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[Shadow Of Fate]

I think the factions thing should be a consequence of several other mechanics.  Religious groups and worship of individual gods+guilds/additional economic organization+ additional political organization+ continued expansion of relationship mechanics+ individual dwarfs pursuing goals relating to religion, economics, politics, and relationships.  I think the end result of the factional divisions should be positive if managed well, a toss of the dice if not managed, and a negative result if intentionally mismanaged/managed by a sadistic player.   

So yeah, factions be something the players can manage to avoid any problems, ignore and get problems at random, or mess up entirely or intentionally sabotage to get outright conflict up to civil war.

There are three things I don't like about it:

1. The first thing I don't like here is that it's a ton to keep track of. There are solutions or preventative measures being talked about where I put in relatives or friends in respective leadership roles. So I have to keep track of friendships, lineage, enemies, whether or not one forge is getting as many bars as the next forge despite my forts overall need for certain things at certain times, etc. I don't like that because it's a ridiculous amount of information to process, watch, and keep track of. It also doesn't exactly make sense that the guilds/factions/etc. wouldn't just elect their own leaders or have the ability to get their own damn supplies considering how complex this is. I mean if it's just a couple of factions then fine. I could deal with these mechanics. But the way it keeps being described to me, a bunch of factions will automatically form in just about any fort, and I'll have to watch all of them to make sure they don't fight each other. This brings me to my second problem:

2. There's no mechanic that results in a more limited creation of factions or at least allows you some control on the number of factions. But if they just come about by default whenever your dwarfs feel like it for every possible group known to dwarven kind, then there will be a ton of potentially problematic mini-groups within your fortress. Loyalty cascades are already hard enough to deal with as is. And there is no real mechanic that you can take advantage of to limit said faction explosion, except for possibly extremely limiting your dwarf population. As it is being explained to me, it seems like there is so much that counts as a potential faction that larger forts and even medium sized forts can't help but have a ton of them. Where is my limiter?

3. The third thing I don't like is that I wind up spending all my time baby sitting factions, tracking lineages, friendships, the amount of supplies everyone gets to play with, or whatever to avoid loyalty cascades instead of actually building my fort out how I like. Either this would drastically slow my play pace down so I would get nothing done, or I would be forced to neglect many of these problem creators until they got out of hand thereby dooming my fort. I realize that you say that conflict is not guaranteed or the default. But it has been repeatedly stated I have to manage them all. A "toss of the dice" (random problems) if you don't watch them basically means it's only a matter of time before they trigger a loyalty cascade. I say that because if we are dealing with potentially dozens of factions or more, as there is nothing really limiting them making a ton of factions because it happens by default, then it's only a matter of time until something goes wrong. Only a matter of time, that is, unless I spend a crazy amount of time and painstaking detail micromanaging them all. So that means I practically have to watch them.

Solution:

Just make the factions numbers more controllable. That's all I ask. Either make the forming of factions base on some more easily controllable mechanic, or let me limit them, or something where I don't just wake up and discover that my 70 dwarfs have split into 40 factions, many of which belonging to multiple factions at once for extra FUN. Don't get me wrong. I actually like the idea of factions and I think it makes a certain amount of sense. But right now it's an idea that has way too rapid a growth. If it were to be put into the game as it is being suggested here, it would need a massive nerf because it could quickly become almost unmanageable in any fort with more than like 20-30 dwarfs. I realize that's not the intent of this idea. But I'm telling you that will be the result if the number of factions created can't really be controlled.

I must not be explaining myself properly. I wasn't suggesting that factions would always get into conflicts without careful micromanagement, or that the family recruitment option should be the only way to mitigate that sort of thing - it was just meant to be an idea for the sort of things that might happen and one possible solution. Scruiser's reply to your post sums it up pretty perfectly as something that could be managed to avoid (or create) problems, or left alone for a chance of trouble in future.

While any large fort should be very very likely to develop factions as a side-effect of dwarves getting friends and families, a reasonably-designed fort should under normal circumstances be unlikely to have those factions get into outright civil war.

Here's the thing. Your take on this has some very interesting points. And I somewhat like the added late game implication this would give. But it's extremely complex, there's a lot to manage, a lot that could go horribly wrong for minor reasons, and there doesn't seem to be much in play here, if anything, to limit factions. Never mind the fact that it would be a mega project to implement it all into the game. There's no control on it once that happens. And that means a lot of time managing it or it will inevitably go wrong. We are going to have to spend a lot of time watching all this stuff and from the looks of it that seems to be an understatement. There has been nothing said here that convinces me otherwise.

I'll admit, I do find this interesting. But personally, I don't want to change Dwarf Fortress into Dwarf Sims or Dwarf Babysitter. I still want to have time to actually build my fortress. This looks like it will take up all my time. Don't get me wrong. I understand you said that it wouldn't be micromanaging unless there were a crisis. I understand that is not how you envision this. But then you, and even Scruiser to a lesser extent, go into all the detail of things I would need to do to keep them from getting into conflict with each other or else all these potentially fortress destroying things will happen. Perhaps the extra detail is partly my fault for encouraging more clarification, but still. It's a ton of stuff to learn and watch and manage and so on. It would take a lot of time managing. And since there isn't anything limiting the automatic and rapid faction creation then it quickly gets out of control.

I'd say that nothing happens "by default", but some things are very likely to happen unless you're working hard to prevent them. Like, you could have a fortress in which everybody was in one single faction if you put a lot of effort into it - something like keeping your fort isolated, refusing to deal with or encourage hilldwarf sites, making your fort self-sufficient and exiling everyone who wasn't part of a particularly fervent religious order you happened to have attracted. Like, if you want a factionless hermit fort, well, that should be your goal in the game, not something you can just kind of do incidentally.

I have news for you. If you have to put a lot of effort for it not to happen, then that means it tends to happen by default. Or it's automatic. Whatever you want to call it. The point is that you confirm my fear by saying things like this. I'm going to spend all my time either making sure these factions that continually spring up without your consent don't kill each other, or I'm going to spend all my time limiting the factions to a reasonable number. This is what I mean by adding limiting mechanics. I'm not talking about having no factions ever in the fort. Maybe that should take considerable effort. But let me manage the numbers better so they don't get out of hand. And don't make it the biggest chore in existence to do so. It shouldn't be some major thing to not be overwhelmed by seemingly endless factions which could all cause loyalty cascades if you accidentally piss them off a little.

In terms of hilldwarf issues it can probably be abstracted pretty safely - disgruntled hilldwarves may run away to the big fortress, disgruntled fortress dwarves may run off to the country, but mostly it would be things like refusing to supply food to a fortress/jacking up their prices, or giving a guide to a sieging/raiding enemy to show them where the traps are, that sort of thing.

What?!?!? "Hey enemy goblins here's our traps, come in the back way. Here, I'll show you where it is..." I didn't realize disgruntled guild members were that suicidal. So they could jack prices, refuse to supply your fortress, show the enemy how to invade your fort, or cause a number of other things to happen because you gave one forge 10 bars and the other 5? These aren't minor things you are talking about, and yet they can be set off for seemingly minor reasons. And despite you saying otherwise, these are all things that would require micromanaging to ensure it didn't happen. You have to make sure every forge gets the same bars, their rooms are all either equally crap or equally great, etc. God forbid you do room upgrades to try and make them happy and before you finish and get to the other guild, it probably causes a civil war. This is what I mean when I say this seems like a bit much.

...Is literally everybody only embarking to evil biomes or glaciers or what-have-you? I honestly don't see the difficulty keeping your initial seven dwarves alive under normal circumstances, and if anything find it difficult to deal with the huge early migrant waves showing up before I've had time to smooth out my starting seven's bedrooms, or then the next ten bedrooms, or then the next thirty, let alone set up initial industries or whatever. At the moment I'm usually  too busy building furniture and smoothing rooms to make trade goods for the first caravan - there's no feeling of carving out a little section of the wilderness and turning it into a homestead, just, I dunno, desperately housing a bunch of refugees.

I think you misunderstand me. Although, it is true that if anything actually does happen to your dwarfs early then you will be hard pressed to replace any of them with what you are suggesting. You ironically make a good point that it could be a problem in harsh embark areas. I suppose it's also an issue in that it makes having a military (I say military but really it's just a few armed dwarfs) early game almost impossible (or at least very risky) because you have limited man power and can't replace anyone who dies if you slip up or get unlucky. To be honest, I didn't even really think of it from that angle.

For me, the biggest thing not about keeping them alive so much as 7 dwarfs is very low man power. I like to expand the infrastructure of my fort rather quickly in early. My plan always relies on at least a few dwarfs coming to join me before the end of the year. I don't want to have to earn the right to have migrant waves right at the start. That makes early game more difficult rather than the late game which is considered the problem here. I'm not talking about massive waves of 20- 30 migrants or anything. You could limit it to a few dwarfs per wave or something. But a couple years of a few dwarfs coming is all I really ask. Then you could be forced to create outside contact to keep the migrants coming or whatever.

I just want an average population of around 15 adults by the end of year 3, assuming no one died. I personally don't think it's unreasonable for the dwarfs to assume your fort is still alive for a wave or two before everyone starts to wonder if you failed, died off, or whatever.

Intolerable would be unhappiness, but that depends on the dwarf's personality, the fort's situation and other things like loyalty to friends/family/faction. Some dwarves wouldn't leave at all, and would just go insane. Some would leave after throwing a few tantrums but before going insane. Some would leave before they went insane. It should be relatively easy to see when any given dwarf wants to leave, and you should be able to persuade them to stay in various ways similar to the ways you can try to cheer up tantruming dwarves at the moment.

Actually, this angle of it doesn't seem that bad. If you keep your fort happy it doesn't happen. And if you don't then you have a chance to persuade them. And if you can't persuade them to stay then it's better than them throwing a tantrum tantrum and contributing to a tantrum spiral. I was worried that they would just up and leave and you might find out about after it's too late, or worse, not notice and then realize a dwarf was missing and you didn't know why. Actually, I'm not really opposed to this part of it. But you do realize this would make the game easier, right?

I'd say "anti-social" here really means more "introverted" - dwarves who have a higher tolerance for isolation (so they take a long time to get unhappy when they're cut off from the outside world), don't enjoy socialising very often and prefer to do so with those they know well. An introverted dwarf wouldn't get unhappy from socialising with their friends (that would include things like eating together, attending parties and so on), and would be relatively alright working with strangers, but wouldn't enjoy socialising with strangers. You wouldn't have to burrow them separately, but it might be worth giving them bedrooms in their own little part of the fort, away from the parties and festivals of the more extroverted newcomers. You should be able to expand their circle of friendships by things like working with other dwarves, meeting those dwarves individually and chatting while in a good mood (eg, with the minecart-lugging dwarf who brings them their food), being saved from peril or what-have-you. They should also have an easier time dealing with their family and other people in their faction, if they have them.

Most of that doesn't seem that bad. One thing that concerns me is the leaving thing. But from what you said here, it sounds like leaving only happens when they get really unhappy. And it sounds like being anti social and uncomfortable about socializing only makes them somewhat unhappy rather than extremely unhappy. Just so long as I didn't have to micromanage them and build them their own burrows and whatnot just to keep them ridiculously happy, I don't think it would be that bad. Perhaps you could have them avoid socializing themselves when not working, due to their personality. Like maybe they would go to their room or something? And so long as they had somewhere to retreat to like their own room, maybe it couldn't get that bad in the unhappiness department? You know what? If that was the case, then I could totally deal with this. I mean if there was still a warning system of them leaving, and a chance to appease them. And both of those things you said existed in your other bit.

Well leaving aside the "losing is fun thing" (because seriously, I haven't lost a game in far too long), if you can't hang onto your isolationist dwarves you replace them with more cosmopolitan ones. You replace your legendary workers by training up more legendary workers, or having sociable legendaries migrate in.

Hmm... Does this mean you suggest there be some sort of migrant wave mechanic that makes it easier to more quickly replace important dwarfs (like legendary workers) who recently left? Except that by doing so, it would be more social dwarfs? Because I wouldn't be opposed to that.

Again, probably messed up my explanation. The idea I'm really going for is that there's a difference between friends and strangers. Sociable dwarves would enjoy socialising with strangers and acquaintances (so, merchants and travellers) and get unhappy thoughts from not being able to do so, and most, especially particularly civilised dwarves, should want to hear some news from the outside world - whether heard from a merchant/traveller directly or from dwarves who had recently spoken with outsiders.

 Isolation-tolerant dwarves would dislike socialising with strangers and acquaintances, and not care so much (or at all) about hearing the news, but be fine with their friends. Friendships should form in a large number of ways and be both difficult and (often) undesirable to avoid, so most dwarves - even most isolation-tolerant ones - should get unhappy thoughts from having no friends at all, but introverted dwarves would naturally have fewer friendships because they would avoid partying and eating with strangers and mostly make new friends through work.

 I agree that an isolationist fort should be, if anything, more close-knit than a cosmopolitan one - it should be one way of keeping introvert dwarves happy staying, because they'd have had time to befriend the rest of the fort and wouldn't be as worried about socialising with them. Dwarves who couldn't live without their news would be something you'd have to either deal with or let go, and personally I think that's fine because no fort should be perfect.

That said, it should be possible to have some dwarves who are perfectly happy with no friends, including isolation-tolerant ones who just want to be by themselves and extroverts who just prefer to be with strangers. Some of those dwarves may be doing this to avoid attracting attention - vampires and exiled criminals for instance, or goblin spies - others may just prefer to be alone or with strangers.

I don't have a problem with this. However, it's not exactly what I was getting at. I think I'm the one who failed to explain myself properly here. You see, generally the isolation mechanics we were talking about were meant for forts who just shut themselves in and didn't deal with outside influences. Example might include repeatedly ignoring traders, repeatedly ignoring sieges, repeatedly ignoring outside enemies, or even just keeping everyone inside so that they didn't have to deal with outside problems. Basically, this would seal them off from outside influences would be isolated. The friendship angle is interesting, but entirely different in nature. What we were originally discussing was that it was too easy to just seal yourself off from the world and thrive, particularly late game where it should be getting harder. So we thought there should be ways to punish that style of play a little bit during the late game. I'll give you an example. With Scruiser's self actualization pursuit idea, he suggested a way to make the consequences of such pursuits tend to go more problematic for a fort that was very isolated. Ideally, we could use such an isolation mechanic to create other late game challenges that tended to be worse for isolated forts in order to counteract the easy solution of sealing yourself in. In order to do that, we had to define what the game thought of as isolated for a fort, and what mechanic could be used to measure that. Also, we needed to know how it would spread in the fort or not, which would mostly be based on contact (or not) with outside influences. And that part of it never really went anywhere, which is why I keep focusing on it.

I do like the friendship angle you put on this. But it doesn't really address the original issue. Originally, I thought you meant it as a part of that. Maybe still you do? Either way, that's why I suggested we put more weight on outside influences rather than friendships when it came to measuring isolation.

[Scruiser]

There are three things I don't like about it:

1. The first thing I don't like here is that it's a ton to keep track of. There are solutions or preventative measures being talked about where I put in relatives or friends in respective leadership roles. So I have to keep track of friendships, lineage, enemies, whether or not one forge is getting as many bars as the next forge despite my forts overall need for certain things at certain times, etc. I don't like that because it's a ridiculous amount of information to process, watch, and keep track of. It also doesn't exactly make sense that the guilds/factions/etc. wouldn't just elect their own leaders or have the ability to get their own damn supplies considering how complex this is. I mean if it's just a couple of factions then fine. I could deal with these mechanics. But the way it keeps being described to me, a bunch of factions will automatically form in just about any fort, and I'll have to watch all of them to make sure they don't fight each other. This brings me to my second problem:

2. There's no mechanic that results in a more limited creation of factions or at least allows you some control on the number of factions. But if they just come about by default whenever your dwarfs feel like it for every possible group known to dwarven kind, then there will be a ton of potentially problematic mini-groups within your fortress. Loyalty cascades are already hard enough to deal with as is. And there is no real mechanic that you can take advantage of to limit said faction explosion, except for possibly extremely limiting your dwarf population. As it is being explained to me, it seems like there is so much that counts as a potential faction that larger forts and even medium sized forts can't help but have a ton of them. Where is my limiter?

3. The third thing I don't like is that I wind up spending all my time baby sitting factions, tracking lineages, friendships, the amount of supplies everyone gets to play with, or whatever to avoid loyalty cascades instead of actually building my fort out how I like. Either this would drastically slow my play pace down so I would get nothing done, or I would be forced to neglect many of these problem creators until they got out of hand thereby dooming my fort. I realize that you say that conflict is not guaranteed or the default. But it has been repeatedly stated I have to manage them all. A "toss of the dice" (random problems) if you don't watch them basically means it's only a matter of time before they trigger a loyalty cascade. I say that because if we are dealing with potentially dozens of factions or more, as there is nothing really limiting them making a ton of factions because it happens by default, then it's only a matter of time until something goes wrong. Only a matter of time, that is, unless I spend a crazy amount of time and painstaking detail micromanaging them all. So that means I practically have to watch them.

   It seem like you are imaging that every conflict would lead to a loyalty  cascade or a tantrum spiral, right?  That is how the game works now for the most part.  I think as part of the faction arc, it would be a requirement to add lots of intermediate levels of conflict (to prevent loyalty cascades) and to add natural balancing mechanism to tantrum spirals.   
   For intermediate levels of conflict:
   The addition of brawling to adventure mode is one example of an intermediate conflict.  The dwarfs wrestle out their differences and in the end they get a happy thought for "got in a good brawl lately".  With less violent dwarfs, they could be happy just refusing to work for a few weeks or complaining loudly or organizing a protest.  The troublemaker could just up and leave your fort, if you allow emigration.  I think there should be a lot of space between perfectly loyal fort member and loyalty cascade booby trap.  A dwarf could be loyal to the Mountainhome, but angry at the local nobles, or angry at the king, but loyal to their civilization, etc.  Attacking their own civilization member could put them in the category of "criminal" if it is a nonlethal attack as opposed to "traitor that must be killed with extreme prejudice".
   Mechanics could be added to balance out tantrums spirals.  Happy thought for "had a good cry lately", "worked out anger in a good brawl", "enjoyed another's misery lately", "enjoyed watching an enemy have an emotional breakdown", "expressed themselves in a peaceful protest" and similar thoughts would balance out the emotional extremes.  So instead of a "tantrum spiral", it would be more of a oscillation between overall happiness and unhappiness, as dwarfs periodically work out their negative feelings in a controlled manner.
  So I think a "toss of the dice" (ignoring factions) should result in disruptions that ultimately sort themselves out the majority of the time.

Just make the factions numbers more controllable. That's all I ask. Either make the forming of factions base on some more easily controllable mechanic, or let me limit them, or something where I don't just wake up and discover that my 70 dwarfs have split into 40 factions, many of which belonging to multiple factions at once for extra FUN. Don't get me wrong. I actually like the idea of factions and I think it makes a certain amount of sense. But right now it's an idea that has way too rapid a growth. If it were to be put into the game as it is being suggested here, it would need a massive nerf because it could quickly become almost unmanageable in any fort with more than like 20-30 dwarfs. I realize that's not the intent of this idea. But I'm telling you that will be the result if the number of factions created can't really be controlled.

 
A few mechanics come to mind that make sense:
Intentionally requesting migrants with certain economic, political, or religious leanings would help ensure that there is only one faction at your fortress.  Allowing dwarf to emigrate would further solidify your fort into a single faction.
Alternatively, top down options set through nobles could restrict dwarfs from forming groups (at the expense of unhappy thoughts about "lack of freedom" "politically repressive government").
Or the player could just max out on wealth and luxury well enough that the dwarfs don't have anything to fight about because they are all enjoying their legendary dining rooms and fine bedrooms and tastefully arranged statue gardens.

I certainly don't imagine a fortress riven by rival factions destroying itself outright except in unusual circumstances. Loyalty cascades would have to work very differently (ideally, they'd be totally reformed) if factions were to appear in the game. I would imagine the greater enmity among dwarves would do a lot to curb tantrum spirals but that may also need to be handled somehow. Dealing with corpses may be a bigger issue.

I would imagine a certain level of population turnover however, as dwarves get disgusted and leave, or are driven out of the fortress. And maybe they return with friends?

Also I'd imagine the possibility of nonlethal confrontations would give the player advance warning in many cases, as they'd get into fistfights possibly several times before bringing out the knives. In fact now that I type that I like the idea of rival dwarven factions getting into drunken brawls just to let off steam and, after brawling, liking their rivals a bit more ("Urist enjoyed brawling with Dakost recently").

It also might be a good idea to give entities a concept of in-group out-group, so that for example rival groups of dwarves may join together to fight their common enemies the goblins, and so on.

All of these ideas work also

[Shadow Of Fate]

   It seem like you are imaging that every conflict would lead to a loyalty  cascade or a tantrum spiral, right?  That is how the game works now for the most part.  I think as part of the faction arc, it would be a requirement to add lots of intermediate levels of conflict (to prevent loyalty cascades) and to add natural balancing mechanism to tantrum spirals.   
   For intermediate levels of conflict:
   The addition of brawling to adventure mode is one example of an intermediate conflict.  The dwarfs wrestle out their differences and in the end they get a happy thought for "got in a good brawl lately".  With less violent dwarfs, they could be happy just refusing to work for a few weeks or complaining loudly or organizing a protest.  The troublemaker could just up and leave your fort, if you allow emigration.  I think there should be a lot of space between perfectly loyal fort member and loyalty cascade booby trap.  A dwarf could be loyal to the Mountainhome, but angry at the local nobles, or angry at the king, but loyal to their civilization, etc.  Attacking their own civilization member could put them in the category of "criminal" if it is a nonlethal attack as opposed to "traitor that must be killed with extreme prejudice".
   Mechanics could be added to balance out tantrums spirals.  Happy thought for "had a good cry lately", "worked out anger in a good brawl", "enjoyed another's misery lately", "enjoyed watching an enemy have an emotional breakdown", "expressed themselves in a peaceful protest" and similar thoughts would balance out the emotional extremes.  So instead of a "tantrum spiral", it would be more of a oscillation between overall happiness and unhappiness, as dwarfs periodically work out their negative feelings in a controlled manner.
  So I think a "toss of the dice" (ignoring factions) should result in disruptions that ultimately sort themselves out the majority of the time.

Yes, that is exactly what I was imagining because that is how Dwarf Fortress tends to play. I was thinking everything would lead to a loyalty cascade and/or tantrum spiral, so thank you for noticing. I do like some of these ideas. My concern is that even just this part of it would be very complex system and thus very hard to balance correctly. But if you could do it right, then I think it would help a lot.

A few mechanics come to mind that make sense:
Intentionally requesting migrants with certain economic, political, or religious leanings would help ensure that there is only one faction at your fortress.  Allowing dwarf to emigrate would further solidify your fort into a single faction.
Alternatively, top down options set through nobles could restrict dwarfs from forming groups (at the expense of unhappy thoughts about "lack of freedom" "politically repressive government").
Or the player could just max out on wealth and luxury well enough that the dwarfs don't have anything to fight about because they are all enjoying their legendary dining rooms and fine bedrooms and tastefully arranged statue gardens.

Well, it's a decent start. I would like a little more in the options of limiting faction numbers and I'll get back to this when I start thinking ideas. And in addition to that, I would also like to add something that made it so they would automatically be much slower to make factions in the beginning. Maybe due to factors like limited population to do it with, or something. Afterall, the goal of this was as more of a late game thing, correct?

I do think that, while cool and interesting, this whole faction idea seems like it would be a mega project all on it's own. There's just so much that goes into it, and so much that could unintentionally go wrong if the whole system isn't set up and balanced correctly to the finest level of detail. It worries me.

[Waparius]

There are three things I don't like about it:
The way it keeps being described to me, a bunch of factions will automatically form in just about any fort, and I'll have to watch all of them to make sure they don't fight each other.

I don't know, depends on your ideas about "a bunch" - in terms of outright factionalisation, I'd expect a (large, lategame) fort to have the following -

- Families
- Friends
- Guilds
- Religions

Now, while ideally everyone would be influenced by their loyalties to all of these, certain groups should just naturally become more powerful than others through numbers, alliances etc, and it's only when they reach a certain level of power that players would really need to keep an eye on them, which would be easily tracked/dealt with by having the most influential member of that faction get elevated to some sort of noble status - Guild Masters, High Priest[/esse]s, [M/P]atriarchs etc. While disaster or player interest might be helped by digging down through faction layers, and it should always have some small potential to cause assorted Fun, most of the time you'd only be dealing with the upper-level stuff.

If factions are able to influence other factions then some nobles will become more important than others, and this should be something that can be managed through player effort or happen on its own. The more powerful a faction is, the more important it should be to keep them happy - meaning that you'd be able to balance between paying less attention to multiple groups with paying more attention to one group.

 So, you might have a fortress ruled by two or three very powerful clans, to the point that those clans are the only factions you need to keep track of, but must be kept equally happy and friendly with one another to avoid problems. You might end up with a carefully-balanced web of guilds and religions where none are so powerful that you need to keep them more than moderately happy, but you do need to keep half an eye on ensuring no one group starts to grab power. These should be things the player can manipulate easily in early-to-mid game, or with more effort in late-game (because I like plans to pay off). I'm not sure how that should go exactly - maybe things like, focus on a single industry to get a guild to entrench itself early, coddle one of your starting seven so that they send for their family, spread out your industries and families to slow down faction growth, that sort of thing.

 Factions shouldn't generally war with each other unless you're unlucky in your faction leaders, but they should generally develop likes/dislikes for different groups that may cause extra problems when there's stress and make some things less convenient - like say, the influential Agenathen Clan hate the the Engineers' Guild because of [Worldgen Event] or something that happened in-play, so you have to remember not to assign anyone named Agenathen as an engineer and deal with the fact that the traps and mechanisms in the Agenathan Clan's burrow may go a bit longer between servicing.

 It should usually be more of an annoyance that you could try to fix with some effort or just mitigate with less effort (say, not putting the Agenathen burrow in the way of your elevators, pumpstacks, mechanical minecart tracks and/or trap defenses, or moving the clan somewhere else (somewhere a little nicer to keep them happy) if it only comes out later in play. 

Even if the Agenathens are so powerful that they essentially run the fort, it shouldn't stop you from having engineers, and it should be possible to undermine them/build up more Engineer-friendly factions, but it should be a project rather than something that you can just idly do, and having an anti-engineering fort should make relying on the engineering industry less viable. Note, though, that you should be able to head this problem off pretty easily in early-to-mid-game (for a few industries at least - I don't think any fort should be perfect) by doing something like assigning a lot of engineers and putting machinery everywhere to make sure the dwarves are used to it before they come under the thumb of the more civilised, less pragmatic Agenathens. Or whatever.

Part of the fun for me in Dwarf Fortress is having to deal with what you have, and that should extend to in-fort politics - that's why I keep pushing these sorts of ideas.

This brings me to my second problem:

2. There's no mechanic that results in a more limited creation of factions or at least allows you some control on the number of factions. [...] Where is my limiter?

3. The third thing I don't like is that I wind up spending all my time baby sitting factions, tracking lineages, friendships, the amount of supplies everyone gets to play with, or whatever to avoid loyalty cascades instead of actually building my fort out how I like. [...] Only a matter of time, that is, unless I spend a crazy amount of time and painstaking detail micromanaging them all. So that means I practically have to watch them.

Solution:

Just make the factions numbers more controllable. That's all I ask. [...]

Does the above solution solve those problems for you as well? Because that's the sort of thing I'm aiming for. Frankly I agree that it would be a nightmare to have to track 40 factions at once from the time you have 30 dwarves. To boil it down, while less-powerful factions should be things you can look at and manipulate if you want, a late-game fort, left alone, ought to usually default to 3-7 factions powerful enough that the player needs to pay some attention to them, with 1-3 being important enough that they matter a lot. Keeping enemy factions happy under normal circumstances ought to be as simple as digging out a large enough fort that they have enough room to stay away from one another, making sure they have enough to do, having the fortress guard stationed in potential trouble spots (eg, entrances/exits and bottleneck corridors), and making sure nobody kills anybody else.

I'll admit, I do find this interesting. But personally, I don't want to change Dwarf Fortress into Dwarf Sims or Dwarf Babysitter. I still want to have time to actually build my fortress. This looks like it will take up all my time. Don't get me wrong. I understand you said that it wouldn't be micromanaging unless there were a crisis. I understand that is not how you envision this. But then you, and even Scruiser to a lesser extent, go into all the detail of things I would need to do to keep them from getting into conflict with each other or else all these potentially fortress destroying things will happen. Perhaps the extra detail is partly my fault for encouraging more clarification, but still. It's a ton of stuff to learn and watch and manage and so on. It would take a lot of time managing. And since there isn't anything limiting the automatic and rapid faction creation then it quickly gets out of control.

I don't know. I hope my explanation is making sense here. Part of the point of faction management being about building a few districts and so on is to make the game encourage more interesting fortress design to avoid that sort of micromanagement, with the latter being there as a sort of last resort. If you manage your fortress, you don't need to manage your dwarves. If you manage your dwarves you don't need to manage your fortress. If you're lucky you might get both.

But on the other hand this is a thing that I want to bring in in late-game. Right now none of my established forts fall apart on their own, so once I've gotten through the early and mid-game there's literally nothing to do beyond abandonment, reckless endangerment or megaprojects, and I'm not interested in that sort of game. I like my dwarf fortress to be difficult all the way through, in different ways at each stage. Factions aren't a problem in early-game, when you're keeping your dwarves alive in a hostile wilderness. They aren't a big deal in mid-game, when you're carving out your fortress and dealing with raiders and thieves and the odd ghostly fisherdwarf. They're a problem in late-game when you have 200 dwarves and multilayered defenses and a pet Marsh Titan and a vampire walled up in the basement... unless you were careful in mid-game and you remember to check the Factions menu every year or two to make sure nothing's creeping up on you. Which is also fun.

It's not fun for me to just be able to have a powerful huge fort with no effort at all after the second year and resort to building giant pointless statues or whatever to kill time. I want a big pointless statue to be a real achievement.

What?!?!? "Hey enemy goblins here's our traps, come in the back way. Here, I'll show you where it is..." I didn't realize disgruntled guild members were that suicidal. So they could jack prices, refuse to supply your fortress, show the enemy how to invade your fort, or cause a number of other things to happen because you gave one forge 10 bars and the other 5? These aren't minor things you are talking about, and yet they can be set off for seemingly minor reasons. And despite you saying otherwise, these are all things that would require micromanaging to ensure it didn't happen.

Not really. Hilldwarves don't live with your dwarves, and it would be an extreme situation that would cause them to guide in invaders - more along the lines of, "Guide us through their traps, and we will let you live!" The difference between them spitting in the invaders' eye and promising retribution versus caving would require that the hilldwarves had low confidence in your fortress's ability to save them as well as low loyalty to it. And again, "micromanagement" would generally consist of, "Make a for with enough room for those powerful factions who don't like each other to stay away from each other", "Avoid having a long siege/kill the megabeast quickly" and "produce enough goods to give your hilldwarf farmers a fair price for their crops". Every so often there'd be more problems, but again, I like the "deal with what you have, no fortress is perfect, losing is fun!" part of Dwarf Fortress and haven't seen it in a late-game fort since 2D.

For me, the biggest thing not about keeping them alive so much as 7 dwarfs is very low man power. I like to expand the infrastructure of my fort rather quickly in early. My plan always relies on at least a few dwarfs coming to join me before the end of the year. I don't want to have to earn the right to have migrant waves right at the start. That makes early game more difficult rather than the late game which is considered the problem here. I'm not talking about massive waves of 20- 30 migrants or anything. You could limit it to a few dwarfs per wave or something. But a couple years of a few dwarfs coming is all I really ask. Then you could be forced to create outside contact to keep the migrants coming or whatever.

I just want an average population of around 15 adults by the end of year 3, assuming no one died. I personally don't think it's unreasonable for the dwarfs to assume your fort is still alive for a wave or two before everyone starts to wonder if you failed, died off, or whatever.

I'd say this should be a matter of fortress placement. If you want huge migrant waves, build near a road or civilisation centre. If you want isolation, go way off on an island somewhere or what-have-you. If there's a road nearby there should be lots of travellers passing through all the time, unless you shut the doors.

Actually, this angle of it doesn't seem that bad. If you keep your fort happy it doesn't happen. And if you don't then you have a chance to persuade them. And if you can't persuade them to stay then it's better than them throwing a tantrum tantrum and contributing to a tantrum spiral. I was worried that they would just up and leave and you might find out about after it's too late, or worse, not notice and then realize a dwarf was missing and you didn't know why. Actually, I'm not really opposed to this part of it. But you do realize this would make the game easier, right?

Option: An entire faction (generally a disgruntled and not powerful one) decides to leave all at once, with supplies. Announcement: "Urist McDisgruntled is trying to convince the McDisgruntled Clan to leave!".

Potential options include trying to make them all happy, exiling Urist before he can convince them, throwing him/them in jail, forbidding their exit, refusing to let them requisition supplies, etc...

Most of that doesn't seem that bad. One thing that concerns me is the leaving thing. But from what you said here, it sounds like leaving only happens when they get really unhappy. And it sounds like being anti social and uncomfortable about socializing only makes them somewhat unhappy rather than extremely unhappy. Just so long as I didn't have to micromanage them and build them their own burrows and whatnot just to keep them ridiculously happy, I don't think it would be that bad. Perhaps you could have them avoid socializing themselves when not working, due to their personality. Like maybe they would go to their room or something? And so long as they had somewhere to retreat to like their own room, maybe it couldn't get that bad in the unhappiness department? You know what? If that was the case, then I could totally deal with this. I mean if there was still a warning system of them leaving, and a chance to appease them. And both of those things you said existed in your other bit.

That's good, that was pretty much what I was trying to say.

Hmm... Does this mean you suggest there be some sort of migrant wave mechanic that makes it easier to more quickly replace important dwarfs (like legendary workers) who recently left? Except that by doing so, it would be more social dwarfs? Because I wouldn't be opposed to that.

My idea is that dwarves can, if they're happy enough and have the right personality etc, send for family, friends, guildmembers and so on - and that would result in a migrant wave. Which would be much more under your control. Possibly also to be able to request migrants from a diplomat or pay a merchant/traveller to talk up your fortress.

I'd address the rest of your post, but I'm out of time, I'm afraid. Have to come back to it later.

[edit]

I don't have a problem with this. However, it's not exactly what I was getting at. I think I'm the one who failed to explain myself properly here. You see, generally the isolation mechanics we were talking about were meant for forts who just shut themselves in and didn't deal with outside influences.
[...]
The friendship angle is interesting, but entirely different in nature. What we were originally discussing was that it was too easy to just seal yourself off from the world and thrive, particularly late game where it should be getting harder. So we thought there should be ways to punish that style of play a little bit during the late game.
[...]
 In order to do that, we had to define what the game thought of as isolated for a fort, and what mechanic could be used to measure that. Also, we needed to know how it would spread in the fort or not, which would mostly be based on contact (or not) with outside influences. And that part of it never really went anywhere, which is why I keep focusing on it.

I do like the friendship angle you put on this. But it doesn't really address the original issue. Originally, I thought you meant it as a part of that. Maybe still you do? Either way, that's why I suggested we put more weight on outside influences rather than friendships when it came to measuring isolation.

Ah yes. I think I got a little lost on the way explaining how friendship and so on would work because factions are one of my go-to "this should be a problem in late-game" things and sociability is part of that.

The core of my idea as related to isolating a fort is having your population begin with isolation-friendly pioneering or hillbilly dwarves, but (assuming an average fort) tending to have it switch over to being mostly made up of more civilised dwarves as the population grows.

The key mechanic to measure this type of isolation would be tracking (in some abstract way) news from the outside world. Assuming trade changes in the ways I've mentioned upthread, there should be a steady stream of merchants, peddlers, travellers and hilldwarves coming and going from the fort at any given time, and they should linger in the fort to eat and sleep and hang out with the locals a little bit, thus spreading the news.

Dwarves who speak with a traveller will have heard the latest news, and they should be able to pass the news along to other dwarves they speak with as well (more or less based on how good their memory is), meaning that news spreads throughout the fort with every merchant visit. Dwarves may want to hear news from one area or another and so prefer to speak with far-travelling merchants or bards than to Urist McHilldwarf who's in once a week. That could use a little more discussion I guess.

 If a dwarf wants to hear the news, and hasn't been able get it through the grapevine, then they should spend their breaktime up at the market or a traveller's tavern or wherever hoping to hear the news. If more civilised dwarves go too long without hearing the news they get unhappy. If wilder dwarves hear too much news they might become unhappy also, but this may be a bit much, really, especially if the stranger-dislike mechanic works well enough to make antisocial dwarves who aren't given enough space decide to leave on their own.

[Scruiser]

I think one of the general points of Waparius's post is that any changes will need good information and interface screens to go with them.  I.e. a warning system to show you emigrates and a way of directly inputting possible responses.  Another screen that shows you factions, how powerful they are, their current morale/status, and their current possessions as a faction.  Another screen that shows guilds and their economic resources.  And so on, for each new feature.  Toady may not do a lot of optimization, but he does put in interfaces when new features are added, and they do give you all the information and control you need (albeit in messy ways sometimes).

Would you all agree?

[Shadow Of Fate]

I think one of the general points of Waparius's post is that any changes will need good information and interface screens to go with them.  I.e. a warning system to show you emigrates and a way of directly inputting possible responses.  Another screen that shows you factions, how powerful they are, their current morale/status, and their current possessions as a faction.  Another screen that shows guilds and their economic resources.  And so on, for each new feature.  Toady may not do a lot of optimization, but he does put in interfaces when new features are added, and they do give you all the information and control you need (albeit in messy ways sometimes).

Would you all agree?

Yes. I would agree. I just like to envision how things would work, as well as how they might tend to go wrong. Sometimes I get concerned at how easily things can get out of hand, particularly in a game like this. When I don't see limits into the design I get nervous because this game has a life of it's own. Often times things happen that even Toady doesn't count on.

I don't know, depends on your ideas about "a bunch" - in terms of outright factionalisation, I'd expect a (large, lategame) fort to have the following -

- Families
- Friends
- Guilds
- Religions

You make a fair point. Those dynamics make sense. My problem is I have to keep track of all of it. And I have to keep track of who the leaders are and whose relations are too them and such. It is also likely that leaders will change, either through reelection like mayors or through something like the old faction leader dying. And if leaders change, I have to learn everything again and rebalanced it so that they are all ok. First of all, I need the game to keep track of that stuff for me so that I can look it up rather than having to memorize it, write extensive lists, etc. Then I need a way to quickly filter thought it so I can make sound decisions without it taking forever.

certain groups should just naturally become more powerful than others through numbers, alliances etc, and it's only when they reach a certain level of power that players would really need to keep an eye on them, which would be easily tracked/dealt with by having the most influential member of that faction get elevated to some sort of noble status - Guild Masters, High Priest[/esse]s, [M/P]atriarchs etc. While disaster or player interest might be helped by digging down through faction layers, and it should always have some small potential to cause assorted Fun, most of the time you'd only be dealing with the upper-level stuff.

If factions are able to influence other factions then some nobles will become more important than others, and this should be something that can be managed through player effort or happen on its own. The more powerful a faction is, the more important it should be to keep them happy - meaning that you'd be able to balance between paying less attention to multiple groups with paying more attention to one group.

So, you might have a fortress ruled by two or three very powerful clans, to the point that those clans are the only factions you need to keep track of, but must be kept equally happy and friendly with one another to avoid problems. You might end up with a carefully-balanced web of guilds and religions where none are so powerful that you need to keep them more than moderately happy, but you do need to keep half an eye on ensuring no one group starts to grab power. These should be things the player can manipulate easily in early-to-mid game, or with more effort in late-game (because I like plans to pay off). I'm not sure how that should go exactly - maybe things like, focus on a single industry to get a guild to entrench itself early, coddle one of your starting seven so that they send for their family, spread out your industries and families to slow down faction growth, that sort of thing.

Well, this is better than every faction just being entitled and troublesome from the get go. I suppose it makes sense for certain faction to become more powerful than others. And it would be nice if you generally didn't really have to worry about them causing trouble until they grew big and powerful enough to become emboldened and have enough influence to do so. My problem comes with how we define that. And how do you determine only a certain amount of factions will at least tend to become so big and powerful? Because it seems to me that there is no limit on that. Not that there should be a hard limit per say. But there should be something in the mechanics that determines a what gives powerful faction it's powerful status which makes it hard for too many of them to become so powerful. Maybe you could intentionally make it so that more factions became more powerful. But the default would be that only a few factions tended to ever get that influential without player meddling. Not sure how it would do that, as we haven't defined what exactly determines a faction being so influential. Where is the line they have to cross?

I'm also worried about the influence fluctuation. Maybe a faction's leader gets randomly elected mayor in like year 5 and suddenly that small faction you wanted to keep from growing is making a power play. Or worse, I could see a bunch of random nobles joining factions, often multiple ones, and suddenly you have a bunch of crazy powerful factions in your fort because they all have a bunch of nobles in them with loyalties towards said factions.

Part of the fun for me in Dwarf Fortress is having to deal with what you have, and that should extend to in-fort politics - that's why I keep pushing these sorts of ideas.

I understand. I enjoy the idea of fort politics to a certain extent. But I also get pissed off by unreasonable meddling nobles who constantly get in the way of my plans. Factions would the same way for me. Might be a nice addition and my ability to play the factions and such would be somewhat interesting to me. Just don't make it too much.

Does the above solution solve those problems for you as well? Because that's the sort of thing I'm aiming for. Frankly I agree that it would be a nightmare to have to track 40 factions at once from the time you have 30 dwarves. To boil it down, while less-powerful factions should be things you can look at and manipulate if you want, a late-game fort, left alone, ought to usually default to 3-7 factions powerful enough that the player needs to pay some attention to them, with 1-3 being important enough that they matter a lot. Keeping enemy factions happy under normal circumstances ought to be as simple as digging out a large enough fort that they have enough room to stay away from one another, making sure they have enough to do, having the fortress guard stationed in potential trouble spots (eg, entrances/exits and bottleneck corridors), and making sure nobody kills anybody else.

Well, somewhat. And it meets most of my concerns I put out replying to a previous section in this same post. It definitely helps, but I would still like ways to more easily limit the number of factions that form in addition to that. However, I need less now. You see, this approach sounds reasonable to me. If I only really have to worry about a handful of them potentially being real trouble then I can actually manage it without spending all my time on it.

My concern, in case you couldn't tell, comes from the fact that I thought these factions would multiply by the rates of cat reproduction and all have their own specific needs met so they would cause trouble and fight with each other.

Factions aren't a problem in early-game, when you're keeping your dwarves alive in a hostile wilderness. They aren't a big deal in mid-game, when you're carving out your fortress and dealing with raiders and thieves and the odd ghostly fisherdwarf. They're a problem in late-game when you have 200 dwarves and multilayered defenses and a pet Marsh Titan and a vampire walled up in the basement... unless you were careful in mid-game and you remember to check the Factions menu every year or two to make sure nothing's creeping up on you. Which is also fun.

I understand that's the goal but I was worried the lack of limiting mechanics would get in the way of that. I like the idea of them being a non factor early game, starting to form but not a big deal in mid game, and then being another challenge for late game. I actually really like that difficulty curve you just described. I was just worried there would be no way to stop the snowball effect avalanche unless you spent a painstaking amount of time micromanaging everything.

It's not fun for me to just be able to have a powerful huge fort with no effort at all after the second year and resort to building giant pointless statues or whatever to kill time. I want a big pointless statue to be a real achievement.

Well I do like mega projects and the ability to test certain things later on once you got the resources and stability to do so. But that said, I get your point and even agree with you. Late game is inherently too easy for an established fort. That's why we are having this discussion in this thread. Because we need more late game challenges to keep it interesting. But we don't necessarily need factions (or any other one particular thing for that matter) to be one of those late game challenges, and I was worried it would be too time consuming and hard to manage. But I'm starting to come around now that several more limiting mechanics have been discussed.

Not really. Hilldwarves don't live with your dwarves, and it would be an extreme situation that would cause them to guide in invaders - more along the lines of, "Guide us through their traps, and we will let you live!" The difference between them spitting in the invaders' eye and promising retribution versus caving would require that the hilldwarves had low confidence in your fortress's ability to save them as well as low loyalty to it. And again, "micromanagement" would generally consist of, "Make a for with enough room for those powerful factions who don't like each other to stay away from each other", "Avoid having a long siege/kill the megabeast quickly" and "produce enough goods to give your hilldwarf farmers a fair price for their crops". Every so often there'd be more problems, but again, I like the "deal with what you have, no fortress is perfect, losing is fun!" part of Dwarf Fortress and haven't seen it in a late-game fort since 2D.

This makes it sound better than you originally phrased it. As long as extreme cases can't be triggered by minor things.

I'd say this should be a matter of fortress placement. If you want huge migrant waves, build near a road or civilisation centre. If you want isolation, go way off on an island somewhere or what-have-you. If there's a road nearby there should be lots of travellers passing through all the time, unless you shut the doors.

I mostly agree with you, as well as with your original description of this mechanic. It just makes early game harder, and more importantly a lot more restrictive, if you don't get a few extra dwarfs coming your way. Or sometimes you draw a bad lot of dwarfs in your first 7, or you need to have the ability to lose a couple because you want a small armed squad (like 3-4 dwarfs) as an early game military. You know. There are a number of reasons why just a few extra help. I'm not asking for a lot. Just a small wave or two regardless of area. So say the first two migrant waves that come have 2-6 dwarfs in them. That would add up to 4-12 at most over 2 waves, plus your 7 originals to make it 11-19 total assuming no one dies. That would give an average of around 15 assuming no one died. And either end would be a more extreme example. You would rarely get only 11 or 12, but would be more likely to in an isolated area. You would rarely wind up with 18 or 19, but might be more likely to if you were near a road with lots of travelers or something. You would be very likely to end up at 13-16. Etc.

I feel like the third migrant wave is where you have to establish outside connections in order to lure more migrants. From there you could decide if you wanted to be more isolated or more connected, which of course would be factored in by your location. You would have to work harder to establish connection on an isolated island, but it would be easier to stay isolated. You would have a harder time staying isolated alongside a busy road, but an easier time being connected and getting large migrant waves. This would also give you flexibility to decide what you want to do while you set up the very beginnings of your fort. I'm all about the flexibility.

Option: An entire faction (generally a disgruntled and not powerful one) decides to leave all at once, with supplies. Announcement: "Urist McDisgruntled is trying to convince the McDisgruntled Clan to leave!".

Potential options include trying to make them all happy, exiling Urist before he can convince them, throwing him/them in jail, forbidding their exit, refusing to let them requisition supplies, etc...

That doesn't seem like it's that bad, either. Could make things interesting. The only thing is there should be several warnings and chances to take care of it before there is a mass exiling. And mass exilings should be considerably rare in the first place. I would also add to the potential options that appeasing just the malcontent dwarf (rather than his entire clan) might stop him from trying to dissuade his entire McDisgruntled clan from leaving, and could be very effective if done early enough.

That's good, that was pretty much what I was trying to say.

That's good. I was afraid everyone would just up and start leaving because they didn't like other people. Giving them their own room rather than always having to do out their own burrows seems like a much more reasonable way to minimize the damage. Having it based on extreme unhappiness, with certain reasons combining with extreme unhappiness, makes it much more manageable than I had originally thought.

My idea is that dwarves can, if they're happy enough and have the right personality etc, send for family, friends, guildmembers and so on - and that would result in a migrant wave. Which would be much more under your control. Possibly also to be able to request migrants from a diplomat or pay a merchant/traveller to talk up your fortress.

I see. I like this mechanic.

Ah yes. I think I got a little lost on the way explaining how friendship and so on would work because factions are one of my go-to "this should be a problem in late-game" things and sociability is part of that.

The core of my idea as related to isolating a fort is having your population begin with isolation-friendly pioneering or hillbilly dwarves, but (assuming an average fort) tending to have it switch over to being mostly made up of more civilised dwarves as the population grows.

The key mechanic to measure this type of isolation would be tracking (in some abstract way) news from the outside world. Assuming trade changes in the ways I've mentioned upthread, there should be a steady stream of merchants, peddlers, travellers and hilldwarves coming and going from the fort at any given time, and they should linger in the fort to eat and sleep and hang out with the locals a little bit, thus spreading the news.

Dwarves who speak with a traveller will have heard the latest news, and they should be able to pass the news along to other dwarves they speak with as well (more or less based on how good their memory is), meaning that news spreads throughout the fort with every merchant visit. Dwarves may want to hear news from one area or another and so prefer to speak with far-travelling merchants or bards than to Urist McHilldwarf who's in once a week. That could use a little more discussion I guess.

 If a dwarf wants to hear the news, and hasn't been able get it through the grapevine, then they should spend their breaktime up at the market or a traveller's tavern or wherever hoping to hear the news. If more civilised dwarves go too long without hearing the news they get unhappy. If wilder dwarves hear too much news they might become unhappy also, but this may be a bit much, really, especially if the stranger-dislike mechanic works well enough to make antisocial dwarves who aren't given enough space decide to leave on their own.

I really like this rendition of it. And what you said last time about friends starts to come together and make more sense. And I believe I already stated that I liked the idea of certain dwarfs being more isolation tolerant, with early game dwarfs tending to be more isolation tolerant and more civilized dwarfs tending to be less so. Most dwarfs would hear about it once the fort heard about it. The isolation tolerant dwarfs would be less social or likely to hear it, but also wouldn't need as much outside information passed along to them anyway. Although, they would obviously still need to hear something on occasion as even isolation tolerant dwarfs are not isolation immune. This also goes back to my suggestion of making outside influences much more weighted than friendships when it came to the isolation mechanic. This prevents an isolated fort from circumventing the isolation related consequences by seeing a caravan once or twice a year and letting the rest be killed by sieges before they arrive because it's not worth going out to help them. It also let's us create a more successful isolated fort, at least to a limited extent, by focusing almost exclusively on the isolation tolerant dwarfs. But it wouldn't be perfect.

I also like the idea of the most connected forts having a steady stream of people coming in, whether it be migrants, merchants, etc. (Of course, that might mean more chances of diseases but that's another discussion.) I like how you don't have this so it's like, here are your four caravans a year and that's it no matter what. A more connected fort might also have smaller groups traveling in and out like a traffic flow. Yet a more isolated fort would have a lot less visitors. Maybe they would only get a few large caravans a year. And a completely isolated fort which was entirely shut off from the rest of the world (extreme example) would receive no visitors because no one would know it existed.

So I'm thinking we could have several levels of isolation go something like this:

1. Completely shut off from the outside (An extreme case that receives no visits from friend or foe at the expense of greatly exaggerated isolation-related consequences)
2. Mostly isolated (Still get the large seasonal caravans, but no in between traffic. Migrant waves are smaller and rarer. Sieges are rare and tend to be bigger. Somewhat exaggerated isolation-related consequences.)
3. Average Fort (Gets large seasonal caravans, and some traffic flow and smaller traders in between on occasion. Migrant waves every year but tend to be medium sized. Big sieges are rare, but small sieges are more common.)
4. Mostly Connected (Same as average fort, but with much more frequent traffic in between large seasonal caravans. Migrant waves happen every year and tend to be large. Sieges of all sizes are more common.)
5. Extremely Connected (Just about constantly traffic, ranging from large to small. Very large and frequent migrant waves. Dwarfs frequently come and go. Sieges are very common. Road is generally built to your fort if it doesn't exist already.)

Then we could gauge the isolation of the fort to make certain things more FUN for more isolated forts based on their isolation measurements. For instance, Scruiser's self actualization pursuits could have some additional negative consequences or consequences that were much more likely to be negative for an isolated fort than a connected one. And a more isolated but close knit fort with a lot of close interlocking friendships would obviously more easily go into a tantrum spiral over relatively little deaths. Stuff like that.