People
Watch Your Kids
Keeping your flock alive is your obvious but foremost task. Keeping up morale is equally important, but drops significantly with premature deaths, especially when children die. Both children and adults but also dogs and livestock tend to get targeted mostly by wolves, and cave animals (bears, hyenas and lions).
During tasks performed, keep an eye out for these high-risk animals, which may well attack your people who come too close. Stay attentive near water banks where animals often come to drink, especially when you have reached Pottery, and will be walking on and off collecting water for the community.
If all goes well, your first deceased people will have died of natural causes and old age, which will leave less effect on your people’s morale than a violent one. At this point, you might have gained the tech to build burial mounds or a Dolmen, which besides being able to bury the dead in, gives an extra boost to prestige as well as having another place for people to level up their morale.
Death by battle with raiders is something that will probably happen, but with the right tactics and defence structure placement, that can be kept at a minimum, say on a scale of 1:10. Once you have means of burial, burying the dead is your people’s primary job as one perishes. Before that, deceased just fade away into the ground like dead raiders and animals by default, but their belongings will always be collected automatically.
In any case, avoid unnecessary deaths, especially during raider attacks.
Expansion
Expanding your population though immigration only happens in reaction to having sufficient free spaces in your settlement, sufficient food and clothes in store, and the prestige you have gained through erecting menhirs and the like but also the amount of raiders you’ve killed.
For babies to be born, people actually need time to procreate, so their workload and mood are pretty much a gauge for newborns to appear. In the early stages, being ‘inviting’ by building many extra dwellings will have the wanted effect, but altogether it will burden your present settlers with high maintenance.
When reaching beyond 50+ people, having plenty of housing available (maybe 15-20 extra capacity or more) limits the number of pregnant women in the village. With raising prestige through structures, and having sufficient food, tools and clothing, this combined will increase migration speed. People will come if the conditions are right.
Immigrants, if any, will come walking to your settlement at the start of every season. It may take them a while to arrive. Expansion is not limitless when playing the standard scenarios; from the point on reaching about 300 people, migration and birth rates start to regress.
Performance
People wil automatically perform a task until it is finished, unless called off for a custom job, when the defence horn sounds, or when they are really in need of rest or food. They will need to eat, sleep, drink, worship and keep warm besides working to keep their conditions balanced. Having too many tasks to perform may eventually lead to starvation, exhaustion, dehydration, depression or hypothermia. Each will try to take care of themselves automatically, but if you have too many prioritized work areas or tasks, people will postpone selfcare to get the job done. When hungry, tired, thirsty, depressed or cold, it takes them much longer to finish a job, so you see the vicious cycle there.
Workload
Avoid rising above 100% workload, as it will surely affect your people’s morale negatively. You can have periods where you exceed that threshold, but if you can compensate and balance that out, people can recharge for the work of next season. Ideally, people perform best at 50-75% workload.
At times, when you have injured, exhausted or otherwise needy individuals, they need some manual guidance to recover more quickly. Direct them to food, water or rest and you’ll save lives that way. Spells of having to send people to bed at an end will probably keep occurring though.
It’s sensible to have workers with balanced conditions.
Morale
Morale drops significantly by eating either raw meat or raw fish. Don’t let (nearly) hungry people butcher animals or collect raw meat if you have other food. Low morale will lead to a sluggish labor and food chain which may take a very long time to correct until the large-scale production of beer.
Besides boosting your settlement with prestige, skull poles, totem poles, banners, burial mounds and megalith structures also offer happiness to your people, onto which they can up their morale levels. Notice that only some of them can offer more places of worship at the same time than just one. Build plenty of these to keep your villagers happy.
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