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[coolio678]

And isn't Toady going to make randomized cultures down the line anyway?

I don't believe Toady is stupid enough to replace the dwarves with a randomized culture with no identifying characteristics.

Cultures is different than races. I think he means that eventually ethics will depend on where the civ settles, what happens, and when the world is generated.

[agatharchides]

Slavery isn't done by dwarves, so no point coding it in. OTHO, I have wished for something to do with prisoners besides slaughter them or have them take up space in the stockpile forever. Maybe at some point you could ransom them medieval style or do a prisoner exchange for dwarves kidnapped by the goblins.

[Urist McDagger]

Slavery isn't done by dwarves, so no point coding it in. OTHO, I have wished for something to do with prisoners besides slaughter them or have them take up space in the stockpile forever. Maybe at some point you could ransom them medieval style or do a prisoner exchange for dwarves kidnapped by the goblins.

There's not until/unless dwarven civs can have cultural differences. The vanilla mountain culture might not do it, but the Banners of Jumping might, due to being escaped slaves from the goblin civ. Who knows? They might have even fought a necromancer in worldgen and become corrupted by his loot. Or had a series of famines and have to drop their aversion to eating sentients. Unless, of course, I'm wrong about Toady planning to have randomly generated cultures at some point.

[irmo]

There's not until/unless dwarven civs can have cultural differences. The vanilla mountain culture might not do it, but the Banners of Jumping might, due to being escaped slaves from the goblin civ.

In which case the UI and other code needed for a playable civ to have slaves would have to be written (and tested).

Presumably goblins have always stolen children to sell them as slaves, even back in the pre-3d era, but we never saw the slaves. It's a relatively small matter to have the slaves show up again (for example, they could sell them back to you, or goblin armies could use them as laborers). It's much harder to expose the goblins' side of that process to the player. For one, you now have people in your community who don't want to do their assigned work, so you have to motivate or threaten them, which has never even been part of the model before. They may also try to escape, and for that not to be trivially defeated by forbidding the door, we need more advanced pathfinding that can decide to go through forbidden doors. Slaves aren't allowed to eat and sleep whenever they feel like it, so we need controls to set up schedules for that stuff. And so on.

Or you can declare that (1) dwarves are the playable civ*, and (2) dwarves don't keep slaves, so implementing slavery as a player-civ feature would be pointless, and thus save a whole lot of effort.


* For fortress mode, I mean. Adventurer mode doesn't have the same demands.

[Logen910]

Is that really quite the same thing? One's simply changing a game's racial culture. One's breaking a material.

They are the same insofar as they involve going to a lot of work to implement a feature that, in its default, as-shipped configuration, will never be used. Dwarves don't have slaves, so the game doesn't have a user interface or the job-queue features needed to manage slaves as part of a fortress. Changing the ETHIC tag so that they theoretically can have slaves won't cause that code to spring into existence.

And isn't Toady going to make randomized cultures down the line anyway?

I don't believe Toady is stupid enough to replace the dwarves with a randomized culture with no identifying characteristics.

I think he will keep the existing entities, so only additional cultures will be randomized.

[Babylon]

There's not until/unless dwarven civs can have cultural differences. The vanilla mountain culture might not do it, but the Banners of Jumping might, due to being escaped slaves from the goblin civ.

In which case the UI and other code needed for a playable civ to have slaves would have to be written (and tested).

Presumably goblins have always stolen children to sell them as slaves, even back in the pre-3d era, but we never saw the slaves. It's a relatively small matter to have the slaves show up again (for example, they could sell them back to you, or goblin armies could use them as laborers). It's much harder to expose the goblins' side of that process to the player. For one, you now have people in your community who don't want to do their assigned work, so you have to motivate or threaten them, which has never even been part of the model before. They may also try to escape, and for that not to be trivially defeated by forbidding the door, we need more advanced pathfinding that can decide to go through forbidden doors. Slaves aren't allowed to eat and sleep whenever they feel like it, so we need controls to set up schedules for that stuff. And so on.

Or you can declare that (1) dwarves are the playable civ*, and (2) dwarves don't keep slaves, so implementing slavery as a player-civ feature would be pointless, and thus save a whole lot of effort.


* For fortress mode, I mean. Adventurer mode doesn't have the same demands.

Pathing through forbidden doors is already included for thieves, although I wouldn't think slaves would be able to get through a locked door most of the time.