Re: Warsim, text based randomly generated stratogy
1. I see this game largely as extremely sandboxxy with all the side things one can choose to do. (that's not a bad thing)
2. many of those examples of female in myth are in fact quite sexist. Vampiresses and Succubie are demonizations of female sexuality, the critical thinking thing you mention as women not being as good at is true to a point, but it has been proven to be socialized rather than inherently biological or psychological so you are already putting a sexist backdrop into Aslona in how folks are educated that would cause that if you are going to use that reason. I do concede that women do function better at higher altitudes and the distribution of weight in their bodies does make them better at high altitude fighting.
In response to what you have said however, I simply respond with this. In D&D there's a reason why they unrealistically give both male and female characters equal physical stats. The reason is that if they don't, it becomes really sucky to play a female character except for a few classes and thus you have the mechanics biased against women.
Even if we are going realistic here, the mechanics are too complex to program to have an equal footing with male a female characters differentiated.
I also said nothing about 50% of your army being one or the other. firstly, I don't think we need to go into that amount of detail with men and women. Anyway, if we were going representative of the population it would be more 51% of the army would be women as there are actually more female births and survivals to adulthood than males, and it isn't a 50/50 chance even at conception as female births are slightly more likely, just like although it seems a 50/50 chance, American coins when flipped are more likely to land on tails than heads.
Second, I said nothing about even the named leaders, just that things like staff would be assigned genders as well when generated. For example, if you wanted to hire a jester, the 3 people that come up, all 3 of them could be men, all three could be women, or you could get a mixed bag. Also, if you wanted to hire only women or only men, you could do so if you so chose though I don't think it ought to do too much in terms of consequences, though perhaps you could lose popularity if you went too far in either direction. Also, you could have male or female leaders of most faction such as independent kingdoms.
But for example, with your example of women and giving birth and such to increase your population, that designates women as not only mothers, but meant for breeding, and I don't want to see that, or other things in this game.
If the game were more complex, I might be able to concede some sort of Homefront mechanics. Right now, that is effectively done via peasants, if we are to imagine your proposed gender mechanics as currently taking place under the peasant role, you've got a lot of women in a much lower position than the men, just by the tiered way units are dealt with which effectively puts women as lower-class citizens. If we had some sort of tier 2 non-combatants and tier- 3 non-combatants that were basically non-fighting knights, this would solve the problem.
Also, historically, although women did not fight frequently on the front lines, things they did in medieval sieges when defending were incredible and they did just as much as the men did.
And as for female soldiers, I don't see why they need to be differentiated in terms of any combat ability. You said they were better sharpshooters (something I'm not so sure of but will allow) and also I know that women are better at using both sides of their brains at once, effectively making their weak side (their non-dominant side) less clumsy than a man's would be. (a right-handed woman has a better left side than a right-handed man) and so on the battlefield, we can just say the female soldiers and knights use different weapons or are set up in different positions or simply that if they are melee fighters, they use the shield with more skill or are able to get by an opponent's guard because a male soldier would use his shield in his weak hand with less adroitness than a woman would.
Also, you could simply say that Aslona and its army use some sort of European Martial arts. Europe had a martial arts tradition as rich as anywhere else but when gunpowder became the norm, most of it was lost. But a lot of martial arts is built around knowing anatomy and doesn't rely heavily on strength to the point that men and women can compete on equal footing.
This is why in Shaolin-Doh (a form of martial arts I practice) men and women compete against one another with no distinction of gender. The art is practiced in such a way that the superior upper body strength of a man and their larger size matters very little and it isn't too hard for a woman to beat a man of her own rank or even higher. In fact, the only person in my class who consistently beats me is a woman and I'm a guy.
I'm just not so sure that the ideas you have for women in the game as to specialized roles and such are really the direction we ought to go, I'd like to hear what others think as well as well as hear more of your side of things.
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