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[Neonivek]

Don't forget that Medieval Stasis is as much the inability to go backwards as it is to go forwards.

So mechanics for technology to be lost is just as, if not more so, important.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, rather than create a technology wall that we just crash into head-first when we "max out", it would probably be better to just create a "drag force" that pulls us back and makes our societies lose technology that eventually just becomes insurmountable.

I.E. there are technologies beyond just making porcelain with high-temperature kilns, but maintaining even that technology takes such a massive amount of national-level organization and resource-management (and often mis-management leading to soil erosion due to the tremendous amount of charcoal it consumes) that you rarely even manage to maintain the porcelain level of technology for very long. 

If we make 10 steps of technology, just to throw out an arbitrary number, we could make anyone not really trying be capable of comfortably staying at level 3.  Anyone seriously trying, without totally focusing everything they have might get to level 8, and if one of their legendaries dies or they can't keep paying maintenance on some of the infrastructure, they can quickly backslide to level 7.  Level 10 is a "I'm dedicating everything I have to getting this" type of deal. 

It would mean having to go back and embrace a maintenance/breaking tools model, and it would also probably require that AI upgrade that allows for "authorizations" that lets dwarves re-order tools as they break, rather than just sitting on their duffs waiting for the player to notice something broke manually, just for the sake of the player's sanity.

[Neonivek]

Not to mention that harsh war can easily be a way to destroy whole swaths of technological process. Especially if an important city is wiped out.

[wierd]

All you need for that really, is item destruction.  Specifically, both book and artifact destruction.

This way it would be perfectly possible for every last book on necromancy to get destroyed by an anti-necromancer sect, for instance-- right along with the divinely inscribed tablets that trained the first necromancers. Doing that, and also offing the offensive wizards, would essentially destroy the practice of that magic, until the death gods put more relics out.

If we already assume that knowledge without the stabilizing influence of a hard medium like books will evolve into something unrecognizable using only word of mouth traditional story telling (basically, just a game of Telephone/Chinese whispers), then by allowing books to be destroyed, we allow knowledge to be destroyed when that generation passes on. The obvious real-world example for this is Alexandria, but there are also many others. The roman catholic church of the dark and middle ages judiciously destroyed copies of important scholarly works from antiquity, judging them as heretical writings or worse. (We recently discovered the Archimedes palimpsest, which narrowly escaped true destruction by being washed and reused instead of simply destroyed. The book contained several of the historic figure's lost treatises on calculus, which up until their recovery in a forensic lab, had be totally lost to history, except as by-mentions in other fragmentary texts.) The library burned, but the fires of ignorance burned out what escaped that fire for many centuries afterward.

(That's not getting into the revisionism and arguably destructive philosphies that go on today of course... but that's dangerously close to previously touchy subjects.)

The destruction of knowledge happens when nobody is left that remembers, and there is no record of the knowledge. As such, death, and destruction of artifacts are all that are really required there, if you make the tech web calculation matrix take such things into account.  It would simplify matters to make tech discoverers into historic figures, as that would aid tracking in the calculation system. (it would also result in carvings of "Urist McFurnaceOperator discovering heat treating", but being disturbingly lax on details if that knowledge gets lost, which then needs to make the engraving say "Urist McFurnaceOperator performing a mysterious ritual" or similar.)

It will make some players very upset if their mood artifacts are destroyable though. Needs more careful consideration.

[Neonivek]

Artifact destruction?

maybe intentionally but they should be able to last forever.

[NW_Kohaku]

Not book destruction, but resource and infrastructure destruction, as well as skill level loss/atrophy.

Basically, we already need to replace clothes that wear out, but workshops last forever right now.

Remember that charcoal kiln you were talking about that took 8 items, including some steel, glass, and pipes to keep running?  What if those items broke, and you had to keep replacing them?  Especially if there was an even more complex version of that workshop that took advanced parts to build and hence, took advanced workshops to be able to build the components required for the highly advanced charcoal kiln?

Part of the point of what has been discussed at length in this thread and others is that technology isn't just being able to read a book about something - we can read a book about how to create a hydroelectric dam, but that doesn't mean you have the infrastructure to actually build one.

And this is, by and large, what SirHoneyBadger's giant mod was about, as well... you have to build factories just to produce the parts to build the factories that make your desired end product. 

So, make the capacity to build something based upon there being enough practical training and infrastructure to build something that lets you build the workshops that lets you build the advanced goods. 

You can't even build the workshop that can smelt the aluminum until you have at least a fortress-wide "expert" technology base in metallurgy, and at least 3 legendary smiths.  And its parts need a legendary smith to maintain every year or so, and if you lose all your legendary smiths, your aluminum-smelting workshop is broken, and you cannot construct anything else with that aluminum metal, and it becomes some legendary lost technology, even if you're looking at the broken contraption yourself.

[wierd]

I dunno.. in some instances, a book on a subject is highly informative.  It doesn't confer skill but it does confer knowledge.  (Assuming it can be read..)

I agree about entropy on products.  However, entropy should also apply to things that are highly coveted. Books mould if touched too much, experience acidic breakdown of the paper, things like that.  Artifact breakdown is also inevitable. Look at the sphinx in egypt; patched many many tims over the aeons of time. It's still around, but it isn't anywhere close to what it was when it was new.

Breakdown of workshops is a good touch, but I was specifically referring to the loss of knowledge. We have abandoned stee mills in detroit, for instance.  Rounding up today's generation, and putting them in there with tools and raw materials to fix the infrastructure, without specialists who know the process, do you really expect they would be able to make product there?

Eg, even if we handwave away the erasing hand of time, and have an entombed fortress from the "pinnacle" of dwarven civilization from before the collapse, where they had everything, and the whole site is still intact, (say, purposeful magma entombment, at a site with a brook)...  we have all the workshops already built! But our dwarves don't know the first thing about using them!

If the fortress kept a library, to safeguard the knowledge of their processes, then the dwarves could read them, and have at least some idea of what the machines did, and how to use them. Otherwise? Mystery machines! Mystical technology of the ancients!

We eliminate this effectively by making books rot, and or, allowing them to be directly destroyed. Libraries can be burned, and ages of knowledge and history can be lost. Knowledge of ancient civic centers can be wiped away, and forgotten. 

By doing this, we permit such fantastic things as "lost cities", and mysterious lost cultures.

Workshop decay only adds to that effect, but I hold firm that books need to be destroyable.

[NW_Kohaku]

Thing is, in the real middle ages, most of the time, it wasn't written in books.  At least, nothing that would be capable of being disseminated easily to give people an understanding of how to actually accomplish an idea without having already had training in that field.

As Andeerz would always be willing to argue if he were still active around here, guilds existed more as a means of monopolizing technology and ideas than as a business, itself.  Basically unions at heart, guilds existed to protect the wages of certain craftspeople by forcing all such craftspeople to join their guild to learn how to do that job.

And like was discussed in the charcoal-burning thread, barring tools like thermometers, how, exactly, is a book going to tell a worker exactly how hot you should let a furnace burn to get charcoal to come out the right way? 

Much of how technology worked in this era was based upon learning things intuitively rather than explicitly.  (Having a sense of when the best time to plant was, rather than knowing any of the science behind why.)

Further, why would a legendary write down the secrets of how to make things as well as they do, when if they keep it to themselves, they remain rare and valuable?  Those guilds got rich maintaining a monopoly for a reason.

Those machines should be mystery machines of the ages to anyone not trained up in the sorts of skills that built them in the first place - that's exactly what creates the discovery then forgetting of technology throughout the ages that we want to model.  Constantly training replacement apprentices should be a part of keeping advanced technology - they are the storehouse of technology for the future, not books.  A single break in the chain requires re-discovery.  Books are just a tool for helping train the new wave of artisans.

It not only creates lost cities, it creates them faster than what you're talking about.

[wierd]

Again, books don't confer skill, they convery knowledge of a technique.

For instance, my local library has a fantastic book on kiln design. Explains all the ins and outs, and contains several useful formula for how to design your own kilns for ideal use.

It does not make you into a sufficiently good mason to enable you to build a quality kiln once armed with that knowledge.

A book about artistic technique won't turn you into an artist, but it makes you more knowledgeable about the technique.  Knowledge is not the same as skill: a person who can read sheet music is not garanteed to be a good vocalist.

The book doesn't make you magically into a legendary.  It says "hey dummy! If you cover up the carcoal like this, you get more charcoal from your load!"

Judging how to control the reaction comes from experience. Book learning only teaches the abstract process.

Compare: programming coursework, vs what's in the textbook, and what you actually find in industry.  Worlds apart on each step.

The book is just the textbook.  By itself, it only offers insight, assuming you can read it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Again, books don't confer skill, they convery knowledge of a technique.

For instance, my local library has a fantastic book on kiln design. Explains all the ins and outs, and contains several useful formula for how to design your own kilns for ideal use.

It does not make you into a sufficiently good mason to enable you to build a quality kiln once armed with that knowledge.

A book about artistic technique won't turn you into an artist, but it makes you more knowledgeable about the technique.  Knowledge is not the same as skill: a person who can read sheet music is not garanteed to be a good vocalist.

The book doesn't make you magically into a legendary.  It says "hey dummy! If you cover up the carcoal like this, you get more charcoal from your load!"

Judging how to control the reaction comes from experience. Book learning only teaches the abstract process.

Compare: programming coursework, vs what's in the textbook, and what you actually find in industry.  Worlds apart on each step.

The book is just the textbook.  By itself, it only offers insight, assuming you can read it.

What you are arguing to me here is exactly what I was arguing to you...

So basically, now that we agree on that point, it's just a matter of impressing how the actual capacity to build that forge is also dependent upon infrastructure.

I.E. you can read books that tell you how a computer works, but that doesn't give you the capacity to build your own Pentium quad-core processor chip plant. 

It is having the built-up skill, intuitive understanding of, and infrastructure to build those factories that is the roadblock to improvement, not a need for a "discovery" that is recorded in a book.  That is, you need to already be skilled before that book could be of any use, and if you already are skilled enough to know what was in that book, it's still not of any use.

Hence, books are of a far smaller relevance than having people trained in those skills, and having the industrial capacity to manufacture the necessary machine tools to the necessary precision.

[wierd]

(Now quite, apparently. My position hasn't changed.)

It would depend on what's in the book...  if the book is on programming, it isn't far removed from formal logic.  For chip design, it would need to be rather encyclopedic, covering everything from EE basics, logic gate design, fundementals of chemistry, and the like...   if it was done in a very blunt, step-by-step fashion, it could convey enough information to get something like a 4 bit counter/multiplier made from large galium arsenide crystals built using lampwork torches and blown glassware.  From there its all practice and refinement though.

It would depend on the book.

[SirHoneyBadger]

What you are arguing to me here is exactly what I was arguing to you...

Isn't it FUN how our best, most open-minded, most generous efforts at communication inevitably boil down to blindly stabbing our thoughts at each other in the dark, from a forever impenetrable universe of our own heads,
Filtered through another vast, forever unknowable, and endlessly--both overtly and subtley--hostile universe of what we are desperately forced to only hope is reality (the alternative being futility, crushing loneliness, and inevitable madness),
and hoping there's someone, anyone out there, in yet another closed universe we can never meaningfully explore or hope to relate to on anything but the most superficial level;
that can relate to us (ha!) to the point of not mistaking our words for knives?

I just want to take a moment to distract everyone from the topic at hand, because we've stumbled into some extremely intelligent and interesting discourse on this thread, and the few unconstructive disagreements we've had, seem to result more from people reaching similar concensus, but either not realising it, or not admitting it, because of differences in perspective, and the instinct that maybe some words are knives in disguise.

I know Valentines Day is arguably mostly a made up holiday as such, but love, and empathy, and maybe telepathy, must either exist as forces in the world, or we're so utterly, instinctively programmed to believe in them, that they're actively saving all of us from insanity, death, and hideous war, on atleast a daily basis.

None of us chose to be in these circumstances, these solitary prisons of our heads; and to add to the isolation, we've all been programmed down to maybe cellular level, to keep some distance from each other (and forced bitterly to admit that it's necessary for our protection!), but as alone as we all are--convicts that we are--we're all atleast stuck on the chain-gang together, and maybe there's hope that we can become something greater than the sum of our disparate selves. This thread has certainly illustrated how much I don't know, and I'm very grateful for that to everyone involved.

It's like handing out free real estate in my head, new places to build that I never knew were there, and brand-new ways of building.

[assasin]

I think a simple idea for the game is to have a number of different very broad techs tied to each civilisation. Starting from basic hunter gatherer techs to what we have now, maybe divided into ten levels. What they would do is decide what techs each civilisation has access to. For example a dwarf civ would need metalworking V to work steel but metalworking X to work candy. Or mining III to be able to channel down more than a basement for surface buildings.

It should be done in world gen with increases in tech levels inside a fort being possible but highly difficult. It should be slow enough that it would be realistic for a fort to only rise two or three levels in a single playthrough. It would have a number of fucntions, making the world more varied, another option for player difficulty level [ie you pick an advanced civ near some tribal goblins or the other way around with tribal dwarfs and a goblin empire], etc. Obviously technologies should be able to be lost, with higher levels being lost more easily than lower ones.

I know its very simplistic, but it could be tied into other systems. It'd just be used as a sort of base to work from.

[Boea]

Metallurgy X could simply be a more advanced forge, and refinery, and then the rest would be little steps in between, or the work of 7 dwarves over a few years piling improvements on already established workshops. [the latter being a more progressive alternative to straight-on jumps with each tier of technology, again with their own limits, since grandpa's workshop can only be so fast, or hot without a complete overhaul]
The rest can be offloaded on the actual potentials/talents/affinities that your citizens can have, and society-based bonuses from having a pretty sizeable metalworking environment. [etc etc, it's expensive, and sieges swerve your curve, and you have to start over]

[NW_Kohaku]

(Now quite, apparently. My position hasn't changed.)

It would depend on what's in the book...  if the book is on programming, it isn't far removed from formal logic.  For chip design, it would need to be rather encyclopedic, covering everything from EE basics, logic gate design, fundementals of chemistry, and the like...   if it was done in a very blunt, step-by-step fashion, it could convey enough information to get something like a 4 bit counter/multiplier made from large galium arsenide crystals built using lampwork torches and blown glassware.  From there its all practice and refinement though.

It would depend on the book.

Well, again, I think the only difference here is a difference of emphasis.

Books might help train the worker, but you need a worker with enough of that practice and enough of that refinement to actually make the minor iterative upgrades to the workshops that cumulatively enable better products over time.

You're just throwing the emphasis on the book, even while saying that it's practice and refinement that creates the actual change, while I'm saying it's practice and refinement that create the change, and books just help bridge the gap in practice sooner.  That's still basically the same argument.

Metallurgy X could simply be a more advanced forge, and refinery, and then the rest would be little steps in between, or the work of 7 dwarves over a few years piling improvements on already established workshops. [the latter being a more progressive alternative to straight-on jumps with each tier of technology, again with their own limits, since grandpa's workshop can only be so fast, or hot without a complete overhaul]
The rest can be offloaded on the actual potentials/talents/affinities that your citizens can have, and society-based bonuses from having a pretty sizeable metalworking environment. [etc etc, it's expensive, and sieges swerve your curve, and you have to start over]

I agree with this as well - especially if we can get dwarves just doing passive upgrades on their workshops, we can have much more nuanced "tech levels", especially when it just becomes what can functionally also be passively modeling the concept of economy of scale.

The more this is discussed, the more I think that having truly difficult-to-build workshops as a requirement for building "higher-tech" items is a good idea. 

I remember the "minimalist challenge" that involves embarking with nothing but a couple bars of copper and an anvil, where you can make one chunk of copper into a kiln, disassemble the wagon, burn that wood for charcoal, disassemble the kiln, make a forge, turn the copper into a pick, mine a hunk of copper or iron ore, and turn that into an axe for more wood for charcoal...

Once you have a single stone boulder, carved with nothing but a single crude copper pick, you can make what are the most technologically advanced workshops you will ever have access to.  You can make minecarts from a log without any tools, for example.

The simple fact that workshops are so easy to build and disassemble makes them utterly transient, when we could be making them into something that have real weight and meaning in the game. 

If those workshops can't do anything but the most basic, minimalistic jobs using nothing but a stone counter, (just enough to bootstrap your industry from Robinson Crusoe levels, but not enough for improved products,) and you have to pimp your workshop to get somewhere, then they become much more solid investments.  (Of course, if you maintain your tech level, and you can still "take back" any item that went into a workshop without it being destroyed, you can still disassemble the workshops from one spot and build it back up in another, but it would at least be a much more laborious process, and a much greater sink of resources.)

Part of the question is, however, how do we do this level of increasingly refined tool-making? 

Are we going to make it so that nothing more advanced than basic goods are available at the start, and to get -fine- goods, you need to upgrade in at least some way?  Even then, is that enough? 

Since there's nothing stopping an in-reality-pathetically-inadequate crude copper pick from mining through granite (which is hard enough that most real-world miners just reach for the TNT to get through) then does a limit on item quality have a real meaning for almost any product of worth besides for trading purposes?

Sure, we could block off access to more advanced versions of goods - glass doors or tables unavailable until you make a glassblower's forge with at least 10 upgrades, or soemthing, but since we're currently at a level in the game where anything past bare subsistence is just fluff...

The other alternative - that we have named iterations of items that have actual differences, is something that I'd honestly prefer to minimize to the greatest extent possible.  Even with something like a *improved mica mechanism* and a -supreme steel mechanism- (provided having adjectives and quality indicators that convey entirely different things isn't confusing enough to start with...) rather than whole other names, we could still be looking at suddenly quintupling the number of items that we will be looking at in the stocks screen.