Peasants/Bronze Dawn
"It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope." | |
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
In game[edit | edit source]
Overall strategy[edit | edit source]
Peasants replace Citizens, which are the villager or worker class unit in Rise of Nations, and are the single most important unit in the game. The primary functions for the citizen is to harvest resources (food, timber, and metal), create and repair structures. Peasants are created from cities and towns, and are fairly cheap to produce. Unlike Citizens, however, Peasants cannot be converted to militia. Nevertheless, the elevated unit population count of Rise of Kings should allow you to create scores of these units, which will be vital for a variety of jobs, including resource accumulation and combat engineering.
Note, however, that Peasants are extremely weak and vulnerable to almost any other unit, especially ranged cavalry so you must protect the bulk of your work force at all times. Once you gain your first level of Military research, you should build Towers and raise Peasant Levy to oversee and protect your peasantry from enemy attack.
Unit summary[edit | edit source]
- Working Caste — The primary functions for the citizen is to harvest resources (food, timber, and metal), create and repair structures.
- Weakest of Them All — Note, however, that Peasants are extremely weak, so build Towers and raise Peasant Levy to protect Peasants from enemy attack.
Notes[edit | edit source]
Bronze Dawn has 3 different ethnicities - Northern, Chinese and Southern.
- Chinese - Vanilla RoN
- Southern - Shares same female villager design with Chinese, but the male is based off the Mesoamerican peasant.
- Northern - is based off Kings & Conquerors' designs for the Thraco-Iranian vaillagers.
History[edit | edit source]
During the Warring States period, Chinese society was split into four \social classes (simin 四民): state officials (shi 士), peasants (nong 農), craftsmen (gong 工), merchants (shang 商). Alhough their social status was that of free men, peasants had often to serve the nobility (guizu 貴族) for different tasks (yi 役). All land belonged to the Zhou throne, which then had it distributed out to the nobility under the so-called well-field or jingtian system, with a ninth of the produce of all lands going to the king. In years of famine peasants gave up their fields and engaged as craftsmen, petty traders or sold their labour force as day-labourers (gugong 雇工, yong 庸). In the worst case, the whole peasant family sold themselves as slaves (nuli 奴隸).
References[edit | edit source]
- Theobald U, Chinaknowledge.de, Zhou dynasty economy
- ibid, Jingtian zhi 井田制, the well-field system