Imagine if all your starting seven were gay, and after that there was a high percentage of gays. It would have too low a child yield, especially in forts that need children. I don't like it as a feature at all, but I could live with/mod it out.
I guess that could be an issue if you were dealing with a fort that 1. included an entirely gay starting seven, 2. had an unusually high number of gay dwarves, and 3. lived long enough for children to have ANY value whatsoever.
Honestly, you'd be more likely to start out in the middle of a volcano, or on a frozen lake that melted instantly. And remember-- Losing is Fun! Wouldn't that weird, statistical outlier that was your one 100% gay fortress be one of your most memorable ones ever?
I like the idea of playing from starting seven and stopping all immigration and relying only on childbirth to grow my fortress. It doesn't take the entire seven being gay to stop this it takes the wrong two. Actually the new mechanics are mostly unhelpful all together in this with the addition of not only homosexuals, but asexuals, and commitment phobes. It isn't even that I don't want to play if gay marriage. Are you saying wanting to play a fort the way I have described is horrible and wrong and my opinion deserves to be ingored or dismissed in favor of yours or others?
I also wish someone would either correct my understanding of how the system currently works or actually take a better look before saying this is a non-issue.
As it stands now, there is a distribution algorithm with some baked-in defaults that defines what percentages of babies born for a specific species will have what sexual orientations. There are tags to control this, but they are not currently in the raw files, so the internal defaults get used everywhere.
You can manually add those tags, and control the distributions manually. In this way, you can make 100% of X species "Gay", "Straight", "Bisexual", or "Asexual" at your whim.
The brewhaha came up over personal ethical squeamishness about the implications of homosexuality as it relates to cultures and cultural norms, and the tensions this causes. (Homophobia, et al. Personally, I think the REAL jewel to be had is in Elven culture, where i see sexuality in general to be widely accepted in all forms-- except for asexuality. Elven culture springs forth from being essentially immortal-- and so long lasting, and diverse family structures would be "expected!" as a cultural norm, and asexual people are dead-ends in that respect for the most part-- As such, I think asexual elves would be... discriminated against.. in their cultural envelope. Remember, a marriage is a joining of two whole FAMILIES-- and elves live a VERY long time, and have VERY big families. An elf that never marries, does not bring the same cultural value that one that marries does, even when no children are born from the union.
![Wink ;)](http://97.107.128.126/smf/Smileys/aaron/wink.gif)
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The values are modifiiable, but this is a very new release, and many things are being fixed/revised. I was just voicing an opinion about the not-quite-good practice of applying the same statistical spreads everywhere, and treating everyone as if they were humans with funny voices.
![Tongue :P](http://97.107.128.126/smf/Smileys/aaron/tongue.gif)