Dawn of Man

I did this in about 5 hours playing on normal, on the first setting near the lake. Two simple things; keep people from dying and attract more people. You attract people by having a high prestige and welfare. You can increase prestige by having lots of structures. This include totems and burial mounds. To increase your welfare you have to have surplus of food, clothing, people are happy and buildings are in good condition.

I ended up moving my people from a lake side area to an area between two lakes. I did this pretty early on and recycled all my building materials. This new area doubled the amount of fish available plus all animals have to drink from water somewhere too. Between the population of 90-100, I ventured out to a third lake to hunt and fish. I did however, add a tent at the third lake as well as a tent in the middle point too.

I can not stress enough how important trade is. You can trade a sharp stick for food. BRILLIANT!

After finishing this one, it will set you up for another achievement:


These are the steps that I consider to be most important listed in order of importance.
-create a new save each time you get 10 more people. If you loose a lot of people, you can simply go back to the time when things were good.
-trade for all food available; you want a surplus
-trade for all clothing and skins available
-trade for all flint and bone available
-set fishing tools to infinite, deactivate auto-build of wooden spears. You will now trade these items as your currency; wooden harpoons and bone harpoons.
-build two crafters and have them operating at priority. Place rock and wood piles and skin dryers near the crafters.
-build adequate storage tents and set these to NOT accept materials; this will encourage storage of food at a 1.5x preservation rate. Build food dryers nears the storage tents. Build several dryers; noone should eat raw meat.
-set clothing to 125% for each types; this will ensure no one dies of cold and increases welfare
-build enough housing for at least 5 more people than your population; anymore than that will be too hard to maintain and repair
-go manually hunting every spring and fall.
-your hunting preference should be for predators; hyenas, wolves and lions. Leave the bears alone as they wont attack you unless they are attacked; plus they can kill the predators for you too. Thinning out predators prevents you from being attacked and prevents other game from being wasted on them.
-if there are no predators in your immediate area, then hunt large game. Try to hunt only adult male, old male and old female. This will help ensure a continuous supply of game. If you are starving, take what you need though.
To take a hunting party out, sound the alert to get the community back. Hold RB and select a group of adults. Then, set a destination a little ways a way. Hold RB to see who is not a good choice to take with you. Anyone hungry, tired, thirsty, cold, holding too many items, slow, angry, lacking a good weapon; leave them behind by deselecting them. About 5 people or so is good. While holding RB, hold A to make your people run to the target. If only a few get there first, rally your troops nearby before going in.
-Set max amount of people to collect berries, fruit and nuts to your nearby areas. Then place a max hunting party in the same gathering areas. This will help in the case the children are attacked while gathering. As your population increases, so should your gathering groups/hunters. Your fruit/veggies should last you until late winter or even spring. If they dont, add more collection areas.
-Do not overwork your people. You should only assign about 1 job per person. Seasonal jobs like gathering can be mixed with gathering sticks/firewood.
-Set your fish to infinite and have 1 person fish per section. As your population goes up, so should the number of fishers. You can also build food dryers near the water and a hut if you are putting fishers out in lakes farther away.
-Your prestige will determine birthrate and incoming settlers. Build plenty of totems and mounds and place them in or near work areas as well as main camp. Having summer clothes also affects happiness; you would not want to wear fur in summer, just old sweaty leather instead.
-try to only take the flint from piles rather than mining it; if you are going for 900 prestige.
-try not to sell flint tools as there is a finite amount of flint