Line #1 VideoGame/DawnOfMan


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dawn_of_man.png]]
2	''Dawn Of Man'' is a SpaceManagementGame by Madruga Works - the same people who made ''VideoGame/{{Planetbase}}''. It was released on [[UsefulNotes/IBMPersonalComputer PC]] through UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} in March 2019.
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4	Set in the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTHeTin Dawn of the Age of Man]], the game challenges you to help a tribe of early humans survive in a changing world. As the ice retreats and the megafauna of old go extinct, they are forced to adapt, or be left behind.
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6	!!This game contains examples of:
7	* AllCavemenWereNeanderthals: {{Averted}} - you are clearly controlling anatomically modern humans, and they don't even use clubs! They do use bones, however...but only to make bone tools.
8	* ArbitraryHeadcountLimit: The number of people who can live in your village is determined by how many habitable buildings you have - if there is space, new people can be born/move in. Similarly, the number of stables you have determines the number of (non-dog) animals you can have, or rather - keep sheltered during winter.
9	* ArtificialStupidity:
10	** Raider AI is ''obsessed'' with bridges and gates. If there is a bridge and one sufficiently far away from the nearest ford, raiders will bee-line toward it and get easily slaughtered during their attempt to cross it. The gate might exist in the open area, with not a single section of the wall built... and raiders will head toward it. Knowing this allows you to funnel all the attacks into kill boxes, while also saving the hassle of building proper fortifications.
11	** Meanwhile, your own villagers will gleefully make separate stacks of the same goods, will attempt to recreate them when the items are manually removed from a structure and will grab random tools, with no ability to control what's in their load-up. You might have 20 compound bows in stock, but the AI will still rather equip the recently looted copper spear. Oh, and the above-mentioned gates? If you build one, it will instantly become a gathering point for your villages during alarms, rather than the actual source of danger. The worst aspect is that the game will ''actively punish the player with an inefficiently debuff'' for manually ordering villagers.
12	* BarbarianTribe: The raiders that start showing up from the Neolithic era onwards. They aren't different from your own people, and might be even ''more advanced'', but are still portrayed as a generic barbarian nuisance. Their bands also significantly grow in size in the Bronze and Iron Ages, transforming the occasional hungry looter into proper raiding parties. Raiders are also designed to simply destroy your village and kill everyone in it, rather than actually ''raiding'' and stealing resources from you.
13	* BearsAreBadNews: Cave bears are one of your earliest enemies, and are more than willing to steal from any carcasses you claim but don't harvest fast enough. They go extinct at the start of the Copper Age, though. In addition to them, brown bears will also spawn, and work in the exact same fashion aside from being smaller than cave bears, providing less resources, and being encounterable throughout the whole game.
14	* BoringButPractical:
15	** Bone and then flint tools. Bone tools are just slightly better than the default wooden ones, but bones and sticks are the easiest and fastest resources to get from - and from an infinite supply. They retain their utility even when you can smelt steel, even if as a stop-gap measure. On top of that, they make excellent trading commodities and can be crafted en masse. For very similar reason, flint tools serve this role later on. While flint is a finite resource, they will be badly needed to prop up your economy for the transition into metal smelting, while still retaining their high trade value in the Copper Age.
16	** Bows. They are only good for hunting, but are one of the most important technologies, ''greatly'' improving your tribe's hunting capabilities. They also allow you to pelt raiders with arrows later on. They also retain their trade value for far longer than any other object, making it worthwhile to still keep skin-drying racks all the way up until the Bronze Age.
17	** The eventual farming and animal care routine, especially after introducing ploughing, waterwheel milling and dedicated bread ovens. Nowhere near as exciting and daring like the early game hunting and gathering for food, but ''[[TruthInTelevision extremely]]'' [[TruthInTelevision more efficient]].
18	* CatsAreMean: Cave lions show up as initial obstacles in the game, and they often attack villagers who wander too far away from the group. At the end of the Neolithic Age, though, they go extinct.
19	* ColourCodedForYourConvenience: Your people are always wearing blue-ish tones. Raiders always wear red (at least once they have woven clothes). When using Primal Vision mode, animals, depending on how dangerous they are, range from green, through yellow, orange and red.
20	* CoolButInefficient: Both copper and bronze are completely avoidable and short of extreme situations, it is easier, better and more efficient to just blow through the required research and go directly for iron. Bronze is a particularly offensive case, since it is an alloy, requiring copper and tin to produce (which are rarely placed together) and usually the surface deposits of copper are already used up by then, requiring the construction of expensive mines - which will be rendered moot once iron smelting is unlocked. Oh, and while producing two bronze ingots, smelting also takes 2 copper ore ''and'', more importantly, two units of charcoal, making it ultimately inefficient due to the wear of tools needed for all the resource extraction. In the end, all the hassle needed to get bronze just doesn't cut it when compared with the stats of bronze objects.
21	* ElementalCrafting: In terms of strength, your tribe starts with wooden tools, and with the application of Knowledge points, goes on to create bone tools, then flint ones, then copper, bronze, iron, up to steel tools.
22	* EmptyLevels: The Mesolithic Era and, to a lesser extent, the Copper Age.
23	** The Mesolithic Era doesn't change the fundamental gameplay of the Stone Age at all, especially when compared with the Neolithic, which introduces things like farming, animal husbandry or weaving, along with a new set of significantly better buildings.
24	** Copper Age, meanwhile, is for all intents and purposes just an extension of the Neolithic, but allows to set up metal smelting infrastructure - but copper itself is not a technological improvement over flint (tools made of either have identical stats and sell for the same value). For comparison, the following Bronze Age opens up an entire set of new buildings and bronze tools render everything prior to them obsolete.
25	* ExposedToTheElements: Lack of proper clothing makes your people just wander around in loin clothes. It's not a big deal during summer, only affecting their mood, but a death wish during winter. Even wearing summer clothes might be insufficient during winter, still causing death by hypothermia.
26	* GrimUpNorth: The Northlands scenario focuses on this kind of environment. Longer winters, shorter summers, and fewer resources will make survival a lot harder for your tribe.
27	* HeinousHyena: Cave hyenas are one of the most common threats towards your tribe until they go extinct in the beginning of the Bronze Age.
28	* HelmetsAreHardlyHeroic: That is probably why there are ''none'', despite the fact that historically, helmets were more common (and ''cheaper'') than any type of body armour.
29	* TheHunterBecomesTheHunted: Once your tribe has access to bows, predators are no longer a real threat and can be readily handled - and they only get weaker from there as time goes on. Eventually, the random event that's an animal attack on your settlement (be it wolves, big cats or hyenas) is more like [[CurbStompBattle an extra meat and skin that decided to wander into your village than a genuine threat]].
30	* INeedAFreakingDrink: Once you have access to it, beer becomes a very quick way to boost morale. And morale is always depleted after sustaining some psychological trauma.
31	* MisplacedWildlife: An unusual example applies to the wild donkeys found in game. These donkeys are domesticated in-game to become the domesticated donkey, but the game is set in Europe, while the wild donkeys encountered resemble the actual ancestor of domestic donkeys, the African wild ass ([[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin which lived in Africa]]).[[note]]Europe did have wild donkeys in the Pleistocene, but these were a subspecies of the onager, nowadays found in Asia, which look very different from the African wild ass.[[/note]]
32	* MoraleMechanic: Every single villager you have has morale, which gradually decreases for a variety of reasons - hunger, injury, having to do hard labor, and seeing other villagers die. It can be restored by using morale structures (such as a totem pole or a CircleOfStandingStones), or by drinking beer. The latter, however, only temporarily raises morale.
33	* NobleWolf: Wolves are the only animals in the game that don't need to be actively domesticated - once the technology to tame them has been researched, they'll automatically seek out your settlement and, overtime, join it. They are also the only domesticated creatures that don't need to be fed or provided stables.
34	* RapePillageAndBurn: Only includes the latter two of the three, but the Ancient Warriors scenario focuses on an environment where your tribe is one of several packed tightly together in a valley, resulting in a much greater frequency of Raider attacks. Your tribe is already at the Neolithic stage of development, with every previous Tech option already researched, although you still start out with a low population count, so you're required to carefully gauge what tasks your tribe does until you get more members to avoid overworking them.
35	* RefiningResources: Killing an animal provides raw skins and meat. Meat (alongside fish) can be placed in a meat drying rack to turn it into dried meat/cured fish, which lasts far longer than regular meat and fish and is the only long-lasting food you'll have at the start of the game. Raw skins, meanwhile, need to be put on a skins drying rack in order to make dried skins that are needed to produce more advanced types of clothing. Eventually, the most complex line of refining is needed to create bronze objects, requiring first to smelt the bronze itself.
36	* RhinoRampage: Woolly rhinos are among the herbivores encountered in the game, and one of the most dangerous creatures to hunt. The same applies to a different rhinoceros species in the game that is a more distant relative, ''Elasmotherium'' (a rhinoceros with a horn on its forehead instead of its nose). Like all megafauna, though, they become extinct at the start of the Copper Age.
37	* ShieldsAreUseless: They are a total waste of time, resources, and even Knowledge points (or trade goods when buying the tech). Not only do they offer minuscule protection, but one that's up to a chance. Meanwhile, the same resources can be spent on making armour, which not only is better at stopping blows, but does so without any RNG involved.
38	* ShownTheirWork: The tools and structures available to the players are meticulously crafted to look exactly like what you would expect of not just the time period, but also of the region the game takes place. This is especially true of the religious statues and structures which are all European in origin, but the designs on them narrow it down to the Northern most European cultures, AKA the Nordic peoples.
39	* SoLastSeason: Each set of tools you create is woefully outclassed by the next tier of equipment that can be researched, so you'll want to remove it [=ASAP=] to avoid cluttering storage. Of course, it's always valuable to a trader, so a good strategy is to keep old tools until a trader arrives, then sell them for more valuable goods. However, one must be careful with this, as wares lose in value when superior replacement is accessible. For example, buckskin clothes have an initial value of 15, but once weaving becomes a thing, they drops to just 1.
40	* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Prior to the introduction of ploughing, your villagers are using wooden hoes, preparing fields for sowing each spring. That's part of the general ShownTheirWork premise of the game. However, this is the only activity in the game that ''drops the morale to zero'' after just a single field, representing hoe-farming as a back-breaking hard labour that it is in real life.
41	* TechTree: A fairly simplistic one exists, where you can spend knowledge to unlock new technologies. For example, research 'Dog Domestication' allows you to begin taming wolves to get dogs, or researching 'Composite Tools' allows you to begin crafting new and different tools out of animal bone.

Context VideoGame / DawnOfMan