One does not simply ride into Moordor... unless they
are Moordor, I suppose.
So the game starts us out in 1329 at Sacred Time, the two-week period at the end of the Gloranthan year. (The Gloranthan year consists of five seasons of eight weeks each, plus the two weeks of Sacred Time.) Each Sacred Time we get a screen much like this, though future Sacred Times will give us an update on various clan numbers instead of the fixed background blurb. You can also hover over basically any feature here to see various things about our tula, like the little Elmal shrine, our cows, our weaponthanes, etc. (Our Uralda shrine is hiding behind the text. =P)
Every Sacred Time we allocate our magic reserve for the year. The nobles present on the clan ring affect the amount you have available to spend and how much you can put into each category. The omens for the year (the first of which is always harvest-related) are to the left, and our reputation meter is in the middle. Also, along the bottom you can see some at-a-glance numbers of for the clan, along with the current members of the clan ring, which is sort of the clan government. (You can click on them on nearly any screen for advice, but it tends to not be very useful outside of events.)
Children gives us more mouths to feed until they grow up. No one ever put magic in this so they took it out for the iOS version. :V
Crops gives us a higher crop yield. (Increased by Ernalda and Barnar worshipers.)
Diplomacy helps any emissaries we send out and also boosts the background reputation-maintaining of our traders. (Increased by Issaries and Lhankor Mhy worshipers.)
Health makes the sick and injured recover faster. (Increased by Chalana Arroy worshipers.)
Herds makes our herds (of all animal types - cows are sort of the gold standard but we also have horses, sheep, and pigs) more fertile. (Increased by Uralda worshipers.)
Hunting increases the yield of our hunters. I'm seeing one source say this was also removed for iOS but all I'd heard about from most was Children, so I'm not sure. (Increased by Odayla worshipers? The wiki says nothing but I don't see why they wouldn't...)
Mysteries raises the chance of success when we sacrifice to learn the mysteries of the gods. The bonus decreases the more we try in a given year. (Increased by Lhankor Mhy worshipers.)
Quests makes it way,
way more likely for our first heroquest of the year to succeed (and you generally don't want to try more than once a year anyway, preferably once every other year). (Increased by Eurmal worshipers, and oh hey we actually have such a trickster right here... :3)
Trade increases basically everything trade-related: the income of our market, the number of routes we can support, the profit of any specific trading missions... (Increased by Issaries worshipers.)
War takes a little explanation, though I'll mostly cover war later on when it comes up - you can also spend magic in individual battles, and every point of magic spent here at the start of the year acts as a point spent in
every single battle that year.
For now I put two points each into Crops and Herds, and one in War. (Most games I'd put one in Herds and
maybe two in War, but I also tend not to start with a second checkbox of Herds available in the first place.) I actually don't
intend to go on the offensive for raiding in the very first year (though if anyone really wants me to, just mention it during this voting period, I'll squeeze one in anyway), but that point will be useful when we inevitably get raided outselves.
It's not a good idea to spend every single point of magic you have available each year. Many events allow you to spend some magic on them (or just remove a few points as a side effect!), and your free magic also acts as the luck stat for your clan.
And thus, we enter the first "month" of Sea season. (While the Gloranthan calendar lacks months per se, as the seasons are eight weeks long, they effectively have two months each, and the game grants two actions per season.) Sea season is the time for planting, and all your farmers will be needed to help out - don't go raiding during Sea if you value your food income! It's fine to send small bands out exploring or accompanying a trading or diplomatic mission, and it's usually a good time to do so.
The various little carvings along the top banner serve as our menus - the currently glowing one of two people in the middle tells us we're on the Clan screen. Along the left, we can see the general state in numbers of our clan, and the slightly-raised-looking ones let us tweak some numbers. We'll probably see all the dialogs for that aside from probably hunters in the near future, so I'll cover those then.
The rock with th ecarvings in the middle appears on many of the screens, with a different configuration of carvings. These tell us about our relevant known and active blessings. Uncarved (grey) are ones we don't know, carved are ones we do, glowing are active. (I didn't check which one this known one is, but it's from our Ancestors, my guess is Divination since I know we have to sacrifice to learn Protection.)
To the right, we can reorganize our clan ring/change our clan orientation, throw a feast, or give gifts to the farmers or weaponthanes. We'll be reorganizing our ring in a moment, but first I'll show a couple other screens!
The circle with the lines across brings up our map. There's actually a fair bit more than this shot shows, you can scroll around by clicking near the edges, but this covers all of our currently known area, with a couple spots of unknown mixed in. We can also send out explorers from here, so don't expect it to say quite this fogged for long! You can press M to show clan borders (which I forgot to do for this shot). The clan names are color-coded to show the relationships:
Blue (ally) > light purple > dark purple > pink > red (feud)
I've usually seen it start off with two feuds and
two allies, I guess we got unlucky.
One of the two feuds (the Elkenvali) is a neighbor, they'll probably be our main punching bag for raids. (Speaking of people we hate, that barest sliver of a location name you can see off to the east is Prax.)
The background screen lets us look up myths and other background info. (I've chosen to screencap these later on, since I had a lot to cap for this update already - they'll be added to the second post of the thread once I do.) The History and Culture sections we just always know everything, but we don't start out knowing all the myths - the double circle marks myths of which we know the details, the rest we'll have to sacrifice for. This is because all the ones we don't know (plus Elmal Guards the Stead, granted because our main god is Elmal) are myths we can perform
heroquests for - basically our clan gets together and LARPs the myth! A number of questable myths also have deeper secrets, some of which we can get via sacrifice, others we have to get in other ways.
The scroll at the very far end of the menu bar brings up the clan saga. We're not very interesting yet.
Now, to go rearrange that ring!
... damnit game, not only is Dorasor not our best leader, he's not even our best Elmal-worshipping leader. >=|
The reorganization screen lets you sort your nobles by skill in a given stat or in chunks of the alphabet. Hovering over a noble displays their stats in the box on the right. Skill levels proceed from unlisted to Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent, Renowned, Heroic - there is some variation within a given tier, though. Anyway, there ended up being some fiddly bits, but nothing I felt was major enough to merit a vote. Points of interest:
- The second-best in our clan at Combat is our
trickster (Orlgard is best though.)
- We have an Uroxi, those are kinda rare. =O (He's only third-best at combat and otherwise unremarkable, Orlgard is better in basically every way)
- Iskalli is actually also the best we have at Custom. (Harsaltar is second-best, I figured we probably want a lawspeaker who's not also our chief. No Lhankor Mhy dudes spawned though.
)
- ... every single femal noble in our clan worships Ernalda or Uralda. Uneven (well, un-as even as you can get with an odd number) gender ratio makes our fertility take a hit, but doubling up on gods makes our
magic take a hit - I'll keep the magic please.
- We have no one better than Very Good at Magic - our best is a different Ernaldan but Iskalli is still in that range, so I dedicated the Ernalda slot to our best Plants chick instead (at Excellent)
- Engarna is only second-best at Animals but out best is a guy (worships Odayla), she's a notch lower but again, gender balance.
Our ring:
And our Uroxi just in case anyone's curious:
Reorganizing the ring takes an action, but we don't end up getting an event for the first month of Sea anyway, so let's see to some farming!
You can see on the rock our active Milk Blessing. We can slaughter some of our animals for food, but hopefully we'll never have to. We can adjust our amounts of fields, pasture, and woods here. I crank the fields up enough that our estimated crop yield is ~1000 units of food (one person eats one bushel per year) and our pasture is roughly double what we need (leaves room for growth, and unused pasture gradually returns to wilderness anyway).
I also adjust the ratios of the various crops - wheat is very fickle, yielding lots when the weather's good but almost none when it's bad; rye is very hardy and should be increased when the omens are bad; barley is sort of in the middle and when the omens are average I'll probably be running mostly that. Barley also gets the highest boost from Bless Crops and makes your clan extra-happy because it makes good beer (which is precisely the advice tricksters give here). You should still grow some of every type of grain no matter what, Ernalda isn't happy if you neglect any of her children. Most people say 15-20% of each, I tend to err on the side of more.
And then, when I move away from the Farming screen, we get our first event!
Orlkensor, a thane of the Kardavi clan, comes to you to ask for information about Arkilla, chief of the Grey Fox clan. "We intend to enter into negotiations with Arkilla, and hope that you know something about her personality, so that we will be well prepared for our parley with the Grey Foxes. You owe us a favor, and we will consider your obligation discharged if you give us good information."
1. "Arkilla? We know her well."
2. "Let us give you a gift, instead of information."
3. "We don't know anything about Arkilla."
4. "We'll try to answer your questions, but do not guarantee our answers will be right."
5. "What do you take us for? A pack of tattle-tales?"Events all let you toggle the text box (with Space) to see the lovely art~. For each event I'll be including the advice from each ring member, though sometimes they give duplicate advice. They usually also favor a specific option or options, which are highlighted blue, but frequently their advice text doesn't obviously correspond to any option, which is the primary reason I'm including the numbers for all options, so I can tell you which they support easily. =P
Better to give Orlkensor a gift than information we are unsure of. (2)
It is wise to gather intelligence on one's neightbors. (No suggestion.)
The best gift of all is... well, a gift. (2)
Arkilla is so silver-tongued she could convince a man to slit his own throat. (1)
Answer his questions; it is good to give him words instead of cows. (1, but apparently neither one has any actual information about Arkilla to give us. >=| )
Just tell him what we think of him, as if we were speaking about Arkilla. (No suggestion.)
It's worth noting that the question could be any of several, but we only have the information on one possibility - clicking the ? button off to the left does let you view information on other clans during events, but the blurbs are not useful here.
