Chapter 143

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Chapter 143: Rapid Development

For a period afterward, Luo Ji’s life was remarkably smooth sailing.

With no barbarian tribes posing a threat in the surrounding area, he enjoyed a rather peaceful farming existence.

[System notification: Congratulations to player ‘Luo Ji’ for successfully inventing ‘Copper Coins.’]

[System notification: Congratulations to player ‘Luo Ji’ for triggering the ‘Currency Exchange’ project]

Playing with the small copper coin in his hand, Luo Ji could barely contain his immense joy.

Although this was merely the beginning, he had succeeded.

His civilization had successfully taken its first step from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age!

Luo Ji struck while the iron was hot, swiftly following up with the launch of the commercial system and the issuance of copper coins.

This entirely new system, as expected, caused a huge stir within the Mirror Tribe.

After all, such a concept was completely beyond the common understanding of people from this era.

However, out of loyalty and trust in their leader, Luo Ji, no one raised any objections.

From the beginning until now, Luo Ji had consistently shown his people through his actions that by closely following their leader’s footsteps, they could achieve a better life.

Accompanying the promotion of the commercial system, a host of corresponding departments were created.

For instance, the ‘Forging Department’ was established specifically for producing copper coins, and the ‘Industry and Commerce Department’ was set up to register and price various goods.

Of course, while called the Industry and Commerce Department, they currently lacked a concept of pricing.

For now, they could only assist Luo Ji.

The initial pricing of goods had to be personally handled by Luo Ji, the leader, leaving him utterly swamped during this period.

However, once this initial hurdle was overcome, with Luo Ji’s previous pricing as a reference, the Industry and Commerce Department was expected to quickly get on track.

Besides these newly added departments, numerous laws also emerged, with the two most crucial ones being ‘Prohibition of unauthorized coin manufacturing’ and ‘Regular tax payments.’

The prohibition against counterfeit money needed no explanation.

However, Luo Ji had almost overlooked the issue of taxes.

If the tribal people didn’t pay taxes, where would the income come from for the tribal warriors who trained diligently from dawn till dusk to protect the tribe’s safety?

How would they cover their living expenses now that the commercial system had been implemented?

Realizing this, Luo Ji quickly added that clause.

Regarding this law, which required half of one’s personal income to be submitted as tax, no one in the tribe expressed dissatisfaction.

Taking the hunting team as an example, they originally submitted all the prey they caught throughout the day to the tribe, and Luo Ji, as the leader, would then distribute it uniformly.

Now, they only had to submit half, what reason did they have to be unhappy?

With the introduction of the new system, the entire tribe revitalized, gradually advancing in a positive direction!

Furthermore, Luo Ji had been quite fortunate in the subsequent player invasions.

The system’s random teleportation points were almost always around the Mirror Tribe.

Although the defensive forces within the Mirror Tribe had decreased due to the establishment of Iron Wall Tribe, Luo Ji, relying on the recently trained slinger teams and personally commanding the defense, had no problem deterring opposing players by leveraging the defensive advantage of the city walls.

After all, players at this tier weren’t like the high-tier experts who could casually dispatch thousands or even ten thousand troops to besiege a city.

They had only a few soldiers at their disposal, and everyone found it somewhat unsustainable to suffer heavy losses.

Unless they encountered particularly aggressive opponents, the default mode was usually to launch one attack, and if it failed, they’d simply withdraw, very decisively and without hesitation.

Occasionally encountering those who liked to play dirty tricks or set ambushes, Luo Ji’s strategy of staying behind his defenses rendered them quite helpless.

A forced siege would incur too heavy losses, so they could only retreat when faced with difficulty.

The only somewhat regrettable aspect was that this defensive playstyle was not conducive to accumulating achievements.

When it came to the system’s evaluation, Luo Ji, who focused on holding fast, often didn’t receive good ratings, ultimately earning only a black iron chest or even a bronze chest.

However, Luo Ji remained patient.

One step at a time, he knew very well that what he needed most right now wasn’t more treasure chests, but the opportunity for steady development.

He hadn’t fully passed this rookie period yet.

One of the biggest indicators was that he could still only passively defend and lacked the spare capacity to invade others.

Although he had planned a defensive playstyle for himself in the early stages, having the capacity to invade others was a clear dividing line between novice and veteran players.

To put it simply, for the players who invaded his civilization over the past few months, if an opponent attacked with a force of fifty soldiers, that player’s total troop strength would be at least eighty, or even over one hundred, because they kept the remaining forces at home to defend their own civilization.

Before invading others, securing one’s own territory is common knowledge for strategy war game players, especially in highly competitive and intense war games.

If you fought hard in an invasion battle, finally broke through the city gates, won, and even plundered resources, only to turn around and find your own base completely emptied, regressing to square one, would you still be happy?

While you’re attacking others, others are also attacking you!

At this point, one of Luo Ji’s weaknesses became apparent, the slingers!

Slingers were a crucial defensive unit for him.

To simultaneously defend three tribes, he had significantly increased the number of slingers during previous military expansions.

This meant slingers comprised almost over 50% of his total military strength.

However, this approach also became a weakness for him now, because slingers could not be used in offensive invasions!

How would they fight?

Would everyone carry a basket of heavy sling stones to battle?

With that kind of mobility, they were useless in offensive invasions and could only fight defensively.

Now, the reason why slingers were phased out became clear, although they were powerful defensive units, their limitations due to their heavy load were simply too great.

In many ways, their poor mobility meant they couldn’t keep up with the overall military development of the era, which led to them being phased out.

In contrast, an archer, even carrying two quivers of arrows, wouldn’t be as heavy as a basket of sling stones.

Archer units could be taken into almost any battle, and their versatility was beyond doubt.

Therefore, Luo Ji’s biggest problem currently was that he had become a complete specialist in military development.

There were only two ways to improve this situation.

One was to select a group of slingers and retrain them as archers.

The other was to continue expanding his military, but focusing future expansion on archers and close-combat shield-axemen!

He personally leaned entirely towards the second method.

After all, as a defensive player, the strength of his defensive forces was too important to him, especially since he had three tribes that needed to be garrisoned.

From Luo Ji’s perspective, there was only one path, and that was expanding his military.

However, the difficulty lay precisely here.

As the saying goes, raising troops in this era wasn’t easy, and raising a one hundred person army was even harder.

For this reason, he absolutely had to focus on tribal development.