Tribal Politics In the Age Of Exploration

How tribes will function politically in low development populations

This is sort of a companion post to todays programming/development update post. My project today in game development is really fleshing out the tribal phase of Axioms. Several populations in the triple digits are spawned in every game province with very similar ideologies and common development level. They develop based on available food surplus early on.

Obviously like in real life populations who live in better areas will gain surplus and begin to develop faster. So groups in deltas, river valleys, quality coastal regions, and good temperatures. With tweaking I expect it to take about 1000 years for populations to start booming.

Tribal populations in poor areas will be more likely to migrate since they are already itinerant farmers due to poor early agriculture depleting crop capacity faster. They don't use heavy plows, don't add fertilizer, all kinds of things like that. Simple, basic agriculture stuff.

I suspect I'll base some of the ideology on climate for convenience. So forest and hill tribes will be more militaristic, like the early Germanic tribes north of Rome. Populations in coastal and river areas will be more religious, settled, and they'd advance faster cause of better farmland.

I haven’t finalized the ideology spectra yet but the key ones for the early phases, which we’ll call The Era Of Exploration or something include certain stuff. There are beliefs for stuff like pluralism in religion, how positively conflict is viewed, whether populations approve of centralization or devolution more, democracy vs autocracy, feelings about kinship and filial piety, and stuff like that.

I’ve been working on the vassal stuff lately and due to the interconnectedness of Axioms this entails dealing with a lot of other systems at the same time, which I’ll discuss in the development progress post on the other section of the blog. Basically I had to get some of the fancy shit more functional before I could do what I wanted. Plus some UI crap.

So much like classical era tribal people in Axioms the first stage of development is tribal federations between essentially elected leaders. The Romans called them kings or at least the translators did but that isn’t quite right. So populations and their character leaders need a way to sort out the pecking order. Axioms has a lot of character actions that are useful for this from the general pool, just need a couple extra.

So characters can throw feasts, engage in duels, flatter other characters, bribe them, go on hunts and lead raids on other groups. Raids in Axioms are a general and important part of the combat system, as they were in history and as they rarely are in strategy games. Hunts and then feasts are similar to existing games in some ways but they are also more interconnected with things. Axioms has a population sim that involves food and hunts actually catch food.

The way food works is basically that populations can engage in basic hunting and gathering themselves and each province has a sort of non-agricultural capacity as well as an agricultural one. As previously discussed a variety of food increases quality of life/happiness which gives a boost to whoever is in charge. There is also a comparative aspect based on if people under other leadership are doing better.

Populations won’t starve if you don’t produce enough food but they won’t gain happiness or grow either. So hunting gives prestige to the characters who lead and participate and it also gives a boost in the form of food variety. Each population in the game has some moderately important food preferences based on race and culture.

Duels provide prestige to the winner and the loser gets some penalties and this is moderated by ideology. Feasts are similar to hunts except that they don’t produce food. The primary benefits is to raise prestige and opinion and respect. I should note that characters have prestige, honor, trust, fear, and respect stats. Opinion is held by and directed towards far more things as thus I consider it a separate thing.

Characters also have stats that impact actions in various ways like might and charisma. In combination with various actions, stats, and and so forth you or npc characters can makes plays for leadership. Note also that the political options are all available for tribal societies. You can form conspiracies, employ propaganda, make deals and all that. Of course with limited surplus wealth as a low development society that stuff is harder to provide resources for.

Characters can lead their own raw population into battle, as a default unit type, both with and without actually military units. This matter since low development societies can’t really afford specialized warriors in permanent armies. Different pop types are different units with moderately different capabilities. You can lead troops on raids ala King Of Dragon Pass, on conquest missions, or on more specific military actions.

I haven’t yet decided how I’m going to handle women and children in populations. Do I split into 3 groups, do I have average age, and so forth? It isn’t super crucial. There are a few actions that affect baby generation and some impacts on what it means to have 200 vs 2000 pop and so forth. This isn’t required for other mechanics to function.

Groups will need relations within a tribe as well as confederation in order to achieve greater goals. Turns in Axioms are a month, currently, which allows for a campaign season type situation. Planting, harvesting, etc. Tribal populations is not an actual hard coded thing, it just describes small low surplus groups with more militaristic ideologies and smaller polity sizes. Populations will sort of develop over time into higher pop, more specialized, more complex groups. Or devolve if disaster strikes I suppose.

I mentioned in a previous post that the lowest level of organization groups can coexist with the highest level. So outside of a strong centralized state tribal groups 8000 years after game start can be pretty similar to those 100 years later.