Having read them I do not think that our ideas are *that* similar. You seem to want a cookie-cutter feudalism by which institutions and classes are 'ported in' from history because they existed historically,
That doesn't seem like a fair read of what I was discussing to me...
Rather, the point of what I was writing was that the game needs to model more complex social models in order to keep the game interesting beyond the first year, as currently, the ONLY threats to a fortress that can feed itself comes from external invasions or maybe a tantrum spiral that is easily averted with tons of happy items like legendary dining rooms. And what drove me to pursue that path more than anything was when I realized just how useless almost every sort of "luxury good" or industries like ceramics are in the current social model of the game. Since the bare necessities of survival and defense are all that matter, the actual utility of anything but food, clothes, weapons, armor, and masterwork chairs and tables was largely as fluff that received no particular attention.
I simply chose to model these social structures that would add challenge and a use for trade items on historical precedent because that plays to what Toady and most of the forums tend to enjoy having: Verisimilitude.
At the same time, the manner in which your fortress is governed may change from your current Communist dictatorship where you have full control to a feudal split control between nobles or religious enclaves or even making a mercantile republic where you have less direct control over the actions of your dwarves.
Why would there be any change in the manner in which your fortress is governed when your Communist dictatorship has successfully met everyone's demands in full? Instead of having a naturally evolving social order the proposal seems to be that we have a series of cookie cutter social orders taken from history.
Because the Communist
anarchy you start with cannot withstand having freeloaders that arrive with migrant waves, and hence naturally has to evolve social orders to deal with members that do not explicitly know or trust or are related to the others, and therefore have a vested interest in their survival.
Simply put, without creating some sort of social strife within a fortress that has managed to get past the basics of survival portion of its lifespan, you create the problem that the game has now: A "Learning Cliff" where all the challenge is pushed into the earliest parts of the game, and is trivially easy from then on. Even the hardest of external threats is largely something that can be defeated through some method of lockdown and game physics exploit, and the game pretty much explicitly demands you do so at this point, as Titans and other procedural monsters are so ridiculously overpowered that there's no real method of fighting them
except cave-ins or obsidian casting.
To give the game back a natural progression of difficulty, you need to create a scenario where the starting seven dwarves can share and share alike in Communist Utopia, but that all breaks apart as the fort gets more established. In short, it's a natural progression from a society where everyone knowns and trusts the others and can rely upon them and freely share with one another to one where capitalism has to step in to handle the dealings with strangers and freeloaders... which seems to be your objective, as well, if not as fully thought through.
I am proposing that instead of implementing whole social orders we instead focus on why the various institutions existing in those orders would actually come to exist in the first place. The ideas of this thread are ultimately an answer to the reason why commercial institutions would arise, based upon the present demands model cloth and weapons grade metals are really the only trade goods that would exist. Since the former would be exchanged for the latter, that means that world peace would put an end to all commercial activity (since weapons-grade metal is the primary commodity).
The present caravan system is an example of a baseless cookie-cutter mechanic, caravans arrive carrying various trade goods because that is what happened 'historically'. It is baseless because nearly everything that is being traded can simply be produced locally with vastly less expense and risk than a caravan entails.
Once we have dynamic demands however then ordinary dwarves start to demand very specific items, my dwarf does not care for a toy boat made of the locally available material of nickel, it must be made of zinc; therefore I must buy zinc from elsewhere, hence I have to buy zinc from an outside source in order to meet that demand.
Again, this is largely why I started the Class Warfare thread. The only way to answer those issues is to create a deeper social dynamic that requires a greater portion of player attention.
At the same time, because so much of the player's time is spent in micromanagement in the current game, that thread is about how to let things that are micromanaged in the early game be automated gradually as different dwarves take up specific roles within the fort. This both helps prevent player attention overloading and makes the more complex systems desirable to the player. (Who wouldn't want a noble position that lets you automate more trees to be felled when wood hits certain minimum thresholds?)
Hence, it pushes player attention away from basic babysitting of workshops towards a more SimCity style of play, where maintaining social order is an actual game challenge.
Again, there's a huge overlap in goals and methods, here. It's simply a much more fleshed-out plan in Class Warfare.
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Topic: Dynamic consumer demands idea (Read 2192 times)