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[NW_Kohaku]

What you say is true about not making every civ have the same power at the end of worldgen.

This is I was talking about the factors affecting points during worldgen. Everyone gets a base amount of points as defined in the raws, a base amount. They could be overritten in the worldgen params. Then, their history over time in worldgen would increase or decrease points based on merits/flaws according to individual civics on a civ by civ basis. Civics will be like Ethics with several factors including War/Peace, general populace education, Ruler education, spirtuality, religion, etc. They will be handled like the Phys_Att_Range factors in the creature_standard raw, with Humans being the basic rulestick.

This is an example:

• the civ could have a bad millitary or social history. Mabye they were too warlike for the other civs to trust them enough to trade with. After all, if you constantly backstab the people that are surrounding you, you would never be trusted enough to trade fairly with. A massive army would be a major threat to other civs so they would be weak in the trust aspect thus reducing points in the Item pool.
• Rulers that that have an emphasis on all having an education may increase Skill points.
• A well established religion would increase Attribute/Soul Points.

These are examples of what I was saying.

But again, attributes means both strength and intelligence and communication skills, and you're using "Soul Points" as a catch-all term for all of those things.

Basically, you're saying the way to make dwarves stronger is to make them attend church more regularly. 

Meanwhile, a civ that performs more manual labor and trade and prefers combat, but aren't as religious would have lower strength and endurance (functionally) than the religious civs.

Really, the problem I'm having is you're mixing "Soul Points" with "spirituality" while having it's actual in-game impact be on things that don't really have much to do with a dwarf's spirituality at all.  Even many of the so-called "Soul Attributes" don't really have much to do with spirituality at all - analytical ability, spacial sense, memory, etc. 

(Likewise, education and skill points don't necessarily mix, either.  You don't really teach people to be better hunters or farmers or woodcutters with books in a medieval setting.)

These are all things that we associate with the mind or intelligence, which are generally secular, but which Toady has called "Soul Attributes" as a way of making the apply so that the "mind" of a dwarf can live on in ghost form exactly as if it had a still-functioning brain.  But how religious that dwarf was has no impact on how much analytical ability the dwarf has.  How religious a dwarf is not only has no impact on a dwarf's strength or disease resistance, but it seems kind of absurd to even think it does.

Besides which, if we ARE trying to differentiate one civ from another based upon something like attributes, wouldn't it make more sense to say that one civ has more analytical ability as a general community than another civ does because of some sort of education system or the like?  Wouldn't another civ be better known for its endurance just because of the particular lifestyle they live? 

As it stands, all you're doing is giving different civs different numbers of points to customize characters in a point-buy system, you aren't actually giving any specific civ a real distinct trait.  A "religious civ" could just as easily have very stupid, strong people as it has highly educated and erudite, frail people, and which one they are shifts entirely when you start spending your points at embark.


I also want to ask if you are aware of Toady's existing intentions to create "Starting Scenarios", which would basically make different civs that you embark from give you different "purposes", for lack of a better word, for your fortresses, and as such, different starting equipment and personnel?

[KtarraMoon]

OK I get your points. I surrender. This idea is stupid and will not be added to the Suggestions vote section even if Toady doesn't see it. I just wanted to throw it up the flagpole anyway and see if it sticks.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK I get your points. I surrender. This idea is stupid and will not be added to the Suggestions vote section even if Toady doesn't see it. I just wanted to throw it up the flagpole anyway and see if it sticks.

You know, when someone asks questions about your ideas, or points out problems, it is neither a personal attack, nor an insistence that none of what you are saying is worthwhile.  Criticism is a force for good.

If someone finds flaws in your ideas, you don't take it personally, you revise the idea to make it better.  That's why it's a suggestions forum, and not a suggestions box.

Look, let's try simplifying the problem a little -
What is the core idea you want to get across, and what little concept or feature did you think you would want to play around with when you were playing DF?

Strip it of the details of how it would get done, and say what sorts of effects you wanted to see in the game as a link between what a worldgen civ had as a result of its history, and what sorts of impacts that would have on the embark.  What do you think DF is lacking as a simulation?

Or, go the other way, and talk about what sort of gameplay you wanted to have players enjoy.  What experience is the game not giving its players that it should?

[SuicideJunkie]

Such boolean thinking really rots my +socks+.
You've gotta treat things like science or engineering, not religion!

When a flaw is found, either fix it, work around it, or determine if it is an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits.

[AdeleneDawner]

My two coppers:

I like the idea of having the option of having more control over the personalities of  the dwarves I'm embarking with. I also like the idea of different civs having different strengths and weaknesses. I don't like 'religiousness' being a single thing with the same effect each time.

DF already has procedurally generated gods that can be very different from each other. Those differences should affect the dwarves, both individually and on a civ level. That dwarf who's an ardent worshiper of the god of gems and wealth? I figure he's likely to have spent some time working with gems, or maybe metal. Perhaps he automatically has Novice rank in gem-setting, for free, or perhaps he has a bonus on learning to work with gems, so that he learns that skill faster than a doubtful worshiper of the same diety, or a dwarf who worships some other diety altogether. If this particular diety is popular with this particular civilization, they're likely to have a lot of dwarves who do gemwork, which puts them in a good position for trading. Or maybe it just makes them a juicier target for the goblins, if the civ doesn't have a diety who gives a bonus to combat or defense. Or maybe they have a trading partner who'll help defend them from the goblins. Or maybe they have a very influential diety of trade - or maybe the goblins wound up with a trade-focused diety - and they're actually trading with the buggers. This seems like the kind of thing that the procedural world generator would be good at, to me.

As to being able to tweak the specific attributes of the starting dwarves on a point-by-point basis... I think we need to wait and see what Toady has planned, not necessarily for this specifically, but for things that affect this, like the mountainhomes setting specific missions for their settlers. Being able to set specific attributes may make more sense than picking from a pool of volunteers, in that case - if the mountainhomes are sending these specific 7 dwarves out to do X, the pool idea doesn't make much sense - but it seems like it primarily comes down to how that's implemented, which we just don't know yet.

[KtarraMoon]

I just wanted creatures that can be Malleable: mold them into whatever is necessary for the good of the fort/player. We are sort of like gods for these creatures, giving orders to them from on high; we tell them where and when to dig, when and where to plant, when to build items, etc. Would you like to be gods over their attributes, personalities, and everything else about them? We could create destined families (families that have great potential for heroics, skills, etc) and in-game castes different from just the sexes (for example: an optimized miner caste, optimized warrior caste, optimized leader caste, etc.) I am sorry for using this term, but we could just call it Eugenics (after all, Francis Galton, first cousin to Charles Darwin, came up with it in 1885.) and, for people who do not want to do Eugenics, the randomized systems would still be in place. That is what I am talking about.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, a few ways to go with this...

First up, you start with talk about making basically every aspect of a dwarf directly alterable.  When I stated asking questions, you then shifted over to talking about civs having different amounts of different traits. 

These are two very different ideas.  Having civs with different traits would seem to imply something like a civilization with a lot of trade routes and which has peaceful relations with a lot of different cultures would have a better linguistic ability, not just a general larger pool of points that can be sunk into any given attribute.  (Or items or skills.)  In fact, the idea that you start out with a blank slate on every dwarf seems to be at least partially contradictory to the notion that each dwarf comes from some sort of background that influences what they will ultimately become.  How can you be a blank slate while carrying the baggage of your past?

This shift in focus implies that you aren't quite certain about what you really want to achieve with your suggestion.

If you have an inconsistent solution, it's time to stop and really ask yourself what the real problem is that you are trying to solve - oftentimes this confusion is caused by mislabeling the problem.  This is why I would ask you to stop and really ask yourself what sort of "hole" in the game you think is missing that you are trying to fill.


Now then, onto the direct content of the current post...

I just wanted creatures that can be Malleable: mold them into whatever is necessary for the good of the fort/player. We are sort of like gods for these creatures, giving orders to them from on high; we tell them where and when to dig, when and where to plant, when to build items, etc. Would you like to be gods over their attributes, personalities, and everything else about them? We could create destined families (families that have great potential for heroics, skills, etc) and in-game castes different from just the sexes (for example: an optimized miner caste, optimized warrior caste, optimized leader caste, etc.) I am sorry for using this term, but we could just call it Eugenics (after all, Francis Galton, first cousin to Charles Darwin, came up with it in 1885.) and, for people who do not want to do Eugenics, the randomized systems would still be in place. That is what I am talking about.

So, let me ask this, then:

Is this really what you think is missing from the game right now - a lack of direct control over the "destinies" of "families" of dwarves? (Keep in mind that right now, the starting seven dwarves do not have families - they are generated from nowhere.) 

Is what you think when you look at the game right now, "I really wish I had more direct control over the specific details I see in the game?" 

Or is there something else that you are actually dissatisfied with at a deeper level than this? 

What is the specific point in the game that gives you that bit of frustration that drives you to want to suggest a change?  Is it seeing the stats of your dwarves, and knowing that you didn't set them yourself? Or is it that the stats or the world history don't really seem to matter?

Sometimes, it's much more difficult to identify the real problems that set us off than it is to actually suggest the solutions to the problems. 

If you want to make a truly great suggestion, you have to dig down beneath the immediate problems you see, and ask what is really missing or not being fulfilled, and why those problems exist in the first place.


There is also the notion that you are retroactively changing the "history" of a civilization by determining that they were actually a proud warrior society or a scholarly society without actually rewriting the history of the civilization. 

Right now, the ethics of a civilization has a major impact on the course of a world's history.  When the ethics of one civilization are in conflict with another civilization's ethics, they frequently go to war.  You are talking about changing some fundamental aspect of a culture, and that's something that really should have had an impact upon the history of that culture. 

Rather than just punching a button that says "this society which conquered the world is actually a bunch of scholarly pacifists", maybe what you REALLY want is to have the ability to change a civilization before worldgen actually starts?

That way, you can say "this is a society that has a big focus upon warfare and conquest" or "this is a scholarly pacifist society", and the history that comes out of worldgen would be different based upon the choices you made in worldgen.  That would be internally consistent, and not produce weird time paradoxes.

Alternately, what you might really want is a chance to just have a broad-scope influence over the course of a given civilization's history during worldgen, rather than simply determining all this at the actual moment of embark, completely disregarding the generated history that DF has built.


Let me also respond to this in part by quoting something else I remember...

This from the recent FotF:

Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

So it seems like a tiered or gradual gradiation into more decentralized control is part of what Toady vaguely sees in the future.

One of the real overarching goals that I see come up when Toady talks about what he wants the game to be in interviews is that he wants to make Dwarf Fortress into a game where you can simply generate a seemingly living, breathing world, with a full backstory filled with tragedy and heroism, all at the punch of a button. 

It's not a world you, as a player, are directly standing in the muck building up with your hands, it's a world where you are just a participant.  You are one fort among many.  You are just the latest guy who managed to scrape together some basic equipment and set out on a so-called "adventure" for "fame and riches", but more likely an early grave. 

You're not really supposed to be God.  And Toady seems to want to make you less of one as time goes on.

Really, the other idea you had, the one about having a civilization with a lot of schools maybe making the entire population have a general +50 analytical ability stat and +20 Linguistic Ability and +20 Focus, but being shut up in school instead of playing outside winds up making them have -10 Strength, -10 Agility, and -20 Endurance compared to other creatures of their own species fits in with this vision of what DF can be much better.

It's something where a past you didn't control impacts the sort of things you are capable of doing - like being dealt a random hand of cards, where you can't determine what cards are in your hand, but where you do have the power to play those cards as you see fit.

Sometimes, herding cats with independent minds is more interesting than simply having absolute control over automatons with no traits you don't force onto them.

[Reelyanoob]

the civ could have a bad millitary or social history. Mabye they were too warlike for the other civs to trust them enough to trade with. After all, if you constantly backstab the people that are surrounding you, you would never be trusted enough to trade fairly with. A massive army would be a major threat to other civs so they would be weak in the trust aspect thus reducing points in the Item pool.

We could also have a nation with a powerful economy, thus being able to supply more item points.

• Split the points into 3 seperate pools: Item Points, Skill Points and Soul Points.
• Keep the option of randomized Creatures but have an option to do something like "Prepare for the journey carefully with soul altering of starting selection".

Having cheaper/variable cost items would be easier to implement and give the EXACT SAME MATHEMATICAL OUTCOME without the complications, with the added bonus of being able to make some sorts of specific items or skills cheaper based in civ specifics, and some rare - e.g. imported - commodities could still be bought, but be much more expensive. For example, the military civ could find weapons,armour and combat skillls cheaper in the list, and trade goods more expensive, while still having a single pool of points.

Splitting up to multiple points pools reduces the player's free choice btw, because the game told you how much you have to spend on each thing, rather than you deciding that. So, MANY millions less possible embarks profiles.

• Rulers that that have an emphasis on all having an education may increase Skill points.

Better yet, give a discount on the cost of skills which are widespread in your civ. A ruler who promoted education would spread skills, so give the effect of the above, but targetted to only skills your civ actually has.

A well established religion would increase Attribute/Soul Points.
These are examples of what I was saying.

That would make Iran the most skilled people in our world, is that a good 'example'? Religion is the opiate of the masses, sorry to say, and would likely keep people docile, not 'extra skilled', except in Theology mainly. Maybe a religion could promote certain skills, and make them cheaper in the starting pool, that at least has an understandable mechanism behind it.

[KtarraMoon]

I want more direct control over the destinys of my Dwarves. That is what I want to see. If you all can help make a formal idea out of this it would be great. I wanted to throw my idea into the ring and see how it sticks.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you all can help make a formal idea out of this it would be great. I wanted to throw my idea into the ring and see how it sticks.

Well, that's a problem.

The thing is, anyone can say "I like ***, make the game have more ***" but a good suggestion involves an argument for the idea based upon how it can be presented to the player, and how it will impact the player's ability to play the game. 

When you make a suggestion, it's on you to make the argument for it, and mold it from a passing thought into a "formal thought"/real suggestion.

If you want me to make a suggestion about how players can have a greater control over the "destiny" of dwarves, I've already made that suggestion - just click this link and read it, or better yet, comment on it.

If you want to make your own suggestion, you have to actually think it through and make the argument, yourself.  You can't just throw it off on others, and say, "It's your problem, now!"

I want more direct control over the destinys of my Dwarves.

This is also unclear.  "Destinies" can mean an awful lot, but more importantly, that's not really what I'm asking about. 

WHY do you want more control over the dwarves?  What control do you not already have that you find lacking?  Would you not be satisfied unless you could pull up a script and program the every thought into a dwarf's mind you wanted?  Or are you wanting to write your own personal version of the DF history, and throw the procedurally-generated one out?