Citizen Skill Knowledge

I was thinking on why knowledge is lost during dark ages; why important information, sciences, and techniques are just lost to time, and more importantly how that can be represented in a game.
I realized that it can be represented by the individual. A citizen can learn a technique either from their personal testing or from time spent training with someone else who knows (something like weaving, or flint napping, or even writing).

This can be represented by a lack of efficiency for simple tasks without knowledge with knowledge being increased overtime, probably with some rating to it like novice, mediocre, adept, and master; the rate that knowledge is gained can be doubled if they work with someone who has a higher knowledge rating.
More Complex tasks cannot be done without prior knowledge, lose the knowledge and you lose the ability to do anything with it.

New techniques can be discovered by having the same citizen working the same tasks for long periods of time, most likely with a mean time to happen formula to allow for technologies and techniques to increase as they did historically without it being the exact same each time, and without advancements to game concepts that aren’t even being worked at the time.

There can also be eureka moments where gifted citizens experiment and observe something that makes them make a new technology from scratch (like agriculture)

Tech can also be discovered through trade and migrants, meeting with other cultures and how they do things.

None of this would be permanent though, if knowledge if not used by a citizen for a set period of time there will be a chance that they will lose the knowledge, maybe decreasing their rating until they completely forget it.

This fits into a dark age, because during a dark age trade and migration breaks down, there is warfare,starvation and death, and all available workers need to focus on surviving, so that over only a handful of generations the knowledge that used to be the backbone of the society is long since forgotten.

What do you think?

Think, for the most part, it was the way of sharing knowledge. In the case of oral communication, there are knowledge providers. If these dies, the knowledge with them also dies.
Then knowledge must also be understood in order to be able to be implemented. Inevitably natural presuppositions, which apply in one place for granted, are missing. If something does not work elsewhere for this reason, this knowledge will no longer be passed on. Although it might have worked again at the next place …
Then the learner must have enough time, e.g. Techniques to test and practice. Think there are many reasons. Interesting topic, right!

I agree with you on your ideas. I was wondering if in addition we can speak or at least mention the idea of making class. Of course it’s not like building a house dedicated to this and have a teacher omniscient who knows everything, but more like an old master who has less strength than adult people but still share his / her knowledge with 10 years old children. I was thinking about fishing and agriculture tecnics in particular but it could apply to any science that don’t need to have strength. For example the old Franck Underwood gather some children between 10 and 16 years and teach them how to build a bow and use it. I think it’s worthless to speak about it because it could give deep feeling about the game and remember than no one is useless in a tribe.

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I think the human resource was used very purposefully during this time. Presumably, children learned very early how to survive and were constantly accompanied by experienced adults.
How this is implemented in the game … you will see at the latest ion of the beta, if there is no Test-Alpha.(…hmm? :wink:)

Yes we will see how they managed to occupied young children and older. I hope, unlike Banished, children won’t become adult at 10 years old and be father at 11. xD

The loss of knowledge is a very interesting idea, yup – in spite of everything said so far by the devs about discovery being essentially learned from outside tribes influence.

One point though is that all knowledge should not be lost, even in the worst case there’s only a few survivor in the tribe.
As an example, I think every child would be able to make decently some things (a fire, a spear, a sling), some tools would be far more crude (a boat, a bow, arrows, a shelter) in the worst situation: being left alone in a wild forest after the whole tribe is dead after the harshest winter or because of a nasty foreign raid by vile neighbors.
This doesn’t suppose he’d be able to build a whole house by himself at the age of 10.

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I agree completely with what your saying, @jim_kahle, it is the same system I would wish fore. As I recall, the developers did want technological development to be based in the tribesmen themselves, their knowledge and discoveries. I think there was more in the thread about technology and development, here.

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