Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MDFification]

Gather round ladies and gents, its anthropology time.

From the design docs;

•Non-town sites need to created and used for various purposes in world generation (prisons, tombs, temples, mines, castles, etc.)
•These places should often fall into disuse (or not be active entity pop locations, as with a tomb)
•Old abandoned structures can be partially buried in available soil layers
•Sites should contain any appropriate items to their (possibly former) purpose
•World gen should utilize defunct sites and get them new inhabitants

Sites falling into disuse provides us with a great opportunity to add flavour to the world. Archaeologists have long known that societies fail. This isn't simply because of some great, insurmountable obstacle (like the current monster invasion leaving a settlement a ruin) but rather an inevitable consequence of economics, specifically a consequence of the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns. To briefly explain the rationale;

1. Organized societies maintain their level of organization because the populace has its expectations fulfilled.
2. The expectations of the populace seldom decreases, but often increases.
3. As a power structure increases intensity of programs to meet those expectations, efficiency of those programs decreases.

Essentially; states (synonymous with civilizations at the moment) continue to exist because they fulfil the needs of the populace. As the populace's needs almost always increase, this requires greater and greater intensification of efforts to meet those needs, which almost always decreases efficiency of those efforts despite providing a larger yield. This essentially means that societies, when isolated, have an expiration date as it become uneconomical for the organization of society to remain in its current form, leading to a collapse of the current system.

In DF terms, this could prove useful. I propose that we add a randomly-generated 'time limit' to civilizations; as this number counts down, their behaviour can change. Then it hits zero, that civilization will experience  'dark age' period and eventually return to the top of the counter, causing its behavior to revert. As I envision these behavioural changes;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Early-Counter Behaviours:

-Rapid colonization of surrounding lands
-Rapid population growth/likely to attract defectors from other civilizations
-Philosophies of this civilization are likely to spread to other civilizations
-Reclamation of old sites (if applicable)

Middle-Counter Behaviours:

-Monumental building projects
-Increased rate of warfare and conquest
-Expansion by population growth/colonization slows

Late-Counter Behaviours:

-Population shrinks (through inflicted plague/famine death causes or by emigration to other civs)
-Construction slows, old buildings are subdivided (i.e. throw up crude wooden walls to subdivide older houses into smaller apartments)
-Much more likely to attempt conquest of neighbouring civilizations, but since the civilization is substantially weaker also much more likely to do poorly in these wars.
-Much more likely to adopt philosophies of other cultures

Dark Ages:

-Population continues to shrink
-Sites have a decent chance of becoming abandoned (this includes a lot of knowledge loss)
-Symbols of various groups and names of groups/places may change.
-Eventually, the society reverts to the Early Counter, and the cycle begins anew

This has numerous in-game benefits. Firstly, it provides some potential for exploration for adventurers. It provides more ruins to explore without clogging up the map, and these ruins will feel like they're not connected to present civilizations. In the ruins, you'll find engravings and statues using the symbolism of past times, and referring to places by archaic names; you'll find coins not circulated by any modern civilization and books lost to history. Secondly, it manages population in worldgen; instead of population almost always increasing (unless you have a lot of megabeasts) it will now cyclically rise and decline, with an upward trend remaining but being somewhat slower. Third, it'll provide us with a new source of wars and occupations; with the addition of counter-triggered 'plundering' phases, civilizations that aren't normally aggressive towards the player or their neighbours may become so.

Thoughts?

[NW_Kohaku]

I believe this is far too simplified a set of mechanics, and it doesn't take into account the real reasons why any of these things actually happened.

For what it's worth, I recommend you read up on Collapse by Jared Diamond if you have not done so already, for further insight on the topic, since this topic is basically what the book is all about. 

Historically speaking, many cities in the Middle East were destroyed (such as being burned down or sacked and having their whole population base killed or forced into evacuation to avoid genocide), but a tremendous number of them were eventually rebuilt.  In fact, most of them were rebuilt on the foundations of the old housing just because that made it easier.  Archaeologists that dig down just find layer after layer of the same housing being built up over thousands of years of human habitation.

The thing is, people filling up cities and villages is like water filling up a valley or riverbed.  As long as there are people, they will always gravitate towards the locations that best satisfy their needs.  If a fertile river valley was the best arable land around both 10,000 years ago and today, then both 10,000 years ago and today, it would be a major center of agriculture.  The area now known Lebanon was known in the time of Ancient Egypt as the place to go for trading for hardwood cedar trees to make ships from, and cedar wood is still one of their major exports to this day. 

Virtually all major cities in the world are along major rivers, and many of them where a major river crosses some transition, such as where the oceanfront harbor where river boats have to exchange their goods to the ocean-going ships, or are capitals that are as central to a kingdom's territory as possible while still being on a river. 

The only reason that you have abandoned cities is because the reason they were populated in the first place ceased to exist. 

This usually happens historically because of environmental changes.  Take Timbuktu, for instance, which was once a critical city in the gold and salt trade because caravans crossing the Sahara used it as their last oasis before the long trek North.  The Desertification of Northern Africa, however, has buried Timbuktu in sand, and the ancient city of unimaginable riches is just ruins, now.  (It helps, of course, that alternate routes to the salt trade were established, and gold from North America shattered the last major pillar of Timbuktu, paving the way for colonialism and the West African Slave Trade...)

It's been noted by historians that "The Seat of Western Civilization" has gradually moved from the Near East (Mesopotamia) westward in a progressive march as time has gone on, due in no small part to the desertification of the Middle East and North Africa.  As Mesopotamia stopped being the core of population (due to inventing agriculture), civilization moved West to Egypt and Babylon, then Northwest to Greece, West again to Rome, and finally into Western Europe in the Middle Ages.  These were not overnight changes, the Near East had cities fall and be rebuilt for tens of thousands of years before the savages of Europe settled into more organized civilizations.  The gradual shift in power was a direct result of the decline in the relative capacity to feed large populations.  (Egypt was once the breadbasket of the Western World, exporting bread to Rome and the like, but now it is fully dependent upon imports of food.)

Even in places where you really do have collapse brought about by the actions of overzealous monument-building, such as is classically thought to have brought about the downfall of the 10th century Mayan population, which supposedly deforested the regions around their cities to the point of allowing soil erosion to destroy their arable farmlands in search of fuel to fire their plaster-making for painting murals.  (Greece's decline has been hypothesized to also be a result of deforestation to build the triremes of her navy, leading to the depleted "Mediterranean" climate.) These are direct effects of human activity depleting the natural resources that made their cities good population cites to begin with.

Even so, while Rome, for example, fell as an empire, the cities, themselves, were still populated, even if the population of Rome itself declined.  And the best reason to explain the Fall of the Roman Empire is that of social and economic upheaval resulting from the shocking excesses of the rapacious Roman economic system, which had by the end managed to enslave over 90% of the Roman citizenry through debt slavery, causing the absolute collapse of its economic system and governmental systems (as the few land-holders left were hoarding their money and skimping on taxes).  The Roman Empire relied upon citizen-soldiers for its glory years, but you couldn't arm a slave for fear of revolt, so they had to hire expensive barbarian mercenaries, instead, but they couldn't pay those mercenaries because none of their extremely politically powerful wealthy landholder were willing to pay more than a tiny amount of taxes, so when the mercenaries came to collect their due...

But for all that, nobody really abandoned Rome.  Rome still largely managed to be the capital of Western Civilization through being the seat of the Papacy, and the lands that would be Italy being the center of the Renaissance, even as France and The Holy Roman Empire claimed greater overall population size. 

So far, the only real reasons for collapse in DF are starvation (which occur for almost no explicable reason) and conquest.  To be fair, conquest IS both a good in-story reason for collapse and lack of rebuilding, since elves who conquer human lands are likely not interested in settling the same land for the same reasons as humans. 

The problem is, none of these other concepts for why civilizations rise or fall are present in the game.  We don't have environmental collapse because environments don't really change either naturally or because of careless resource exploitation.  We don't have collapses of cities built along older major trade routes as new trade routes for major goods are opened, since we don't really have major goods, and cities largely rely upon food from local villages, alone.  We don't have declines of major industrial sites as technology marches on, and leaves old mill towns in the dust because technology does not march on and leave older reasons to base an industry in one place dry up as it becomes more economically advantageous to place your major industry in another place. 

We don't even have mines running out of ore, causing the collapse of the fortress built around them, which would be the most obvious of causes of resource-related collapse. 

Rather than seeing arbitrary collapses just because civilizations are supposed to collapse, the game would be greatly enriched on working on creating underlying reasons why cities are built in the first place, and then allowing for their irrelevance to undermine them as they fade into obsolescence, or face the ramifications of their resource-depletion in a more natural way. 

Even better would be the storytelling potential of why such-and-such a fortress or city was abandoned due to a citable reason, such as slave revolt or the desert trade caravans becoming obsolete when the great cog fleets of the shores of diamonds could make a trip carrying more masterwork ceramic mugs from the new fortress Steampulleys more quickly and cheaply than camel caravans to Oakenabbey, and thus the trade city of Bellwhistles fell into irreparable decline.

[MDFification]

I believe this is far too simplified a set of mechanics, and it doesn't take into account the real reasons why any of these things actually happened.

For what it's worth, I recommend you read up on Collapse by Jared Diamond if you have not done so already, for further insight on the topic, since this topic is basically what the book is all about. 

Jared Diamond's theories fall under just one school of thought about societal collapse. My source for why societies collapse is The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. Unlike Diamond's book, this actually compares numerous theories of why societies collapse to one another, and then applies each of the major schools of thought on the matter to individual cases of societal collapse. The economic explanation, that of Diminishing Marginal Returns, was the only theory that can be applied across all examined incidences of societal collapse.

Diminishing Marginal Returns is applicable to every known societal collapse, which cannot be said of environmental factors, foreign invasion, overpopulation or the other reductionist reasons you're putting forward. At best, these are contributing factors. States are fundamentally problem-solving engines. The question isn't what brings them down, it's why this specific problem could not be surmounted. Why States fail to adapt in the face of adversity in some situations but not others is explained by Diminishing Marginal Returns. It is not adequately explained by resource deprivation. Resource deprivation, environmental change, and population growth exceeding resource capacity is something civilizations struggle with their entire existence. Why they lose these struggles when they do is not explained by the theory you're citing.

Historically speaking, many cities in the Middle East were destroyed (such as being burned down or sacked and having their whole population base killed or forced into evacuation to avoid genocide), but a tremendous number of them were eventually rebuilt.  In fact, most of them were rebuilt on the foundations of the old housing just because that made it easier.  Archaeologists that dig down just find layer after layer of the same housing being built up over thousands of years of human habitation.

As I suggested; sites are, under this system, very likely to be reoccupied following their abandonment. I am an archaeology student. It would be foolish to the extreme of me to suggest these sites remain permanently unoccupied.

The only reason that you have abandoned cities is because the reason they were populated in the first place ceased to exist. 

This is not true. There are plenty of cases of cities being entirely depopulated, and only resettled after decades or even a century of more. If you read closely, you'll notice I never called for cities to be permanently uninhabited.

Rather than seeing arbitrary collapses just because civilizations are supposed to collapse, the game would be greatly enriched on working on creating underlying reasons why cities are built in the first place, and then allowing for their irrelevance to undermine them as they fade into obsolescence, or face the ramifications of their resource-depletion in a more natural way. 

It's true that we should want actual socioeconomic rationales as to why DF sites are where they are. But we aren't talking on the scale of specific sites. We're talking about entire societies diminishing or collapsing rather than adapting. Diminishing Marginal Returns is holistically sound, even if it's more simple a system than you'd like. It adds realism rather than detracting from it.

tl;dr blindly accepting Diamond's explanation as gospel when it isn't the academic consensus or in any way considered a defining work isn't something I'm comfortable with. If you disagree with Diminishing Marginal Returns, understand it an refute it.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not simply copy-pasting Jared Diamond, here.  In fact, I cited Rome as an economics problem, just as you are trying to argue, which, I'll point out, is an argument I got from entirely different authors, some of whom are very much in favor of economic theories.  (Did you simply see the name Diamond and discount everything else I was saying?)  Although I should point out, saying "economics is always the cause of social change" - as seems to be becoming more and more popular - is a little disingenuous an argument, since, if you try hard enough all social interaction can be called economics, which merely makes it tautological.  The argument seems to be that a plague is an economic condition, as is deforestation, as were the Conquistadors.  At a certain point, a label is either rendered semantically meaningless, or just a tool of oversimplification to force the same predetermined solution onto every problem.

In any event, what you are describing in the OP is not at all a model of economics, it is,

I propose that we add a randomly-generated 'time limit' to civilizations; as this number counts down, their behaviour can change. Then it hits zero, that civilization will experience  'dark age' period and eventually return to the top of the counter, causing its behavior to revert.

Now, I haven't read Tainter's book, myself, and I'm just going off of a synopsis to get the gist of what his point was, but I'm pretty sure that he's not saying that societies just arbitrarily go into decline just because a cosmic clock struck 12.  The purpose of these sorts of mechanics in the simulation are to create the sense of verisimilitude when players look at the world, and see that a once-great city has gone into decline, and can then go ask a scholar "why"? Maybe the scholar has a right answer or a wrong one, but there should at least be some reason.  Or, the player should be able to walk through that society and see the signs of growth or decay, based upon the social structure of that given society.  You, yourself, said that this was supposed to be adding to the flavor of the game, but what flavor is there if these civilizations die out for no reason whatsoever?  What determines which ones are abandoned, if this is all random, and if so, what determines which ones get reclaimed?

Without being able to answer these things, you don't have a modeled social theory, you have a label stretched across a gross oversimplification of behavior.

(In fact, reading the synopsis, Tainter suggests two ways in which social degradation can be avoided: Technological advancement and interdependency with other complex societies. Neither of these factor into your initial model.)

I would also point out, in previous DF versions, it's been a problem that human populations never really reach full potential because of starvation, (early .31 had cities that crashed due to starvation after about 100 years, and never recovered at all) but goblin populations are ones that always fly full-force into whatever population limits are set, since they have no caps, whatsoever.  (Further, being populations of Planet of the Hats narcissistic anarchists, most human economic theory is stretched fairly thin trying to be applied to their social structure, which shouldn't be capable of complex society to begin with.) Toady's actually been working to make some cities not be ghost towns occupied entirely by abandoned shops filled with tables from floor to ceiling.

As I suggested; sites are, under this system, very likely to be reoccupied following their abandonment. I am an archaeology student. It would be foolish to the extreme of me to suggest these sites remain permanently unoccupied.

OK, very likely, why? When it doesn't happen, why? 

You have left no mechanism in this model you proposed in the OP to measure these things, utter than blind randomness.  Cities rise and fall, are abandoned or reoccupied for no reason.

This is not true. There are plenty of cases of cities being entirely depopulated, and only resettled after decades or even a century of more. If you read closely, you'll notice I never called for cities to be permanently uninhabited.

You start off by quoting in a goal of making cities abandoned for long enough that soil layers build over the foundations, which outside of major sandstorms, doesn't tend to happen overnight. 

Further, why wouldn't certain sites be completely abandoned forever when their main purpose for existence was depleted?  (I.E. why would someone come to rebuild an old abandoned mining town when the mountain has been strip-mined bare?) 

Again, the wealth and status of Timbuktu was connected to the gold trade in particular (and salt as a secondary trade), but it has largely fallen into abject poverty after the caravans that were its raison d'etre stopped marching across the desert.  (And Timbuktu was on the point caravans chose to cross the Sahara, incidentally, because it was as north as one could get on the River Niger, which was used to transport the gold from downriver up to Timbuktu.)

That isn't social complexity, it's the simple fact that it was a house built upon a single pillar, and when that pillar is knocked down, nothing is left to support it.  Why would anyone want to start a camel caravan across the Sahara in the modern day when shipping is so much cheaper by sea? What does Timbuktu have to offer when you take away its caravans?

It's true that we should want actual socioeconomic rationales as to why DF sites are where they are. But we aren't talking on the scale of specific sites. We're talking about entire societies diminishing or collapsing rather than adapting. Diminishing Marginal Returns is holistically sound, even if it's more simple a system than you'd like. It adds realism rather than detracting from it.

tl;dr blindly accepting Diamond's explanation as gospel when it isn't the academic consensus or in any way considered a defining work isn't something I'm comfortable with. If you disagree with Diminishing Marginal Returns, understand it an refute it.

The problem is, you don't have a system, you have a timer that causes arbitrary things to happen for arbitrary reasons.  There aren't "Diminishing Marginal Returns" here, there aren't even Marginal Returns in the first place. 

There are no economic processes here with explained mechanics. Monuments are built at one point, and then they can't be afforded the next.  Where did the money come from in the first place that it can't be spent, now? What changed to make buildings be subdivided rather than building new housing? Why are plagues suddenly popping up now when they didn't exist when there were more people but less infrastructure in the city?

You don't have a "simplified" version of Diminishing Marginal Returns, you have a label of "Diminishing Marginal Returns" printed over nothing.  I have to go to outside sources to even see what Tainter's theories even are because they are impossible to discern from your model.  If someone can't recognize what's being modeled by the model, then there's something wrong...

I'm not opposed to the general concept of Diminishing Marginal Returns, and in fact, I think it's the sort of thing that really needs to be more prominent in games like Crusader Kings, which do have increasing costs associated with increasingly large realms you have to keep pacified, but it doesn't go far enough in modeling the costs of additional layers of complexity in a single globe-spanning empire.  When you hit larger-than-kingdom level, it becomes trivially easy to expand through perpetual war against inferior enemies, and placate any unrest with choice divvy of the spoils of war to favored superdukes and effortless curbstompping of any rebels with a minor detachment of your massive army. 

The problem is, again, you're not actually doing anything to represent these increases in costs, nor even where those increases in costs are coming from.

You are saying societies should collapse from whatever state they are in due to overcomplexity, even when that society may have become stunted in their growth.  It's frequently the case that dwarves are stuck in a single, small mountain range, with no place to expand, and as such, they do not ever get the chance to be a giant, sprawling empire that would suffer the problems of a complex society.  They are and always were a "simple society" like a Dark Ages European nation the Western Roman Empire collapsed into. 

All of Europe wasn't just littered with wholly abandoned cities, not even for just a couple decades during the decline of the Western Roman Empire, but that's what your model says should happen. 

For that matter, since wars and starvation and plague are a part of this model of decline, should we just turn off such things until such a time as the time limit on each society dictates they are due to happen?  The simplicity of folding everything into a single, self-contained model that does not regard the status of one's environment or neighbors indicates that's actually the proper response.

Further, while it's already being modeled in DF, regardless, plagues and invasions from outside groups are not strictly economic problems, it is merely the capacity of a society to react to those problems that are determined by their social stability and economic vitality.  The Mongol Horde is coming in the 14th century whether you have a vast empire with a powerful military, the best technology in the continent, and have the absolute fealty of a legion of hand-educated highly competent vassals or a squalid hut with half a pig shack to your "realm"'s name while you fight with your brother over who gets to own the whole pig shack.  One of those is more likely to be able to kick the Mongols back into the steppes, however. 

What would make a far more interesting game would be something that actually tries to assess the societal cohesion, raw GDP, and yes, general Marginal Returns of what a society can do, and represent these things in the gameworld, such that players can see the actual wealth and power of a vibrant nation in effect, and see when one site or another falls, and for what reason that fall occurs.  (Even if it's nothing more than yet another genocidal elf war.)  Seeing the capacity of a society to split itself, (not unlike the Eastern and Western Roman Empire,) so that a failing complex society could turn into somewhat simpler societies that could then survive in some state, rather than just abandoning all the cities in Europe because they passed their freshness date would add far more to the game. 

A way to actually involve these concepts would be to make wood production drops on a per worker basis (functionally costs more per unit productivity) the more lumber resources are exploited.  Farming returns are taxed less efficiently, and more rot, the more layers of nobility there are managing them.  (This actually happens very well in Crusader Kings - you can only tax one layer down the vassal system, and their income depends upon their own holdings and what the fiefs below them pay up, and non-Islamic feudal holdings by default pay nothing. Burghers are annoyingly free-willed, but at least pay SOME taxes.) Having a transfer of food that is wasted, or in more direct mechanical terms, having an increasing load of food-draining, but not food-producing nobles arise as complexity increases is a reasonable model that would manage to put some burden on a society, and prevent the society's growth from an actually traceable, measurable standpoint. There's a cut for waste, fraud, and abuse.  There's a cut for spoilage on the wagon ride to market because villages have to be built further and further from town.  There's a cut for the soldiers who have to defend these more vulnerable villages from bandits.  You can actually trace the problem to its roots.