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[Urist McDagger]

We have the five cultures defined in the raws, but having every human nation be a "plains" culture with the exact same types of items, language, government, emphasis on farming, and ethics is kind of... well... dull. Why couldn't they be randomized during worldgen? The Nation of Cheese might be a mostly rural country, while the Magenta Confederacy is an urban coastal nation based around the slave trade and fishing. The Nation might be a theocracy, while the Confederacy favors the vampiric dictatorship model.

It might also extend into subgroups, with, say, one of the Nation of Cheese's towns being settled in the desert and having more desert-suited clothing while another is in a more temperate area with shirts and pants instead of robes and turbans.

[Sus]

An interesting suggestion, I'd say this is worth exploring a bit.

There might be complications with a procedurally generated staring civ, though.

[Matoro]

Why just for humans? Every race should have subcultures. Woodelves, cityelves, mountainelves... Dwarves who live in freezing mountains have different culture than ones in temperate mountains.
That is good suggestion, and would add some realism to game. Also it would add some flavor to adventure mode. In fishing-cultures architecture would be different than it is in plains. Shops would also have different items.

[Neonivek]

Ok I hear the word "Proceedurally" all the time to the point where I am starting to think it is being abused.

What do you mean? Do you mean that civs can pick from different types of government? Do you mean magical programming that makes up governments on the fly?

[irmo]

We have the five cultures defined in the raws, but having every human nation be a "plains" culture with the exact same types of items, language, government, emphasis on farming, and ethics is kind of... well... dull. Why couldn't they be randomized during worldgen? The Nation of Cheese might be a mostly rural country, while the Magenta Confederacy is an urban coastal nation based around the slave trade and fishing. The Nation might be a theocracy, while the Confederacy favors the vampiric dictatorship model.

They're all foreign nations that might trade with your fortress. Other than having slightly different trade goods, what difference would this make?

[Urist McDagger]

Why just for humans? Every race should have subcultures. Woodelves, cityelves, mountainelves... Dwarves who live in freezing mountains have different culture than ones in temperate mountains.

Mostly just because they're currently the only race with real settlements, but that'd be great to see once the other races' places go back in properly. Surely at least a few other people wouldn't mind being able to explore the frozen ruins of the regenade arctic dwarf nation of Necrobeers along with the above-ground cities of the plains dwarves?

Ok I hear the word "Proceedurally" all the time to the point where I am starting to think it is being abused.

What do you mean? Do you mean that civs can pick from different types of government? Do you mean magical programming that makes up governments on the fly?

More like it uses the raws for the civs at the beginning of worldgen, and then history can affect them. We sort of have that now, with vampires openly ruling civs and occasionally the law giver being a priest, but it'd be pretty cool if this was expanded. A country ruled by a soldier would be completely different than one governed by a priest of a fertility and love deity. A town that was recently liberated from goblins could keep the culture to a degree and be more anarchic than most, or one that was taken from elves could still have a druidic tradition.

They're all foreign nations that might trade with your fortress. Other than having slightly different trade goods, what difference would this make?

Not too much besides the flavor, trade goods, and traders' equipment in Fort Mode, I guess, but it'd impact worldgen and Adventure Mode, along with the outside world after release 5.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

If you kept up with the dev notes then this is already planned. Races will have their own cultures that are either generated at the start of world gen or developes over time.
An example of this was when Toady was talking about why Goblins suddenly had the NOEAT tag, he claimed this was becaue he couldn't think of Goblins ranching, farming nor could he see them as nomadic hordes. The quote was something like: "Humans were the Mongols so we're going to have human Mongols".

[Iapetus]

On a similar line, I think it would be nice if different cultures used different naming conventions (either defined in the raws, or procedurally generated).

At the moment, all cultures use the convention of (as far as I can tell) first name = random noun, second name = random noun/verb/adjective pairing, with the only difference between entities being what pool of words these are chosen from.

Instead , different entities use conventions like:

Modern style (surname is inherited from father (or alternatively from mother)).
Anglo-Saxon style (first name is a random noun pairing: e.g. "Randalf" = "Shield Wolf", surname is usually earned)
Icelandic style: (surname = father's first name + "son" or "dottir"
Native American style (first name = adjective + noun)

[MonkeyHead]

Boundaries and filters would be needed though to prevent "stupid" behaviours - things like conflicting ethics tags, or cultures devoted to fishing in the desert.

[irmo]

Boundaries and filters would be needed though to prevent "stupid" behaviours - things like conflicting ethics tags, or cultures devoted to fishing in the desert.

So do a ton of work to implement procedurally generated cultures, and then another ton of work to filter out the ones that don't make any sense, so that we can have basically the cultures we already have. The stock, hardcoded DF Elves are already more interesting than whatever this algorithm would vomit up, but they're not proceeeedural!

(They're also the same for everyone, which means we can talk about them and have a common reference point. I think the value of this is badly underestimated.)

[Astramancer]

Ok I hear the word "Proceedurally" all the time to the point where I am starting to think it is being abused.

What do you mean? Do you mean that civs can pick from different types of government? Do you mean magical programming that makes up governments on the fly?

All procedurally means is that it's semi-random, based on an initial condition (worldgen seed, in this case), and generated using a specific set of rules.  Using the same seed, you always end with the same result, but using a random seed means you end up with random, semi-predictable results.

So to answer your questions:  Yes to all.

The rules could say that there's a chance that if a vampire wanders by, and they're surrounded by hostile civs, they could choose to instill the vampire as dictator.  The seed and other factors of worldgen say if a vampire wanders by, and if they are surrounded by hostile civs, and the seed also says if they instill it or not.

Some seeds might say "yes, instill him" but don't offer a suitable vampire, or maybe there's a suitable vampire but the seed says they don't instill him.  There could also be a suitable vampire, the civ is surrounded... but they opt not to take the dictator option.

With a random seed, it may as well be random, but the same seed will always gain the same result.

That's what he means by procedurally.

[NW_Kohaku]

A slight aside on it, Toady himself just called (maybe still calls) these things "random", and I remember reading an old (2008 or so) quote from him on the subject. 

Procedural is sort of a buzzword among programmers for things most people would call random (to distinguish it as "random with a chart of possible structured outcomes" from "any crazy thing, like coming up with monkey-pig-dishwasher").

[10ebbor10]

Boundaries and filters would be needed though to prevent "stupid" behaviours - things like conflicting ethics tags, or cultures devoted to fishing in the desert.

In think survival of the fittest would take care of it nicely. Ie settlement runs out of food and dies.

Btw, it would be fun and realistic to see a Viking like culture defeating a previously peacefull desert civ, only to have to give up those cities a few years later because they can't manage themselves there.

[Silverionmox]

In any case, more variety in cultures, both inside of and between races, would be a good thing. Both accumulating hand-crafted templates and procedural recombination would be an improvement.

[NW_Kohaku]

In any case, more variety in cultures, both inside of and between races, would be a good thing. Both accumulating hand-crafted templates and procedural recombination would be an improvement.

Yes, but at the same time, there needs to be a greater possibility for variety than in the current system for this to make sense.

In what way do current ethics really matter in the game?  You can't really overtly see how a given civ's ethics work directly in-game.  Most ethics only come up as a cause of wars with elves over some random peasant telling a lie. 

When you mod a new race in, it's hard to make them significantly different from one of the currently existing races, as only human cities even exist, no technology exists that dwarves do not have access to, (With most of those technologies being pretty basic and universal, at that.)  and the game doesn't work properly if you give creatures abilities or ethics that dwarves do not have, as the game is not currently designed for anything but dwarf fortresses. 

This stuff is planned for "eventually", but that "eventually" is after a large number of pre-requisite steps, and I don't see this one happening anytime in the near future (by which I mean "the next 5 years, at least").