, but as they are I'm confident we'd win in a fight with one of their several tribes.
Similarly, if we chose to try and support one tribe to increase their conflicts with each other, we'd only be talking to the one tribe and it's highly unlikely that they'd use that small event to immediately unite the others and overrun us.
They are divided, any single fragment of their larger population is within our ability to handle, and the chances of them uniting is extremely low unless and until either a huge crisis forces them together, or enough time possess for them to settle things amongst themselves.
Also, they've already faced raids and not united or retaliated, keep that I'm mind. I think. Brb looking for quote.
Edit: yes. The spirit people are raiding the lowlanders and the lowlanders aren't banding together in retaliation, so the chances of our own action causing that is very small.
The spirit talkers had taken offence to this and were actively raiding with the intent to destroy, but they weren't actually getting very far in their efforts since someone would see the abandoned fields and move in within a year or two.
Indeed, but at present, I don't think diplomacy with them is anywhere near viable. Their culture is diametrically opposed to ours, our people see their culture and feels revulsion at everything.
Diplomacy is not going to go well due to that. We have strong penalties.
Our people value the land and nurture it. They farm it to dust and then steal someone else's.
Our people work the land as a whole community. They so detest it that they would force other people to farm for them.
Our people value charity, even in the most dire straits, they will love thy neighbor. Their people love fucking over their neighbors, going beyond the generally accepted raiding for wives and into slaughter.
Consider what our diplomatic party is going to be thinking when they try diplomacy. It will be lucky if we simply left at insults.
Again, you are partially correct, but I still don't fully agree with you.
Time spent means we can increase the tech gap, but it also means that they increase in population further and gives them more chances of reuniting.
Waiting could be good, but it could be bad. It's impossible to say.
On the other hand, attacking has a high likelihood of success, but success may not actually achieve much, or push them in ways we'd rather not encourage.
The diplomatic option might solve our problems with them, it might simply get our diplomats killed triggering eye for an eye, or it might be the key to their greater unification and make everything worse.
I find that waiting serves us better than them. They're going to be busy killing each other until some party gains enough of a decisive advantage to blob up, or until the fighting peters out.
However, we produce a great deal of wealth and food, so our population will outgrow theirs in anything but the shortest terms(and this only because they don't care about sustainability).
This is why an early conflict profits them. Their short term losses are easily replenished compared to ours, while our long term growth outpaces theirs.
Hell yes. That's one of the things that'd extend the Centralization tolerance at least. We have achieved writing by dint of having so much to keep track of people need to start marking things down.
I don't think we can assume that attacking them will make them unite. People have been killing them for awhile now, and others just go and take over the spots that were left empty. If we got together and wiped out one or two of their big groupings the others might just laugh, enslave anyone that managed to survive, and try to expand into that land. At the very least this sort of response would slow them down.
Personally I don't want to do that, I would rather see what the spirit talkers come up with, but I don't think you can claim that it will definitely have a predictable result. Sometimes people hate their neighbors that they already warred with more than they hate far away people.
True enough. But it's a known risk(historically, the situation down in the lowlands looks like the pre-roman Italian region or the early English region, where everyone was stabbying everyone else until the bigger polity stomped in and motivated them to start unifying over the next 4-5 generations).
Remember, there's more than one way to unify. You already listed one way.
See, normally their raids on each other doesn't produce lasting gains. The winner gets a boosted economy from an influx of slaves and new land, but now they have more land and less warriors to oversee it due to the dead and injured from the raid, so they're easy prey for their neighbors, and the chain of raids ripple out...then equalizes out.
What can change this? An external party destroying a sub-faction's armed forces, but not taking the land. This means their neighbors get a free grab at the underdefended land and population, which gives them an economic boost without a military hit. Which allows them to grow, so that in the next generation, they can attack another group without getting so weakened that they'd be vulnerable.
Not sustainable, but past a certain size, it no longer becomes feasible to attack the larger group at all, so the area is going to basically crystallize into several large blobs that have to diplomacy with each other mostly by being unable to beat each other anymore.
The only thing I actually care to argue about here is their military vs ours.
I think we're having a misunderstanding.
When I say we have a warrior culture, I mean that we specifically have a group of people who are given rations in order to train and wrestle and stand guard all day.
When you point out the lowlanders raids and conflicts, I think that they have a high military stat. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about having a professional army, and I'm fairly certain they do not. Here's why.
We have skilled farmers using upgraded farming methods who create an abundance of food. It is this abundance that allows for a professional army, abundance that the lowlanders don't have.
The lowlanders have a lot of people, and a lot of inefficient farms. They match each other, barely, and that creates enough that they don't go hungry, but they do not have enough to give food away to people who don't till the land, and they don't have enough to store for times of trouble such as the drought.
Secondly, I don't think they rely overly much on slaves. They've just begun sacrificing those they capture, which is at odds with capturing people for work. Sure, the two aren't exclusive, but they are at odds.
They might have slaves working the land, but I don't think they rely on slaves to the point that they'd have a dedicated group for it.
Everything they do seems to rely on explosive population growth, and that same population in turn is required to farm the fields in order to support their massive population with those inefficient farms.
When they fight, they send the same people who are otherwise busy with farming. They probably fight less in the planting and harvesting seasons.
Then they are arming and training their slaves. I don't think you should assume that they can raise a huge amount of farmer soldiers without those farmers getting ideas like 'why are we slaves' 'why don't we kill these guys and go home' 'maybe we should be the masters now!'
Uh...they got a primitive version of the knighthood-serf system. This actually requires a large warrior caste, to keep the slaves working rather than going after their masters with farm tools.
Second, their strength lies in outnumbering their opponents with low-quality levy troops, rather than a dedicated warrior caste. That's what I was talking about.
Where is this from?
Outnumbering opponents with low quality troops?
That was many generations ago, back when we first met the traders. At the time our warriors with the traders fought off their raiders well enough, but a generation later it was considered too dangerous to go there even with warrior escorts.
If people have been fighting for three generations with nearly everything around them, they're going to get good at it.
We don't have a caste per se, but we do have 'trained professionals'.
We can easily mount a raiding expedition that simply overwhelm our opponent. That way, we don't have many losses, and we can gain veterans and combat experience to boot.
Once we ran a tribe off their land, we'll build forts and occupy the land. Provided we rinse and repeat and not do it too often, we should be able to slowly conquer their land until we have overwhelming numbers.
Note that their land is crap, and had gotten worse. Noting also that we don't have forts invented yet, though I suspect that's going to be our next project to keep our farmlands safe.
I think you'd find that our population is not going to be hugely interested in settling their land. It takes the work of generations to restore it.
I think the idea behind raiding is to slow or stop any growth in our direction, and to trim their massive population a bit.
They have a shifting seat of power, as the ~6 powerful clans that make up the lowlands fight each other.
If we raided one or two, I think their inner conflict would shift in such a way as to keep things in balance, such that the ones we weaken team up to put the other ones down to keep their position stable, or perhaps they get overrun by their neighbors costing hundreds (thousands?) of lives in pitched battle and giving us new targets.
I don't think we'd do anything so stupid as attacking all of them at once when their division is our biggest advantage over them.
First, pitched battles, not really happening any time soon. The kind of military organization for that doesn't exist. It's raid groups, not armies.
Secondly, the Spirit Talkers are already doing that. Their population isn't growing fast so much as it's replenishing fast(as is only practical if your raiders are getting children on multiple women and don't have to mind their opinions or risks of repeat pregnancies). This is common in raider heavy cultures to keep the flow of warriors going.
The pop cap remains based on the ability of the soil to feed them...and it's only getting lower as they overwork the land.
If you're looking at the population cap, ours is actually much higher, but we simply cannot have children that quickly without developing better medicine, or greatly changing cultural values.
The threat is their eventual unification, not in them breeding like zerg and pouring out in giant human waves.
However, we produce a great deal of wealth and food, so our population will outgrow theirs in anything but the shortest terms(and this only because they don't care about sustainability).
This is why an early conflict profits them. Their short term losses are easily replenished compared to ours, while our long term growth outpaces theirs.
The first was running up against the fact that the lowlanders apparently had so many people that every man, woman, and child in the Three Peoples could kill a lowlander and that would merely be set back for a generation rather than annihilated
That's what? Probably a 3 to 1 disparity, I'd guess.
They've got a significant headstart on us. Even if our method of agriculture lets us sustain a denser population, we haven't expanded much, while they're continually expanding and claiming more territory. In the long term we'd do better but we need to a) avoid getting flattened first b) expand our territory.
Right now we have the smaller population and the less warlike culture.
Ugggh I just finished responding to you. Can't phone fast enough, ifheigyd :tffjjy
Ok, yes the threat is in them unifying. However, their population will continue to grow explosively, even divided as they are.
I claim, again, that they use massive armies of relatively untrained farmers rather than a dedicated warrior class because they can't afford to pull people away from the fields the way we do our own warriors.
Their experiences might result in a high military stat, but that still doesn't translate into a professional army that their culture can't sustain. They simply don't have enough food.
Edit: oh, as for the pitched battle thing, what else would you call it when you kill your neighboring lowlands tribe and take their land? Either way, hundreds of their own dead which benefits us.
The only thing I actually care to argue about here is their military vs ours.
I think we're having a misunderstanding.
When I say we have a warrior culture, I mean that we specifically have a group of people who are given rations in order to train and wrestle and stand guard all day.
When you point out the lowlanders raids and conflicts, I think that they have a high military stat. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about having a professional army, and I'm fairly certain they do not. Here's why.
We have skilled farmers who create an abundance of food. It is this abundance that allows for a professional army, abundance that the lowlanderd don't have.
The lowlanders have a lot of people, and a lot of inefficient farms. They match each other, barely, and that creates enough that they don't go hungry, but they do not have enough to give food away to people who don't till the land, and they don't have enough to store for times of trouble such as the drought.
Uh the lowlanders use slave labor. Its what makes their warrior culture possible.
Our method:
-Grow a surplus of food through agricultural technology.
-Dedicate surplus to enable full time warriors.
We can produce 4 units of food with 2 units of population working, so we can afford to feed 1 unit of full time warriors and still have a reserve stockpiled to befriend people with(which we then spent rapidly in famine).
Their method:
-Acquire a population of slaves for farming.
-Work the slaves at unhealthy levels of sustenance.
-Replenish slaves from neighboring populations.
They produce 2 units of food with 2 units of slave population working. But they feed the slaves half rations, allowing them to feed 1 unit of full time warriors. When the slaves get sick, they just raid for more.
Secondly, I don't think they rely overly much on slaves. They've just begun sacrificing those they capture, which is at odds with capturing people for work. Sure, the two aren't exclusive, but they are at odds.
They do this when they raid:
-Capture young boys for labor.
-Capture young women and girls for wives.
-Capture older women for labor.
-Sacrifice the men and anyone they can't capture.
This deals with their starvation problem by giving them a new patch of ground and the food reserves of the group attacked, AND the slave labor to work it with. By sacrificing the adult male population(recall this is the strategy Harzivan used against the Eagle Tribe), they ensure that there will be no retaliation or escape attempt possible in the near future.
It also generates explosive population growth due to the large influx of women every time they pull off a successful raid.
This is not at all unusual for slave labor based cultures, though it's unsustainable in the long term, it lasts as long as there are foreign populations to harvest for slaves, at least until the slaves become a permanent underclass instead of war booty once they run out of people to raid, at which point explosive population growth will taper off because slaves will no longer be socially acceptable to have children on.
You literally just explained to me how their slave culture is supposed to work. Am I supposed to read things you haven't written yet?
More importantly, I don't agree that they have a slave culture anywhere near efficient enough for what you propose. I'm not denying that they take slaves at all. As I said. Reading comprehension please.
Everything I've read suggests that it's their massive population spreading out to hundreds of inefficient farms. Not their massive population of slaves.
That's what? Probably a 3 to 1 disparity, I'd guess.
They've got a significant headstart on us. Even if our method of agriculture lets us sustain a denser population, we haven't expanded much, while they're continually expanding and claiming more territory. In the long term we'd do better but we need to a) avoid getting flattened first b) expand our territory.
Right now we have the smaller population and the less warlike culture.
But they aren't expanding? They started on larger and better quality land, and have been basically passing the land around between each other. The total geographical area settled has not increased
Over the course of generations, their land has steadily declined in quality, but since it's not really fully utilized like our settled lands(which is about the only thing keeping them from not starving, since the land is being ruined pretty fast).
We've chosen a Build Tall defensive strategy. They've gone with a Build Wide offensive strategy. I don't really see them being able to roll over our lands unless we don't invest in a defensive or military project next turn. Worked stone and wood weapons should be a pretty nasty advantage against their more crappy stuff.
Keep practicing?
My fingers feel kind of funny now though.
Ok, yes the threat is in them unifying. However, their population will continue to grow explosively, even divided as they are.
I claim, again, that they use massive armies of relatively untrained farmers rather than a dedicated warrior class because they can't afford to pull people away from the fields the way we do our own warriors.
Their experiences might result in a high military stat, but that still doesn't translate into a professional army that their culture can't sustain. They simply don't have enough food.
Edit: oh, as for the pitched battle thing, what else would you call it when you kill your neighboring lowlands tribe and take their land? Either way, hundreds of their own dead which benefits us.
Your claim remains unsubstantiated against the actual update contents, which specifically point out that their people don't farm the land but have slaves do it for them. That their farms are organized in clusters around central points(the warriors in charge). This is a knight-and-serf setup, though the serfs are newly looted rather than inherited.
This may be hyperbole, but their aggressive raids and population rebounds are also not sustainable without heavy use of captives.
They still cannot afford to pull people away from the fields, but that's because if your warrior population drops sufficiently, the slaves will rebel.
...though their strategy of enslaving only the women and children makes it so that it takes much less dudes to keep them in line, and allows them to rapidly bounce back from population losses, because whenever they destroy a village of equal size, they'd roughly double their population in the next generation, as they take in the entire female population of the target(which is the bottleneck on population growth).
Which is why the pitched battle thing doesn't work unless you have the kind of aggressive culture to capitalize on the weakness. After such a 'pitched battle' the winner will double their population in the next two generations.
Like AN had said earlier, this is a powerful steamroll strategy, but it's hit it's burnout point because the environment cannot carry it, and culturally it'd collapse once they run out of enemies they can defeat easily.
We've been here. As Harzivan. The fields run fallow, the glory burns out. The gender imbalances prime them for social strife when one day a generation of young men grows up and cannot get the four wives that their status demands.
The fastest counter to this strategy for us is to leverage our advanced construction to learn how to create defensive structures.
We already have the following techs:
-Wood
-Masonry
-Irrigation
-Stone
-Animal Husbandry
-Wheel
This means the following are within reach of a project:
-Watchtowers. We lack the construction experience to make a structure of significant height, but we're close to it.
-Walls. We can do this right now. Not really possible to wall off our farms or the border, but we can wall off a village and evacuate to it when attacked so our warriors don't need to worry about their dependents.
-Ditches. We're GREAT at ditches. A simple defensive ditch saps the momentum of a raid, buying time to react. I think we already have this though. Just need to organize our settlement so they have a defensible configuration instead of agricultural.
And since we have the wheel, forestry and animal husbandry, we can make use of construction material they cannot. Whole logs and bricks can be worked at a distance via animal hauled carts.
-Ditches. We're GREAT at ditches. A simple defensive ditch saps the momentum of a raid, buying time to react. I think we already have this though. Just need to organize our settlement so they have a defensible configuration instead of agricultural.
I don't think there is any more fundamental a defensive position than "Find big hill. Make big hill bigger. Add surrounding valley and walls. Live on top of big hill."
While I think there is a distinct chance of it pushing Centralization too high to be reasonable for our 'tech' level (man, we use that term for everything, don't we?), the "Stay Home" vote is pretty likely to balance it out by not commiting to any other projects, so we can (probably) double down on easing out the resulting issues.
Hmm. If we can get decent stone fortifications up we'd be largely unassailable. We'll have a massive advantage as the defender if they try a direct assault, and their siegecraft is probably shit. They can't starve us out without an extended campaign, either. We're in pretty defensible terrain, on top of that.
That said, it's worth noting that fortifications won't stop them from torching our farmlands and pillaging everything outside of the walls. This is a pretty big weakness if someone does decide to exploit, actually, since so much of our agriculture is based around careful land management.
But they aren't expanding? They started on larger and better quality land, and have been basically passing the land around between each other. The total geographical area settled has not increased
Now I feel bad for trying to sass you. I say trying because I dunno if it worked, given the following is basically a discussion addressing exactly that point.
Your claim remains unsubstantiated against the actual update contents, which specifically point out that their people don't farm the land but have slaves do it for them.
does it? All I could see about this whole slave thing is that they recently started sacrificing people in addition to their usual slave-taking. Nothing about having their entire culture be reliant on having enough slaves...
Especially since the recent drought would have killed them all.
That their farms are organized in clusters around central points(the warriors in charge). This is a knight-and-serf setup, though the serfs are newly looted rather than inherited.
This may be hyperbole, but their aggressive raids and population rebounds are also not sustainable without heavy use of captives.
Are their farms organised this way? I'm mostly just working off the latest update here, where it says that groups splinter off and settle nearby after disagreements, and that there are about 6 major tribes or clans at the moment, fighting each other for power.
The farms being organized around these clans aren't quite the same as the knight and serf setup you're suggesting exists.
They still cannot afford to pull people away from the fields, but that's because if your warrior population drops sufficiently, the slaves will rebel.
...though their strategy of enslaving only the women and children makes it so that it takes much less dudes to keep them in line, and allows them to rapidly bounce back from population losses, because whenever they destroy a village of equal size, they'd roughly double their population in the next generation, as they take in the entire female population of the target(which is the bottleneck on population growth).
Does that actually count as a standing army though? Not that I'm granting you this point, but overseers do not make for professional army level units.
Which is why the pitched battle thing doesn't work unless you have the kind of aggressive culture to capitalize on the weakness. After such a 'pitched battle' the winner will double their population in the next two generations.
Like AN had said earlier, this is a powerful steamroll strategy, but it's hit it's burnout point because the environment cannot carry it, and culturally it'd collapse once they run out of enemies they can defeat easily.
We've been here. As Harzivan. The fields run fallow, the glory burns out. The gender imbalances prime them for social strife when one day a generation of young men grows up and cannot get the four wives that their status demands.
The fastest counter to this strategy for us is to leverage our advanced construction to learn how to create defensive structures.
We already have the following techs:
-Wood
-Masonry
-Irrigation
-Stone
-Animal Husbandry
-Wheel
This means the following are within reach of a project:
-Watchtowers. We lack the construction experience to make a structure of significant height, but we're close to it.
-Walls. We can do this right now. Not really possible to wall off our farms or the border, but we can wall off a village and evacuate to it when attacked so our warriors don't need to worry about their dependents.
-Ditches. We're GREAT at ditches. A simple defensive ditch saps the momentum of a raid, buying time to react. I think we already have this though. Just need to organize our settlement so they have a defensible configuration instead of agricultural.
And since we have the wheel, forestry and animal husbandry, we can make use of construction material they cannot. Whole logs and bricks can be worked at a distance via animal hauled carts.
Okay I'm going to try and sum up my arguments. This is the part you should prioritize in your response, if you choose to do so.
First, the spirit talkers sent raids. These raids succeeded in killing small settlements and burning farms. How does this fact play into your professional army hypothesis?
It works with my large levy hypothesis because the levy was unformed at the time of the raid, disorganized, and unprepared. By the time they would have gathered and organized for a response, the raid would have finished and moved on.
Second, Given the recent drought would have killed most or all of their previous slaves off, how do you explain their return to strength? Who would have done the farming, and how would they have been able to support their warriors during this time?
I am willing to believe they have a high military, and a culture based around exploiting that stat, but I am entirely unconvinced that they have a professional standing army. That requires certain choices to be made in their past that, to all appearances, they haven't made.
I do believe that they capture slaves and use them to further boost their population and work the farms, I do not believe that they have enough slaves that it forms the foundation of their culture at this relatively early point in time. Is there any part of the story you can point to that suggests an overabundance of, or a reliance on slaves, rather than merely benefiting from them?
[X] Confederate, develop a new position to manage the relations of the tribes
It's better if we integrate over a longer period of time, perhaps after the lowlanders eventually attack in force.
[X] Attempt to speak with the lowlanders and find other means of dealing with the problems
It gives the Chief of Chiefs his first job to do, and it means we aren't attacking into them on their own soil. If diplomacy doesn't work (we have diplo and econ 4), then that means even if they attack us with our military 2 our defensive bonuses on home ground should even out the advantages.
[X] Confederate, develop a new position to manage the relations of the tribes
[X] Stay home, brace for trouble
Well if were going to stay home and brace for trouble, at least we can do it in a active way, as in,
- Build fortifications (and outposts)
- Dams rivers who flow into the enemy area
- Scorch the land after they dry usign a BIG FIRE.
Hmm. If we can get decent stone fortifications up we'd be largely unassailable. We'll have a massive advantage as the defender if they try a direct assault, and their siegecraft is probably shit. They can't starve us out without an extended campaign, either. We're in pretty defensible terrain, on top of that.
That said, it's worth noting that fortifications won't stop them from torching our farmlands and pillaging everything outside of the walls. This is a pretty big weakness if someone does decide to exploit, actually, since so much of our agriculture is based around careful land management.
Stone fortifications are still far away. Stone is intensively difficult to build with by muscle power, especially without the tools needed to gather and shape it.
Mason and miner are extremely difficult jobs, as the update itself said. You'd need someone who spends their full time developing upper body strength and the techniques to work stone into shapes, and entirely new ways of planning to shape stone to what you want. A lot of early stone architecture was mainly religious for that reason. Sure it's solid as hell, but you could build a wooden village for the effort to quarry enough stone to build one house.
I'd also note that torching our farmlands is difficult.
Thank the forest management action. We actively clear out the leaf litter into controlled burns and use them to make fertilizer, theres always water within range in a ditch somewhere and finally raiders trying to burn your stuff aren't paying attention to the warriors who grew up in the area and is now coming to shank you from a tree.
does it? All I could see about this whole slave thing is that they recently started sacrificing people in addition to their usual slave-taking. Nothing about having their entire culture be reliant on having enough slaves...
Especially since the recent drought would have killed them all.
Are their farms organised this way? I'm mostly just working off the latest update here, where it says that groups splinter off and settle nearby after disagreements, and that there are about 6 major tribes or clans at the moment, fighting each other for power.
The farms being organized around these clans aren't quite the same as the knight and serf setup you're suggesting exists.
That explains a lot of the gap in understanding. I'm going by two updates ago added to now.
Earliest lowlander information we have from trader rumors:
-They were the raiders plaguing the traders, who were driven off by our warriors.
-They started out as farmers, but preferred to attack neighbors to loot resources rather than focus on agriculture.
-They wiped out various smaller groups in their area that the traders used to deal with.
Then we got the expedition by Cwryl which revealed that:
-Their organization was nuclear. Villages managed the farmland immediately around the houses.
-Bigger villages were based on richer soil, but could not manage more land than that.
-Clear signs of conflict between their own people.
-Their SOP was to kidnap all the women, girls and boys, then slaughter everyone else and burn the village.
-This was to have the people taken work the land for their warriors, and then to expand into the area of the conflict with a village of their own.
-They routinely suffered starvation and other crop failures, but dealt with it by just expanding into new villages fast enough that they always had new land by the time the old farms failed.
Then we got the post-drought rumors:
-They expanded their slave raids for sacrifices to the spirits.
-The Spirit Talkers attacked villages, but they were replaced within the year by a new group.
Does that actually count as a standing army though? Not that I'm granting you this point, but overseers do not make for professional army level units.
There is little difference, they fight for a living and do little else. They're GOOD at fighting, considering they've rolled over entire cultures in their area, trying to expand faster than their fields failing.
Hmm.
Okay I'm going to try and sum up my arguments. This is the part you should prioritize in your response, if you choose to do so.
First, the spirit talkers sent raids. These raids succeeded in killing small settlements and burning farms. How does this fact play into your professional army hypothesis?
It works with my large levy hypothesis because the levy was unformed at the time of the raid, disorganized, and unprepared. By the time they would have gathered and organized for a response, the raid would have finished and moved on.
Straightforward:
-The lowlanders are not united. They routinely attack each other, and their military strength is directly proportional to the quality of the soil. Thus, the military strength of any given village is proportional to it's size and only the size.
-The lowlanders were starving. All of them. Our warriors got a quarter ration during the drought. Their warriors got worse because of their lack of reserves and their slaves couldn't cut rations!because they were already at minimum! Then the rain washed away their topsoil at it's end.
-The Spirit Talkers never starved at all. When drought came, everyone else brought them food. They were well fed when they attacked the lowlander villages.
Second, Given the recent drought would have killed most or all of their previous slaves off, how do you explain their return to strength? Who would have done the farming, and how would they have been able to support their warriors during this time?
Get new slaves. Raid the other lowlander villages and enslave them, or fail and be enslaved. Slave population replenished from the family of the defeated warriors. Then regular population replenished from children borne by the daughters and wives of the defeated.
You're conceptualizing them as a unified people like ours, but they have no centralization. Every village is maybe 2-4 families of all warriors, with maybe thrice that in farmer slaves, depending on how rich the soil is.
When their youths come of age, the ambitious set out with their brothers and cousins to conquer a village of their own, while the others settle down to work the land(and then starve when the soil wears out 4 generations in). As such, the destruction of one village or another has little significance, it just means the next guy going out there to find their own place to settle doesn't need to stab the locals first, but will be weak until they can gather their own slaves from their neighbors.
It's an old formula, and it worked in many places.
It gives the Chief of Chiefs his first job to do, and it means we aren't attacking into them on their own soil. If diplomacy doesn't work (we have diplo and econ 4), then that means even if they attack us with our military 2 our defensive bonuses on home ground should even out the advantages.
Do keep in mind the significant diplomatic penalty from the culture clash though. Not that it's impossible, but our people are deeply repulsed by how the lowlanders treat the land they work.
