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[slink]

I took Mudcrab to be referring to the idea of incorporating waste management into the game when he said that about nerdiness and insanity.  I don't agree a fecal fixation is a nerd attribute, but I do agree it would add nothing to the game.  What would come next, Dwarves hopping up and down, wetting themselves, and then bursting into tears if there was no toilet?   

I don't care what gets added as long as I can edit it out if I don't want it.  That is the strong point of DF for me, that it can be so heavily edited.  I don't even necessarily like the same play mode all of the time, and I really don't care if other people play differently from me.  "Losing is Fun" is the Bay12 slogan, but mine would probably be "Almost Losing Can Be Fun, Sometimes".

Tarn Adams take on this topic was in the Dev Log: "I don't yet see a way to make something like rubble or different sizes of rocks a net positive for the game, so I'm just going to stick with the larger intermittent boulders for now to keep things moving."

It's obvious to me from that statement that he does not think the mere existence of rubble justifies itself.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

different people enjoy different thigs about the game. it's in alpha, and the direction it's going to take isn't clearly set, i don't think this is optimal because many people of different mindsets converge to it and expect different things from development, some people are bound to be left out in the cold, and toady has to accept that instead of trying to please everyone. i know i'm losing hope in the game, because i see toady going in a direction where he is abstracting a lot of things i wanted to deal with. i don't blame him for it, i admire the man and what he created, but i was expecting something else. i just hope i'll be able to model a more in depth game later, since i lack the competence to create one of my own from scratch

[Manveru Taurënér]

I for one want some kind of rubble system in play as well, and agree with most of what NW_Kohaku is saying, but also agree that rubble should have some uses to not make it feel all too negative. I as well want the game to pursue realism within reason, as I find trying to manage all these things enjoyable. It has long annoyed me how mining currently works some kind of magic that makes the mountain mysteriously disappear if you use a low-skilled miner, and how you easily can dig to the bottom of the world in mere moments with a single miner. A rubble mechanic or similar is direly needed, and for those that can't stand it I have no doubt an ini option to disable it would be hard to implement.

[NW_Kohaku]

I took Mudcrab to be referring to the idea of incorporating waste management into the game when he said that about nerdiness and insanity.  I don't agree a fecal fixation is a nerd attribute, but I do agree it would add nothing to the game.  What would come next, Dwarves hopping up and down, wetting themselves, and then bursting into tears if there was no toilet?   

Actually, it adds a source of fertilizer that is infinitely replinishable, so long as you have dwarves.

Nitrates from Urea, the most significant component of Urine, are the prime constituent of 90% of the world's Nitrogen fertilizer. 

Further, the ancient world's only reliable source of ammonia (used for a wide variety of uses from cleaning agents, to dye-setting agents, to , and even as a glaze on pastries because it would make them more shiny.)

Likewise, urine was used in the production of saltpeter, which has a variety of uses in cooking, as well as the production of gunpowder.

Urine was such a valuable commodity in the middle ages that in many

The most significant possible use for urine, however, is in its fertilizer use, as it provides the key to generating a "cradle-to-cradle" biological resource framework for the game to follow - everything in the game that is biological is not simply springing from nothing or disappearing into nowhere, there is a "Conservation of Mass" for the nutrients by making crops take nutrients from the soil, crops being eaten and giving nutrients to the dwarves who eat them (this will be the place for a detailed nutrition system to track what nutrients go into what dwarves), the nutrients eventually being eliminated from the dwarves as waste material, and finally, that waste material being composted into fertilizer that can go back to the soil of dwarven farms to re-start the nitrogen cycle anew. 

Using urine, we can create a full-fledged ecosystem simulator, with long-term effects including pollution and environmental decay and soil erosion, allowing players to experience the full effects of their actions upon the environment.  No longer will "blasted hellscapes" from the overuse of magma cannons just be the temporary state between when magma has been poured and grass just shoots up again, we can have long-term environmental management (or destruction) projects!

Tarn Adams take on this topic was in the Dev Log: "I don't yet see a way to make something like rubble or different sizes of rocks a net positive for the game, so I'm just going to stick with the larger intermittent boulders for now to keep things moving."

It's obvious to me from that statement that he does not think the mere existence of rubble justifies itself.

"I don't yet see" is not a statement of finality at all.  It simply means he hadn't by that time considered a scheme whereby he believes rubble will justify itself. 

That is merely the invitation to argue the topic further. 

I am capable of arguing things.

[slink]

I took Mudcrab to be referring to the idea of incorporating waste management into the game when he said that about nerdiness and insanity.  I don't agree a fecal fixation is a nerd attribute, but I do agree it would add nothing to the game.  What would come next, Dwarves hopping up and down, wetting themselves, and then bursting into tears if there was no toilet?   

Actually, it adds a source of fertilizer that is infinitely replinishable, so long as you have dwarves.

Nitrates from Urea, the most significant component of Urine, are the prime constituent of 90% of the world's Nitrogen fertilizer. 

Further, the ancient world's only reliable source of ammonia (used for a wide variety of uses from cleaning agents, to dye-setting agents, to , and even as a glaze on pastries because it would make them more shiny.)

Likewise, urine was used in the production of saltpeter, which has a variety of uses in cooking, as well as the production of gunpowder.

Urine was such a valuable commodity in the middle ages that in many

The most significant possible use for urine, however, is in its fertilizer use, as it provides the key to generating a "cradle-to-cradle" biological resource framework for the game to follow - everything in the game that is biological is not simply springing from nothing or disappearing into nowhere, there is a "Conservation of Mass" for the nutrients by making crops take nutrients from the soil, crops being eaten and giving nutrients to the dwarves who eat them (this will be the place for a detailed nutrition system to track what nutrients go into what dwarves), the nutrients eventually being eliminated from the dwarves as waste material, and finally, that waste material being composted into fertilizer that can go back to the soil of dwarven farms to re-start the nitrogen cycle anew. 

Using urine, we can create a full-fledged ecosystem simulator, with long-term effects including pollution and environmental decay and soil erosion, allowing players to experience the full effects of their actions upon the environment.  No longer will "blasted hellscapes" from the overuse of magma cannons just be the temporary state between when magma has been poured and grass just shoots up again, we can have long-term environmental management (or destruction) projects!

Tarn Adams take on this topic was in the Dev Log: "I don't yet see a way to make something like rubble or different sizes of rocks a net positive for the game, so I'm just going to stick with the larger intermittent boulders for now to keep things moving."

It's obvious to me from that statement that he does not think the mere existence of rubble justifies itself.

"I don't yet see" is not a statement of finality at all.  It simply means he hadn't by that time considered a scheme whereby he believes rubble will justify itself. 

That is merely the invitation to argue the topic further. 

I am capable of arguing things.

We've all noticed that you like to argue.   

Take it from me that making a simulation too detailed leaches the fun from a game.  I once designed the biochemistry of an artificial lifeform that made it difficult to keep it alive long enough to breed because it was too accurate.  It was very satisfying for me as a simulator but not what the game really needed.  Many of the players ended up playing with the plants and small animals in the environment, without the norns.  It was a good simulation, but not a good game.

[NW_Kohaku]

We've all noticed that you like to argue.   

Take it from me that making a simulation too detailed leaches the fun from a game.  I once designed the biochemistry of an artificial lifeform that made it difficult to keep it alive long enough to breed because it was too accurate.  It was very satisfying for me as a simulator but not what the game really needed.  Many of the players ended up playing with the plants and small animals in the environment, without the norns.  It was a good simulation, but not a good game.

I understand the concern, and I do keep it in mind: there is a balance to be made, and I try to make it.

The reason the Farming thread because the monstrously complex thread it is was specifically because I was trying to address both concerns simultaneously.  It is a serious simulation of multiple complex effects, but at the same time, most of the complex effects go on "under the hood" with little direct player intervention.  One of the things I talked about simulating, for example, would be invasive insect species that eat your crops having a population number that could be (rather abstractly and invisibly) tracked, but all you really see as a player is that caterpillars or crickets or something are eating X amount of your crops.  The tools at your disposal to combat this could be to foster bat colonies or spider colonies or to build a ring of bushes that can release a pheremone that attract the natural predators of those caterpillars (such as a specific type of wasp that lays its young directly into the bodies of caterpillars) as a defensive wall around your crops. 

The game can simulate quite complex mechanics behind the scenes, but as long as the solution for the player is "you need more bat houses in this farm", or "plant a shrubbery here", it's not overwhelmingly complex to the player. 


Mining, however, is much less complex and much more Newtonian in its presentation, and as such, the number of ways we can alter the gameplay in a manner that doesn't completely destroy realism is rather limited.  I support rubble for gameplay reasons, not realism reasons, but believe that the realism is beneficial.  The true problem is, as some people have pointed out, you can, within the first month of the game, hit the magma sea, build a pump, and have a near-mantle magma workshop set without ever having to use intermediary non-magma furnaces. 

In the old 2d versions of the game, when it was all gamey and had little simulation, there were underground rivers to stop your progress and add additional threats to the fortress security for digging that far in.  That underground river added some positive benefits for dwarves who tapped it, but it was mostly there as a roadblock and a hazard to dwarves.  It wasn't realistic at all, but it served a serious game purpose of pacing the game better.

Now, we don't have that pacing, we can just dig around the cavern layers, or seal them out, no need to worry about underground lake floods.  We can head straight to the magma sea, and don't even have to worry about fire imps popping up our magma trenches to throw fireballs in our magma forges. 

That's why we need rubble - it's a roadblock.  It's something that slows the rate of speed of the player to expand back down to levels that have been missing from the game ever since 3d. 

And as a bonus, it's completely realistic, and with cave-ins being put back in at some point in the future, we can have slower mining that takes more planning and puts the game back into the simulation. 

[slink]

One thing that needs to change if we're to be slowed down in digging, farming, and generally providing for our Dwarves is the size of migrations.  It's fine to say that it is unrealistic to dig out farms, a well, an entrance tunnel, and four storerooms before autumn, but then when we get sent 37 Dwarves during the following winter how are we to provide for and protect them in the tiny hole we've managed to clear?  That (impossible?) challenge may be the point of the game for some, but it does not give satisfaction to the kind of players who prefer building sandcastles to knocking them down.

I'll stick with my "make it an option if you must" position.

[GoldenShadow]

Not every embark site is suitable for surface forts while you spend the first year digging out your starting hole. Evil biomes with deadly rain or clouds, extreme climates like deserts or glaciers which have zero trees or plants and no liquid water.  With how quickly immigrants arrive, you'd never have time to be able to keep up with digging out and clearing the basic living spaces, let alone the space required to set up all of the industies required to run a successful fort. Aquifers already slow down the initial mining, you lose a lot of time just penetrating those.

Then the invaders show up. I feel the first invaders already catch me unprepared most of the time.
Do you want to delay the arrival of the first invasions(ambushes and sieges) to compensate for the slower start that this rubble hauling will cause, and extend the boring buildup until the fun starts?

Or should every fort wall off the outside world while you spend many boring years of watching rubble hauling before you can play the game?

[PoodleIncident]

I agree with the notion that stone should be scarce and valuable, but not just as raw material, also for fortress purposes. Dining in a legandary dining room carved out of the living bedrock should make your dwarves happy. But you should go through some tough times of dirt holes and log cabins first, while you excavate that.

[NW_Kohaku]

One thing that needs to change if we're to be slowed down in digging, farming, and generally providing for our Dwarves is the size of migrations.  It's fine to say that it is unrealistic to dig out farms, a well, an entrance tunnel, and four storerooms before autumn, but then when we get sent 37 Dwarves during the following winter how are we to provide for and protect them in the tiny hole we've managed to clear?  That (impossible?) challenge may be the point of the game for some, but it does not give satisfaction to the kind of players who prefer building sandcastles to knocking them down.

I'll stick with my "make it an option if you must" position.

Well, I would agree with you there.  In general, for what I am saying to really make the sort of impact I want, a lot of things need to change, but this is the groundwork we can lay to get greater things accomplished.

I've generally been arguing that dwarf migrations need to be throttled down to about 1/30th to 1/50th of what they are now.  We should not see more than one or two families at a time come to a fortress, and deaths should frighten off civilians for a longer time. 

Rather, I think that, like how farming and mining should be slower, the building of a fortress as a whole should be slower, and the addition of new dwarves will become a precious blessing of additional labor to survive with, rather than the curse of too many people to know what to do with. 

Further, the whole of the Class Warfare idea is based upon the idea that fortresses should have more complex social structures as they become more populous and sophisticated, which will add a sliding degree of difficulty to maintain your fortress as it grows more populated and powerful by making dwarves have internal stresses (such as guild politics that must be negotiated or class based strife where workers may demand more luxuries from the bureaucracy and nobility for their efforts as the fortress grows richer and more secure). 

Coupling these things with the greater degree of sophistication in sieges, the barony/county/duchy/kingdom control we have with the Army Arc and later improvements of nobles controls over the local region, the trading we get through Taverns, the economics overhauls, we can move the game into being something challenging, complex, and fun enough for players to enjoy every stage of the game as a challenge, rather than simply overcoming the initial self-sufficiency hurdle, and then playing the game as a bunch of legos to move around because there is nothing else interesting going on.

[NW_Kohaku]

Not every embark site is suitable for surface forts while you spend the first year digging out your starting hole. Evil biomes with deadly rain or clouds, extreme climates like deserts or glaciers which have zero trees or plants and no liquid water.  With how quickly immigrants arrive, you'd never have time to be able to keep up with digging out and clearing the basic living spaces, let alone the space required to set up all of the industies required to run a successful fort. Aquifers already slow down the initial mining, you lose a lot of time just penetrating those.

Then the invaders show up. I feel the first invaders already catch me unprepared most of the time.
Do you want to delay the arrival of the first invasions(ambushes and sieges) to compensate for the slower start that this rubble hauling will cause, and extend the boring buildup until the fun starts?

Or should every fort wall off the outside world while you spend many boring years of watching rubble hauling before you can play the game?

Evil biomes exist for those who want to have a Hellishly punishing environment to live in.  They literally exist because most players feel that the game is too easy, and they give the chance to have a much more difficult time of surviving the start-up. It's a little odd to say that we shouldn't be making them so hard.  Once you're underground, a tundra isn't that different from a fertile plain, so having players have to figure out how to survive on the surface for a little bit isn't a bad thing.

More importantly, "many boring years" shows you aren't really considering how this would work out.  Rubble would be extremely easy to dig out at first - you only have to move the rubble a tile or two in order to get it out of the way.  The distance that dumping has to go only increases as the length of your tunnel increases. 

Further, it only really slows down excavation if you dig a single central stairway or single-tile-wide probing hallway, and have to wait for rubble to be moved out, which is exactly the sort of excavation that should be slowed down.  "Broad and shallow" excavations, such as digging out multiple rooms from a hallway at once can let a miner bounce from places where it is clear to mine to the next place that is clear to mine as the haulers pick up behind him. 

Also, as I said before, you can simply build a wall around your immediate embark vicinity and a simple shelter as you get started.  That is basically all mining does for you in terms of preventing a siege from being a serious threat, anyway - provides a wall.  You can still make traps with some of your stone, and

Yes, some places are not suitable for building aboveground very much, but if you are never put in a situation where building aboveground was desirable, then that wouldn't even matter, now would it?  Those places only become interesting when you would want to be aboveground sometimes.

Anyway, just thinking about the problem a little, I can already come up with means of getting around the problem.  If you dig or build a shelter on a hill or cliff, you can dump your rubble much more easily.  You would obviously need to time your excursions to when it was safe and preferably use some method of washing clean the contaminants when the clouds were away.  So long as atom smashers are cheap and easy to set up however, (and only take 5 tiles of space, including door and stairs) then all you really need to do is survive until you set up an indoor atom-smasher. 


You see, the problem you have in approaching this is that you are demanding that you not have to adapt your approach to the game in any way to how the game itself changes. 

That's not what a game is or is supposed to be - a game is supposed to be a problem and a set of rules that teaches you the terms by which you can succeed.  If you simply try to stubbornly apply the same methods every time and declare the game broken if you aren't rewarded for always behaving the same way, you aren't really approaching the game as a game in the first place.  (Or in other words, how often in an FPS game do you try to jump on enemies heads and refuse to shoot a gun, because that's how you learned to play games in Mario?)

If you start from the approach that anything that doesn't let you instantly have a fully-functional fortress handed to you on a silver platter from the start for free, then of course you're going to have problems with almost any game rebalance that ever comes down the pipe as Dwarf Fortress becomes a more complete game.

[slink]

I guess first I should say that I am a fan of Legos.  We eat on our laps because the dining room table is covered in Legos.   

Overall I feel DF has been developed with the positive features in the ascendant, followed by the negative to balance those.  This makes sense, because otherwise the game remains unplayable for all but a few, for much of the time.  Slowing everything down without first removing the need for speed goes contrary to that practice. 

The game can always be voluntarily made more difficult.  I have modded my crops to make most of them take longer to grow, and their end-products cost more to buy, because farming was trivial otherwise and I wanted a larger farming and kitchen area.  Anyone could do this.  Anyone could decide voluntarily to only dig X layers deep in any given year.  Anyone could decide to construct everything from blocks so as to slow down building.  Anyone could decide never to make stone crafts for sale.  But if the game forces too much difficulty on everyone without choice, then people will get discouraged.  Discouraged people wander off, and stop sending in money.  It's like one of those Don't Use Cable ads from DirecTV.   

[Gilihad]

snip

Mining, however, is much less complex and much more Newtonian in its presentation, and as such, the number of ways we can alter the gameplay in a manner that doesn't completely destroy realism is rather limited.  I support rubble for gameplay reasons, not realism reasons, but believe that the realism is beneficial.  The true problem is, as some people have pointed out, you can, within the first month of the game, hit the magma sea, build a pump, and have a near-mantle magma workshop set without ever having to use intermediary non-magma furnaces. 

In the old 2d versions of the game, when it was all gamey and had little simulation, there were underground rivers to stop your progress and add additional threats to the fortress security for digging that far in.  That underground river added some positive benefits for dwarves who tapped it, but it was mostly there as a roadblock and a hazard to dwarves.  It wasn't realistic at all, but it served a serious game purpose of pacing the game better.

Now, we don't have that pacing, we can just dig around the cavern layers, or seal them out, no need to worry about underground lake floods.  We can head straight to the magma sea, and don't even have to worry about fire imps popping up our magma trenches to throw fireballs in our magma forges. 

That's why we need rubble - it's a roadblock.  It's something that slows the rate of speed of the player to expand back down to levels that have been missing from the game ever since 3d. 

And as a bonus, it's completely realistic, and with cave-ins being put back in at some point in the future, we can have slower mining that takes more planning and puts the game back into the simulation.

Taken from the FotF thread, I think it still applies:

well the main point people have is adding rubble, seems to add nothing to the game but time consuming disposal, it is not interesting, it is drudgery just to dig out a room, something you will do 20000000 times while playing dwarf fortress.

...

I simple don't understand your fascination with adding clutter and extra useless items to the game.

What Greenskye and Caldfir are also correct, but there's something else that is important about what I am arguing for:

At a basic level, we need to throw sand in the gears of mining. 

Spoiler: longish argument (click to show/hide)

Hauling itself is not a really tedious problem for players.  There's a big difference in game-costs and player-costs.  It just takes time and the mere effort of designating the place you want the junk to go.

Instead, it is a problem when you can designate a whole mountain, step away from the game to go make yourself a sandwich, and when you come back, a single dwarf has completed a mountain-top removal project. 

What we need is for mining to have some in-game cost that makes it not so easy for players to vaporize whole mountains in an afternoon. 

And to go back to your own quote:

evil clouds: deadly and sometimes frustrating, but creates fun.
less stone next update: no more buying caravans with eight million stone crafts, may actually have to work for something.
sieges: dangerous and badly timed, deadly. but add a purpose for the complex combat mechanics, keep in mind sieges are unfinished atm.

I don't think you make a good case, here... Evil clouds have one real purpose: The surface is deadly - dig down, dig down immediately, and never come back up.  All caravans and migrants are done for. 

Less stone next update affecting caravans?  Why? Who bothers making stone trade junk, anyway, when Large Serrated Steel Discs and Dwarven Syrup Roasts can single-handedly buy whole caravans?  (And right now, caravans are more effort to scroll through their lists of junk than their goods are actually worth, anyway.)

Sieges, meanwhile, do have a definite fun element: They force players to build their fortress with an eye towards defense.  But you aren't showing how this element is in any way really different from mining, as handling sieges typically is about altering the lay of the land and mining.

Water has a fun element: You cannot directly manage where water is going, you have to work with water in dry environments, and use floodgates or pumps to control when water will be in a given chamber.  The indirectness of control makes it more fun.

And yes, there are definitely other systems I want to see added to the game as it becomes more complex that would also be fun, such as sewage systems or ventilation systems which will be fun for the logistical management that we already need to have in managing siege defense and water or magma management, but to say that we should stop at just these things because, arbitrarily, we consider designing the minecart/logistical systems by which we remove rubble not to be fun while designing the systems by which we move water or manage sieger progression are fun. 


The reason why we need rubble is, counter to your expectations, it should reduce the number of junk items being generated because it slows down the pace of excavation considerably, as each time you mine a set amount of stone, you have to deal with the excess material generated.  By the time that you are mining again, that rubble should be dealt with and out of memory in some manner or another. 

This isn't the only thing, we should eventually have better cave-in mechanics and requirements for supports or reinforcing walls. 

The ultimate goal should be that mining should no longer just be assumed, that every mineral in a given embark is your Armok-given right to haul out and do with as you see fit - you have to work for your stone, and make do with the resources you can manage to get, rather than simply sitting on tons of waste stone you can ignore forever and probably will never use. 

We, as players, should have to look at the geology that we can see, and start sitting down and trying to guess, as real miners do, where the ideal places to mine will be, and where the physical limitations of their ability to mine and set up the support and safety infrastructure will make mining less of a priority or too dangerous to carry on with.

Further, you can't act as if mining is somehow a separate issue from concepts like sieges or evil clouds or or cave-ins or water management or farming.  Mining is how we deal with all those problems - making mining less fast and easy makes every problem we face more challenging and complex.  If you can no longer just dig down to the magma sea while carving a labyrinth into a mountainside as your only entrance to your fortress and magma drown the first siegers you face because that much excavation becomes a serious obstacle, then suddenly, you've made not just mining harder, but sieges harder, as well. If you can't just burrow underground immediately and stay down there forever when facing an evil cloud, but must either come to the surface to dump excess stone outside, or else face severely cramped conditions as you try to find ways to get rid of stone, (although, granted, currently, this will only matter until you get your atom-smasher running,) it makes evil clouds harder.

DF is a game where the systems are all inter-connected, and the game is only so simple and easy because all the systems are simple and easy.  Make one more complex, and it doesn't mean all that much, but when you make all of them more complex, even slightly, you've introduced a resource and problem-juggling game where you have to triage what problems are most likely to kill you next.

I think this is your most reasonable argument for adding rubble to the game, but it'd require a bit of balancing. As it is now, it is fairly easy when starting out to just dig a 1-tile tunnel into a mountain, stick a wall there once you're all inside, and never have to worry about anything until a building destroyer shows up. I agree that rubble could help making things harder starting out, which is good, but if it made it impossible to create a large fortress within a year or two, it might not be worth it. Think of the bedrooms/halls for 40-80 dwarves, stockpile storage for food, workshops, workshop storage, barracks, training rooms, etc. Those are all basic things which still require space. Another thing is that it looks like as if most of your argument for rubble could just be replaced by making mining take longer.

You say:

The reason why we need rubble is, counter to your expectations, it should reduce the number of junk items being generated because it slows down the pace of excavation considerably, as each time you mine a set amount of stone, you have to deal with the excess material generated.  By the time that you are mining again, that rubble should be dealt with and out of memory in some manner or another.

If rubble can't be used, how is it nothing more than junk? You would be creating the same amount of junk, but it would have the name of "granite rubble" instead of "granite stone", and possibly be even more worthless (assuming that you can't do anything with it).

I'm sure that rubble would add complexity to the game (sometimes a good thing by itself), but would it add a corresponding amount of depth? I would be in favor of it if you had specific ideas for what it would add. As the idea seems now, what new things does rubble add to the game besides slowing down mining? Can we do stuff with it? If it has !!SCIENTIFIC!! applications, like being ballast for trebuchets (as of yet unadded ) or being able to be combined into cement for pillars for supports with new cave-in mechanics, I'm all for it. If it is just for adding more things for us to dump while slowing things down, why not just decrease mining speed via the skill, instead of adding something that has no use at all?

Spoiler: Regarding beds and sleeping (click to show/hide)

You use the example of beds and sleeping a few times, so I'll try to see if I can explain while I think beds add depth. If a dwarf sleeps on the ground, they get an unhappy thought. One of the whole management goals is to keep a happy fortress. While this is easy enough to do with making statues and awesome food, when/if it gets balanced, it can actually have an impact. Also, sleeping can be influential in terms of increasing variability and depth in the game. It allows vampires to feed, and your militia to not be ready for that siege that comes in the middle of the night, when you only have 10 dwarves awake instead of 20. This is an example of adding both complexity and depth. Rubble seems to only add complexity, with no depth (influence of other game mechanics) that couldn't be achieved just by decreasing mining speed.

Wyatt Cheng had a good blog post about the sort of thing I'm trying to convey here on his blog. Sorry for any misinterpretations of your posts or points I don't explain clearly.

[NW_Kohaku]

I guess first I should say that I am a fan of Legos.  We eat on our laps because the dining room table is covered in Legos.   

Overall I feel DF has been developed with the positive features in the ascendant, followed by the negative to balance those.  This makes sense, because otherwise the game remains unplayable for all but a few, for much of the time.  Slowing everything down without first removing the need for speed goes contrary to that practice. 

The game can always be voluntarily made more difficult.  I have modded my crops to make most of them take longer to grow, and their end-products cost more to buy, because farming was trivial otherwise and I wanted a larger farming and kitchen area.  Anyone could do this.  Anyone could decide voluntarily to only dig X layers deep in any given year.  Anyone could decide to construct everything from blocks so as to slow down building.  Anyone could decide never to make stone crafts for sale.  But if the game forces too much difficulty on everyone without choice, then people will get discouraged.  Discouraged people wander off, and stop sending in money.  It's like one of those Don't Use Cable ads from DirecTV.   

The game will always have the ability to be legos.  You can always turn off eating, turn off sleeping, turn off sieges, cave-ins, set SPEED:0, etc. and just play legos.  The game SHOULD have an option to throttle the overabundant migrant waves that controls it more effectively than this diplomat nonsense, but that's another argument. 

The thing is, the game doesn't offer the degree of complexity many people who want the game to be more than legos adds, however.

By extending the length of the farming season, because each planting and harvest is exactly the same amount of labor, will only give you one effect: needing larger fields.  If I want invasive pest species, the need to build bat colonies, or use bumblebee skeps to pollenate my orchards, a soil nutrient system, composting corpses and bodily waste back into fertilizers, or any of a number of other things, there's going to need to be hardcoding support. 

It's not taking anything away from the people who want to play Dwarfcraft: Creative Mode with absolutely all the game features turned off and minerals set to max so that they can fly and build an entire castle out of diamonds while invincible to give everyone else the game they wanted to play, but it does become unreasonable when those same people make the argument that others can't play the game they want to play because nothing should ever move away from the lego-building mode, even with init options to turn things off.

[bombzero]

well guys, I must say this argument seems rather moot.

the people for it are all discussing it now, however this thread will be on page 100 by the time we actually get to a point where it makes sense to add rubble with DF's current development rate.
the people against it are considering how it fits into current game/next few updates. Nobody has said they were against it indefinitely, just that it wouldn't work out well in the current state of the game.

oh and NW and the other 'for' people, you're starting to sound like elitist, old guard jackasses. Please remember that I, and probably a few others here who are against rubble, have been playing DF since it was two dimensional, so you have absolutely no reason to assume our opinion is somehow less valid then yours.

I would love anything and everything simulationist that ADDS TO THE GAME to be put in at some point.
now, everything you said until recently about rubble made it sound stupid, time consuming, and pointless, in the future please actually present all of your thoughts in tandem so as to not sound like a conceited retard. however, now you are actually starting to make sense a bit as you present logical arguments instead of "HURR HURR ADD RUBBLEZ ITZ COOL N RALISTIC".