Some people just love exploring, others are seeking resources to use for production or a good site for a village.
The units and the more scouts you have, the more exploring you can do.
Request your “free” (of Admin skill requirements) element in your orders immediately (it will be named the same as the tribe it is splitting from with “e1” appended, so 0500e1 for me.) Transfer something like 30 warriors, 30 inactives and optionally 30 inactives plus a horse each, clubs for the warriors and at least 6 month’s worth of provs. You could include “provs on the hoof” by way of some goats or cattle to avoid embarrassment or having to eat your mounts.
Skipping the inactives means the element will not breed, it also makes it easier to feed and requires less horses. This bit is up to you.
The element will need to herd their horses and any other animals they have brought along. They will want to use their 8 scouting parties (remember, as a new clan ONE of your tribes can have 8 scout parties from its tribe AND another 8 from its element – if you split off additional tribes and elements they will have to share their tribe’s scouts.) Generally the rest of the element will hunt – you might want to send some slings along to aid in this, especially if they are lumbered with inactives. However, if they find themselves in a forest, say, and their tribe isn’t, you might want to take the opportunity to strip some bark to help with tanning skins into leather so as not to waste your limited Forestry capacity ( 10 people per For level each turn) – just so long as the food holds out.
Your tribes can also generate elements based on Admin level – this will take 2 levels. Admin is a Group B skill which makes it an ideal secondary skill attempt leaving the full chance primary slot for a Group A (Tribe) or Group B (Village) and still being achievable in a reasonable time.
Exploration can also be speeded up through trading information with other tribes. Areas tend to be settled in waves so other tribes of a similar vintage could well be quite close (although in the TN world quite close tends not to be really close.)
Sub tribes can move independently, develop their own skills, get their own 8 scout parties (but only one of your tribes gets the bonus scouts mentioned above, the rest will have to split their 8 groups between the tribe and their elements) and if the develop Admin can have their own elements (Admin2 for the first.)
Remember the subtribe needs to eat and you probably left the hunting skill in your main tribe. Provs, herds, feeding skills and hunting gear (slings at the moment) should all be considered.
Your first village site does not need to be perfect. You can easily move on, especially if you have not invested a lot in it. Villages enable you to do many things a tribe cannot and one of the most important of these is Refining.
To create a village all you need is to build a meeting house and come up with a name. This requires Eng 2 and 100 logs.
To build a Refinery requires Eng 2 and another 100 logs, plus 50 iron, 200 coal for each smelter. Each smelter allows 10 people to refine (you will also need a skill level in Ref for each 10 people you want to refine each turn). HOLD ONTO YOUR INITIAL IRON AND COAL to construct your first refinery.
The minimum resources a temporary village site should therefore have are coal and iron mines. Ideally the village would be on the coal mine with an iron mine nearby (you need more coal than iron, its easier to move the smaller amount of iron than the coal.) The village will want mining skill and either another tribe with mining skill or to have a mining element (and possibly a trade element to transport goods with.)
For a longer term site, it would be nice for your village to be in hills for stone with access to forest for logs. Adjacent water is very useful as can be access to the sea.
As a village with a meeting house can transfer goods to and from units in adjacent hexes, you can minimize the moving parts and units needed if you can site your village with as many desired resources in the hex and in adjacent hexes as possible.
This will not be a quick goal and will be even slower to actually research something, but research is an important part of development.
In order to research you need a tribe that can devote a LOT of skill attempts to the task as you need to get a skill to level 10 and those last few levels cannot be counted on to zip by.
To gain research capacity and not bog down entirely you will want to split off subtribes so that other useful skills with more reasonable chances of being obtained can proceed along with the tribe going for that elusive level 10.
Some level 10 skills bring the advantage of allowing the unlimited assignment of workers as well as research, when planning on who goes for which skill, remember that unlimited is a lot more for a tribe with 10,000 workers than it is for a tribe with 100.
To maximize general skill increase:
The sooner you qualify to participate in the Fair the better. It is held in turns 04 and 10 every year. This allows you to trade items and perform cultural activities to obtain silver, commodities to obtain slaves and hirelings and silver to obtain items and gold
To participate in the Fair you need either:
The Fair allows 10 trades (so buying 5 items and selling 5 items or buying 4 items, selling 3 and performing 3 cultural activities etc.)
Early on your best money making options at the fair are likely to be your slings which you can conveniently sell for 8 silver each and turn around and buy leather for 3 each to make more slings to hunt with and sell at the following fair.
Early on you can raise some money by selling excess provs, gut, bone.
Once you are a bit more established you can do a worthwhile trade in wagons. In the medium turn iron ore, iron, spears and swords all generate nice amounts and salt is also good if you can get any.
But in your earliest fairs (especially with Winter Fair) consider cultural activities like Art, Cooking, Music, Dance and Triball to generate some silver just through labour. Of these TriBall is the best as you can assign 800 instead of 500 participants and generate more money by assigning clubs and horses. You can make more from these activities by developing their skill and from your Eco skill, but you don’t need any skill to participate.
What to buy at the Fair? If you wasted your start up iron you can purchase some iron to make smelters for a refinery, leather is great value, tools to increase output of skills with limited assignment are worthwhile – you could double your output of some resources, avoid having to invest skills in metalwork before you are ready to churn out traps and tools and effectively double your Forestry and Quarrying skills. Horses are good value and once you have some gold (you can buy it) there’s always slaves.
This is down as the last goal because initially it is not going to be a major one (except for units split off without being provided with a food source) but is likely to catch you out later on.
To start with, you can do little other than hunt and should produce a nice surplus. This is might take a bit of a hit in your first or second winter but you will seem to be doing fine.
Then after your first year, you can be attacked and are likely to start assigning defenders. Your herds will have grown from herding at fair purchases and will require more labour and you will have developed a whole bunch of skills that you will be diverting workers to.
At some point players either find they have spent 3-4 years sitting still in a forest and accumulated so much food they cannot move without dumping enormous amounts or that their surplus has vanished and they have eaten all their goats and started on the cattle or even horses.
It’s just something to keep an eye on so you don’t enter winter with an enviable supply of stones but nothing to eat.
The other reason to consider food is from a labour requirement point of view. To start with this isn’t a factor. But eventually you will want to assign more people to mining than to hunting. You will want to assign large numbers to refining every turn and large numbers to quarrying. Being able to efficiently feed you clan with minimal labour will open your industrial potential.