I know SO moved it back but I just want to disagree with banditry being more advanced than Tribal Warfare. In Tribal Warfare you have generally ritualized ways of fighting with specific rules on how to win. Banditry is very primitive, so much so one could say Chimps use a form of Banditry when fighting other packs. It also doesn't have to be an army, bandits can be individuals who take things from others. Thus scavenging fit well as a tech since its based collecting and taking things.
And as a 3rd comparison Militia is more a defensive type of warfare with more or less untrained individuals.
Perhaps the moniker is the problem. Banditry implies organized robbery from a large group of individuals and a culture of such behavior. It implies Gang behavior. This, admittedly was probably a little more advanced than what we see in chimps.
However, Theft is probably something the Homo Sapien was involved in since before we were Homo Sapien. Some good arguments have been made that the evolution that put us ahead of other Hominids was our ability to commit acts of deception, our ability to lie cheat and steal basically.
I don't know that you can say any kind of early social policy (civic) would be possible to represent this early period before it was even recognized that we should begin to try to be anything other than selfish beasts. However, once we began to learn how to establish rules of cooperation and social orders to work together more effectively is probably also when some individuals began to specialize in breaking those rules and getting away with it. It would probably also be around then that some of those individuals would 'band' together and organize this behavior against rival groups.
Calling that Banditry would be somewhat acceptable but it can't be directly compared to the same kind of Banditry such as we witnessed during the middle ages, large groups of social pariahs, outlaws, renegades and fugitives banding together to become a plague on society from its outskirts and on its less guarded trade routes, which the term tends to imply.
Perhaps Thievery or Raiding may imply these early practices better?
Also, I think we've gone back to ignoring that the Thief unit was all but made obsolete by the difficulty in finding enough production in this tenuous growth period at the beginning of the game to build the Bandit's Hideout so as to make them available - then the Thief is itself also a very heavy build and is weak enough to make such a selection very risky. I like being able to get them out there but I usually find myself just waiting for Rogues as it takes that long to get on top of production enough to have wiggle room to build Criminals. Didn't use to be this way... I used to find Thieves very valuable in the fight against Neanderthals. But more content put in since has pushed the Bandit's Hideout into the 'too heavy a build for quick enough benefit' range during the time period of the game that would normally be the height of the Thief's activities.
This was one reason I was thinking of putting the Bandit's Hideout into the auto-built on crime category. But I can see the reasons not to go in that design direction at this time. So the other alternative, imo, is to make it a bit cheaper on the build costs by about 1/2. At the moment it has the cost I would normally associate with a wonder to be built in the equivalent era. And since the Thief requires that building to come into play first, I'd even knock it down by 25% on its training cost. It just sucks up so much valuable limited production during that first stage! And the AI is evaluating this correctly thus why we don't see them in the game much.
