Mmm, to be honest I'm leaning more towards dropping the archers from this raid, while they typically emerge unscathed my memories of their actual effectiveness is that they weren't actually that good. Also did you see my edit in that post about the silver workers plan?
If that's your thinking I've got to ask why your voting for the plan which explicitly encourages clan hunters to come along.
We are working on a generational scaler here, so this will not be one or two raids, but years of harassment.
We probably need to be more ruthless in our wars. For example, we might have been better served attacking Brushcrest during their war with Makar, or settling Lakefort while they were distracted.
I'm decidedly not saying that you need to trade. Makar became great and powerful by nothing but war.
For me it's hoping to drive the nomads away from the lowlands at least for awhile, so that when we rush to put in Menhirs it will actually be taken seriously by our neighbors rather than looking like the tribal civ equivalent of tantruming children claiming a bunch of stuff without having anything actually backing up said claims. This is in effect a show of military force to say, hey, this is our land, don't ignore our existence if your planning on using it like you have been doing previously. I wanted to start the Menhirs last turn but people voted for the silver mine instead, which means the nomads and lowlanders have had longer to go yeah this is our normal stuff not the valley people's stuff, we'll just ignore them when they claim it without backing up said claim.
Menhirs honestly don't do all that much. If we want to make the kind of military statement you're hoping for we need to start being more committed in conflicts, rather than doing essentially minimal damage then retreating to our mountain holds.
They did nothing but war, but they slammed everyone around them so that nobody had the room to grow to challenge them.
A lack of expansion is going to bite us in the ass, especially since the lowlanders have much more room to grow, and they've been having trade with multiple other factions for decades if not centuries. Merely keeping the lowlanders from settling Lakefort isn't good enough in the overall view of things.
I think we will seriously want to consider who to approach about an end to hostilities. Azel just warned us about isolationism, and we all know how that ends.
You are not aware of any villages up in the mountains. As far as you know, the Hersmen / Goat People are entirely nomadic ever since you destroyed Soft Hills.
That doesn't address the problem that we're definitely becoming isolationist. We don't have positive interactions with anyone outside the mountains, we just raid them. This stifles trade and tech development, and it makes our cultural dominance which we were so excited about basically worthless in regards to converting anyone but the White Clans, etc.
You are not aware of their social dynamics.