This weekend I got to implement faction cultures. These, in a way, act as an intermediate point between group cultures and polity cultures. Each faction inherits the cultural attributes of its core group when it is first created, but then the faction culture will remain more or less the same regardless of how much the core group's culture drifts apart. In this manner it is easier to represent how a cell group, being just a representation of the overall population in a world cell, can diverge it's culture through migrations and other interactions. While a faction, being an abstract societal entity, will tend to retain its core values and knowledge over time.

This doesn't mean faction cultures will remain static. They will slowly, adopt the characteristics of it's core group. Although the main purpose of having faction cultures is to keep track of the effects of events and decisions. The idea will be that leader decisions can effect change over a faction's culture. For example, a contentious choice can make the population have less preference for authority, which will make it harder for future leader choices to be well received. Or it can make a clan more readily adopt farming as an activity if the clan leader pushes for it once the discovery of agriculture is made.

In addition to the introduction of faction cultures I had to do a rewrite of polity cultures. Previously, a polity culture was more or less a representation of the overall culture of all groups under the influence of said polity. Now, instead, polity cultures will reflect the weighted average of the culture of all the factions within it. So the attribute values of each of the factions cultures within the polity will be multiplied by their factions' prominence then added together. As before, individual group cultures will still drift under the influence of their polities. Which means that groups will indirectly be influenced by the prominent factions.

Next up is user interface work. I need to improve the UI to make it easier to select and interact with tribes. The current method to focus on a tribe is highly impractical and I got tired of having to chase down the button as it scrolled up and down with the dynamic text in the Info Box. Instead, there will be now a fixed prompt that will appear whenever a polity is selected. Additionally, there will be a separate method to take control of a tribe and to disengage from it. Then it will be time to go back and flesh out the split clan decision and maybe introduce on or two more decisions.