Dawn of Man....

While I completed the overall scenario achievements. I'd not fully finalized the Northlands map/scenario from my own gameplay points of view, one milestone remained; The iron age and all it's tech upgrades.

So, yet more pottering about with the Northlands map saw entry into the Iron age. I'd maintained the village population hovering around the 130 to 150 mark by over micromanagement in the copper age. The greatest problem with maintaining a high population was due to the miners. Some mines were far(but not that far), yet villagers would go to or be in the mine in 'summer' clothing then only return to the village hauling ore and die of hypothermia because the season had changed. I worked around this by doing a call to arms just as autumn ended; That way the population would gather in town; Then when winter had just begun I'd end the call and they would head straight to the store houses and get wool clothing etc before restarting their tasks. Not perfect but it helped.

I also found it handy and more effective to search for young animals on the map that could be 'captured' rather than hunting the adults. It's an easy, quick way of gaining the same food value and maintaining your own stabled animals. It saves the danger of the hunt.  I also think but not searched for info online that doing so stops disease from popping up and killing your domesticated stock. So it's good to keep capturing some wild versions of the animals you keep. Which does make sense.

Going into the iron age I was able to unlock all but three of it's tech in one go, which felt good. The last of the tech was gained by trading.

Once bought it popped up the last Milestone.

In getting to the Iron age I was able to 'enjoy' the map a lot more. I think that was down to only really needing Iron instead of Copper and Tin for Bronze(closed those mines down). Also with the added bonus of Steel production, again without the need for extra mines or minerals(same resources as with normal iron production).

Sticking with the copper age for tech point hoarding in retrospect works for all other ages bar copper. The faster you can get to Iron from it the better.

Some metalsmith to blacksmith upgrades as well as bloomery upgrades were easy. Deep Mining makes the iron mines last longer and for me they were a lot closer than any other minerals to mine. Happy days indeed.

Add in a few ovens and the change from copper to iron age is a massive workflow improvement. 

Just a bit more faffing about with the village to do, for pure enjoyment of a great game.