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[Elliott_Thinas]

If a military dwarf leader is consistently unhappy and disillusioned with his fort, it should be possible for him to launch a coup, where all military dwarves in the squad have to decide their loyalty towards either the fortress or their leader. The rebelling squad becomes an enemy to the fortress but only targets loyalist military squads, nobles, and the royal guard and nonviolently incapacitates resisting civilians and fortress guards. If the coup wipes out the leading noble family, the commander of the coup, or the highest ranking soldier from his squad (in the event the usurper was killed during the rebellion) assumes a new noble position as Tyrant. After this, your original civilization will declare you an enemy and attempt to send soldiers to retake the fort. Like the usurpers, they will avoid targetting civilians and guardsdwarves unless necessary, and if they can capture or kill the Tyrant, the fortress returns to its original civ, and new nobles will be sent. This would be pretty cool as it would let you control the leading faction of the fort. You would also need to be careful to ensure the loyalty of the soldiers by giving them nice rooms and tombs.

[DanielLC]

I'm confused as to whom the player controls. Is it that the player controls the loyalists while the coup is in progress, and whoever wins when it's over?

[Elliott_Thinas]

Yeah, they would control the loyalists up to the death of the current noble, then switch to the usurpers up to the death of the tyrant.

[Aquillion]

This gets into the problem of who the player really is.  It seems odd to just arbitrarily say that they're the loyalists, and then suddenly become the usurpers when they have control (in fact, it makes the most logical course of action for the player to simply give in and let their nobles get killed, because they don't want any more dwarves to get hurt.  Hell, the player was probably killing several nobles themselves.)

[Fieari]

Eh, let the player control everyone like normal.  It's just the dwarves' behavoir that changes, in who they target.  But to make it work, you'd have to make it so that they'd ignore orders to station themselves somewhere, and would make their own military plans.  De-draft them, and they'll tantrum (and still have their weapons).  That sort of thing.

I mean, when your dwarves go fey, who are you then?  You're still the player... but the dwarves are still dwarves.

[DanielLC]

How about making it let the player choose to be the loyalists or usurpers?

Given that the AI isn't really smarter than fight to the death, it might be a good idea to just make it so the player doesn't control anyone until the fight ends.

[Elliott_Thinas]

I think that's the idea; the player is someone who wants the best for the dwarves. It wouldn't really make sense to give the player direct squad control of the usurpers because they are acting like tantrumming dwarves, to an extent. The player also is not allowed to tell nobles what to do or where to put their noble guard, so those interactions between the usurpers and nobles would be pretty much out of the hands of the player. Once the usurper takes control, they would no longer be 'tantrumming' (staging a rebellion) and game play would continue as usual. Either way, the rebellion would be something pretty much sorted out between the dwarves without much control for the player, as the dwarves independantly decide their own loyalties.

[chucks]

Non-lethal takedowns have also been discusses many times in this forum.  If the fortress guard can quell the coup in non-violent means and you have ares setup for dwarven justice, your rebellious military command could be brought up on treason.  Either the sheriff or the hammerer or the dungeon master could dispense with cases of treason, with the potential for a public execution of the traitor.

[The Laughing Man]

Really what we need are political parties within the fortress; perhaps a loyalist party consisting of nobles, royal guard, maybe some of the wealthier craftsdwarves/brewers/cooks as well, and a military party consisting of military, armor/weaponsmiths, and siege operators. (maybe also a peasant led party assisted by the fortress guard and mayor) By default, only the ruling party would exist and other parties would gradually form and build tensions with the rulers.  For example, if we had a very large military we would quickly see several squad leaders get together and form a party which would then try to recruit more members (mostly from the military but with some probability of getting random nonmilitary dwarves); however, if there are enough royal guard, they ought to act like political police and hunt down enemy parties and either give them all jail sentences or at least remove the leader and dissolve the party (giving the military bad thoughts but avoiding political clashes)  But if the party is allowed to become large enough, they should start rioting (which ought to work like tantruming, but they should avoid attacking each other) An actual coup should occur at the choice of the player to avoid annoying random periods of fortress inactivity; so anytime the fortress has more than one party there should be some option to change the ruling party, at which point the population of the fortress would split between the former party, indifferent, and the revolutionary party according to previous party size and influence, and depending on relative strengths and leader personalities the parties could battle for control or the ruling party could step down.

This gives the player a good amount of indirect control in influencing politics: suppose the fortress is currently ruled by nobility and the loyalist party has about 10 members whereas the military party has 20 members.  To avoid rioting, the player could either initiate a revolution (and risk losing a few non-nobles that may side with the loyalists), they could reduce the size of the military which would halt growth of that party, or they could draft some royal guards to put down the rebellion.  (I suppose a coup could be initiated at some threshold of party size rather than at the players discretion, which would seem more simulation-y, but might just be annoying)

[Pilsu]

I don't see revolutionary groups forming unless the populace is treated very poorly. Making dwarves automatically prepare for murder would be really annoying