I just started playing this (I've just gotten to Frostvellr) and I have a question. What impact does the "Fighters" and "Clansmen" stats have? I get that the more people you have in your caravan the more supplies you're going to need, but is there a good reason (except being a nice guy) that you'd want many people in your caravan? And what about the fighters? It's not like they participate in the battles, so what does that stat mean? Are there going to be events (encounters with the Dredge, perhaps?) that you can only succeed at if you have a certain number of fighters?

I'm guessing it'll become clear as the game goes on, but I'd just like to know. Can anyone help me out?

@gkhan: Clansmen, no doesn't matter beyond your own attitude towards the game, whether morality of saving as many as possible matter to you or not. Personally I found it more engaging to go in with a mindset of trying to have as many people survive as possible. But yes mechanics wise it does not matter aside from depleting your resources faster.

Fighters and Varl on the other hand do engage in what are called "wars". Basically you will have encounters where hundreds of dredge attack your caravan and depending on how you chose to do them the game does some math of your numbers versus their numbers. However and this is speculation, in my play through the game seemed to always approximately match my army in numbers in these encounters regardless of how many I had, so the more dudes I got the more dredge got thrown at me, therefore I would venture a guess it would try to do the same in the opposite direction and give you smaller number of enemies if you had more losses, up to a point, maybe.

@tennmuerti: I figured that the fighters and varls would play into stuff like that. Given that the game seems to be all about moral choice, I probably will play to maximize clansmen too. That's the whole point, after all.

Thanks duder!

@tennmuerti: I feel like that game really needed to explain the "war battles" or whatever much better. They're the only place where fighters and varl potentially mattered, but it was really ambiguous to what degree their numbers affected it, if any.

And as someone else suggested elsewhere (can't remember if it was these forums or not), it would've been nice if like, for every week or something that goes by where nobody starves, maybe you get rewarded 5-10 Renown or something. Just so there is some mild incentive to buy supplies. As the game works now, buying supplies for Rooke's group is just a huge Renown pit that doesn't earn you much aside from a sense of satisfaction.