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[Bumber]

Ah, gotcha. You mean for mega-projects and things. It didn't occur to me to factor those in because they're a meta-game. I wouldn't want a game mechanic to destroy someone's mega-project in the first place because they're playing for a different reason, and Dwarf behaviors would essentially be wasting their time. Nobody that wants to build a computer in Dwarf Fortress is going to enjoy being locked completely out of their fort because they were.. you know.. making a computer instead of what the game would otherwise be. This suggest allows for people doing mega-projects not to be punished for playing a different game but punishes people trying to run an actual fort if they run it poorly.

This. It's kind of tiresome, not very interesting. To me it seems more like a gamey "player was banned from fortress" mechanic than any kind of politically intriguing story-telling element. If you can instead take control of the rebellion, you could eventually force the mountainhomes to concede, leading to a permanent change in government structure or ethics, or even a new civilization. (I.e., the colonies are tired of neglect and mismanagement by foreign-appointed nobles and decide to break-off and form their own little 'Murrica with a House of Burgesses and no barony.)

I have to wonder how many people are going to lose a proper fort without intentionally trying to torture their dwarves. Inexperienced players are more likely to lose of other causes long before. Experienced players will find it trivial, if bothersome, to keep their dwarves complacent while they do whatever it is they're doing.

[GoblinCookie]

What if you had to choose your side when the rebellion starts? If you chose loyalists and was defeated then you cannot reclaim, but if you chose rebels and defeated your own loyal militia you could continue, but you will have to face your previous civ.

It still has the same problem.  Make sure to piss everybody off so that when they rebel and you play the rebels you do not end up losing too many people.

People who fail to upset everybody but still upset enough people to be overthrown the better play is punished while the worst player is rewarded.  It is a perverse incentive built into the system unless rebelling forts are irreclaimable.

Ah, gotcha. You mean for mega-projects and things. It didn't occur to me to factor those in because they're a meta-game. I wouldn't want a game mechanic to destroy someone's mega-project in the first place because they're playing for a different reason, and Dwarf behaviors would essentially be wasting their time. Nobody that wants to build a computer in Dwarf Fortress is going to enjoy being locked completely out of their fort because they were.. you know.. making a computer instead of what the game would otherwise be. This suggest allows for people doing mega-projects not to be punished for playing a different game but punishes people trying to run an actual fort if they run it poorly.

I don't see any of this as being complex at all either. It takes three or four button presses to change civilizations on the embark screen, there's nothing complex about unretiring a fortress as the group currently living in it and then facing the civs they're at war with, that's already possible in the game. Fort destroying tantrums have already been a thing in the game. All I want is for tiny story elements so stuff that already happens in the fort looks more emergent, and an additional demand alert so there's an easier way to keep track of when Dwarves don't have beds. By the time the Army Arc hits and Dwarves are sending out armies for reasons nearly all of this code is likely to be in the game anyway, it's just some interface changes and a thematic change.

I was never talking specifically about megaprojects.  I was using megaprojects as one example of what I meant about myopically focusing on something while ignoring your dwarves needs in general because the more general approach was falling on deaf ears.  Rather than a megaproject it could equally be something more practical, such as obsessive militarism.  It is vitally important when adding any feature to avoid perverse incentives to bad gameplay.

Your proposed solution, fighting the mountainhome's armies rewards myopic militarism because the mountainhome armies are at the end of the day just mortal soldiers.  A player that ignores all the needs of his dwarves to accumulate a huge army is simply going to reclaim and clobber the mountainhome army which is balanced for players not so obsessively militaristic.  The rebellion took away none of the weapons and armor he created nor did it rid the dwarves he drove to rebel of their military skills.

Perverse incentives again.  Do not try and moderate your obsessive militarism, instead make sure to completely ignore all your dwarves so that the minimum number of people are loyalists when the rebellion comes.  If you moderate your myopic focus to placate some of your dwarves but not enough to stop the rebellion then you lose twice, you lose all the dwarves you managed to keep loyal AND since you did not accumulate the maximum military power as a result you are then wiped out by the mountainhome army. 

[kemoT]

Then maybe there should be some limited number of rebelling dwarves, for example 60% of the fort. If the number of rebelling dwarves exceeds this number you can't take control over them.

[falcc]

What if you had to choose your side when the rebellion starts? If you chose loyalists and was defeated then you cannot reclaim, but if you chose rebels and defeated your own loyal militia you could continue, but you will have to face your previous civ.

It still has the same problem.  Make sure to piss everybody off so that when they rebel and you play the rebels you do not end up losing too many people.

People who fail to upset everybody but still upset enough people to be overthrown the better play is punished while the worst player is rewarded.  It is a perverse incentive built into the system unless rebelling forts are irreclaimable.

Ah, gotcha. You mean for mega-projects and things. It didn't occur to me to factor those in because they're a meta-game. I wouldn't want a game mechanic to destroy someone's mega-project in the first place because they're playing for a different reason, and Dwarf behaviors would essentially be wasting their time. Nobody that wants to build a computer in Dwarf Fortress is going to enjoy being locked completely out of their fort because they were.. you know.. making a computer instead of what the game would otherwise be. This suggest allows for people doing mega-projects not to be punished for playing a different game but punishes people trying to run an actual fort if they run it poorly.

I don't see any of this as being complex at all either. It takes three or four button presses to change civilizations on the embark screen, there's nothing complex about unretiring a fortress as the group currently living in it and then facing the civs they're at war with, that's already possible in the game. Fort destroying tantrums have already been a thing in the game. All I want is for tiny story elements so stuff that already happens in the fort looks more emergent, and an additional demand alert so there's an easier way to keep track of when Dwarves don't have beds. By the time the Army Arc hits and Dwarves are sending out armies for reasons nearly all of this code is likely to be in the game anyway, it's just some interface changes and a thematic change.

I was never talking specifically about megaprojects.  I was using megaprojects as one example of what I meant about myopically focusing on something while ignoring your dwarves needs in general because the more general approach was falling on deaf ears.  Rather than a megaproject it could equally be something more practical, such as obsessive militarism.  It is vitally important when adding any feature to avoid perverse incentives to bad gameplay.

Your proposed solution, fighting the mountainhome's armies rewards myopic militarism because the mountainhome armies are at the end of the day just mortal soldiers.  A player that ignores all the needs of his dwarves to accumulate a huge army is simply going to reclaim and clobber the mountainhome army which is balanced for players not so obsessively militaristic.  The rebellion took away none of the weapons and armor he created nor did it rid the dwarves he drove to rebel of their military skills.

Perverse incentives again.  Do not try and moderate your obsessive militarism, instead make sure to completely ignore all your dwarves so that the minimum number of people are loyalists when the rebellion comes.  If you moderate your myopic focus to placate some of your dwarves but not enough to stop the rebellion then you lose twice, you lose all the dwarves you managed to keep loyal AND since you did not accumulate the maximum military power as a result you are then wiped out by the mountainhome army.

The aftermath of a civil war is guaranteed to have no greater than the maximum military strength a fort had prior to a civil war. Because a bunch of Dwarves die in the process. This is seriously just.. it's a tantrum spiral with plot. Tantrum spirals happen right now and you can reclaim that fort and get all of the goods that were in it without any issue at all. There is no reason to make it impossible to reclaim a fortress, and what you're suggesting just makes the game tedious and ruins it for anyone playing a meta-game.

Dwarves don't have a concept of the player at all, that's the whole problem this is meant to address. Tacking on arbitrary restrictions to simulate Dwarves being mad at a player is a completely pointless endeavor that can only serve to reduce the number of things you can do in the game. How is it fun to be locked out of a fort because you were making a mega-project? How is it more fun to be locked out of a fort ever than to be able to go in and play a rebel civ? There's no point at all to being locked out. It's not fun, it's not immersive, it doesn't make the game more realistic because realistically the player doesn't exist to the Dwarves and exists even less if they think of their nobles as the ones screwing them over.

If people start getting locked out of the game because they're not good at it new players won't start. The entire idea is preposterous and doesn't even have a realistic in-game explanation to it.

[Bumber]

Your proposed solution, fighting the mountainhome's armies rewards myopic militarism because the mountainhome armies are at the end of the day just mortal soldiers.  A player that ignores all the needs of his dwarves to accumulate a huge army is simply going to reclaim and clobber the mountainhome army which is balanced for players not so obsessively militaristic.  The rebellion took away none of the weapons and armor he created nor did it rid the dwarves he drove to rebel of their military skills.

It did, however, take away your source of migrants as well as the only caravan that brings steel (or anything else on demand.) Any future soldiers or laborers you're going to be raising from scratch (read: useless children.) You're on a more even playing field with equipment material and greatly outnumbered.

[GoblinCookie]

Then maybe there should be some limited number of rebelling dwarves, for example 60% of the fort. If the number of rebelling dwarves exceeds this number you can't take control over them.

That is a contrived solution to one of several problems, none of which needed to exist in the first place.  The most efficiant solution is not to create the problem in the first place.  There is absolutely no reason why players needs to be able to take over fortresses that have rebelled against them.

It might be possible to track down all the problems and individually create an gamey mechanism for each of them but that is a lot of needless work for Toady to create a mechanism for a legion of problems, themselves frequently creating more problems when a simple and elegant solution totally in keeping with the spirit of the game exists.

The aftermath of a civil war is guaranteed to have no greater than the maximum military strength a fort had prior to a civil war. Because a bunch of Dwarves die in the process. This is seriously just.. it's a tantrum spiral with plot. Tantrum spirals happen right now and you can reclaim that fort and get all of the goods that were in it without any issue at all. There is no reason to make it impossible to reclaim a fortress, and what you're suggesting just makes the game tedious and ruins it for anyone playing a meta-game.

It is not a just tantrum spiral with plot, unless you get your way.  In a tantrum spiral the dwarves damaged your capital during their tantrums and you lost the entire population, having to start again with.  In this case however you get to keep the whole population with all their skills along with the accumalated capital, provided that you pissed off so many people at a time

You are dead wrong on the military front.  The defeated army will have a small mountain of metal equipment, equipment that can be used to equip even more soliders.  The only effective limit on military power other than population is the available amount of military equipment since there is no real drawback to having everyone in a squad as long as you do not activate all squads at a time. 

We have a poor player who has ignores the demands of their dwarves in order to obsessively focus on the military has now been rewarded with even more militery might.  While the player that moderated his military obsession but too late ends up being crushed by the might of the mountainhome both because he lost or maimed loyalist dwarves in the rebellion and because he did not acquire the maximum amount of arnaments.

Dwarves don't have a concept of the player at all, that's the whole problem this is meant to address. Tacking on arbitrary restrictions to simulate Dwarves being mad at a player is a completely pointless endeavor that can only serve to reduce the number of things you can do in the game. How is it fun to be locked out of a fort because you were making a mega-project? How is it more fun to be locked out of a fort ever than to be able to go in and play a rebel civ? There's no point at all to being locked out. It's not fun, it's not immersive, it doesn't make the game more realistic because realistically the player doesn't exist to the Dwarves and exists even less if they think of their nobles as the ones screwing them over.

The dwarves do have a concept of the player.  The player is 'a mysterious force' that guided a particular individual to do certain things.  However it is quite clear that you the 'mysterious force' is operating under certain restrictions, the majority of individuals and all the settlements that you did not create are beyond your control.

The player is the 'mysterious force' guiding the government.  If people rebel against the government, they are rebelling against the player because the player and the government are one.  Else players would be able to say 'tantrum not', 'strange mood not' to their dwarves because it is realisticly required that they have the ability to control everything and everyone. 

What you advocate is unrealistic because there are no realistic consequences for events.  You and the government have been overthrown, being overthrown means you are locked out of what you used to run.  You can always come back in adventure mode and visit your old fortress, so there is no physical locking out at all. 

What I advocate however is our being able to play on as our exiled loyalist dwarves as they create a new site.  That way the player is directly rewarded for still managing to keep some dwarves happy even when the writing is on the wall rather than flooding everything in order to exterminate the whole population and reclaiming the deserted site.

If people start getting locked out of the game because they're not good at it new players won't start. The entire idea is preposterous and doesn't even have a realistic in-game explanation to it.

Nonsense.  Being overthrown is not an easy thing to accomplish because the game explicitly tells the player about all the factions in your fortress and how pissed off them are.  The player can always do things to placate the unhappy or rebelling factions and there is a buy time mechanic built into the game.

The new player that simply makes mistakes can appoint nobles from rebellious factions in order to placate the faction.  The beauty of this idea is that those nobles cannot be dismissed without pissing off the factions more than appointing them.  But there are limited number of noble positions and if a faction that owns all the nobles rebels it is insta win for them.

It did, however, take away your source of migrants as well as the only caravan that brings steel (or anything else on demand.) Any future soldiers or laborers you're going to be raising from scratch (read: useless children.) You're on a more even playing field with equipment material and greatly outnumbered.

For how long?  The central government does not represent a ruling class since there is none, so it is not a Left/Right thing.  The central government also cannot represent the 'mysterious force' that is the player obviously since we never play as the central government unless we are the mountainhome, which in has just been taken over by the rebels.

There is actually no realistic motivation as to why the central government would even intervene in the first place.  The player's old government would not represent anything to them other than the cook that set fire to the kitchen.  They want to save the kitchen not the cook and they certainly would not send an army to destroy both themselves and the kitchen in order to save the cook. 

[Bumber]

For how long?  The central government does not represent a ruling class since there is none, so it is not a Left/Right thing.  The central government also cannot represent the 'mysterious force' that is the player obviously since we never play as the central government unless we are the mountainhome, which in has just been taken over by the rebels.

There is actually no realistic motivation as to why the central government would even intervene in the first place.  The player's old government would not represent anything to them other than the cook that set fire to the kitchen.  They want to save the kitchen not the cook and they certainly would not send an army to destroy both themselves and the kitchen in order to save the cook.

It would seem strange that you can unretire literally any other fort in your (or any other dwarf's) civ except that one. It leaves no way to continue your fort/megaproject without going in as an adventurer and committing a massacre for ill-defined meta reasons or hoping someone else does it for you. The mountainhomes then learns nothing from it all and proceeds to return things to the status quo with the player (old government) on reclaim.

There's also the interesting question of what happens when the monarch is in your fort and gets caught up on one side of the rebellion.

[GoblinCookie]

It would seem strange that you can unretire literally any other fort in your (or any other dwarf's) civ except that one. It leaves no way to continue your fort/megaproject without going in as an adventurer and committing a massacre for ill-defined meta reasons or hoping someone else does it for you. The mountainhomes then learns nothing from it all and proceeds to return things to the status quo with the player (old government) on reclaim.

There's also the interesting question of what happens when the monarch is in your fort and gets caught up on one side of the rebellion.

I do not object to us being able to take over an AI fortress in Adventure Mode, as long as it is not too easy.  The rebelled fortress counts as an AI settlement and you would be able to coax your way in just like with any AI settlement. 

Nothing special would happen if the monarch is in your fortress. He is just another noble, which means you either will be part of the rebellion or he will be overthrown.  If he is a loyalist and there is a peaceful revolution then there will be a rebel pretender Anti-Monarch that will try and take over his job.  If there is a violent revolution and he is loyalist then he will either be killed or driven off, in both cases the rebels end up appointing a new king.

I do think however that in order to demotivate people from coming back in Adventure Mode and massacring everyone people should be able to play on in exile.  That means we get to take all loyalist dwarves that were alive when the revolution was victorious, along with a standard embark adjusted with extra food+drink to accomadate the larger population and embark at another site of our choosing.  Seven extra dwarves are added in on top of those dwarves as with a normal embark.

That way people are rewarded for doing the right thing, for keeping at least a few dwarves loyal and not simply drowning everyone in order to reclaim the whole site with the original seven dwarves.  The exile government keeps the original name and the SITE positions (not stuff like baron and monarch) belonging to the original site. 

[Bumber]

I'm okay with being able to win back your site slowly via non-violent means. I don't see why the reclaim 7 should need be surviving loyalists as opposed to susceptible new minds from other forts. It should work out as every member you let join the rebellion is another dwarf you have to win back over.

Nothing special would happen if the monarch is in your fortress. He is just another noble, which means you either will be part of the rebellion or he will be overthrown.  If he is a loyalist and there is a peaceful revolution then there will be a rebel pretender Anti-Monarch that will try and take over his job.  If there is a violent revolution and he is loyalist then he will either be killed or driven off, in both cases the rebels end up appointing a new king.

I mean it seems like it has the potential to create a civilization-wide civil war when their king has just been challenged/deposed/killed.

[Urist Tilaturist]

My personal view on this is that dwarves should rebel against their nobles if they make stupid demands, but not ban the player from the fort. The player should control loyalists until the rebellion succeeds, and then have the choice of playing on as the rebels, now possibly in civil war with the mountainhome, or retiring the fort. If he later reclaims, the fort is possibly in civil war, but still playable. Completely banning the player would remove !!fun!! from the game, something very undesirable.

[GoblinCookie]

I mean it seems like it has the potential to create a civilization-wide civil war when their king has just been challenged/deposed/killed.

It does, however such would really require the ideas discussed on Dwarven Politics to be implemented.

[TheHossofMoss]

This is an epic thread! I like this idea.

[helmacon]

I like the ideas in this thread, but half this stuff is already in game in some fashion. Unhappy dwarves will already seek out specific nobles and hold a "meeting" in which they yell at the noble. This goes one of two ways. Either it goes well, and the dwarf recives a small positive to alleviate the stress, or it goes poorly and both dwarvs recive strong negative thoughts.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Since only dwarvs that are already un happy can hold these meetings, a poor meeting can push them over the edge. Since they are right next to thier noble when they turn, thats often the first person they would attack.

So, they already riot and target specific nobles ( If not intentionaly, but still to the same effect) and as said before, tantrum spirals are already a thing. The only other thing is rebellion entities, and that's more or less out of the question untill the whole cult/secret entity mechanics are already in place, at which point it would be fairly easy to add.

As for changes in control, i personaly think you should only remain in control of units alligned with the entity you chose at start.

Last of all, a question. How would you prevent civilizations from fracturing in world gen? Some people generate worlds specificly to have low numbers of civilization. Would rebellions only be able to form if the civilization count is under the maximum? This would be easy to abuse, and make the rebellion system inconsistant though. Also, extreame world gen conditions could cause hyper-fragmentation of civs, leading to basicaly city states. (actualy, that sounds kinda cool.) The point still stands though, city states could cause odd interactions with other world gen/updating mechanics. Especaly with the way world updating invasions are handled currently. (invasions seem to spike post world gen.)

Anyways, thats my two cents. sorry for spelling/grammer mistakes, i literaly wrote this in like two minuets. One last thought, you could make it a fortress only feature, or have it toggleable in the raws, the way you have tempeture and invasions and economy right now in the int files.