Why would you ever want to keep wildlands in your tula?

They give less food when used by hunters than farms, and make it easier for you to get ambushed. I do not see any reason to keep them.

Pigs?

Pigs seem to be mostly an emergency resource, meaning you're doing badly on the food front anyway. It's of course better to stabilize your food income with farms.

Or at least that's the way it's seeming to me.

From what I understand, having a few hunters about may help spot raiders, and help to increase the response of the fyrd a bit...Hmmm, might be interesting to try a game with no, or practically no wildlands or hunters, and see how that goes....

“Hunters fight as part of the fyrd, improve your skirmishing ability (see battle tactics notes), improve the odds for your exploration missions, help your weaponthanes spot enemy raids, and even provide the clan with some goods by selling the pelts and horns of their prey.”

This is of course a tradeoff, and it means you can’t both have hunters and clearcut your entire tula and run an agribusiness.

Thanks for clearing that up David...awesome game btw :-D

The information on the wildlands and hunters is incoherent at best. I have read in sections of the manual both that wildlands make it easier to get raided and that hunters help spot raiders, also that hunters improve skirmishing and train in bows but that they're not any stronger than farmers on the fyrd.

I understand you can't clear up all wildlands if you want to have any pigs, and then again it's very hard to cover ALL the land in a large clan with planted crops (because that would take an unreal number of farmers, herders and cows), so you will always have some wildlands. Wildland grow by itself too, occupying the herds grass first.

In my clan (about 900 people after about 12 years of game, with more land than needed to grow into, long average campaign), I keep about 80 wildlands, and I almost never get raided, and even when I am, my people usually spot the enemy. I don't know what I did right, but it came to a point I don't care about the wildlands anymore than I need (rare).

You can't sneak a large group across fields. But just having wildlands doesn't mean you have a lot of hunters. Who are better at skirmishing, but just regular folk when the forces clash.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means that having average-sized wildlands filled with the average number of hunters is ok and there's no such thing as cutting down all wildlands or having a large number of hunters as part of a strategy, right? Which leads me to my point: it doesn't make all that much difference. You just can't have empty wildlands or too large or too little wildlands. Average is good and balanced.

What I meant by saying the information is incoherent is because this is a complex game and certain bits of info are scattered along different pages of the manual and different ring advisors and different screens in the game, and they're hard to interpret (for me). The manual at certain points led me to believe that having any wildlands are a complete disaster, then at other points led me to believe that bowmen are perfect killing machines (when skirmishing) only to become commoners in close fight. None of these are true, wildlands can be useful, bowmen play a minor role when you start investing 5 or more points of magic in battles but they fight okay in the fyrd.