@Emacz was asking me about slinger's shields, this is my answer, which could be interesting for some: Most people who could carry some sort of shield did, even animal hides, but it's a matter of how much stats would change. Besides, units were never as uniform as in a game, one just simplifies the most common ideas on them. Strabo (writing at the time of the game) says: "Although naturally disposed to peace, they bear the reputation of being most excellent slingers, which art they have been proficient in since the time that the Phoenicians possessed the islands. It is said that these were the first who introduced amongst the men [of the Baleares] the custom of wearing tunics with wide borders. They were accustomed to go into battle naked, having a shield covered with goat-skin in their hand, and a javelin hardened by fire at the point, very rarely with an iron tip, and wearing round the head three slings of black rush, hair, or sinew. The long sling they use for hitting at far distances, the short one for near marks, and the middle one for those between. From childhood they were so thoroughly practised in the use of slings, that bread was never distributed to the children till they had won it by the sling." Slingers could use a shield, having one hand mostly free, but that's useful when skirmishing close to the enemy, which is a role already taken by the javelineers (although one does more crush damage, the other pierce). In a simplified game, you want the slingers to do something else: slinging from the longest range. You can always just move the slinger closer for shorter range, but because of that would you want to add some shields in the animations to be that historically accurate? And also the javelin as a secondary weapon? Maybe, but stats shouln't change that much, and you also want to make units as differentiated as possible, not to confuse the player. It's also a matter of looking at the whole equipment: -Slingers: could have carried small shields, but couldn't use much armor (because of how the weapon is operated), slings are the easiest to carry, and munitions you can get easily (less so for lead). -Javelineers: most probably carried small shields, given their shorter range, but they also needed to be mobile because of that, so didn't carry much armor. -Archers: some apparently carried small shields, but coud use more armor, so makes sense to make them a bit slower. Not all javelineers were the same, not all archers were the same, each had what they could afford. -Crossbowmen: not necessarily all used large shields in all situations, but you either simplify and choose some representative units, or will have a plethora of options, most of which won't be convenient to even train.

I could be wrong, but it could be that they garrisoned on buildings that were closer to trees than to farms.

No inconsistencies there, since κώμη doesn't translate preferentially as home and house.   Not my point, but that þurpą not meaning village could have been, although I don’t think much can be said about that, since it only appears once.   Then you say (or repeat) that, because Lehmann point rests entierly on his incorrect ordering of ON and OE, and, again, from the ON incorrect meaning he states.   Not true (if you keep referring to it as a single farm), þurpą appears only once in Gothic, and, yet again, ON states the opposite, why dismiss my ON dictionary quote?:   So, your whole argument seems to rest on two quite weak points: 1. For Gothic, þaurp appears only once, thus not much can be really concluded. Haimaz appears multiple times as village and at least once as country, and wīhsą at least 6 times as village and at least 4 times as country. The country/countryside/farmlands discussion is totally irrelevant and not even the point (for a change). It’s not about farmland/country, but about how rural they are with respect to villages. I don’t care about wīhsą, the point is that you can’t rely just on Gothic, otherwise wīhsą would seem even more rural than haimaz, according to your own criteria and opposite of your own proposal. 2. The next attested instance of a þurpą cognate is in 725 OE, meaning village. Later on in OE and OHG it kept being used for “hamlet, village, farm, or estate”. For OHG, any spurious dictionary shift right in the 8th century cannot be just extrapolated back a thousand years supposedly unchanged. Heim being an older ending doesn’t mean it didn’t also mean all the other things every source states it meant, nor does it imply that the ancestor of dorf was an individual farm because it wasn’t used earlier as a place ending, as the multiple sources I’ve mentioned previously clearly state (just quoted one yet again explicitly stating how it was originally applied, and its etymological sense). Thus, sources show that haimaz was used in many different ways, while þurpą and wīhsą were more similar between them. And it’s clear already that Germanic hamlets were a bunch of cottages, farmsteads, estates, whatever one wants to call them, nitpicking on this point is a useless byzantine discussion. Those who put together the Proto-Germanic dictionary knew their sources, including (especially) the Gothic Bible, and heim/dorf/whatever endings. You have to explain why you think they didn’t.

I never seen this before. It might be worth to test it

That's what I do, and some of my farmers ended chopping wood. @wowgetoffyourcellphone, I don't think it's because of the rally point, because most of my farmers continued farming, while just some ended chopping wood, and had to put them on farms again. Seems something weird is going on.