Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  Do you choose to use 373 units of spiritual energy to immediately diffuse this technology?

  Cost: Axes take 5% longer to make.

  Benefit: Axes need repair half as often.

  Secondary benefit: You’ll stop worrying so much about your brainy people getting brained.

  I wondered how the technology could diffuse instantly through me as the controlling spirit. This only used a small part of the spiritual energy that I had accumulated over the past week, and I of course chose to have this change made.

  It was cool. It was awesome. It was a better stone axe.

  It was not archery.

  Much of the production of stones and axes was used by Marcus who had for the entire first week all of the workers cutting up poles for spears.

  In a game of Civilization spearmen are a second tier advanced technology, which you need bronze working for. And I will admit that what Marcus was drilling the men of the community into was nothing like what Philip of Macedon’s phalanxes looked like.

  But spears are probably humanity’s oldest and most important tool.

  Spears have been the center of hunting technologies since homo erectus ran around the plains of Africa stabbing each other and antelope.

  The classic picture of cavemen wandering around with clubs to beat each other over the head, so that they could drag each other’s women back to their caves to rape into domesticity — and I wonder what the prevalence of that as a picture of man’s natural state says about us, it certainly was not the natural state of my hippie elves — is completely inaccurate.

  Cavemen used spears.

  Yes: Cavemen used spears, not clubs. They used spears like every other group of human warriors, well into the twentieth century. A rifle with a bayonet affixed to the end of it is a short awkward spear, and there are many stories of them being used to kill people even during WWII.

  Knights were not mainly swordsmen, their primary weapon was a spear. Lances are spears.

  Despite the cultural significance of the sword being vastly greater than that of the spear, in actual historical practice a sword was primarily used as a secondary weapon, much like how a handgun’s use compares to that of an assault rifle. It was perfectly normal for civilians to carry swords while shopping, so that they were ready to break into violence if they got into an argument about who thumbed whose nose at who, but carrying an eight foot long pointy stick with a knife attached to the end would have made it harder to carry all the groceries home while keeping the arm of your lady friend.

  On an actual battlefield, the sword was used after the warrior lost or broke his spear.

  I learned this from YouTube.

  YouTube is awesome. Or was. No doubt since my consciousness has been stuck in this other world, YouTube, like everything eventually does, has gone to crap. But I learned everything I know about swords and spears that is actually true from YouTube. I do not think it is breaking the fourth wall too far to suggest that Scholia Gladitoria is a great channel to watch, if you want to learn more about sword fighting and other forms of pointy object murder.

  So Marcus, following the deep-seated human desire to have lots of long sharp pointy things available to stab barbarian thugs who wanted to come and eat us, ordered enough spears made so everyone, man or woman, among the hippie elves had one to fight with and several spares.

  He ordered everyone to sleep with the spear they were issued near them, and to have another spear near where they were working.

  They were constantly drilled in the use of these weapons by Marcus who had them practice throwing extra spears, standing in a line with the spears out, and charging. Spears are thrusting and stabbing weapons where the point of aim can be switched very easily, and Marcus had the warriors arranged in rather thin skirmisher lines, where everyone could stab and then flee quickly.

  When I looked at the status bars of my people, I found that all of the elves were very quickly gaining experience as soldiers, and at using spears. Also I learned that because Marcus was such a great leader, each soldier who was following his orders would be twice as effective.

  I had expected the elves, being hippies and all, would hate militarism. But actually it turned out these were not pacifist hippie elves. Spending time on military drill actually enhanced their morale, not nearly as much, of course, as time spent contemplating the stars, or bowing down in worship to my gem, or even as much as time spent collecting crabs and bashing their heads in for the tasty meat. But they liked the military drill. They liked it a lot more than they liked actually making the spears.

  Once everyone had spears, Marcus demanded at every council meeting that we send out lots of scouts to explore everything. He wanted to find if there were any barbarian encampments anywhere near us, and he wanted to find high-quality flint stones. He wanted to know what routes would be easy for barbarians to come in through, and he wanted to know everything about possible military resources we might find.

  Marcus also wanted to lead the scouting expeditions, because he did not think that any of the elves would be able to deal with a dangerous situation alone.

  Here again I disagreed with his choice, but this time it did not bother him nearly as much. I was terrified of what would happen if a large group of barbarians appeared near the camp while Marcus was not here to defend us.

  If a barbarian horde was about to attack, I wanted him here.

  As soon as enough of the elves had drilled enough to receive on the status sheets the marker for having decent levels of spear proficiency, I sent out groups of five elves at a time to look around, and see what was out there.

  The scout groups were made up of younger elves, mostly men, though there were some women who had the aggressiveness and joy in using spears to want to be one of the actual soldiers.

  I let Marcus select fifty elves to be the primary warriors of the tribe. While everyone spent half the day twice a week training, this group of fifty would be the permanent soldiers. I planned for them to continue training with spears, even after we had archery, so that we would have a disciplined line of soldiers who could fight on the ground, and protect the rest of the elves while they prickled our enemies from a distance.

  I hated losing all of this labor to military drill, but I was more terrified of getting barbarian rushed right now than I was of falling behind whatever tech curve I was trying to keep up with.

  While the elves lived in tents, they would not have very many children. This wasn’t something I could find out directly from the view of looking at individuals, but population growth rates, and fertility rates were visible on the demographic statistics screen, which I of course studied and looked at with a great deal of interest once it became available.

  The screen showed that the elves had a -75% modifier to fertility because of the lack of a settled environment. The longer that it took to prepare the treehouses they wanted to live in, the longer it would take for my exponential expansion through the mass breeding of hippie elves to begin.

  Not that the elves would have a particularly fast exponential growth rate, even in optimal circumstances their population growth rate would be much slower than human populations could grow.

  I desperately wanted archery, but if I assigned large groups of people to think about the nature of wood and strings and hurled spears, which literally was how scientific research was modelled by the world, then they would not be able to drill with Marcus. They would not be able to build the huts to create a settled situation, I would not be able to build up stockpiles of food, and furs, and other preparations for the winter months.

  Also they were very inefficient when they tried to study technologies as specialists, because there were no specialist slots to place them in, like I had for the group of twenty worshippers around the gem, or like the workshops the craftsmen focused on grinding stone axe heads had built for themselves.

  Still, I focused as much of my labor resources as I could on thinking about how to make bows.

  I was convinced that it woul
d be madness to have my people try to fight a barbarian horde as spear wielders. The elves simply did not have the strength to use really big spears, so barbarians would be able to use longer and heavier spears to outrange them.

  Marcus had made for himself an eleven foot long massive spear that was as thick as a man’s wrist bone, and tipped at the edge with a razor sharp piece of flint carved out of the shattered axe head of the barbarian raiding party.

  He looked much scarier than the elves with five or six foot long spears that were sometimes pointed with nothing more than fire hardened wood, but which usually had a crude stone point attached to the end.

  Of course Marcus was much scarier.

  Marcus strongly disapproved of me focusing on developing archery after the men got basic proficiency with spears. Even though I let him keep his fifty soldiers to train as much as he wanted. But half of those fifty were off scouting on any given day.

  But the rest of the tribe he could only drill with for half a day twice a week. I had initially planned to put them to work training once a day, and have them do other tasks the rest of the week, but I had a theory that four hour learning segments were more efficient than eight hour learning segments, and that spreading them out twice a week would give better retention than just having one long session of training with the spears each week.

  They did need regular drill to both improve or retain their skills. The status screens of each person showed a marker when they weren’t using a skill that showed how much the skill declined per day. In the case of training with spears, there was also a fitness measure.

  The first time I saw that skills declined when they weren’t being used, I immediately jumped to look at Marcus’s profile with something close to anxiety: I did not want his vast martial skills to fall apart simply because there was no one for him to spar against who was worth the fight.

  However none of his skills were decaying, and in fact Marcus’s leadership skill was slowly moving from expert to mastery. I figured it out when I looked closer at his long list of traits: Tantalus Graduate: This warrior has learned his skills through blood and pain that have carved the knowledge of how to use weapons so deeply onto his soul. He can never forget any skill he gains.

  Well that was convenient, I thought suspiciously.

  The elves with their merely ordinary, almost human, skills did not show any decline in skill between training periods if it was a three or four day delay, instead of a one week delay, and in fact there would often be increases in how skilled they were over the days they weren’t training, which reflected the consolidation of memories and knowledge.

  So I didn’t lose any time if I made them practice twice a week.

  I experimented with letting Marcus have groups of recruits for eight or twelve hours, and they learned far less than two or three times as much in the extra time.

  So every four days, alternating between morning, afternoon, and evening training sessions a shift of the elves would practice stabbing, charging as a unit, and dodging Marcus while he tried to move slow enough with his eleven foot long spear to let them avoid getting hit hard enough to bruise if they were really good.

  The more intelligent and creative elves were assigned to spend most of their time contemplating archery, and day by day the completion bar on the technology achingly slowly drifted towards full.

  However all of the elves spent some of their time hacking at tree branches with the stone axes. It improved morale to have the unpleasant tasks distributed evenly.

  Marcus was the only one who got out of that, since he was spending twelve hours a day shouting the elves into a semblance of almost skilled fighters.

  I even made the fifty soldiers take their turn at cutting down trees and branches. Marcus had argued that they should be exempted, just like Virtunis had argued that the chief worshippers should be exempted. Sapientus had not argued for those contemplating archery to be exempted, because he was too busy staring hazily at the clouds to notice what the council conversation was about. Numericus didn’t have any opinion on the topic.

  I did not want a caste society to develop where certain groups had better privileges. Perhaps it would have improved the morale of Marcus’s soldiers a little, and perhaps their military sharpness would have been a little higher with the extra days of training, but what military gains I would have gotten would have been balanced by the loss of morale in the rest of the men. More importantly, the elves currently were a society of equals. I wanted that equality to last as long as possible, even though I was sure an aristocracy eventually would develop.

  Chapter Eight

  The scouts constantly discovered useful things.

  Undisturbed herds of deer which they could disturb and return carrying large supplies of meat on their backs. Little ancient ruins that had hoards of gold coins. A different ancient ruin which had a functioning pottery kiln, that was brought back, examined, and from it the elves learned how to make pottery to start storing vegetables, fruit, and salted crab and deer meat for the winter.

  We also found a rich salt deposit, and each week a dozen people were assigned with one or two soldiers to serve as lookouts to go out to the salt deposit and fill up pots full of salt and bring them back to the main encampment.

  After about a month of exploring we found a riverbed with what the scouts, having stoneworking knowledge, immediately recognized as good quality flint stones. We carried almost the entire load of stones over the next week back to the encampment, and had enough stones to keep a dozen specialists busy for a very long time knapping enough edges to affix proper blades to the ends of everyone’s spears.

  Marcus had both a practice spear and a combat spear for everyone, where the practice spear had a dull sandstone head that could not carve a man’s flesh, while the combat spears, with their flint heads that could easily shatter if mishandled, were saved for the possibility of actually needing to kill people.

  And then one day, my favorite group of scouts — it included Arnhelm, the young elf who had responded to my first call to gather together and fight the barbarians. This group was led by a much older but still young elf of 245 years named Hamali — one day this group of scouts found something really impressive.

  You have discovered the hidden mountain temple of the ancient Petrezselyem, with its sheltered orchards and gardens full of parsley, dedicated in worship to the great gods.

  Cool, huh? Seems like your bunch of hippies aren’t the only hippies to ever be in this area. Except that other group of hippies liked to build things. Explore the temple to find all of its secrets and all the hidden treasures within. More importantly, this temple can serve as a second place of power where you can have elves worship you to generate even more spiritual energy. And those orchards might give your people a bit of a variety in their diet, so they don’t grow horns and fur from eating too many deer.

  Woah.

  That was my first thought.

  The sun shined on the tall marble columns of the entrance to the temple, built into the side of the mountain, with wide gaping gates. The rocks around here had a yellowish color and I realized after a minute that the temple I was looking at had an entrance that was almost the same as Petra from Indiana Jones, or Civ 5.

  That was a really good wonder in the game. +1 food and +1 hammers on all desert tiles. If you had a river going through desert hill tiles you could build farms on them and get some amazing city spaces. Add to that the desert folklore pantheon producing culture and you’d have a city that could propel you to any victory type. On top of all that, you got an extra trade route and a free caravan.

  You know, that is all sort of beside the point.

  My mountainside temple was in a wet forested mountainside instead of in the middle of the desert. But I still liked it.

  The marble columns looked like they had not eroded at all, despite the wet environment and regular rainfall.

  I watched the scouts look around as they moved to the open entrance of the complex. The gate gaped thirty fe
et high, and while not vast by the standards of the early twenty-first century, it was still enormous compared to anything near my settlement.

  The scouting party was five elves with three dogs. They all carried six foot long spears, with flint heads from the barbarians weapons, since they were still the best edges we had.

  It took an enormous amount of skill to knap flint stones correctly, and the elves who were specializing in flint knapping had only reached the stage of doing a passable job at the sharp edges — they also tended to waste a lot of the stone. As for the dogs, they had been trained to only bark at dangerous animals, or other humanoids, instead of wildly yapping at every squirrel or bird.

  The men had been trained by Marcus into a passable pretense of alert scouts.

  Marcus liked to jump out of the woods he could somehow hide in despite his size, and scare the daylights out of groups of elves who were practicing as scouts if they didn’t keep a good watch on all sides.

  They slowly walked through the marble opening, with vines growing all around the bottoms and tops of the marble, but unable to find any purchase along the length of the marble.

  The stones of the floor were placed together so tightly and neatly that no plants grew between the cracks. That was impressive even for the twentieth century. Life usually finds a way, and all.

  Once they were through they walked into a vast courtyard which sloped up towards the hills. The gate of the temple opened into a valley, with nearly sheer walls on both sides, aligned so that the spring sun glowed directly into the valley as it rose and fell. Along the sides of the hills and in the gardens in the courtyard there was a profusion of thick green weeds with purple, and yellow, and white, and red flowers. And on each side of the marble flagstones leading away from the gate were orchards of trees neatly placed in squares, with the weeds somehow not choking them off despite the lack of care in this place.