Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  The experience from this battle has unlocked your first level of martial tradition.

  What do you wish your tribe to focus upon:

  The brilliant use of terrain — you gain a 10% boost in combat efficiency in all terrains except flat open ground.

  Ambush tactics: Your warriors will be much better at setting ambushes, hiding, jumping from cover and then getting away once more.

  Woodsmen: You will have a 20% bonus when fighting in the woods.

  This was a hard choice for me.

  Obviously the first choice, the generic general boost of being good at using terrain I dismissed immediately. We had not started by getting the biggest general boost, and we would not continue by getting the biggest general boost.

  No the question was whether to take ambush or woodsman.

  I liked both. I liked both a lot. I wished I could take both of them, but I couldn’t.

  For the foreseeable future woodsman was roughly the same as a straight 20% bonus to my combat capabilities. Most battles would occur in the woods, not in the open ground.

  Though part of the last battle had been fought in the open ground, not in the woods. The last bloody conflict where Marcus charged them like a madman, instead of staying put on the hillside.

  I would have only gotten a bonus with woodsman to 70% of the fighting so far. I’d be forced with woodsmen to make a very strong effort to fight enemies while they were still in the woods, and if I ever built strong fortifications, woodsmen wouldn’t help us if we faced a siege. Neither would ambush either, probably. In the case of a siege the terrain bonus would be helpful, since it would multiply the benefit I got from fighting behind fortifications.

  Of course I’d have people outside of the settlement hiding in the woods and trying to ambush enemy foraging parties during a siege.

  And that was the answer right there.

  Fighting in the woods made it easy to lay ambushes, but my big victory had been because of the use of constant ambushes. A society that was better at setting ambushes would be better at winning battles with very light losses.

  I suspected that it would take more effort to use this ability, and it would be far more likely that once I took ambush, I’d someday end up in a war where I didn’t get any benefit from it at all. But in the wars that it did help me, it would help me a lot. Also ambushes were intrinsically defensive, and they intrinsically took advantage of the fact that I knew my own territory, and that in any wars I would expect my opponents to come to me, instead of going out to fight them.

  Also, I could probably figure out some way to use an ambush while stuck behind fortifications. For example making a part of the walls’ defenses look temptingly weak, and getting the enemy to launch a night attack which I was perfectly prepared for. If a big civilized army marched right through my territory, and stayed together in a neat doom stack, I wouldn’t be able to fight them in the woods, but I might still find some way to use ambush.

  So maybe it was even more flexible than woodsman.

  And ambush seemed like more of a skill tool than a noob tool.

  To be honest, and this was like the way I’d regenerate maps when I played Civ until I liked the starting territory, I preferred simple noob tools that didn’t take much brain power or difficulty to use in play. I played games because I liked seeing numbers get bigger and to explore the edges of a sandbox, not because I wanted to push myself to the edges of my mental abilities.

  But succeeding here was important. And I had all the time in the world — or close to it at least — to make plans and to figure out how to guide my enemies into ambushes. And Marcus and my other people could look for ambushes on their own, and I could boost their mental abilities while thinking about plans.

  I should go for the high skill option and get good enough to use it, because this was too important to not try my hardest.

  So I selected ambush tactics as the first martial tradition of my people.

  The morale of everyone following the battle was sky high. The bonus to morale from battles couldn’t make people blissful, but for the next few weeks a lot of the elves went about their daily work — even grinding sandstone axes and chopping down trees — with a smile on their mouths, and a whistle in their hearts.

  There were piles of barbarian bodies to dispose of.

  Martialus was now placed into second in command of the military, now that Marcus had been returned to his place as the chief leader. He thought eating their bodies was a good idea, and he would not listen to anything anyone else said against the idea.

  Sapientus, the science advisor — or maybe the contemplation of the stars advisor — was convinced by his arguments that cannibalism would help the elves contemplate the skies, and the two of them formed a block opposed by everyone else in the council meeting.

  Or at least I thought everyone else opposed. Numericus wore his squirrel skin cap and cowered in the edge of the gem room and said almost nothing. However, when Martialus loudly exclaimed that there were a hundred bodies out there for us to use as we wished, and we’d best use them for food, Numericus corrected him by pointing out that there were in fact one hundred and three barbarian bodies, in addition to the eleven elvish bodies.

  Everyone agreed we should bury our own heroic dead.

  I was pretty sure from Numericus’s disgusted expression as he listened to Sapientus and Martialus that he did not want to eat the corpses of the dead. I wondered if in addition to sadism and puppy torturing, there was some hidden trait, too horrible to be revealed to me, in Martialus’s character sheet marking him as a cannibal.

  Most likely though he just wanted to do this because it was the closest thing he could do to being cruel to barbarians now that they were all dead.

  Also, it wouldn’t be very nice to the other elves either…

  The decision was made by the council, without my needing to interfere — though I would have if they had decided to become cannibals — that we would burn the barbarian bodies, since digging graves was too much work. Especially now that the ground was much harder due to the colder weather.

  Burning the dead seemed appropriately respectful to our glorious enemies, and all.

  Marcus had excellent morale too after the battle. And his opinion of me was now neutral, with just a tiny bit of positive feeling.

  The bastard.

  I’d used ambush tactics to beat the barbarians here while only losing eleven dead and three disabling injuries. This victory was much better than the one he had planned on. And all he was now was just neutral towards my guidance.

  I felt like I was dancing in a fairy circle while high on weed and something else at Burning Man, and happy about it.

  I knew why Marcus didn’t yet really admire me.

  I didn’t deserve it.

  I had made a bunch of dumb decisions, and our easy and clean victory was partly just luck. Had the barbarians been looking upwards and spotted the trapped trees, they probably would have tried starting fires, if nothing else. Or maybe a different tactic I could not currently think about.

  Also it took more than one victory to establish that I was good at finding routes to victory.

  However in all this time, I never could forget those who I had lost. I hoped I never would forget them.

  We gained several other big advantages from the battle. All of my people, even the ones who were in units that saw no combat, or which just ran away, gained a little combat experience, and after the battle I was able to see in their skill trees that the combat experience skill had been unlocked, and they’d all gained at least the first level of that skill.

  The group of a hundred that had been led by Arnhelm and Marcus and did most of the fighting had the first three levels that gave them the rank titled “veteran”.

  The combat veteran trait didn’t do anything to training, but it boosted the speed at which they reacted to sudden negative events, their alertness in combat, their efficiency at damaging enemies — the description of the skill said that this bec
ause veterans were more ready to put killing force behind a blow against an enemy, while untested troops shied away from actually hurting a fellow person — and it enormously reduced the morale loss from seeing comrades killed.

  It made sense to me that the world system distinguished between the specific skills you had as a soldier, a general skill at soldiering, and being a combat veteran. It was always well known that there simply was something different about being on the verge of death, and trying desperately, with all your muscles, all your brains, and all your friends to kill a bunch of people who wanted to destroy you and your tribe. A real fight taught you things and changed the mind in a way that no amount of drilling, training or practice could.

  We also looted their bodies. They had excellent axe and spear heads and they wore lots of deer hide. We always liked having more deer hides to wear and to turn into tents, especially as the first snow of the year came two weeks after the barbarians were defeated in a freak snowstorm that made the air much colder than it was for the three weeks after.

  The thing that worried me enormously were minted coins in the pouches of a dozen different barbarians, including their leader.

  It wasn’t just abandoned ruins.

  We were not alone here, as civilized people. There were others in this world, others who used Bronze Age technology while we were still in the Stone Age. Others who had an economy sophisticated enough that they bothered to melt down metals and press them into little round pieces with a crudely stamped leader’s face on them.

  It scared me.

  I didn’t think that barbarians could overrun me, but it was unfair — we had opponents who had a more advanced start than me, and their city states or kingdoms, or whatever they were, most likely had the power to currently crush us like an egg.

  And I knew nothing about them.

  We also found small precious stones in their bags, a few pearls, and a couple of tiny diamonds.

  I hoped they were like AIs given advanced starts. They would be dangerous and require clever thinking to get around, but they wouldn’t be clever in the way a human was.

  I also sort of doubted that I would be that lucky.

  The final bonus I got from the battle was the most important: I finally got archery.

  Or well, I got it two days after the fight.

  A battle like this was an eureka moment in Civ 6 for my military skills. It caused huge boosts in how much we knew about how to solve the problems that we had faced in the battle.

  I got immediately afterwards an ambush technology: Camouflage and Concealment. I also got a bunch of research points deposited into several other ambush technologies.

  Further, the research points I’d get from studying these technologies would also go up 50% faster because of the martial specialization in ambushing I had taken.

  And I then found that an entire tree of technologies was only available because of my martial specialization — and that the system had not explained this key feature of how the upgrades worked to me.

  The dick.

  Now I was wondering just what technologies were hidden behind the woodsman tech choice. I was pretty sure they would be good stuff just like the unlocked ambush techs were really good things.

  Finally, all of the javelin throwing had boosted my archery tech to the point that I was told that if I kept the focus on archery the way I had, there was a 2% chance of it popping every day.

  And then archery popped on the third day after the battle, much sooner than I had expected, though there was nothing odd about the statistics.

  Arnhelm was the one who discovered it.

  He had not three, but four levels of combat experience now, which marked him as an experienced veteran. Which apparently was different than a veteran soldier, presumably because the system wanted to mess with me by pretending not to know that veteran literally means something like experienced. This was more than anyone else in the community had, except of course Marcus, whose combat veteran score was, of course, the highest possible.

  A few days after the battle Arnhelm was checking over with several other men all of the throwing javelins we’d recovered from the battlefield, and deciding if they were still usable, or repairable, perhaps by just replacing and retying the twine that kept the spear head attached to the pole or if the flint head was unusably damaged and should be tossed aside for other uses.

  And then suddenly he swore as he held a pole that had been worked smooth, and then laughed, a menacing laugh that promised death to the next enemies we would see.

  And the popup appeared — I usually now liked popups.

  When I first went to college, in the early 2000s, I did something dumb enough with my first laptop computer, that popups constantly appeared from random ads, and I would click them closed one by one.

  You have discovered archery

  As the ancient Kurds said: Do not throw the arrow which will return against you.

  You don’t throw them because you shoot them with a bow.

  Your warrior has been inspired by the late carnage and battle. He is a man who does not like to fight fair. He has come close to death too many times, and seen too many friends die. He wants to be able to stay further away from his enemies.

  He wants to be that sniper guy who just kills everyone without ever being seen by them, while they get more and more frustrated and angry, and don’t realize that their real problem is just that they are bad, and it isn’t actually about how good their opponent is. And eventually they just quit trying.

  You remember how you “played” first person shooters? Arnhelm wants to do that to your enemies, and now he will be able to unleash death from afar with the bow. You have the most advanced of Stone Age murder technologies.

  He’s been thinking about this for a long time, and seeing the javelins in action, thrown again and again, pushed his mind into the arrangement that at last he figured out how to do it. In addition to the military advantage, hunters armed with arrows will be twice as productive.

  This was good. This was really good.

  But I still worried for what the future would bring.

  The fights we faced would only become worse and worse.

  And despite everything, the dead in the last fight were nearly 1% of my total population. Hamali and the lost scouting group meant 1.5% of my starting population, and so far the new pregnancies and births would barely make up for the losses of the first year.

  I really hoped that we had earned a period of peace to start an exponential growth curve.

  I spent almost as much spiritual energy as I’d used in the fight to spread the knowledge of how to make bows to all of my craftsmen and how to use them to all of the soldiers.

  Most of the bows were smaller weapons, with relatively light draw weights. There was no serious armor that needed to punctured through, and even the strongest elves could not use much more than a fifty pound draw.

  However, one bow was much, much more impressive. It was a huge warbow made with a seven foot long stave for Marcus. He proved my expectation of being brilliant at everything by striking a target two hundred fifty yards away.

  And then he hit a target that was on the far side of a hill which he could not actually see. He used the spiritual blessing I gave him, combined with how I could see his target, through the eyes of another elf, to function like artillery spotting. Then the massive draw weight of his oversized bow allowed him to create a perfect arc to the target. Marcus pulled back the arrow, released the twanging string, and the shaft hit exactly where he wanted it to a fifth of a mile away.

  Badass.

  Marcus’s opinion of me might be neutral, but I was very approving of him.

  I had at this point following both the battle and the development of archery two primary goals. I wanted to get a settled home for everyone that was large enough that they would feel comfortable getting frisky and making babies. The elves were slow at reproducing, so the sooner they started the better.

  The other thing I really wanted wa
s to make sure I trained everyone in the community in the use of the bows.

  After everyone had bows, I gave Marcus a full month where he had four hours of everyone’s time each day to train them. I empowered the people with the training blessings as they did so, allowing my store of spiritual energy to fall to just a hundred thousand units.

  Spiritual energy was a huge boost to the value of archery. Archers with a large blessing could aim with vastly more precision and speed. However this wasn’t enough to allow them to consistently hit enemies who were really far away, even accounting for how it was usually impossible to find corridors to aim down that went more than thirty to fifty yards in the thick forest.

  Arrows are bigger, bulkier and slower than bullets. Unpredictable wind gusts will change their flight profile far quicker than that of a bullet. Marcus could still shoot an arrow hard enough to hit at the edge of his vision, but even he could not consistently hit a man at such distance, because there were too many random chances for skill to account for them all.

  I am quite sure those stories about Robin Hood hitting an arrow through the back at hundreds of paces are simply mythical. No one could aim that well, not consistently.

  Of course it is no surprise that such stories exist.

  They sound seriously cool.

  And Robin Hood is the protagonist of his story, and if there is one thing that characterizes protagonists in fiction more than anything else, it is that they have unusual luck, whether good or bad.

  While we were training with the bows, my flint knappers were very busy, spending the whole day after they finished their assigned training period, every day, plying their craft, and I had to send several big groups of elves to collect more stones to bring back to the settlement for knapping.

  Flint is hard and sharp, but also very brittle, and stone arrowheads often shattered or splintered if they hit a rock, or even a hard tree trunk at the wrong angle. We used deer hide targets, with a human figure painted on with deer’s blood, as the target for shooting practice so that the soft target mostly protected the arrowheads when the archer hit, but, alas, especially in these early weeks, often the archer did not hit.