While At the Gates looks like a 4x game, it’s a bit more like an iron age HR manager simulation. The bulk of the game consists not of expanding your mighty empire but of trying to get your “employees” (your clans) to quit complaining and get to work. Although the game’s tooltips give a basic idea of how to do this, many of the finer points are left unexplained. This guide will provide more information, based on my personal experience in 100+ hours of play on Version 1.3.

If you have additional observations you feel are helpful, you're welcome to leave a comment.

Every clan that joins your tribe comes with two traits, some good, some bad, and some a mix of both. Your job is to see that each clan is given a task they are suited to while minimizing strife and also ensuring that the tribe as a whole gets everything it needs to survive and grow.

Troublesome traits can be removed from a clan by an Instructor but the cost is an extremely steep 50 parchment each, which makes such social engineering an end-game luxury. For the majority of the game you will have to deal with what you get, and often what you get isn’t so nice.

Certain tribes have unique abilities which affect traits:

• The Alemanni will never recruit clans with fully-negative traits. This is a great help to clan management, but you will still get clans with mixed negative-positive traits, so you still can’t ignore them completely. Also, because they draw from a much smaller pool of possible traits, you are more likely to get clans who insist on being in one particular profession, which can greatly restrict your flexibility.
  
• To a lesser extent, the Slavs and Avars (no supply cost and +1 supply cost, respectively) affect the viability of clans with certain supply-related traits such as Adventurous, Wasteful, or Resourceful. The Avars’ +1 movement bonus negates the penalty of traits like Frail and Lazy.
  
• The Franks receive +1 mood to every clan, but this does not affect clans who have a “mood is never above x” trait like Miserable. It does affect clans with the Loyal trait, and this is probably the only time you’ll ever see a clan become Jubilant!

You will notice pretty quickly that many clans have traits which seem to contradict each other. It’s not clear whether this is a bug or intended, but there are certain rules which govern conflicting trait behavior and the game does not explain them anywhere, so here is what I’ve observed.

Quite commonly a clan will have one trait which makes them prone to crime, feuds, or desires, and another which prohibits them from that action. In this case, the prohibition takes preference and the clan will never commit that action. Sometimes this results in a clan having effectively only one trait, which is pretty silly but can be a relief.

More rarely, a clan may have two conflicting job preferences, e.g. Rustic and Curious. This is quite annoying because, in my experience, when placed in one of the desired professions the clan will always eventually develop a desire to switch to the alternate preferred profession. I don’t know if fulfilling this desire satisfies them forever or if they will constantly develop new desires to switch between professions because I have always cured these clans of their indecision with Instructors. If you have further observations on this, leave a comment.

Dissatisfaction with job placement is always expressed by desires, and therefore a clan with a trait which causes them to never have desires will never complain or lose mood if placed in a job they dislike because of another trait. (See below section on desires)

The two main types of jerkfulness in ATG are Feuds and Crime. The game tries to be cute about how clans “may rarely” commit a crime, but in my experience any clan which has one of these traits WILL eventually commit that deed if placed in the position to do so, and you will have to deal with it. There is no grace period; even ONE TURN is enough time for a jerk clan to spend on a tile with another clan for them to commit an act of jerkery. Punishing a jerk clan makes them lose their job and all XP they have in that discipline, makes them permanently lose a level of mood, AND adds an invisible debuff to that clan which makes them train extremely slowly. So the best way to deal with jerkitude is not to let it happen at all. This makes it an extremely high priority to isolate jerk clans out of the settlement and away from decent folks as soon as possible (or send them off to die, if that’s your thing).

Crime: Basic Jerkery

Crime is split into two types, Brawls and Theft, but they are functionally indistinguishable. If left on a tile with another clan, a crime-prone clan will eventually commit one or more crimes. From then on, any clan which currently shares the tile with that clan will have their mood drop one level per crime committed. This is obviously not ideal.

There are several ways to deal with crimes that have been committed:

• Punish the clan which committed the crime. As always, this results in the punished clan becoming rather useless and is generally not recommended.
  
• Isolate the criminal clan away from decent society permanently, and no one will care. A great solution as long as they can do something useful alone outside the settlement, which not everyone can.
  
• “Remove” the crime with an Instructor. An extremely expensive solution at 50 parchment per crime.

So it’s obviously better to prevent crimes before they happen, and fortunately there are two good ways to do that. Besides preemptively isolating crime-prone clans, you can also makes sure they’re being watched by a clan with a crime-preventing trait such as Eloquent or Intimidating. These “cop” clans will prevent all crime by other clans on their tile, making them valuable for both the settlement and any tile with multiple jerks on it such as a military stack. But McGruff doesn’t police his own and cop clans may still commit crimes if they have the traits for it unless they are being watched by a different cop clan!

Feuds: Advanced Jerkery

Feuds are a more serious type of jerkery, because there is no way to prevent it except by isolation and no way to “remove” it like a crime. No cop clan can prevent feuds, the involved parties will never be satisfied until one of them is punished, and the punishment debuff is forever. And despite the fact that the game defines feuds as “a special type of desire,” clans which have a “never develops desires” trait CAN still be involved in feuds.

So feuds suck and you should avoid them at all costs if you want a productive tribe. The easiest way to do this is by isolation of the feud-prone clans in professions outside the settlement, but some clans are feud-prone and also insist on being inside the Settlement. (Read the trait text carefully: some clans who want to be “inside” are okay with that being a Structure such as a farm or logging camp, while others truly can’t be satisfied unless they are inside the Settlement itself.) What to do in this case?

You can just decide to live with a clan who will eventually become permanently grumpy and place them in a profession where that won’t matter much (see Good Job-Trait Pairings below). Or… well, winters are harsh, and not everyone who goes exploring comes back. As the game says, “it’s a matter for your conscience.”

Desires: the Minor Jerkery

Some traits make a clan more prone to developing desires, which can be a minor annoyance. As far as I have observed, there are only two types of desires currently implemented in the game: the desire to go inside when it’s cold, and the desire to change to a different type of job. The first one is usually easy enough to satisfy because it only takes one turn of being inside the settlement to satisfy the desire. The second one may or may not be easy to satisfy depending on your situation.

If for whatever reason you do not satisfy a desire within about a year, the clan’s mood will begin to drop (except clans with the Demanding trait who will immediately become Angry until you fix the problem). But once the desire is satisfied, the clan will permanently gain a level of mood, which can actually make desires quite useful (see Cheesemaking below).

Most traits are pretty straightforward and it isn’t difficult to tell which type of jobs the clan is suited for, but a few are less obvious.

Many traits make the clan move faster through certain types of terrain. This sounds nice but unfortunately most of them are quite underpowered even in the early game before you have paths set up. They sound like they might make ideal scouts, but Explorers and Surveyors already ignore every type of terrain cost except for streams, so the bonus is actually wasted on them. You might save one turn here or there moving a Marshmen digger clan into an iron deposit or something but it’s nothing spectacular. However, there are two exceptions:

1. As noted, streams still cost extra movement points for Explorers and Surveyors, so Rivermen is actually quite valuable for them, as streams are an extremely common terrain feature and slow down your exploration and path-building quite a bit.

2. If you start in a dense forest, the Woodsmen trait can save you a huge amount of grief on any active clan like Hunters or Gatherers.

Some traits like Greedy, Corrupt, Low Fertility, and anything that lowers mood like Miserable will make a clan permanently worse at resource production. While you can just stick those clans in a resource producing job anyway and deal with the inefficiency, often a better choice is to put them in a production-enhancing job. These are the jobs like Potter and Tiller on the left side of the tech tree, which enhance the production of your other workers but don’t produce anything themselves. These jobs can be extremely powerful, and since they produce nothing on their own, a lowered resource production trait does not affect them at all.

Mood enhancement through intentional desire manipulation is possible. Granting a desire makes a clan happier--and therefore more productive--permanently, so putting a clan in a job you know they dislike so they develop the desire to leave it results in basically a free productivity boost as long as you have the flexibility to retrain them.

Similarly, while one clan will always become upset from being punished for a feud, the other will always become happier. So placing a feud-prone clan in your settlement on purpose will eventually result in a permanent happiness boost for either them or whoever they pick a fight with. Since the fallout of punishment is so annoying to deal with I don’t generally recommend doing this, but if you really can’t do anything else with a jerk clan and don’t feel like killing them, putting them in the settlement and making them the tribe punishment monkey for mood boosts for everyone else is at least one way they can contribute.