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[misko27]

Rather than killing elves,

No comment
other then that, I must say I am hopeful that you are right. in terms of hiearchy, the humans always struck me a being dis-uited kingdoms held together by some sort of common framework, a confederacy essentially, like the u.s. but with far more state power, so the articles of the confederacy. the elves hit me as some sort of religious/magic system, worshipping god and nature and such. I suppose the type of government will matter. with the humans, it could be possible in adventure mode to take over a kingdom, possibly as the world-gen says "on a wave of popular support", or "through the power of arguement". I've always liked the ability to kill peoples, and being able to attack the evil elven civilazation nearby will make me so happy, as they are hating on a nearby dwarven civ and kicking their asses, and I cant intervene. Actually, they should add that, ability to intervene in conflicts that involve others. I mean, they are attacking them for ethics, and I do have those same ethics, so why cant i help?
Anyway, for some reason, I rate a diplomacy/civilization simulater as realistic if they can at all simulate the events of the 20th century. you know, attacking a civ without taking it other, take it other temporarily until end of war, returning cities to others following completion of some goal, like killing the leader. Revolution is a biggie.RNG plus revolution will be funny as hell. SUPPORT THE FISH PARTY.

[reality.auditor]

There's a huge amount of potential for content to be added in this release, and a lot of potential side tracking.  I'm actually curious just what Toady plans to add for this release (which isn't likely to be what actually ends up in the release, of course).  "Activating the world" could mean anything that happens during world gen could happen afterward now, which is quite a lot.

Uh, no. I have impression that it is NOT continuing worldgen after starting fortress. At most, it will prepare various things for future real living world running after initial worldgen.

All I see is making world during worldgen more lively and more things happening. Start to get used to 24h generations and small worlds. It is not gonna get better.

[Cruxador]

@Telgin: currently that sort of thing is calculated on a weekly basis.

@dhokarena56: I would be very surprised if we see the main features of the army arc in the upcoming 18 months.

On human civilization in general, they seem to be aiming for roughly the italian merchant republic type of thing. That said, I would like to see political structures decoupled from race. Ethics can be grounded in race, to preserve stereotypes, but even then some variation would be nice.

[FearfulJesuit]

I've finished the rewrite of the code, but now I have to debug it -- right now civilizations don't appear to be spreading in world generation. On the other hand, "sites changing hands during play" is now peaking up at the bottom of the first page of my notes, so that's good.

Excellent.

Yeah, I suppose 18 months is too optimistic. The thing about DF development, though, is that what I think we're seeing more and more as the years pass is that most of the stuff that we're dreaming about right now- a revamped economy, armies, etc.- are already halfway done; Toady is constructing a framework for them, and we won't really be able to see how it all fits together until the cows come home. I'm really quite excited to see what'll happen after sites changing hands and the combat revamp are finished- I bet some army arc-ish stuff.

[medikohl]

it would be interesting if you could hire units, such as mercenaries.
you pay for them yearly with the trade caravan.
you provide food for them and possibly better equipment
also I'd like to see the ability to declare war

[MrWiggles]

it would be interesting if you could hire units, such as mercenaries.
you pay for them yearly with the trade caravan.
you provide food for them and possibly better equipment
also I'd like to see the ability to declare war

Those are all either explicit goals or emergent abilities from combined features.

Though do you mean, declare war in Adventure Mode? I dont know if that'll be possible, and if it, even manageable, but civ. mgm. isn't even hinted at how that'll be handled.

I guess it'll depend how Wars are handle in the game too. I can envision a pretty simple definition, that can scale up pretty well to actual wars. 

[powell]

Can someone post the google docs link that always has the next version change list?

[Putnam]

I'm not sure if that's up-to-date. Last I saw it was before 34.01.

[Telgin]

There's a huge amount of potential for content to be added in this release, and a lot of potential side tracking.  I'm actually curious just what Toady plans to add for this release (which isn't likely to be what actually ends up in the release, of course).  "Activating the world" could mean anything that happens during world gen could happen afterward now, which is quite a lot.

Uh, no. I have impression that it is NOT continuing worldgen after starting fortress. At most, it will prepare various things for future real living world running after initial worldgen.

All I see is making world during worldgen more lively and more things happening. Start to get used to 24h generations and small worlds. It is not gonna get better.

Oh, no, I wasn't implying that you'd want to run a 5 minute world gen then "let it finish" by continuing world gen as you played.  Toady made mention of things like populations doing nothing but dying out after world gen right now and intends to change that, so while I don't expect full fledged world gen to continue after the initial gen, it seems to me that his intention was to make some things continue on afterward.  How much was what I'm wondering.

[Urist_McArathos]

My hope is that families mating, being born, and dying would continue past world gen with heirs and such properly implemented.  I hope this framework sets the stage for proper diplomacy: sites will have worth and value to various factions, which might influence wars, sieges on your fort, and even new ambushes as you play (a group of bandits might be tracked past worldgen and might attack your fort if it's on a road or bridge they claimed, for example).

I'm eager to see if this sets the stage for a more dynamic fortress mode game: perhaps even the return of the diplomats from the elves and dwarves, and expanded in their purpose, conversations, and demands?  I'm very hopeful.

[FearfulJesuit]

My guess is that the system Toady is going to have to come up with is scrapping entities and groups as distinct groups as they are now.


To my mind, the best way to approach it- or at least one way to approach it, which I think would be easiest to implement- is that entities and groups have previously been seen by the computer essentially as objects.

I propose essentially that entities, groups and all the rest have to be seen by the computer as sets, in a pseudo-mathematical sense of the term. A set can contain objects (ie people), or it can contain other sets. (To any mathematicians in the audience: obviously I'm working with naive set theory- in formal, Principia Mathematica set theory, sets are not quite this intuitive.)

This would create a framework for more advanced interactions between entities and other groups (which I shall hereafter label sets, as the game will be treating them all in roughly the same way for the purposes of our discussion.) Firstly, sets will live in a semi-hierarchy. To start with the very very obvious, at the very bottom will be simple sets that contain only objects, dwarves for example. A nice example of this would be a Mason's Guild in a fortress; the Mason's Guild would be defined by the computer as the set of all masons in your fortress. Above them would be sets that contained other sets; consider, for example, a human merchant republic run by the guilds; parliament might simply be the set of all guilds.

Likewise, different people would belong to more than one set; sets would belong to more than one set, or split along the lines of other sets. This would make it much easier, for example, to code in systems of government; government would simply be defined as a hierarchy of sets within it, and other sets would have hierarchies as well. Under this system, the king of a civilization is not actually treated any differently from the master mason in a guild, because from the computer's point of view they are both top dog in their respective sets. The only difference is the power allotted to them by the "constitution" of their sets. By creating a sufficiently loose framework for these constitutions, the computer can create, procedurally, structures for all sorts of sets, from bandit gangs to merchant guilds to cults to nations. Outside events, or the inclusion or exclusion of sets or objects within the set could change the constitutions. (Again, as with set, I use constitution as a blanket term meaning "the operating data attached to a set).

Perhaps I should make a more full-fledged post on this in the suggestions forum?

[misko27]

Huh, this might solve loyalty cascades by making the dwarfs who kill someone renegades (enemes of civ and group) right off the bat, so the person who kills them will face no repercussions.

[FearfulJesuit]

Huh, this might solve loyalty cascades by making the dwarfs who kill someone renegades (enemes of civ and group) right off the bat, so the person who kills them will face no repercussions.

It would be an easy way to solve it, yes, but the set system by itself won't. Currently, the problem- translated into set theory- is that if a dwarf is a member of the set of your civilization, he will neither attack nor be attacked by other members of the set. A random critter- say, a badger- is most definitely not a member of the set; it can attack and can be attacked by members of the set.

In a loyalty cascade, a problem arises where the dwarf attacking the caravan guards is suddenly both inside and outside the set of your civilization. The way to solve this- which under the set system will have to be addressed anyways- is that all sets, or most sets, will contain in their constitutions conditions under which a member of that set can be expelled from that set. These conditions will not always be crimes- if a mason dies, he might be removed from the set of the mason's guild. This works on the seemingly obvious but, as we've seen with loyalty cascades, no means active assumption that a member can either be a member of a set or not a member of a set- it cannot be both outside and inside. Suddenly, a loyalty cascade becomes that much easier to solve; simply, if a member of a dwarf civilization attacks another member of that same civilization, it is expelled from the set, and-no longer being a member- can be dispatched easily; its killer will not have killed a countryman, and will not be at fault.

I must say at this point that fuzzy set theory is incredibly tempting. If you're not familiar with it, in classical set theory, something is either in a set, or it is out of a set; it cannot be both. Under fuzzy set theory, every member has a degree of membership, represented as a number between 0 and 1. For example, one member of a fuzzy set might have 25% membership, and another might have 75% membership; the latter is more of a member than the former, but it is incorrect to say that either is or is not a member of the set. This is an extremely tempting proposition for a set system in Dwarf Fortress. For example, you might have a constitution for the mason's guild wherein deceased members of the guild are afforded a funeral at the guild's expense. However, a dead mason is, from the point of view of fuzzy set theory, "not as much" of a member of the mason's guild as the still-living head mason.

As tempting as this is, I would propose that anything that fuzzy set theory can do, the hierarchy and subset system can do just as well- just have a constitution where dead masons are still members of the mason's guild, but the lowest rung on the hierarchy. Or, alternatively, anyone who has ever been in the guild is a full member of the mason's guild set- call it Guild A- but those still alive are in a subset, call it Guild B, within Guild A, and death constitutes expulsion from Guild B but not from Guild A. Or, in the loyalty cascade version, the berserk soldier who killed the caravan guard may still be a member of Civilization A- and is thus afforded a funeral and tomb by the civilization when he dies- but by killing the caravan guard expels himself from Civilization A's subset Civilization B, the set of all objects and subsets that are "active" members of the civilization and are thus not considered enemies.

I really should make a suggestions thread about this system.

Also: suddenly, uncountably infinite clowns.

[Eric Blank]

The problem that causes loyalty cascades right now is that dwarves are members of both the local government and civ government. They get exiled from sets just fine; they jsut down get expelled form sub-sets.

When you order a dwarf to kill a merchant/diplomat from your civ, that dwarf will become an enemy to the civ, at which point everyone that is still a member of the civ (in the beginning it should be everyone) is an enemy. However, because he betrayed the civ government but not the local government, he is still a member of the local government and therefore killing him makes the killer a traitor of the local government and a hero of the civ government. This escalates uncontrollably, where dwarves are killing eachother left and right and becoming traitors to either the civ or local governments, and then those that kill another dwarf who is a member of both governments still will become renegades that have betrayed both governments, at which point it's legally safe to kill them. Members of the same faction (of which there are four) will be friendly towards one-another, and it is possible for them to continue living together.

Having conditions on which a dwarf is dropped from all (legally recognized) loyalties within their civ would definitely be a good solution, because as soon a they betray the civ or local government, all parts of the dwarven legal system exile them. Criminal gangs or other sets or pseudo-entities that the government doesn't recognize as an official part of the civilization government wouldn't necessarily exile them though, assuming they wouldn't be concerned about the law of the civilization. For instance, they might still be members of their family, or their gaggle of friends in a clique, or even employed by a guild or business, if those groups don't automatically exile members when a civilization does, such as in the case they span multiple civilizations or the personalities of many of the members don't permit them to just kick someone out on orders of the guard.

Dwarven civ considers you a traitor now? Go live with your cousin in the human civ! You've still got a friend in the merchants' guild, so you could hitch a ride with them.

[misko27]

.
When you order a dwarf to kill a merchant/diplomat from your civ, that dwarf will become an enemy to the civ, at which point everyone that is still a member of the civ (in the beginning it should be everyone) is an enemy. However, because he betrayed the civ government but not the local government, he is still a member of the local government and therefore killing him makes the killer a traitor of the local government and a hero of the civ government. This escalates uncontrollably, where dwarves are killing eachother left and right and becoming traitors to either the civ or local governments, and then those that kill another dwarf who is a member of both governments still will become renegades that have betrayed both governments, at which point it's legally safe to kill them. Members of the same faction (of which there are four) will be friendly towards one-another, and it is possible for them to continue living together.

Yes, this I know. I call the groups renegades, loyalists, seperatists, and citizens. Right now If you REALLY wanted to you could create a seperatist fort, by having a group of dwarves kill a caravaneer each, and then be somehow seperated from the local population. Then, everytime a caravan comes, repeat with new dwarves, and seperate them into new group, rinse repeat, congratualtion. Migrants would be problematic, but you could just lock them away until it's time to train them into members.

Also, a dwarf could and Should have differing levels of loyalty to each individual set so if a conflict were to arise, instead of the bizzare situation we have now, dwarves could "choose sides", so if a civil war DID happen, dwarfs wouldn't spotaneously decide to murder each other.

Civil war is a nice idea. I suppose you could manage that using your set system, with a dwarf in government belonnging to a specific faction, and if their ideals amd actions were too oposed, a civil war might spark. As of right now the king is universally beloved and everyone does as they are told