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[alfie275]

You should be able to make sets for castes, a caste could belong to multiple sets and can be set to breed with only individuals from certain sets, this would also be useful if you want a gene to affect the chance that a creature will be a particular type (dog breeds, job (soldier, manual labour)) but not the actual caste (gender, exploding soldier, huge soldier etc). Sets should be able to nest, so you can define a set as being inside another.

[Footkerchief]

Can you give a more fleshed-out example of how you'd make use of multiple "caste sets" for a particular creature?

[Neonivek]

Some aspects of this suggestion make sense in theory, but yeah Id like a more tangable example.

[alfie275]

One example would be dogs, you would have the breeds as caste sets and then the genders as the castes. Or a hive based creature which has 3 different soldiers:A spit based ranged attacker, a suicidal exploding one and a heavily armoured agressive one, and 3 different workers: miners with spade like hands, gatherers with sharp scythe like hands and strong haulers with many arms. You might want to have a soldier to work ratio of 1:5 or in the future we might be able to make it vary depending on situations, ie a hive under siege or an outpost might produce more soldiers or a resource gathering hive might produce more workers.

[Footkerchief]

One example would be dogs, you would have the breeds as caste sets and then the genders as the castes.

Okay, so say we have a caste set for Dalmatians, a caste set for poodles, and a caste set for bulldogs.  What kind of information about the breed is stored in the caste set?  How does the body specification for a Dalmatian interact with the body specification for a female dog?

[Neonivek]

That sounds a bit like what we already have for the next release.

Unless you mean like... There are two castes each with a 50/50 chance... and within those castes there are 5 other castes each with different chances of success.

[Footkerchief]

Unless you mean like... There are two castes each with a 50/50 chance... and within those castes there are 5 other castes each with different chances of success.

What chance of success are you talking about?  Do you mean birth?

[Neonivek]

Err yes...

From what is sounds like... It seems like he is describing "Sub-castes"

"This is the worker Caste. Within the worker caste there are Scythemen, Shovelmen, and Armymen (PUN!)"

[Footkerchief]

For the soldiers/workers it sounds like sub-castes, yeah, but for dog breeds it's more like... "other caste," because the dog's gender is independent of its breed.  I think caste sets are too generalized to be a useful tool.

Alfie, my recommendation is to reconsider what you're trying to accomplish so that you can devise more delicate tools.  For example, for the soldiers/workers thing, what's really needed is caste breeding groups of some kind, so that workers only mate with workers and give birth to workers.  Toady has already talked about implementing those in the future, so you'll be able to do that eventually.  Dog breeds are much more difficult, though, especially since there are no clear lines between breeds.  Toady discussed the problems of implementing breeds in the very recent creature raws mini-podcast.

[alfie275]

Caste groups could also be treated as a caste in respect to entity positions, ie only castes in the soldier group can be the leader of the army etc.

[Footkerchief]

Caste groups could also be treated as a caste in respect to entity positions, ie only castes in the soldier group can be the leader of the army etc.

Well, the next version already supports that.  You can restrict an entity position to whatever castes you choose.  You have to list the permitted castes individually, but that shouldn't be much of a chore unless you have, like, dozens of permitted castes.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i think that caste hereditarity sould be a higher priority, we could set it as genetically inheritable

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

, in a simplyfied mendelian way: two diferent castes breed and have a 50 percent chance of producing one like its father, or one like it's mother, if the offsprung creature is the caste of its mother, and mates with another of the same caste there should be a little chance of generating a being the same caste as his father

culturally inheritable

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

and set it that it is inherited as a status or title from either the father or mother

or simply random with a defined chance, like we have now