How common was matrilineal or enatic across the scope which the game represents?
Not an expert on medieval history and certainly not across the very broad cultural scope of the game. But based on the patterns in HRAF, my guess would be that matrilineal and enatic were quite rare, even within the large geographic and temporal scope of the game?
Based on that: maybe the rationale behind the various "nerfs" of those playstyles is to undermine any tendency for those types of inheritance and social organization to become unrealistically prevalent in any given play line?
ADDIT: so at least one person "Respectfully Disagrees" with my QUESTIONS about how prevalent these forms of social organization were!? Or was it my reference to Human Relations Area Files!?
Like I said, "MY GUESS" so if I'm wrong please do provide us the evidence to correct me.
ADDIT PART DEUX: So this of course just touches the surface of the tip of the iceberg, but this seems about right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrilineality#Matrilineality_in_specific_ethnic_groups
I vaguely recall there was an Iberian culture that persisted unassimilated into at least early medieval period which was matrilineal?
well for 1, there are plenty of things that werent historically possible *at all* the game enables the players to do, if not outright encourages it. so simply making the arguement that "maybe enatic is worse in every possible way for *history*!" is kind of pointless. especially since the only way it could ever exist at all, let alone ever be "unrealistically prevalent" is if the player specifically chooses a single doctrine when reforming a pagan faith.
especially since the entire point of the game is *to* be ahistorical, have "what if" scenarios, which is difficult when 2 extremes that should in practice be only slightly different from eachother, enatic and agnatic, infact is simply agnatic doing everything enatic does, but better, with even more useful features.
that and the way enatic currently works *is* broken in many ways, and have numerous bug fixes associated with it, because so much of the game before enatic was an officially supported feature was coded to assume agnatic or agnatic-cognatic.
I mean enatic religions with merchant republics are a coin-toss whether they break every succession.
and to your actual "how prevalent was it historically", i mean, in what time period, in what region, at what scale? the game spans from 8th to 15th centuries and england to india (though ironically that last one, historically, i suppose isnt as far as one would think *wink*)
sure, at the highest levels of kingdoms and empires, you didnt see many women in power, because men were usually physically stronger and larger, so they were soldiers, and in a martial society that meant they were more valuable, coupled with a decent likelihood of women dying in childbirth AND women needing many children because of high infant mortality rates, meant societies "led by men" were more likely to be stable in a Dynastic sense.
but the farther down the hierarchy you go, the less the distinction was treated as a hard rule, because the lower you go and the less resources you have, another pair of hands is just another pair of hands, man or womans.
but again, as said above, the entire enatic doctrine is a massive "what if" scenario, of "what if this society took all the values, roles, responsibilties, and powers, typically associated with men of the time, and gave them to women", and by normal game mechanics involving male/female differences they were already "inferior" because of fewer kids and les time to get them, no reason for further mechanics to "nerf" it
