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[Arkenstone]

So, everyone here should know that feeling when the immigrants just keep on coming, when either you're not ready or something kills them or over half of them are children! Wouldn't it be nice if you had a way to directly influence your immigrants short of editing the .init file?

Well, that's where the Customs Officer comes in. He works in his office like a Bookkeeper, constantly updating updating the fortress's ad programs, deportation agreements, and internal policy towards newcoming migrants. (How does he communicate with the outside world? Dwarven Email, of course!) Maybe he meets once a year with a liaison to discuss policy.

The purpose of the Customs Officer is to control immigration policy. This policy consists of a number of options accessed through the (n)obles screen. The specific values are as follows:

Value:	Range:
Borders:	Free - Open - Restricted - Closed
Minimum Experience:	Unskilled - Apprentice - Journeyman - Master
Children:	Encouraged - Tolerated - Discouraged - Denied
Skills:*	(Priority 0-5)*

*One priority slider for each applicable skill group/profession ("stoneworker", "engineer", "military", etc.)

Underlined are default values. For each entry:

Borders affects the baseline number of immigrants. When set to "Closed", no immigrants are allowed. "Restricted" will allow only a few dwarves whom match your other qualifications in each wave. "Free" will attract as many immigrants as possible (as is done now), and "Open" represents a default balance point.

Minimum Experience sets what level of skill acceptable migrants should have. "Apprentice" equates to Adequate or better in at least two or three skills, "Journeyman" would be similar to "Proficient" or better in at least one, and "Master" would have overall skill levels greater than a starting dwarf. (Note that this isn't necessarily a "hard" limit if your Borders are Open.)

Children determines how likely incoming migrants are to bring their children along with them. Refusing to accept children may convince some dwarves to leave theirs at home, but it also may convince others not to come at all.

Finally, there are a number of priority sliders for skills to determine which are preferred over others. This works similar to caravan goods priorities.


The Customs Officer has to work constantly to maintain this policy's effectiveness, or else it won't really do much at all.

[Skullsploder]

I like this. It means I can have do away with the team who make slabs for migrants each time a wave hits.

But seriously, this would be an excellent way to incorporate immigration control into the game without having to modify init.txt, and also helps to make it slightly more difficult - If you don't protect that liaison, your immigrations officer can't discuss immigration policy with him, and the mountainhome may believe your borders are still closed; meanwhile you have 2 dwarves alive after the tantrum spiral and one's stark raving mad.

Plus, I like the idea of reducing the amount of children in exchange for a reduction in total migrants, and that sort of thing. It should work on some sort of squared scale, so the more restrictions, you place, the more rapidly your immigration numbers dwindle.

To keep it from being overpowered though, I think the advertising ability of the immigration officer should be very, very small. Maybe enough to guarantee 1 or 2 master dwarves in a specific skill per year, if your fort is successful. Also, reputation for wanting a certain thing should build over time, so your fort gets a reputation back at the mountain homes/out in the colonies (for when you're a mountain home) of being a place where a mason can always find work, or where kids are welcome and there's a pile of gems for every jeweler - and a successful fort should take more than 2 years to build up enough reputation to consistently attract those 1 or 2 specific master dwarves.

I mean, training dwarves in any skill really - except medicine I guess - is so easy already, that this would need to be very harshly balanced, as above.

Just my two cents. 

[shadus]

I love this idea... just "Open and Closed" would make me happy too.

[GavJ]

I sort of disapprove of this. I'm all for options in RAWs or init files doing similar things, but that's changing the game rules, the culture and laws of the civilization etc. Anything makes sense under those circumstances, because you're just rewriting the story.

...But it makes little to no sense to do this in-game. How do immigrants in the mountainhomes 400 miles away magically know that 5 minutes ago, your customs officer wrote on a piece of paper that immigration is restricted?

The only way they'd find out is via the mountainhome liaison -- if changes to your customs policies don't take effect until he arrives and gets back again each time, then okay, that works if you do it that way. But it wouldn't be much less annoying than now, honestly. And with that much lag time, you're unlikely to be routinely changing your policies mid-fort anyway, so what advantage does it have over direct raw/init options instead?



The attractiveness of this in gameplay flows mainly from thinking of it in terms of having immediate effect on the next migrant wave, but that version of it is unrealistic.

[Arkenstone]

...But it makes little to no sense to do this in-game. How do immigrants in the mountainhomes 400 miles away magically know that 5 minutes ago, your customs officer wrote on a piece of paper that immigration is restricted?

Because the dwarf with the big axe patrolling your borders turns them away?

Immigration waves being spaced months apart, there is realistically time enough for a message sent by foot to make it to the nearest town, at the very least. It's just one of those things that are too fine-detail to show up in Fort Mode (until Hill Dwarves/Duchy stuff is added, at least).


Beyond that, remember that this is a game. Migrant policy (at the very least, open/closed) is something which is definitely needed from a gameplay perspective, and this way is more immersive/realistic than any other I've seen.

[GavJ]

Because the dwarf with the big axe patrolling your borders turns them away?

Except you didn't say anything about a big axe... in fact you said he works out of an office.

But okay, change of plans: axe patrol, fine. What about when he's sleeping or eating or drinking or partying when a wave shows up and not on the border with his axe? What about if the migrant wave has 5 different dwarves with competent fighting and discipline skill and your guy with an axe is a novice who doesn't know how to use it and they're starving? What if you have civilian alert turned on? It's one thing to send word to the mountainhomes not to set out. It's quite another to attempt to turn away people who already showed up and didn't bring supplies to get back... That's basically murder. Which means they should try to defend themselves like any attacked non-civ dwarves would. And even if you do scare them off, in my opinion you should still be obligated to deal with their ghosts if that's the way you're playing it, just like if you let them die currently near you.

Immigration waves being spaced months apart, there is realistically time enough for a message sent by foot to make it to the nearest town, at the very least.

Who sends the message? Do you have to give up a dwarf and risk losing him for weeks to send it? What if he gets eaten by an elephant halfway there trying to run around in the wilds on his own? Does that mean you might have to give up a whole patrol for safety? What if there is no nearby town and you live on a glacial island on the other side of the world from your civ, would you have to send a whole 7 dwarves with supplies to send word?





Long story short, I quite disagree that this is "definitely more realistic" than other alternatives. Namely the current one, which is not only simpler (you can't really complain about "too fine detail" when you're proposing to ADD more details...), but already makes perfectly fine sense and thus sets a high bar for a replacement: liaison sends word, migrants don't set out. Liaison already has a caravan of guards and merchants and supplies to make any distance journey. The customs officer by comparison doesn't make sense as is.

I like the general concept, though, and I'd love to see it somehow refined so that it becomes a solid, believable, more fun more options alternative than cold, emotionless init options. But it needs work.

[GavJ]

What might help salvage the original flavor and option-richness while also allowing realism would be some sort of plausible fast communication system. Made it its own thread, see http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143014.0

[The Riddled Basement]

I really like the concept of the customs officer.
Together with pidgeons it feels legit to put in the game.
Being able to restrict immigration would be very fun if you want to keep your fort small or if you want to create a millitary outpost with only millitary dwarves. And this in turn would work well with features to come like invading sites etc.
I would love to see this noble in game.

What if you could actually give coins to dwarves that meet prerequisites to immigrate, like in ye olde days when England would pay 50 pounds for people to go to America to settle. You could encourage faster immigration with a bigger budget, or you could build the reputation by keeping the settings for an extended period.

Please give your thoughts on this

[Skullsploder]

I.. I liked my suggestion. Reputation would be cool :/ Also, changing init settings feels too easy for me, and (counter to that) I hate that I have to save, exit, change init, and then load again each time I decide my immigration policy needs revising.

Plus, the option-richness is awesome, and would add a lot more depth to immigration.

On physically preventing immigration: Border patrols should be a thing, perhaps via a squad designated from the noble, just like a captain of the guard or hammerer. This squad would then have a schedule order available to literally patrol the border, with their patrol route being preset (i.e. the edge of the map) by the game. Depending on the amount of time per year they spend patrolling (i.e. doing the preset schedule order), the amount of dwarves in the squad, and so on, you get a bonus to any negative modifiers you applied for immigration - i.e. less chance of unwanted dwarves immigrating, plus faster reputation gain.

Come to think of it, you could simply make it an option available to any squad in the scheduling screen: train, protect burrows, patrol, or patrol border.

Then, as above, you'd get bonuses to negative modifiers based on amount of dwarf-hours spent patrolling (two dwarfs patrol for 2 hours = 2 dwarf hours patrolling) per migration wave.

When migrants arrive, your immigration officer has meetings with each migrant, the desired ones become part of your fort, and for the undesired ones who came through despite all your patrols, a screen pops up set out like the units lists where you can choose which of the undesirables to turn away.

The undesirables turned away would have a chance of either becoming berserk, or leaving peacefully, with an option to give them food as a way to influence the chances of peaceful leaving.

Having family members or friends turned away would be a very big negative thought for dwarves in the migrant wave or in the fortress.

I believe that that would allow realistic immigration control for players, which isn't in any way too easy or anything, nor too hard. It also gives greater incentive to not turtle, since without access to the map edges, you can't prevent the influx of migrants who need to be memorialised.

[Dorf and Dumb]

I like the original suggestion - I made a similar one, but the officer adds more color.  Plus, his Persuasion might affect the skill level he can attract.  The one thing I wonder though is when are you going to choose anything but the most skill requirement you can?

It would be cool if the officer could actually leave the map, weighed down by a few dozen bags of gold coins to help in advertising and recruiting dorfs of a particular desired skill, like Weaponsmith, and return with the migrants.

[vache]

Honestly, I can see this just being a cheesy way to get high skilled dwarves.  Without some other extrinsic motivation, it would be too easy to just say "send master weaponsmiths!" all the time.  There would have to be some economic or other motivating factors, like "send master weaponsmiths, we will pay them 50% more than anywhere else!"  I think an in between solution before economy would be to just set a certain quota with your liaison who relays that to the mountainhomes for the migrant waves.  Migrant waves should come once a year and arrive with the caravan for protection.  Periodically, in addition to the migrant waves, you sometimes have travelers pass by who request to join.  These are usually family units or random adventurers who are looking for somewhere to settle for whatever reason.  You can base your decision off of the migrant's skills and the size of their family/group.  So, maybe that weaponsmith would be a nice addition, but his waxworking wife, dozen small children, and hateable vermin collection might not be. 

[GavJ]

just say "send master weaponsmiths!" all the time.

As I understand it, the idea is pretty much that you still get just as many master weapon smiths as before (or SLIGHTLY more), but don't get the riff raff. It's not like they all just become master weaponsmiths.

Which may or may not be good depending on your goals. If you're doing a megaproject, you WANT riff raff to go build walls for you and stuff, for instance.

[Detharon]

I like the idea of being able to influence the immigration.

Currently outpost liason checks the ymm... d_init.txt file and if population exceeds the cap he reports back that new dwarves are no longer welcome. He could as well consult the Customs Officer instead. This approach fits the lore more than modifying external files.

That said, I don't want a strict control, more like a way to open/close immigration and perhaps a way to slightly bias the immigrants towards the desired ones.

[nanomage]

I think that the plausible amount  of control over immigration would be a nice idea. That said, what is suggested here is by a huge margin more than "plausible control". There is simply no infrastructure (no embassies or representatives to inform anyone of your policy, no websites or offices to conduct migration points tests, no border protection to enforce your rules) neither in the other dwarven settlements nor in your fortress to support this degree of control and complexity. The only possible way for you to control immigration is via the liaison, by informing him what professions or ages or genders you need most. Even after that, your order can only be realistically thought of as a rough guideline which shifts the distribution very slightly toward the desired outcome.

[Wyrm]

Because the dwarf with the big axe patrolling your borders turns them away?

Except you didn't say anything about a big axe... in fact you said he works out of an office.

But okay, change of plans: axe patrol, fine. What about when he's sleeping or eating or drinking or partying when a wave shows up and not on the border with his axe? What about if the migrant wave has 5 different dwarves with competent fighting and discipline skill and your guy with an axe is a novice who doesn't know how to use it and they're starving? What if you have civilian alert turned on? It's one thing to send word to the mountainhomes not to set out. It's quite another to attempt to turn away people who already showed up and didn't bring supplies to get back... That's basically murder.

A dwarf eats and drinks about once a season. That's plenty of time to get back to the mountainhomes. Or they're allowed to take one meal each before they leave.

Also, you realize that the standard solution to overpopulation is for the superfluous dwarves to meet with "unhappy accidents" right? Overpopulation isn't just a problem of logistics for the fortress, it's a problem with performance. That necessitates some unrealistic solutions.

Who sends the message?

The turned-away immigrants.