hmm there is a lot of weird arguing in this thread. i think slavery is a really cool suggestion and im suprised it is meet with so much negativity...
GreatWyrmGold: you treat the fact that dwarves have ethics against slavery as some final argument against this suggestion. why?
suggestions are peoples views on how to improve or change the game. so change the ethics tags?
Because we all know that Toady has the final say in whatever happens. These ethics were written up by Toady, and reflect what he wants the respective races to be, and hence, dwarves enslaving people is unlikely to happen. Same reason why another variety of suggestions need to be declined, as they don't fit into the game's universe. (For example, firearms, ...)
Kohaku is the one with the most legitimate critic of this suggestion. how does a slave differ from a regular dwarf, gameplay wise?
but you are all not very creative when thinking about this. i can think of a number of easy ways that would make the slave different, and that doesnt require a whole new social structure aspect of the fortress.
its easier to do this if we first define what we want from the new slave feature;
1. slaves should do worse jobs than other dwarfs.
2. slaves should have worse living condítions than other dwarfs.
3. slaves should be able to revolt.
1 is hard since, as someone pointed out, the game cant really tell which jobs is worse than the other. be we can do that instead. say hauling. maybe we can agree that hauling is a job fit for slaves. so slaves can only haul.
maybe we can also say that a slave cant reach skill levels beyond adequate. that would make you naturally put all the slaves to do the shittiest jobs, since they suck at it. if you somehow enslave a legendary carpenter or something, she could get lowered skill levels, showing that she is only a shell of her former self as a slave.
2 is easier. how do we make them have worse living conditions than the already poorly treated dwarves? we make them accept even worse living conditions. so they can sleep on the floor anywhere in the fort, not wear clothes, eat maybe a third the amount of a regular dwarf, and drink only water. all this without a unhappy thought. beacuse if we make it easy for the player to treat them poorly, most people will.
3 is maybe the hardest. here i think the easiest would be to have it work like animal training. maybe it could be modified so that slaves gets more prone to revolt if they see others revolting. that way you could have revolting spirals and such.
soooo.... yeah. i think the slave suggestion would be really cool, and it would fit with the feel of the rest of the game really well.
So, and why would we want to use the less skilled, more prone to violence, slaves at all. Really, we could just use dwarves, put them in the same badish conditions and we'd have more or less the same risk of rebellion, and our dwarves can still gain skill. Also, I can't see why you want the slaves to revolt randomly, rather than as a result to the living conditions they've been put in.
Besides, your suggestion forces people into one intrepretation/ form of slavery, which is not a fun thing. Dwarves fortress is a game about choices and suchlike. There's always a different way to do things.
For example, why would the legendary carpenter be reduced to a husk of her former self. That would imply that slaves are always and uniformly treated badly. Maybe some players decide that they really want a legendary carpenter, and hence give her optimal living conditions, and above all a quite pleasant live, but still prevent her from leaving*.
*Such a person wouldn't be called a slave though, more probably a war prisoner of some sort. However, it's the same difference.
Basically, I'd like to see this system implemented as a framework, with dynamic behaviour coming from that, rather than a hardcoded enslave option.
Stuff needed for that:
-Military repression (Creatures less likely to riot when military is around/ punishments are increased)
-More detailed tantruming and rioting behaviour (Refusing to work, deliberatly making crap, sabotaging, organised rebellion...)
-Rationing system
-Multiracial forts
-War prisoners stop trying to murder you.
So, when you want to enslave a group of [Insert Race here], you can release them as war prisoner into your fort (with chackles and whatever security measures you want ), and order them to do stuff.
These would then behave as ordinary citizens (with lowered happiness from being imprisoned) and if the militia isn't watching them to well, they might try sabotage stuff, make low quality crap, or just plan a rebellion and fight their way out.
This combination of systems allows a variety of slavery systems, as well as more interesting domestic management and a whole lot of other stuff.
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Topic: Fortress mode Slavery (Read 11627 times)