In history, armor eventually became good enough that distance projectile weapons basically were useless for directly injuring the enemy elites. Instead archers basically were a nuisance that forced them to always wear uncomfortable armor. Also bows could kill their horses and less wealthy servants.
Walls of shields were another good tactic that made ranged weapons not that useful.
However I knew that my elves would find ways to continue to win wars against enemy forces, and this was why I was very glad by now that I’d gone for the ambush skill instead of a woodsman skill. Even a really powerful army, for example the Roman legions, could be whittled down when they had no ability to get at their enemies. In this thick forest it would be very difficult for an organized force with a shield wall to march in a good formation, and the elves could wait for them in the trees to show an opening, and then attack, and fade back away before being caught.
If an enemy launched headlong charges to try to kill the elves who sniped at them, they would open themselves to ambushes. If they had lots of their own bowmen, my elves would know to target their bowmen, and to only shoot from places where they had very good coverage from the trees, and where they would be able to run away along a line that was protected from return fire by the arrows.
However, the next group I would face, would not be in bloody battle.
After ten years, a group arrived in my forest who were not trying to kill and eat my people.
Chapter Twenty
Let me set the scene for you: A line of forty people, about ten of them carrying the long spears of barbarian warriors, looking alert and angry. Many of them had collections of javelins in hand, waiting to hurl onehanded at any enemies who appeared. And some of the spear men had hide shields slung over their backs.
However this was clearly not a party coming to attack me.
More than half of the men, instead of carrying weapons, carried giant woven sacks over their backs, and they all stooped under the burden of carrying these heavy sacks.
There was a group of seven in the back, bearing sacks that looked twice as heavy as those of the others, and with ropes tied loosely around their necks connecting each man to the next, and this line of men was led by a muscled and scarred man who had a missing eye that gaped openly at the forest, with no eye patch. He swore regularly at the tied up men.
Slaves.
This whole party was led by a tall, jolly fat man with a huge grey beard that stuck in every direction. He happily hopped along the trail singing a song that was translated to me as Expressions of peacefulness and desire to trade.
And then after I’d watched this group through the eyes of the two scouts in a platform near the southern border for several minutes, the moment the man leading them saw, despite the camouflaging branches and leaves that grew up around the watch platform, my two scouts up there, he waved at them. A new popup appeared:
First Trade Mission
You and your elves are going to get so ripped off by these people. You thought all this time that it was great that they were spiritual and could give you all of those sweet, sweet spiritual energy points that you use to let them learn faster, fight better, and contemplate the mysteries of murdering people from afar better.
But they are hippies. And if there is one thing that is true about hippies, no matter where they are from, they don’t know the value of money. Or most of them don’t. The ones who do are usually drug dealers. Their customers also don’t know the value of money.
All your elves have a minus 50% modifier to trade. I wonder just how much they are going to give away when this group of traders arrive all the way into your settlement.
Do you wish to attack all peaceful traders entering your settlement, thus giving you their stuff, and a 50% bonus to the value of the resources you find in your own territory, from autarchy?
Or do you wish to invite the traders into your lands, so that you can get ripped off by them? After all, there is a sucker born every minute, and you can make the saying come true!
As tempting as this made the idea of just murdering them and taking all of their stuff (and freeing their slaves) before they could cheat me of all my stuff, I knew in the long run establishing trade was a much, much better idea.
I ordered the watchmen down from the trees to peacefully greet the line of traders and lead them inwards towards the home settlement, though they would then return to the platform as soon as a much larger group of elves, that would be led by Marcus, met them to escort the traders the rest of the way to the village.
However, the elves could not understand the traders, and the traders could not understand the elves. And then as I became frustrated watching the confused pointing and shouting between the two groups, another new popup came:
Bigger council meetings!
It is time to add two new members to your list of advisors. You should find someone who is good with a talent for languages and negotiating to be your foreign advisor. You know the guy who talks to foreigners, and convinces them that everyone wants to be friends, instead of just murdering each other.
And you should find a hippie elf who likes bartering for money to be in charge of trade. Good luck — this is even more against their nature than counting numbers like your chief of statistics, Numericus likes to do.
I of course was able to find an elf with an expert level of skill at bartering. Though not a master level skill. That gave him a 100% bonus to trade skills, but he also had the -50% modifier from being an elf. So in the end he just had an average ability at bartering with the bonus and the negative exactly cancelling each other out. And this was the absolutely best person I had at negotiating.
We were so thoroughly going to get cheated.
However, I had five elves who were master linguists, a sixth who was an archmaster linguist, and dozens who had the trait “language enthusiast”. That trait both meant they learned languages at double the base rate, and were happy while doing it, and they also got a small permanent bonus to happiness for each language they knew.
It also turned out that these language enthusiasts knew an average of five languages. I assumed that these languages were languages from their old world, and it immediately struck me that it would be useful if a lot of my elves knew a second language which we would not teach to anyone outside of my population.
I checked Marcus’s status sheet, and he had moderate proficiency in one of the most common languages that the language enthusiast elves already knew, and I issued an order for everyone who was a squad commander or higher to learn that language as a battle language, and for this language to never be spoken in front of foreigners.
As for my ambassador, I did not go with the archmaster linguist, but rather one of the master linguists who had a very high extraversion and friendliness trait, and an above usual level of amorality.
That all seemed pretty useful, especially the amorality, for a diplomat.
I immediately called together my council once I appointed the new members.
Marcus spoke first, with his strong resonant voice, a voice trained to shout commands across a battlefield, and a voice which entertained itself by roaring at his enemies after he’d hewn the head of their leader off. “They must be carefully escorted and not allowed to wander. They may be spies for some enemy kingdom, a spirit like our own guide may have sent them, and they may wish to see our defenses. And even if they are only what they claim to be, peaceful traders, they may tell, carelessly or for money, any information they learn about us to our enemies. The less which they know the better.”
That made a great deal of sense.
I approved the order Marcus wished to make. The group would be led through one route in our defenses, where they would get to see an intimidating line of watchtowers, but they would get no other details, and we would hide as well as we could all of the traps prepared near that route. Once they were in our settlement, they would always be accompanied by soldiers and limited in where they were allowed to go.
M
arcus added, “I’d like one of those metallic shiny plates their guards are wearing, if you can buy one. Or maybe buy a lot, to put on all of the elvish spearmen. We need every advantage we might get when it comes to a close combat.”
Virtunis exclaimed, “Incense! They have incense! Do you know how wonderful it is to meditate while incense is burning? You must buy incense, for both here and the temple. We’ll be able to meditate upon your goodness even better, and you shall gain more of that spiritual energy you bless us with! Buy incense! And the ivory they are carrying — we can carve special figurines from ivory, and anyone who owns them in their home will think about you just a little bit more, and be a little happier for it, and you shall gain just a little bit more power from them as they go upon their daily activities.”
The advisors were very good at advising me to do what they wanted.
Bonamicus, who had been named the chief of fun after he arranged a massive snowball fight during our third winter that left everyone with a glow of happiness for a whole week, said, “Those silk fabrics they have! We’ll want to buy them. And some of those bags, there was a delicious smell from them. The food we’ve been eating is so bland. So, so bland. We need new spices. And those bracelets and necklaces, and all the jewels. They’d look very pretty on us? Wouldn’t they? They would! It would make everybody very happy if we were able to buy jewelry.”
Numericus listed all of the goods that we had which we could trade with: Some gold coins and small gems we’d taken off the bodies of dead barbarians. A pile of coins we’d found in a ruin once. Tens of thousands of prepared deer hides and squirrel furs, and beaver furs, and bear furs, and wolf furs. We had a small pile of pearls from the clams that we occasionally fished for a bit of extra variety in our diets, though they were much harder to get for the amount of food than crabs or fish, which were in turn harder to get than fruit or deer meat.
We also had tens of thousands of sharp prepared flint heads that were there for spare arrow and spear points. By now we had so many of them that we could trade them without harming military preparedness.
Commercialus, the new trade advisor, spoke last.
At this point I want to mention that I eventually learned why so many of the elves with these interesting and useful specializations had absurd Latin-like names that named them after the special skill they had. It was part of the culture of the elves that a man could adopt a new primary name as an adult to mark significant life changes, or to mark what was special about them.
Most elves never changed their names, largely because most of them never developed any weird and remarkable skills. But any elf who developed a skill that less than one elf in a thousand cared about to develop, that elf usually saw that as an important part of his or her identity, and the elf would take on a name that reflected this difference.
Hence Commercialus, who named himself that because he liked bargaining and bartering, and he was ridiculously good at it, for an elf.
His role was simply to be a downer. “We are ill equipped to deal with these strange and sophisticated people. None of you know anything about how to trade. You will be like babes from whom they take a sweet pear, and give in turn a rock. We ought not allow anyone to trade privately on their own account with these traders at this time, for any who do will be ripped off, and we ought to only trade a little, enough to make it worth their while to come again, for each time they come, our knowledge of what things are worth to them will increase, and we will not be handed cheap things after spending a great fortune, and we will not give away items of great value to them for little benefit.”
All of the other advisors exclaimed in unhappiness at the idea of not being allowed to buy overpriced jewelry, silks, spices, incense, and everything else they were salivating over. And just at the cost of handing over to the traders every deer hide and fur they’d accumulated over the past decade.
I planned to confirm Commercialus’s order, but what I found when I went to confirm that order was that by doing so, while I’d save the resources of the people, I’d cause a substantial hit to morale, and I would also encourage corruption, because some of elves would choose to secretly buy what they wanted.
And that was a bigger problem than just a morale drop would be.
In that case the elves who disobeyed my rules would be the ones who got tasty spices and pretty bracelets, while those people who obeyed the rules would not get what they wanted. Thus to restore morale, I’d need to punish the elves who’d bought illegally.
I saw what would come next: I’d need to appoint a council member for punishment, and Martialus the sadistic would want that job instead of his current position drilling the militia, and then everyone would be unhappy, and things would spiral into a dystopian police state where the government tried to control everything anyone ever did, all in the name of protecting them.
I wasn’t a libertarian, but I was sympathetic enough to the idea that unintended consequences were bad, and we didn’t want them, to pause and think before I gave orders that people would not want to follow.
What I decided was that instead of banning trading, I would limit how much trading elves could do privately on their own. The decision was that they could not trade away more than 10% of the value of their resources, this would be enough for them to buy things they wanted, but would keep the work of years from being destroyed.
Hopefully at some point I’d be able to have a system where Commercialus negotiated for everything anyone wanted, and then it all could be distributed to the elves at a fair price, but that wasn’t yet possible.
I however now did see a number of technologies that were unlocked for commerce that would allow me to do distribution like that, at the cost, of course, of enormously increasing the size of my bureaucracy.
The obvious thing to do that none of my advisors suggested was buying the slaves — and Numericus did not list the almost one thousand adult elves and hundreds and hundreds of children as a potential resource we could sell.
The policy modifier: No Slavery, was already set, and everyone knew it.
I was tempted to buy the slaves, so that I could set them free and ask them to join our civilization as free citizens. Unfortunately, it turned out that I could not get that to work, since I still could not tell anyone exactly what I wanted to do.
While I had no slavery selected as a policy, I could not order any of my people to trade for the slaves, and it would have caused disruptions to morale and weeks of anarchic convulsions to switch the policy to allowing slavery — just like switching a civic causes problems in Civilization.
And then I would need to switch the slavery civic back off, which would cause another period of anarchy, though this would be much shorter, as it was going a direction my elves wanted, and after slavery was turned off, presumably anyone I bought would now be a free citizen.
Except they might decide to run away instead of staying, or something.
Also I would have a negative modifier to my population’s happiness for a long time, because they really didn’t like either slavery or inorganic changes in government structure.
I would like to free the slaves, for their own sakes, and because if they stayed in my empire, it would be extremely useful to get some people who were citizens who didn’t have the negative modifiers elves had.
Unfortunate that it was just not possible.
As soon as the council meeting ended, Marcus went to meet the band of traders and the scouts leading them into my kingdom with a group of twenty soldiers, and a half dozen linguists including the new foreign advisor, and Commercialus.
Early the next day he arrived, and immediately the linguists spread out amongst the group of traders happily trying to talk with them, and pointing at things, asking for the words. I placed a large spiritual blessing for learning on all of the linguists and by the time everyone arrived in our settlement they were all able to stammer along in the traders’ language.
The caravan was ushered carefully past defensive platforms that
stood roughhewn in the treetops, each of them having one or two elves holding their bows, who cheerfully, and with curiosity waved at the passing party.
Two wooden bunkhouses, with dirt packed around the outsides for insulation that the elves lived in during winters, were cleared out to provide a place for the traders to sleep while they were here.
That evening everyone in the settlement crowded around in a big group to watch and talk with the traders.
They gave out sacks of wine in big skins. It was much like what I imagined a party with Jesus must have been like. That old proverb about not putting new wine into old skins now had an image to go with it. There wasn’t enough for anyone to get drunk, after all this was a sample of their goods, not them bringing the booze to the party, but everyone enjoyed it enormously.
We gave a huge party in their honor.
Freshly caught deer were spitted and roasted over huge fires, with the flames leaping high around the glistening and cooking meat. Everyone sawed off pieces with their flint blades, burning fingers aplenty. And there were also roasted clams, and crabs, and delicately poached fish of seven different varieties. All of it amply seasoned with the herbs that grew in our woods and with whose use we had become familiar. Three types of birds were fed to our guests and our people.
And pears, and apples, and a variety of roots. Acorn meal and chestnuts roasted over the fire, and for a change in flavor preserved and heavily salted and smoked deer meat, and also rabbit stews with green leafy vegetables to flavor the pot.
The traders in turn cooked some of the meal, adding seasonings to it, that everyone was given an opportunity to try, tasting the flavors of cinnamon, and nutmeg, and black pepper, all coming from the lands far to the south where, as my diplomat learned in the course of the night as he questioned them, giant cities many times as big as our settlement lived along the banks of mighty flowing rivers.
Civilization- Barbarians Page 21