Part 49: Fire Season

Going for marriage has won by a hair!



Well, we tried.





It's now Fire season. The weather is hot and the crops more or less take care of themselves, so Fire is the traditional time for raiding. You'll note that the weaponthanes are suddenly feeling confident - we haven't fought anything yet, so I guess they're just happy about the free weaponthanes from Tarsh.


In the vote from back in Sea season, exploring and building a watch tower were almost tied. To move things along, I'm going to build the watch tower now. Also, here's something I forgot to mention earlier: The game doesn't default to having all our weaponthanes on patrol, and this is for a reason. Weaponthanes who are busy patrolling don't have time to train, and they'll start grumbling at you if you try to stick all of them on patrol for too long.

But enough about that. No events occured after building the watch tower, so let's raid! We'll be doing a proper raid for now - cattle raids are really just a small bunch of warriors sneaking onto another clan's tula to steal their cows. Nobody really cares about you doing this since every clan does it. If your thieves get caught, it turns into a battle, but such battles are nowhere near the scale of a full raid.


This is the screen we launch all our raids from. You can see that the only nearby clan that doesn't like us is the Vostang, but we can raid any clan without angering them a whole lot as long as we don't attack them over and over again. We have no idea how strong the other clans are - sometimes ringmembers who are skilled in Combat can give you an idea, but the ring's advice here is all just "we have enough weaponthanes to go raiding".

We can also set the number of weaponthanes, footmen, and auxiliaries to send. A bigger force isn't necessarily better - we still need people back home to guard the stead, and larger forces are more likely to be spotted and met with a full defense from the other clan. It's always a good idea to send along auxiliaries, because they help prevent deaths and wounds among your warriors. I'll be handling this myself unless goons are very eager to send a particularly large/small force.

Note that we can only raid clans that are either nearby or feuding with us, which means we can only choose from the following: Vostang(feuding with us, and nearby), Kardarvi(feuding with us, not nearby), Wolf(allied with us), Blue Jay, Jenestni, Orlundi, Six Brothers, Squat Oak, Undaroli, Wildcat, and Woodpecker. Trying to raid clans that aren't nearby can be tricky, because that requires us to travel across an uninvolved clan's land first, and they're not always happy about that.

Who should we raid?

And while we're at it, what are our general goals for the rest of the year? I'll make sure we see a bit of trading/diplomacy and sacrificing to the gods for mysteries no matter what the vote is, just so that we can see everything. But that's not enough to take up a full year, so we should set some goals now to move things along.