This was another very busy weekend, but a much less stressful one. I was able to work on the game for quite a bit and managed to clean a lot of issues I found with the new migration algorithm. Migration speeds for unorganized bands are back to "normal" and there are way less failed migration events than there was at the beginning.  Tribes are starting to migrate too. Though they are currently hindered because, by the time tribes appear, all surrounding cells are already occupied by unorganized bands, which is the reason I implemented a hokey "tribe influence" expansion event in previous versions. 

This time around I don't want to use what amounted to a bandaid to force tribal expansion. Nevertheless, I don't believe I will able to improve on tribal expansion without doing something about unorganized bands filling up all of the space. So I decided to put tribal migration into a sort of soft-pause to start working on the next big feature: Tribal Aggression.

Tribal aggression, as the name implies, will be focused on introducing conflict into the simulation. Specifically, the goal is to allow tribes to expand by stealing territory from neighboring unorganized bands and other tribes. Aggression does not imply warfare though. Instead, tribal aggression will be more like small-scale raiding, where tribal bands will bully and attack neighboring camps and push away (or kill) their population.

Aggression will have a counterpart: acculturation. This is the process by which a tribe will slowly merge in people of unorganized bands and neighboring tribes (through processes like inter-marriage, blood bonding rites, etc). This will be kind of similar to the old tribal expansion event, except that it will only occur within cells already occupied by the tribe and will not involve any kind of abstract territorial expansion mechanism. It will also depend on the tribe having a very open society and not being excessively aggressive.

To add both of those mechanics I will possibly need to add a few more cultural attributes, so you'll see me talking about them a lot in the next blog entries. In the mean time, I'll start with the implementation of the tribal aggression algorithm. Though, there's still quite a bit of stuff I have to deal with unrelated to the game, so progress will continue to be rather slow for at least another three weeks.