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[thvaz]

You mentioned wilderness creatures and bogeymen - and I'm extending the question to other night creatures too - there will be a change in the next release where the villages and town react to them independently of the player involvement? There will be a  chance of the guards catching them or organizing raids to their lairs?

[CypherLH]

When you mention village relationships, does that apply only to human villages or is it all civilized and populated sites? And if so, do all the villages act independently, or is there now a concept of nations/civs in their interactions with each other? Do the village warlords have any relationship with their lieges?

Will villages "bicker" for actual reasons such as competing land/resource claims in this release or will feuds of some sort simply be generated with no real reason behind them? I would ask the same thing about the reasons behind Orc occupations of villages/towns.  I suppose delving into this might get into some of the old Army Arc stuff where entities were supposed to start to actually caring about stuff.   

[Vgray]

Wait a minute, since when does DF have Orcs?

[CypherLH]

Wait a minute, since when does DF have Orcs?

haha, I meant goblins

[hermes]

Wow, I never imagined villages would be fighting each other.  The new world is going to be glorious for adventurers.

[Urist Da Vinci]

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/#2013-12-09

Cue xenophobic village leaders deciding that adventurers are trouble to be eliminated, while apathetic villagers don't mind you being around. They are willing to sell you stuff and so on, but won't support a revolution against their "protective" leader, who is a relative.

Can leaders have and enforce beliefs that are generally not supported by the population, but not in such a way that their population suffers or hates them? (as a consequence of the way things will be implemented, not as a special feature) I am thinking of something like a sheriff who doesn't want "vagrants" in his town.

[smjjames]

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/#2013-12-09

Cue xenophobic village leaders deciding that adventurers are trouble to be eliminated, while apathetic villagers don't mind you being around. They are willing to sell you stuff and so on, but won't support a revolution against their "protective" leader, who is a relative.

Can leaders have and enforce beliefs that are generally not supported by the population, but not in such a way that their population suffers or hates them? (as a consequence of the way things will be implemented, not as a special feature) I am thinking of something like a sheriff who doesn't want "vagrants" in his town.

Who knows what emergent behavior will crop up, but the next update is certainly ripe for it.

As for leaders having and enforcing beliefs, at first I thought you meant religon, but there is no religous conflict in the game yet and no plans for them I don't think, then again, emergent behavior.

[Knight Otu]

When you mention village relationships, does that apply only to human villages or is it all civilized and populated sites? And if so, do all the villages act independently, or is there now a concept of nations/civs in their interactions with each other? Do the village warlords have any relationship with their lieges?

Will villages "bicker" for actual reasons such as competing land/resource claims in this release or will feuds of some sort simply be generated with no real reason behind them? I would ask the same thing about the reasons behind Orc occupations of villages/towns.  I suppose delving into this might get into some of the old Army Arc stuff where entities were supposed to start to actually caring about stuff.   

Toady called them abstract topics, so I'm guessing they're like most reasons for war currently - kind of fake, but looking reasonable. Also, he mentioned that goblin and human settlements squabble this way. It's not clear, as far as I know, if it is based on site type or on other factors.

So yeah, the gear switching since the last release had sort of scuttled one of the major thrusts of the game part of the game we were initially planning to add with bandits, or at least timed it out for this version. We're trying to salvage that portion into a playable segment without extending the length of the to-do list (which is possible since it had some defunct notes). Adjacent human/gob sites now squabble between themselves and each other in world gen, and tensions over various abstract topics (livestock, fishing, water, right-of-way, etc., depending on the entity/site) boil over into raids and sometimes the establishment of site-to-site tribute relationships and nepotistic (nepotic? words are hard) rulership changes. Generally, all the world gen leaders respect family a bit more in terms of how the tensions play out, and they don't make position holder selections so randomly.

[WillowLuman]

Will languages ever differentiate, such that an adventurer might not be able to read the signs or understand people in a far-off land?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Will languages ever differentiate, such that an adventurer might not be able to read the signs or understand people in a far-off land?

Rainseeker:   So how do you see that affecting adventure mode? You have your adventurer, he finds this 'leafen tablet' scrawled by the squirrel people that he just slaughtered and he's like 'hmm, what does this say?'
Toady:   It might be harder to learn the language now you've killed them all.
Rainseeker:   That's true, so you could maybe have an ability to talk and learn their language gradually?
Toady:   Yeah, that's what we're hoping for. The thing that's neat is in a rudimentary way – it would be impossible to pull this off, for me anyway, in a really satisfying way – but if you've got ... Right now the grammatical structure of all the languages is the same, well they can only say one phrase, like 'Johnny run/walk the dog of war', there's only one kind of phrase they have but they're all the same. So even now you could say 'you know thirty percent of the goblin vocabulary, these are the exact words you know' and then whenever you hear a phrase it could translate those words and not the others. But the thing that'll be neater, if we're storing the things that people will say in conversations ... this conflicts with other things, so I'm not really sure how this is going to work, it might just be the writing, it might not be with the conversations; I'm not quite sure ... but if you have the basic sentence trees syntax ... noun/phrase things or whatever, sitting behind the sentences then the grammatical rules can take those trees and turn them into all kinds of different stuff, shifting the word order, cramming certain things together, putting little helper words everywhere, all that kind of stuff ... and still have your knowledge of the language interpret parts of it, or let you pick out pieces of it, in a really straightforward fashion while still preserving all the diversity of the languages. It would be pretty easy to do overall, except for the part where you actually build the sentence trees for everything you want to say. So it's like, you want to say 'the sword is hidden in such-and-such a cave'; that sentence tree's not so hard to build, it involves two of those noun type phrases we already have, like the 'shiny sword' or whatever it's called and the 'cave of darkness' or whatever it would be called, those we can already do. Then you just need to say how the verb works, and once you can construct that you can translate that into all the different languages and they can apply their rules to how those things work. It's nowhere near as complicated as an actual language where you just need all these little rules that modify them, and people don't even have a complete theory; but the game can have a complete theory, because I know what sentences are allowed to be in the books. We control that information and it allows us to complete the picture, so it should be cool. I guess that's a 'yes' for that question, if it was a 'yes/no' question. Is there any possibility of old languages? Yes. It should come in with the treasure hunter stuff, that's where it's on the dev page, if I remember.

There's obviously a bit more info to it in there if you're interested, but this part answers the question well enough ^^

[Uristsonsonson]

Do the village conflicts only relate to human villages, or does it work with any inter-kingdom settlement disputes? Also, now that we're going to have fights between two towns of the same kingdom, will we be seeing larger scale wars between nations of the same race? It'd be fun playing as the commando champion to the true heir to the throne and taking out the pretender's generals one at a time.

[Thundercraft]

Excerpts from Dwarf Fortress Talk #7.2:

Toady:   It’s basically a magic question at the end of the day, so you have to step back and ask yourself again what have we got planned for magic and then how does it fit into fortress mode and all that kind of thing. There’s an extent to which we haven’t been able to plan this out because we’re still not sure exactly what we want to do. What we want to focus on is making it so that if there’s a magical object that’s really a rare special magical object then it should be something that you don’t really understand that well and that’s not necessarily reliable. It depends on the source; where does the magic come from? Was the dwarf inspired by all those gods that don’t actually exist in the game right now, that are just names, or did the dwarf create something so perfect that it just gets infused by magic because it’s a perfect thing, or did the dwarf really have some understanding of magical forces and create such a thing...

...The other kinds of magic there is where it’s not an industrial process are things like having conditions, so if one dwarf were inspired by the god of the harvest to create a chest that you can bring with your armies so that they never have to have supplies or food, then that artifact could in fact be very reliable; it would not be understood and the god might say ‘if you want to keep using this then never march during the full moon’ and if you do then we can really indulge in catastrophic horrible things because it’s your fault; the werewolves can come out of the chest and eat everybody, or whatever needs to happen.

I do understand that magic and magical artifacts are a long way off. And this talk explains that not all artifacts will be inspired by gods. But, my question:

When it comes time for magical artifacts, if their creation actually was inspired by a god, then will the item description mention this fact or even the name of the deity?

I would think that if a deity actually got involved in dwarf affairs by giving a dwarf a mood to make an artifact, then that deity would probably "sign" his or her name on it. In a way, it's more their creation than the moody dwarf's. And even artists tend to sign their name on their works.

[Putnam]

These are the magic strings that are in-game right now, for comparison:

Code: [Select]

The item sparkles with a supernatural brillance.
The air around the object seems warped as if it were very hot, yet the item is cool to the touch.
The object looks oddly square.
The item constantly emits a nearly inaudible high-pitched whistle.
The item is covered with small bumps.
The item smells like wet earth.
Tiny streaks of lightning streak quickly over the object's surface.
Creatures that look at the item cannot think negative thoughts.
The item is covered with minute gray hairs.
The item sounds like rustling leaves when moved.

These descriptions are assumedly in the loo"k" description.

These will probably be replaced later on, but it may give you an idea as to the things that item descriptions might have later.

[thvaz]

Ow. Awesome devlog. I like the fact that the war between villages was triggered by an extreme opposition by their faiths, so it wouldn't be too common, making it special.

[smjjames]

I think you mean wow not ow, heh.

Wow, that devlog is a perfect example of emergent behavior right there. Exciting times in the next update, right?

Got two questions here: Are you going to apply the AI to the other races as well? Also, would it be possible for a full blown civil war to erupt within a civilization? The new devlog hints at the potential for larger scale internal conflicts to arise.