As I mentioned last week, I'm currently on a weeklong vacation trip. Though I knew there would be quite a bit of time during the trip where I would have nothing to do. So I brought my dev laptop to continue working on the game whenever I got a chance (and to keep the dev log active).

This time I worked on another issue that has been nagging me for a while now. When a tribe splits, it seems to start a chain reaction where it continues to split at a faster phase until the world is left with thousands of one-celled tribes. Tribe splitting is an event/decision combo which is part of the base mod. One of the conditions that triggers the event is the administrative load of a tribe which is calculated from its total population and the distances from each tribal cell group toward the nearest clan core within the tribe. Once the administrative load grows too high, the event fires up, splitting the tribe and dividing the admin load between both tribes more or less evenly. Or so I expected. Here's an example of a tribe splitting in two after becoming too big:

To understand why the tribes start splitting more frequently after the first split. I added an overlay which shows the administrative load of each tribe as varying shades of yellow, with more intense tones indicating higher loads:

As you can see, both tribes show very high loads after the split, which shouldn't be happening. To better understand why, I added a second overlay that also display the admin load as different shades of yellow. But now the shading is done at the tribal cluster level (each cluster represents a collection of no more than 25 groups):

Here it becomes a bit more obvious what is happening. The split process is not being done evenly, and many cell groups from one tribe are left separated from their tribe and within the territory of the other. These separate groups balloon up the administrative load of their tribe because they are considered to be at an infinite distance from their respective core. This is by design: I want groups that are not adjacent to their main tribal body to eventually become their own tribes. The problem is that this happening way too much. With both tribes leaving hundreds of separated groups dispersed all over after the split happens. Those separate groups, which are normally very small, will keep splitting from the main tribe until each one of them becomes it's own tribe. Meanwhile, the parent tribes will keep splitting themselves to reduce their respective admin loads, but every time it happens, it will leave even more abandoned groups. Which means that the admin load remains very high after subsequent splits.

Over the next weekend, I hope to solve this issue by reducing the amount of cell groups that are left separated from their tribal core. I also want to solve a similar issue with tribal groups that migrate over rivers and oceans, since those will also count as very distant when calculating administrative loads. I don't expect to solve both issues over the weekend since I'll be traveling back home during that time. Although I hope to be halfway done by then...