Religious sites: back in the old days big rocks, ponds and things in nature was considered sacred. Perhaps the tribes could be fighting about these places. If they hold one location they would gain "morale" which would buff positive attributes and nerf negative ones in different combinations.

I like that one. "religion" in the game is nature worship superstition type stuff. there are caveman gods whose effects are similar to those you describe. dovetails nicely.

Resource sites: I don't know if there is some economic system in the game, but having different locations with herbs, wild boars and other things could be important to guard and fight about. Perhaps you could also make it possible to "share" a resource with others.

resources and depletion and renewal are modeled. depletion is a function of direct player use and number of bands within say, a days journey of the resource location.

Could be useful to have "hideouts" where you keep resources and then make it possible to raid these. Squirrels have these hidden piles or stashes of nuts. Perhaps that could be an interesting model.

storage pits, stumbling across storage pits, and raiding of storage pits is modeled.

Trading rocks: long time ago here in sweden, people were not living very close to each other. Both for food scarsity and to avoid rivalry. To prevent sisters from marrying brothers they had these annual gatherings around large natural formations. On these sites they formed new marriages and traded goods, as well as doing some gossiping and learning. Perhaps you could set up some regular meetings in the game, where people could send a caravan to, with marriable individuals and goods. These could then be "raidable".

see the "Althang" suggestion in the related thread listed above.

raiding the Althang! how uncivilized! and BOLD! <g>

i've come up with the following motivations or goals for bands:

survival - we just want to get along - sheep

xenophobic expansion - only room for us, and we want it all - killers

wealth - raiders/thieves

slaves - slavers

domesticated animals - zookeepers

knowledge - learners

subjugation - kings

i'm thinking that bands that are close enough to help, but not so close as to compete will be good candidates for allies (for kings, thieves, etc). this works out to bands that are more than one days travel, but less than 3 days travel away., about 30-60 miles away. sheep bands get preyed upon by all the others. i'm thinking 90% of all bands will be sheep. sheep will probably always ally with any other nearby sheep against the other types. there are about 36,000 bands active in the game at any time. now i have to model their interactions in the background while i run a FPS/RPG in the foreground, or approximate the effects on the player of such modeling.

36000 factions is a few more than in total war : P

I think the Crusader Kings (2) is a better example to use than Total War for the politics. Perhaps some parts of it can be implemented in a cave man setting. I'd suggest looking into it too!

• All important persons (in your case: the cave men) have their own personal ambitions and goals (get wealthy, become leader etc.).
• The counties, duchies and kingdoms (in your case: the tribes) have their own goals (reclaim lost territory, form a kingdom etc.).

Let the backstabbing commence!

• Trading with humans, inlcuding exchange of slaves and "cave-men". Sometimes exchanging warriors could be a sign of trust and friendship?

"what i got on me" trading with anyone is in there, and trading with bands at their shelters (same idea, more stuff) is planned. also, there are NPCs who specialize in trading and have lots of stuff to trade. they are what's left of "the store" in settlements from the original version. they will probably get watered down, and not carry every object in stock. There are also plans for true realistic trader encounters, with wandering professional traders. even at this early stage before man had settled down in one place year round, there's lots of evidence of early trade spanning surprisingly large distances.

another NPC specialty is warrior. you can hire warriors from "friendly" bands. but they are quite expensive.

attack to subdue is in. capturing prisoners in combat was turned off while i dealt with a tactful way you can enslave, kill, rape, and/or eat your prisoners. that design problem has been solved, and it "Looks like caveman is back on the menu, Boys!" so to speak.

gift exchange is in there, but troop exchange is not. but its a perfectly valid action. i think that one's going on the todo list.

Just to clarify: in the game, the cavemen are humans. All PCs and NPCs are species homo sapiens sapiens (IE us). the closest you get to a "traditional" caveman is Australopithecus, a giant gorilla-like ape. But Australopithecus is an ape, not a hominid (early species of man). While the time period setting of the game could include the era when homo sapiens sapiens, neanderthals, and denisovans were all present at once, homo sapiens are the only hominid species in the game.

I have thought about adding the ability to play earlier hominid species, but it would just limit your skills, intelligence, actions available, and your personal "tech tree".

i suppose for thoroughness i ought to add the odd encounter with other hominid species that existed at the same time.

All important persons (in your case: the cave men) have their own personal ambitions and goals (get wealthy, become leader etc.).
The counties, duchies and kingdoms (in your case: the tribes) have their own goals (reclaim lost territory, form a kingdom etc.).
Let the backstabbing commence!

sounds like a good approach. both leader goals, and faction goals.

the difficult thing about modeling "politics" in this case, is the large number of factions and their small size.

this is before there were real "tribes". in real life, a band was 10 to 30 individuals, usually a group of extended families. the biggest bands never topped 100 people.

in the game, bands are capped at 10 individuals, as the player controls a band of their own, like squaddies in a shooter that you can tab between at any time. 10 seemed like more than enough for one player to handle at once. and having bigger bands doesn't get you much, a higher chance that someone will have the item or skill you want, thats about it.

while the size of bands is capped at 10, the frequency of bands and random caveman encounters still reflects an accurate estimate of population density at the time. also, the game models migration, so bands come and go.

the result is, no "country" has more than 10 guys, a "country" only lasts for about 3 months before they pack up and head for greener pastures, and there are about 36,000 "countries" in the game at any given time.

so traditional faction/politics stuff doesn't just drop right in and work correctly. its more like 36,000 households out on the frontier with no formal government, than it is 36,000 factions vying for power. then again, maybe that's the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

I also agree with moneal regarding the oddity of not being able to become friends with enemies; that is a rather crucial human behavior of societies.

I've already started changing this, which has let to the questions:

when should a neutral become hostile?

when should a hostile become neutral?

now instead of friendlies and hostiles, 90% are neutrals (friendlies were already basically neutrals), and 10% are hostiles (bushwhackers). there are also plans to add thieves and slavers. bushwhackers try to kill you for your stuff. thieves just shake you down. slavers attack to subdue and attempt to capture you.

Perhaps model it on venn diagrams rather than raw individual percentages.

Let's say the static value is broken into 0-25 = enemy (category 5/1), 26-45=unfavorable/distrust (category 4/2), 46-65=neutral (category 3/3), 66-85=favorable/trusting (category 2/4), 86-100=friend/ally (category 1/5)

But then let's say that you are 75 with group A, but group A is 86 with group B, and you are 25 with group B.

So the balance of your relationship with group A would be the crossing point between B and A to you...perhaps that formula would be something like group A rating less (group B rating to group A), so perhaps some interplay can occur here where say, if you use group A to talk to group B, group A's rating on your behalf is 36 (difference between you to group A and you to group B, less Group A's rating to Group B), and perhaps this inversely could impact your relation to group A at times...

Focus on the first number of each category for a moment e.g. category 1/5, only think of this as "category 1", for the moment.

say the standard rate is 1 point per friend point when they are category 1 range and 5 points per friend point if they are category 5 (0-25) range to you.

But in this environment, it could get more complicated...the rate of friend point gain on that 75 that you have with A is dependent somewhat on your relation to group B...meaning, it costs more; so, perhaps half of the your relationship aggregate of friends of group A (in this example, that's just one other entity, group B) is added to the cost to group A gain in friendship for you.

So, A, in this example, would normally cost you 2 points per point of friendship, but due to group B in category 5, the cost rate is 4.5 per friendship point gain for group A for you.

Now, flip to focusing on the second number in category 1/5, so that we are looking at "category 5".

Equally, it works in your favor in friendship point earning to group B, so if there is a favorable friend to you that is a friend to an enemy of you, then cost is lessened by the difference in sort of reverse at half the category rating of the difference of group A's friend rating to B less your rating to group B.

So Group A's friend rating to group B is 86, and your friend rating to B is 25, so the final rating is 61, and 61 is category 3/3 (neutral).

Half of 3 is 1.5, so now we take the cost for group B and less it by 1.5 in your favor due to your friendship of their friend.

So the cost per friendship point to group B would normally be 5 points, but with the aid, that becomes 3.5.

So a friend weighs a bit in your favor to making a friend of an enemy, but an enemy of yours that is a friend of one of your friends weighs even more.

So...this encourages to "play nice", or rather...be political as hell and get those hands greased up, or you can just pay the extra for those whom you do like and continue to tell their friends to piss off.

This is only a conceptual model to express the idea; and is entirely capable of being scaled to whatever fits best, and can be compounded by many factors beyond these simple starting variables.

i see you talking about this game a lot here, (which is good,) but maybe you could make one thread just to describe how it is working right now and link to it whenever you create another thread/question ? a lot of the answer depends on how the game should *feel/be* like.

good point.

i should probably post a description in my journal.