Bug? Ludicrous number of steads burned before fyrd is called in spite of enemy being noticed before it arrived.

[Wraith_Magus]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=604580951

At first, I thought it was just some text bug. Instead of saying something like "our army hit theirs while they were still praying to their gods", I saw an odd and completely out-of-place "they already burned an insane number of steads" message that seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the way the battle was going or went. I totally outclassed them, I have dozens of hunters and over thirty weaponsthanes to do patrols, plus a couple treasures that up patrol effectiveness, and every fortification in the game, and yet they just insta-torch all my steads?

Losing 59 steads, naturally, zeroed my goods... yet, again, there was nothing else besides that tiny notice and BAM, zero goods.

WTF, game?!

[david]

Definitely would be a bug, looking at the code I don't see any way that would be possible.

Not every stead is inside your fortifications, BTW. You aren't city people!

[Wraith_Magus]

Well, I didn't mess with the game code, so it obviously is possible, if unexpected. Maybe I managed to roll some really high number for that divine inspiration thing, and the number went out-of-bounds, and caused some buffer overflow error or something? (I.E. in Wizardry 8, if my resistance to an element goes above 255%, I suddenly have -245% resistance because they apparently used five bits to make it signed or something.)

As for "city people", I'd expect a city would be more likely to outgrow its walls than a tula with a static maximum population. What's the point of a ditch or pallisade that doesn't guard the vast bulk of the homes? Historically, farming villages tended to leave the homesteads all bundled together for protection, while they had to just walk out to the unprotected edges to reach their actual fields, much less those giant, open pastures. I can't imagine 59 steads are some tiny minority of steads - presuming they are based upon Germanic longhouses, they held extended family plus servants or guests, so size may vary but half a dozen to a couple dozen. There shouldn't be more than a hundred or so steads total. It seems like someone in the garrison would NOTICE if that many of the fyrds' houses were on fire before they had any alert...

[david]

Given it's a bug, saying it is unreasonable that nobody notices is pretty much a tautology.

If I recall correctly, it was the Iron Age Celts didn’t like to live within sight of another stead. Why would you want to live next to someone else’s filth?

[Wraith_Magus]

Well, I'm not all that familiar with the way Celts did theirs, but I've been going on assumptions of Germanic longhouses. (Is that specifically the culture they are meant to ape?)

From what I've read, they kept their livestock (besides the pigs, which were just too stinky,) in the longhouses with them. I don't know why people would be so concerned with the smell of another person's filth when you can't smell past your own, anyway...

Besides, there are practical matters for why a farming community would want to huddle together: Socially, staying just in one's own field is isolating; Economically, people needed to trade for things with their neighbors on a daily basis for basic necessities and it would be impractical to live too far from one another when you need more thread or to borrow some flour; Worse, however, is that defensively, it makes you vulnerable, and these people live in a more hostile world than real humans did.

Farming communities tended to be layed out with a cluster in the middle, then a wheel of farms radiating outwards, with the most established farmers being in the more convenient middle, and the newer people in the outer ring, and possibly more likely to be forced out of the inner huddle of buildings where the best protection was.

[david]

The Orlanthi are not intended to ape any particular culture.