Food problem and goods problems. Have you found the resources on your tula? (iron, gems, green clay, etc)? If not, start exploring your own tula (a nice low risk activity!). Shift your crafters to work with those, and increase your number of crafters a little above the number suggested by your ring. If you are short on farmers, recruit more. It occurs to me that you might have a very high number of children compared to surviving farmers, which could explain part of your food problem. You will annoy people, but you might want to recruit from vagabonds and wanderers, since they don't bring so many kids with them.
You really need to create trade routes, but you'll need an issaries shrine to get anywhere with that, and you are out of goods....Are you still owed any favors? If so, you can collect in goods I think. Alternatively, how many horses do you have? If you aren't disastrously short you could trade some for some goods. That should let you build a shrine to Issaries--trading, market, or silvertongue will help your wealth, and spare grain will help with your food situation, so it is all good. Once that is built, approach a clan that owes you a favor and doesn't dislike you to try and form a trade route. That will start to bring in a little more in the way of goods.
Once you aren't flat broke you can sacrifice to learn some of the crops blessings and lock them in with a shrine, ditto with some more war blessings.
Sometimes you need to just focus on one thing at a time, so I'd suggest get your economics fixed now.
>
> Too many farmers sick,
are you assigning sacred time magic to health? Even doing it every
second year helps keep the amount of sickness down, every year is
better, but I understand that sometimes magic is in short supply.
>
> I know the Earthblood blessing but don't have enough resources to
> fund a shrine.
see my bit about economics above.
>
> I put the Excellent warleader on the ring. He's wounded now, but our
> raids seemed to go better.
good, at least one thing starting to turn around. Now, don't raid too
much if you are short on farmers. Even when you win, you'll lose some.
>
> Sigh... I feel like we're treading water, not moving ahead. At least
> we seem to be out of the deathspiral.
Progress can be pretty slow for a while, but then it slowly begins to
avalanche in a good ay.
>
> Any food suggestions? Time for another HQ?
"Questing is the answer to most of our problems" one of the leaders sometimes tells you, and it is true....but you need to be able to set up good conditions for the quest. If you are low on magic and don't have leaders with the right skills, it can be too risky. Certainly the Ernalda quest to improve crop yields is very powerful. Any of the Ernalda quests can give you short term relief, so if you have only a marginal questor (you want good leadership, plants, and magic by the way, with probably that order of priority) you can do it to boost the quester, and the three year general benefit will still help your crops, and by then your quester should be ready to do it again.
I also need to explore...
For sure. Treasures will make life better. Failing all else, send out leaders you don't care for much with not too many thanes but a reasonable number of carls. Have them go slowly and not too far into unknown territory and most will make it back, and you won't miss those who don't (and their replacements might be more useful). Yes, it is callous....but it can work.
--Bryan
> sigh.
>
> Darren
>
>
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