Last week was very productive. I finally got a hang of the extreme splitting and spaghettification of tribes. The current behavior is still somewhat janky but I can live with it for now. Here's a speed up sample of the simulation running (the gif is speed up 8x times over the actual sim speed):

To get to this point I had to do some serious rewrites of the clan and tribe splitting events/decisions. First of all, clans now split less randomly than before. Previously, when a clan had a high administrative load it would randomly spawn a new clan on any cell that was part of the same tribe. Now, the clan splitting behavior is tied to cell groups instead of entire factions. Any cell group within a tribe can spawn a new clan if its too far from any other clan core (the farthest the cell is, the more likely it is to spawn a new clan). Also, the new clan will be split from the closest clan it can find that is part of the same tribe. 

On the other hand, tribe splitting will no longer have a dependency on the administrative load of the tribe. Instead it just depends on the relationship between the tribe's dominant clan and the clan that wants to split. The worse the relationship is, the more likely the clan will separate from the tribe to form a new one. This is not exactly ideal but this prevents tribes from suddenly exploding into fifty tribes, all at the same time, just because the original tribe could not get rid of a single cell with an extremely high administrative cost. The next step will be to also tie this tribe splitting behavior to the distance between the dominant clan and the clan that is trying to split. Though I'll leave that for later. Instead, I now started working on the effects of the much more frequent territorial invasions. The first step I did was to implement a clean way to simulate 'clan collapse'. This is what happens when the cell core of a clan is has switched most of its prominence to a neighboring tribe, and most of its original population has either migrated away or has been integrated into the new tribe. In this case, an event triggers which just basically deletes the clan and displays a dialog (if the clan is under the player's guidance) to inform the player that the clan will cease to exist (the dialog text is a placeholder that needs some redacting and flavor):

Now, clan collapse is just one of the possibilities that can occur to an overrun clan. And it should be the rarest one. The plan is to add a few more events that handle alternate scenarios. One of them, the most realistic one, is that the overrun clan will simply migrate it's core to a different location farther from the occupied territory. Another scenario is that the clan decides to become part of the tribe that is taking over the territory, thus integrating the remaining members of the clan into the tribe in one fell swoop. There's one other event which might occur as a consequence of the previous ones: two separate clans can join together and become a single clan. This should only happen if the cores of the merging clans are very close to each other, and it will only occur if the clans belong to the same tribe and have a very good relationship with each other.

So, the focus of the next few weeks will be on fleshing out the set of possibilities to handle situations were clans get overrun by their neighbors...

By the way, a reminder that the itch.io community forum for this game is temporally disabled. Please make use of other alternatives to discuss the game (discord/reddit/youtube/twitter) or reach out to me until the problem is fixed.