Settling Down Or Packing Up Camp: Nomads, Tribes, And How Food And Terrain Shapes Societies
How can we make nomads and travelers and itinerant tribal societies really cool? Easily.
Introduction
It doesn’t matter what kind of “historical”, or as I like to call them “Earth-themed”, strategy game you play these days. One problem remains constant above all. Playing different societies does not involve engaging in different gameplay. It is a famous experience in civilization to try and stack every historical wonder in a single city. You can even do this in Civ6, which arguably has the most real map based variation.
But even there, when you play Egypt you get +15% ancient wonder cost, but you don’t explore how or more importantly *why* Egypt is known for their large religious/state construction projects. There’s nothing particularly Egyptian about the experience except that you might start with a lot of flood plain tiles in a desert. Although basically every Civ can both find/settle and thrive in that setup pretty quickly after the game starts.
Civilization *does* provide some historical education. I once won a round of Latin/Classic “Quiz Bowl” because I read the Civpedia entry about the Ptolemaic dynasty that was attached to the Pharos Lighthouse. It’s been a while since I was in school and playing Civ 3 but I believe that is the relevant entry. But anyone can build that or the pyramids as well. Playing Egypt, in 3 or 6 is not meaningfully distinct from playing any other one of the eponymous civilizations.
I learned a lot about the Sejm and other fascinating aspects of Polish history from some of the more popular current scions of the historical strategy genre. Chonky Lithuania was a revelation for someone educated in America. But even in that series it doesn’t really mean much to play Poland instead of Aquitaine, and the Sejm is actually just a few painful modifiers and an event chain, and not something you truly interact with.
Both the more popular modern grand strategy games and the more classic Civ and clones put a lot of stock in “culture”, but this may be the most abstract feature of all. The things that fall under the umbrella of culture functionally don’t exist. Why did the Egyptians build so many great monuments? What is the difference between the riverine agriculture of the Nile and the more rain based agriculture of Italy or Gallia? Why was Roman citizenship distinct from that the of the Greeks and their contemporaries in Carthage or Anatolia? None of these games address this at all. How did Byzantium differ from Rome? Who knows?
Axioms Of Dominion doesn’t even have a mechanic called “Culture”. It attempts to provide mechanical and systematic capabilities so that you can experience the constituent parts of what we call culture or tradition and you can see concretely how these things created the societies they did and the famous aspects of those societies. In this post I’ll be addressing primarily the different types of agriculture and also pastoralism and nomadic life and how that created the iconic traits of famous historical societies, and how Axioms grapples with modeling them.
River World
Ancient Egypt is one of a few unique ancient societies in that it powers agriculture with a single giant river and a seasonal floodplain. The river both renews the soil and provides the moisture for crops to grow. Not only did this riverine agriculture provide enormous amounts of food given the labor input and the land involved but when the flood was happening and nothing could be done for farming that is when the Egyptians, using mostly regular workers and not slaves, engaged in their various monumental construction projects.
Indeed many famous monuments existed besides the pyramids. Not only colossi and sphinxes but also giant artificial lakes and funerary temple complexes. The so called Valley of the Kings became the primary spot for tombs after the Egyptians maxed out the art of pyramid construction and no longer able to build larger and larger pyramids moved on to a new method. Other societies built something that could be called a pyramid although they usually lacked the majesty of the greatest of the Egyptian monuments.
Agriculture in Egypt, and other riverine civilizations, was simply less work for a given amount of food and this is why the most major societies evolved around great rivers. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Bengal and Indian societies and of course the Chinese empires centered around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. These places required far less technological sophistication and intensive agriculture to support large populations.
Consider that Finland was incredibly lightly populated until heavy and sophisticated heavy plows were invented. This is an extreme example of how lack of intensive agricultural capacity shaped the development of Europe and the inland sea. Roman state activities were focused on more practical matters than massive monuments in most cases, due to their good but not incredible agricultural capacity and the more intensive requirements.
The Grass Ocean
Meanwhile the steppes were places where settled agriculture was very difficult. Here we see the old world version of the Great Plains. Ideal conditions for a pastoralist and nomadic society. The per land area carrying capacity of these regions was much lower. Additionally societies had to be on the move continuously depleting excess forage before heading to the next location is a sort of circular or elliptical pattern, allowing the previously used areas to refresh themselves.
This lifestyle, as well as the lack of stable paths for anything like a road is what caused the need for almost all of the populace to have animal handling and riding capability. Additionally the lack of large and complex settlements relative to riverine societies created a situation was game hunting was both more useful and wild animals weren’t driven away from the populace because of the constant movement. Riding and archery were uniquely valuable in thes environments for a much larger proportion of the population.
Additionally the lack of stable settlement and static agriculture is theorized by some to have hampered the evolution of society into high state capacity autocracy. And far away would be master would struggle to track their people and create standard measures of taxation. It was also more difficult to support large populations in specific places. Indeed the logistics of nomadic groups was much more like that of an army on the march, quickly depleting local forage and food supplies.
The wide open terrain also allowed for many groups to connect at specific parts of their ranges and routes and the concepts related to land ownership were quite different, similar but not identical to the concepts of the plains natives in America.
Wealth was also measured in livestock and could more easily be imapcted by raids. You can burn a field but you can’t take it with you, and harvesting needs to happen at specific times and requires a long continuous effort during which you can’t move compared to stealing livestock which is mobile. While settled societies sometimes moved armies with “meat on the hoof” as part of the supply train, they were also farm more limited in this aspect vs horse and livestock cultures.
The Primeval Forest
Classical Germany, much like pre-colonial America, had large areas covered in continuous forest. Northern Germanic tribal societies practiced a relatively unique method of settled agriculture. They would employ localized slash and burn methods to create a temperorarily fertile soil for small scale farming and they’d move after a period when they’d depleted the natural and ash based nutrients in the soil.
They could be called something like itinerant farmers. They of course additionally could engage in foraging in the forests around their short term settlement. Their agriculture was much more labor intensive and limited than riverine agriculture or even open field rain based agriculture.
I’ve made a few posts relating to the social and political aspects of these societies and I did quite a bit of reading on them because I think they themselves and also their interaction with the imperial societies like Rome are very interesting.
Modern scholarship disputes any sort of pan-Celtic religious or cultural institutions but they *are* all shaped by similar geographic and agricultural forces. The laws of life in Ireland or Teutoberg or Gallia are not *that* different. Just as the Greeks or Romans and even to soem degree Phoenicians had similar religions and ideas of the world so did the so called “Celts” and especially the pan-European forest based societies.
Systematic Failures Of Design
Now that we’ve addressed some of the basic factors that impacted the lives of certain subsets of ancient societies we can talk about how existing strategy games fail. Why do countries lack flavor outside of historical quotes and silly digital animatronic figures ala Civ 6 or CK3? When you play Egypt if you look beyond some art assets and production values the *gameplay* experience differs little from that of Rome or the Aztecs or India.
While the Civilization games are actually a little better than the grand strategy that came after them they are still mostly just modifiers but with slightly more map presence and flavor. You have a unique building and some terrain food/production modifiers but all the actions you take are the same. Build a couple generic buildings based on tiles and a few units.
In Civ 6 we see every society building a pasture on an animal tile once they get the tech and then that is that. And there’s no cultural variance based on who does it aside from +1 food from nation or religion or civic. Additionally there’s no real *mechanics* associated with pastures. It is just a tile improvement. Having 10 pastures vs 10 quarries doesn’t really feel any different except one has slightly more food or stone in their city.
So called grand strategy games don’t even engage with these things at all besides a +10% horse archer or cavalry combat bonus. And we don’t see much difference between unique horses like step ponies vs Arabians vs draft horses or w/e.
In fact I would argue that not having meaningfully mechanically rich game systems for logistics and food production that connect with how militaries work or how taxation or administration work are fundamental failures of design. How can you experience any flavor or verisimilitude related to playing a specific historical society when the simulation does not contain the basic facts of geography and culture which create their identity?
Material Circumstances Create Culture
Not only do cultural skills and traits like horsemanship or archery or sailing derive from the geographical and material circumstances but also religion. The god of the sea was one of the triumvirate in Greek and Roman religion whereas the gods of the forest or the beasts predominated in Celtic and Germanic religions. Wonder why? Who knows. Certainly not our game designers. The Egyptians built so many massive monuments and temples because they had the food and the off-time. The American school year schedule is based around the spring sowing and fall harvest and winter holidays.
It is impossible to make meaningfully distinct societies and experiences and gameplay mechanics if you are eliding core aspects of what made a society what it was. Religion, culture, military development, logistical advantages and disadvantages. When you create a game where all material requirements are abstracted to “gold” or even “gold and shields”, where incredibly distinct societies all use the same abstract mechanics, then of course there is no immersion and no distinct flavor. Scythians start with lots of cow tiles to build static pastures on and Egyptians start with lots of floodplains to build irrigation and so forth doesn’t allow the player to engage with and certainly not shape the experience of the society they are playing as.
King Of Dragon Pass is a game about fantasy pastoralists and so the key military mechanic is livestock raiding and punitive expeditions. That creates a flavor that a germanic tribe or steppe society in a grand strategy game can’t possibly compete with because you just have a tribal settlement instead of a castle holding. And no one has crops or livestock. Different cultures don’t have difference farming or campaign seasons, and indeed there are none of those things at all.
Expanding The Experience
Many people ask why Axioms needs to complicate the game with a city builder style resource system or a city builder/rpg/mmo blended crafting system. Well because then you can have a meanungful logistical system with the iconic trio of Food, Fodder, and Firewood. Your army can only engage in a realistic, magic aside, expedition or campaign to achieve plausible goals.
Conflict can engage with geographical features like rivers or seas vs forests. Trade can be a detailed and important system and you can represent the causes of conflict and the limitations. Marches across the world and total war can be restricted for understandable and flavorful reasons.
Different societies in Axioms will have mechanically different economic, military, and religion experiences. If someone turn off magic for a classical history mod you could actually feel like you were playing Rome and expanding the power of the legions or Egypt where you dealt with the cultural drive and economic limitations related to building monuments for prestige and religious purposes. When you were playing a steppe society you’d actually have the advantages and limitations of horse archer armies.
Societies could have ideologies and dietary preferences and limitations. Different religions could have different offerings and grave goods and gods connected to their material culture.
If you were playing with full fantasy gameplay enabled then coastal or riverine societies would have logical magical focuses related to water or wind. Mountainous cultures would focus on earth shaping or metal manipulation.
Characters would other characters in similar societies and circumstances due to their skill at or interest in riding or hunting or poetry or dueling or swimming. All of the things that would otherwise need to be hand scripted and which could feel arbitrary could be concretely connected to the wider simulation, to the map, and to the narrative.
Nomadic Mechanics
One unique thing about Axioms is the way it handles map modes and “province control”. Specifically multiple polities can exist within the same province and the primary political mapmode defines “control fraction” rather than just painting a province the color of the nominal “owner”. Additionally not only multiple populations including those with distinct owners but also multiple combat capable forces can coexist within a province based on the “stances” of the combat forces and their ability to both easily locate each other and bring their enemy to battle.
This is relevant for nomadic or itinerant societies because it means that “leaving” a province doesn’t cost you some arbitrary advantage. Non permanently settled societies and populations will be able to move back and forth between provinces or follow long winding migration routes across multiple provinces before circling back eventually to previously visited provinces. Moreover both armies and full populations on the move can travel across many provinces unless they are actively obstructed, in the case of, say, one-way migrations.
Mechanically this will be partially the same as how raiding works as described in the post linked below:
It is even possible to set up various agreements through the “commitment” system which I’ve previously described to provide for travel/migration rights on a one off or continuous basis or for Roman style “barbarian” settlement and refugee travel.
I put a lot of work into the mechanics and systems for hill people or steppe tribes because Axioms is a game about replicating the experience of fantasy novel protagonists and/or major characters and this is a popular set of tropes, including stuff like having a single “neutral trade city” hidding away in a religiously or culturally significant location. And of course the Mongols had a sort of neutral administrative city tucked away in Central Asia in real history as well.
Similarly migratory itinerant forest tribes will be able to travel, usually with a reduced range and lower frequency between provinces as they deplete the soil capacity of their temporary slash and burn forest settlements.
Socially pastoral and steppe societies will often spend a lot of time and energy on raids and other activities relatively unique to them, somewhat similar to what is portrayed in King Of Dragon pass. I’ve discussed before the social culture of northern germanic tribes during the classical era. This is the other side of the coin from the feasting and glory focused raids on settled societies.
You can refer to the posts above related to the germanic forest tribes mostly commonly engaged with the Romans.
While I haven’t written a specific post related to it I did a similar amount of research and effort on mechanical support for the “great migration” tribes like the vandals and the goths and the huns.
Conclusion
I went to quite a bit of effort in both programming and research to support distinct, flavorful gameplay differences between various kinds of societies. As far as I’m aware no existing game allows for this diversity of gameplay or the effort to provide a historical basis for the distinctions between these groups and to simulate those differences in a concrete way.
I’m pretty hopeful that unlike my creation of Secrets, back in my original 2012-2016 work, or my explanation of and implementation of “social occasions” in 2022, though the overall system dates back to the original design work, this content will not be implemented by some other developer before I am ready to release the game. That would be a big bummer for me. I really want Axioms to contain a large selection of completely unique experiences. Even if my implementations of Secrets and Social Occasions are, IMNHO, superior to those of games is semi-adjacent genres.
Note that as discussed in some of my earliest posts on this blog, this level of differentiation extends to riverine vs regular settled societies, to seafaring societies, and so forth. I’m considering another more detailed post on coastal seafaring groups beyond the existing blue/brown water posts.