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[GoblinCookie]

Let me be clear about a few things:

A lot of people seem to believe that dwarf fortress is build to be some sort of socialism simulator, and was intentionally made so we would see a society without class, without economic distinction, without individuals being rich while others being poor, etc. That is simply not the case. When the economy was first introduced, we saw some dwarves getting rich while others being poor, deppending on what kind of jobs they had. I see absolutely no evidence for that changing when the economy is reimplemented (whenever that is). Of course, one can hope it will be more balanced and that the player will be able to set up a system where even citizens who have less valued work or work less will be able to sustain themselves, but the idea of wealth inequality remains.

Of course, in the old system you also had things like legendary craftsdwarves (as well as nobles) being exempt from the economy, which was weird and also caused problems. But judging how dwarves view craftsmanship as the most valued thing in the world it's kind of understandable why would they do that.

You see, I'm not suggesting DF to become "High Fantasy Capitalism Simulator 3000". It's just that me and a lot of people (apparently, including the developers) find the idea of having coins in the game, and a class system where some are rich and others poor interesting in a society simulator like DF. If it was just about "efficiency", why don't we also start complaining about dwarves throwing tantrums and being emotional about things? That makes them less efficient, but it's an interesting feature.

You never adressed my point about the possibility that some dwarves wouldn't enjoy living in a place where they are not being properly compensated for their talents or hard work. Should a mason that works hard and costantly be happy about recieving the same treatment as a dwarf who is constantly idle or is more lazy? Again, making dwarves think that way would make them less efficient, but it would bring more to the game. Of course, you could work that in with different consumer damand as you suggested, without the need of coins, but as I argued before, coins are more interesting to me and a lot of people.

Like it or not Dwarf Fortress is presently a Socialism simulator.  That *is* the game of Dwarf Fortress as it presently stands; whether Toady One intended it or not that is what he has thus far made.  Briefly back when the economy was around it was Socialism develops into Sort of Feudalism for no apparent reason simulator. 

I did not address the problem of the skilled mason not being properly compensated for his hard work because it is not a real problem.  The mason like everyone else in the fortress has never been taught that he should be personally rewarded for his personal efforts, all he knows is that the fortress is better off.  Instead ask yourself: why would the creed of personal reward for personal gain be invented? 

The likely answer is that greedy leaders figured out that they could get mr. master mason to work HARDER than everyone else by giving him special rewards.  Otherwise he only works has hard as all the other dwarves he can see working around him.

1. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/imgs/dwarf_holdings_3c.png   <--- Yes it is. The capital (the one who gives out purple lines) commands several holdings, and some of those holdings (the ones who produce red lines) control other holdings who in turn can control other holdings (orange lines).

2. No they're not. You can't decide who goes to jail for what, or what's a punishable crime and what isn't. Sure, you can ignore it and never make jails or appoint a sheriff, but that's about as influential as you can be.

3. Sure. I guess I should have said "commercial" instead of "economic". You can't decide how trading works, and are stuck with the trade agreement limitations the game bounds you to. When people refer to dwarven economy, they generally think of the classic dwarven economy of old, when  internal commerce was first (unsuccessfully) implemented into the game, with internal trading, currency and a tax system.

4. You can't create your own "custom positions" in the game. You're stuck with what you got. You could say that "my dwarves don't believe in death penalties or corporeal punishent because I never appointed a hammerer or a captain of the guard", but that's you roleplaying. Dwarven institutions are dead set, and it reflects on what Toady imagined what dwarven society and culture would be like. You could also refrain from cutting trees and say that your dwarves are in fact elves wearing fake beards, but again that is just you being creative.

The institutions in the game are not really just "suggestions". Players can roleplay if they want to by ignoring some of them, but the game doesn't support or recognize these actions.

5. You do not appear to understand how the nobility works in DF. Nobles literally get mad when some "lesser dwarf" has nicer accomodations, and feel entitled to better rooms and furniture. They can make arbitrary demands and arrest dwarves for not meeting them. They only work now because of a bug, and it's silly to put it foward as if it were a feature. Nobles are a class, whether you like it or not. There is more mobility than in most (frankly, all) ancient societies, but it's still a class.

1. Yes holdings have a relationship, larger more important settlements administer hold influence over less important settlements.  Like well every system aside from Anarchy. 

2.  Yes you have to choose to create the jails and appoint the sheriff/captain of the guard.  Just because you are only given the option of duplicating existing insitutions if you choose to build those institutions in the first place does not mean that you start with a pre-existing institutional setup.

3. You do not rule the world that is true. 

4.  Again, just because you are copying something that exists elsewhere does not mean you are not building something from the ground up.

5. I know full well how the positions work, I mod the game.  What you are talking about is really individuals abusing their personal power in order to get themselves nice rooms.  Other folks can have the same stuff provided they do not have better stuff than the people in charge.  If they do not get the nicest rooms then they may personally get upset but they cannot overthrow the player and institute a new player that respects their elite privilages.  Essentially calling the present DF nobles a ruling class is rather like calling a pebble a mountain.  Work exemption is not a bug since it never ever worked at all in any capacity, it is thus a feuture that was never implemented. 

[Ribs]

Some kind of setting in the int files would be nice to control that (like, maximum [TAX_EXEMPT_POP:80] (percent), minimum of 20 (so the nobility and upper echelons always collect at least a fifth of the population in taxes; no cheating the upper crust of all thier money. )

And technically, soldiering nobles would be the officers - Generals, Captains, Lieutenants, and MCOMs, though I usually rename them to Colonel since unless the General shows up they're the Army's active hammers and blades in your fortress and thus the highest ranking officer likely to enter the fray, and Militia Captains, who I think would be better named as Sergeant, Militia Captain sounds too fancy for a militia squad leader or more like what the commander's title should be.

And not even because they're listed as "nobles," but because as both non-coms and commissioned officers they'd be the most likely to be on direct Monarchy payroll rather than the fortress itself or otherwise get special treatment due to thier rank as squad leaders and officers in the military. After all, the cities pay the government, and the government pays the soldiers, which could be abstracted in some way as them being exempt or receiving higher wages than regular soldiers.


I dunno. Been up since 2 AM. Take that with some salt, cause I rambled a bit.

Yeah, officers are nobles. It's just that Tarn mentioned more specialized positions before:

Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.

So, from what I can tell, the idea is that all your fortress soldiers are kind of officers with their knight retinues, therefore minor nobles. The riff-raff of the dwarven military will be concentrated outside of the fortress (hill and deep-dwarves). Maybe not the guards, though.

[Ribs]

Like it or not Dwarf Fortress is presently a Socialism simulator.  That *is* the game of Dwar Fortress as it presently stands; whether Toady One intended it or not that is what he has thus far made.  Briefly back when the economy was around it was Socialism develops into Sort of Feudalism for no apparent reason simulator. 

And, as I said, like it or not there is no evidence that when the economy is reintroduced, it will go back to being some variation of that briefly experimented system. From what we've seen from the developers perspective, they enjoy the idea of having coins in the game. Also, of having classes:

   Toady:   Yeah. We usually don't do this. We don't put up goals that are in order, but we got... The new dev pages should be posted as this talk is posted, so you can go over there now if you want, or just go check it later at the main Dwarf Fortress page, under "Development". And you'll see that there are four sections. Most of them are old sections, but they've been refurbished and moved to the top, in order. So the first thing we're going to work on (this is probably starting at the beginning of December) is job priorities. So we've been saying this for a long time now, as one of the top vote-getters on "Eternal Suggestions", and it's time to get some work done there.
We had to do some work to figure out what people wanted here, because the original suggestion was very general, and pointed in different directions, and had different approaches, and it wasn't really settled. So we have decided, first off, that we're not really working to change VPL [The labour list for each dwarf. Seen by pressing v-p-l near a dwarf in the game - Ed.] at this moment. We have some things that we're going to do later (we'll get to that in a moment) that will point toward big changes toward VPL. But the first push on job priorities is just going to be about the basic 'job selection' model. So right now, as people know, the jobs pick the dwarves, and that leads to bad selection sometimes. The job will just snatch up the first, nearest qualified dwarf to do the job, regardless of whatever jobs that dwarf might want to do, and that can lead to some really sub-par selections.
And there's a kind of symmetric problem if dwarves pick jobs. They'll pick jobs that another dwarf might be better suited for. So you can't really have jobs picking dwarves or dwarves picking jobs; you need to have a system that merges it all together and has a delay incorporated so that things can work themselves out. Not a big delay, almost unnoticeable, but just enough to get the right dwarf to the right job. And this will allow you to do things like taking a skilled dwarf, that you'd normally be forced to turn off their hauling, so that they would do the jobs you want them to do. And now you'd be able to leave their hauling on, for instance. They do hauling when they were truly idle, but they would still be able to go do their appropriate jobs when they were available. And by the same token you wouldn't have... We noticed that a lot of people were setting up this 'peasant class' of dwarves, unskilled dwarves, that were just set up for hauling. That should be a little less necessary now.

Threetoe:   Except now we're going to be working with the last of these projects will be to implement new peasant classes of dwarves.

Toady:   He he he. Yeah this is the kind of VPL change we were talking about. It should be exciting to see the status of your dwarves realized. And certain ones you'll be able to control more than others. Now there will be a circumstance under which you can control any dwarf to a large degree, and that's going to be the new 'Do This Now' prioritization for jobs, which will just snatch up the nearest dwarf that can do the job (like pulling a lever), and force them to do it. They'll drop what they're doing and save your fortress. Might stress them out a little bit, depending on the kind of dwarf, but you'll be able to do that finally. And furthermore we are mindful of things like the trading jobs, the harvest, and so on, and hopefully that'll be handled with the new job selection model overall.
We are trying to stay away from spreadsheets and numbers approaches that kind of open up every single job to be ranked, you know, according to different numbers for each dwarf or workshop because that is unmanageable when the number of dwarves get high.

Threetoe:   Also, it's a hint where we're going with this, which is to get rid of VPL all together, eventually.

I did not address the problem of the skilled mason not being properly compensated for his hard work because it is not a real problem.  The mason like everyone else in the fortress has never been taught that he should be personally rewarded for his personal efforts, all he knows is that the fortress is better off.  Instead ask yourself: why would the creed of personal reward for personal gain be invented? 

The likely answer is that greedy leaders figured out that they could get mr. master mason to work HARDER than everyone else by giving him special rewards.  Otherwise he only works has hard as all the other dwarves he can see working around him.

...now we're discussing ideology. I honestly believe that greed is part of human nature. The feeling of deserving more for working harder is also part of human nature. Wanting your close friends and family (or clan, whatever it is) to have a better life, and trying to have them inherit whatever property you could provide them to give them a better life (as opposed to just accepting that the state should redistribute whatever they earned for the "greater good") is part of human nature.

I've talked to Soviet Union expats in the past. The Soviets tried to make a society where all the workers were equal. It didn't work. You know why? A lot of families did their best to avoid that the forced equality. They would bribe people, contraband products, cheat the system, everything to give a better life to themselves and their families. I've met a USSR born woman who had all sorts of private tuition and privileged housing when she was a child, provided by her parents. They used all the powers they had to make sure she had a better education than most, worked hard at it, and helped her a lot. It was far from an "equal opportunity society", even for those not in power.

Same thing with Cuba. Officially, a high-skilled worker such as a doctor or an engeneer recieves almost the same salary and benefits as a low-skilled laborer. They pride themselves in the fact that a doctor makes 800$, while a janitor makes 600$. In practice, it doesn't work like that. There are zones and neighborhoods in Cuba where these people have more or less a middle-class standard of living (for third world standards), and enjoy better accomodations and more access to resources than other people.

They really tried to make workers in Cuba equal under the communist regime. They couldn't. Do you really want to have this discussion, though? I don't think this is the thread or even the board for it.

2. Yes you have to choose to create the jails and appoint the sheriff/captain of the guard.  Just because you are only given the option of duplicating existing insitutions if you choose to build those institutions in the first place does not mean that you start with a pre-existing institutional setup.

Again, if the only institutions that the game recognizes are those, then those are the only ones. Anything else and you're roleplaying. "Like most people in his group (dwarven civilization), Urist respects commerce, values craftsdwarship above all else and despises nature". That's what the game is telling you. You can ignore that and pretend that all your dwarves hate commerce and are tree-loving hippies and made a society that works with that in mind, and the game even supports you in doing so to some extent, but you're going against the norms and values that the game set up for you from the beginning.

5. I know full well how the positions work, I mod the game.  What you are talking about is really individuals abusing their personal power in order to get themselves nice rooms.  Other folks can have the same stuff provided they do not have better stuff than the people in charge.  If they do not get the nicest rooms then they may personally get upset but they cannot overthrow the player and institute a new player that respects their elite privilages.  Essentially calling the present DF nobles a ruling class is rather like calling a pebble a mountain.  Work exemption is not a bug since it never ever worked at all in any capacity, it is thus a feuture that was never implemented.

I'll need actual proof that it's a feature in order to believe it. It's probably in the bug-tracker, so maybe I'll go take a look at it later to see if Toady had anything to say about it.

[StagnantSoul]

The most of the world is capitalist, and even the parts of the world that are "communist" aren't really communist. Why? Because communism will never work as long as there's individuality.

[Splint]

The most of the world is capitalist, and even the parts of the world that are "communist" aren't really communist. Why? Because communism will never work as long as there's individuality.

Or greed, as someone else stated. And everyone's greedy. Hell, my dog is a near violently greedy shithead even though she doesn't need to be. Animals in general - humans, dwarves, even a fucking house cat, are all greedy shitheads when you come right down to it in a broad strokes way (which I admit is unfair to paint every complex living thing as a greedy jerk, but it's just the way nature programs everything with a pulse.)

Hell, ants could be seen as models of communism, sacrificing evolving even the most primitive notions of self for the good of the hive. And even then a few species aside, the overwhelming majority of colonies will destroy others if they run across another because "Fuck you guys, this is our forage turf!" Just as humans do when we fight over resources.

It's a textbook example of something that sounds nice on paper, but when put into practice it just doesn't work. Even if the government isn't run bt complete shitminglers like virtually every communist state was - if not for part of thier history, then the entirety of it, the lower ranks will still try to cheat the system if they think they can get away with it.

The fort runs in communist-leaning systems out of pragmatism right now, because the previous system was broken due to a combination of engine troubles with coins and other facets, like skilled laborers resulting in even slum-housing being too much for an out-of-work lye maker or part-time footsoldier or nobles constantly jailing people for absurdly specific mandate failures, thus preventing them from being able to work and thus support themselves (purple  spinel boats spring to mind.)

This forum and thread are not the place to discuss ideology though. Please take such a thing elsewhere, because such discussions rarely end well in my experiences (ever try to Argue for the NCR in Fallout New Vegas? Arguing RL ideological stuff like communism almost inevitably gets about as bad as that, if not worse.)

Once more, talking out of my ass because Splint =/= Expert on such things. At least I'm more lucide this time around.

[Helari]

I don't believe the economic system should default to either socialism or capitalism, the middle grounds should also be covered. "Less developed" options should also be supported if not be featured more prominently like economy governed by tradition (little adaptability or even pursuit of higher performance and profit, trade and occupation is governed by strict custom and expectation enforced socially or with laws).

edit: You guys shouldn't really try to treat DF as some kind of model designed to prove that socialism is impossible/possible. DF is a fantasy simulator after all and the creatures and cultures in it can be completely different from the ones we live with.

[Shazbot]

( Pre-Script: Initially when I wrote this I placed the terms 'communist' and 'capitalist' into small quotes to highlight that these were not terms being accurately used, but represented two poles on a spectrum of ideas. This implication was too subtle, and I apologize for the confusion. The specific ideas I had in mind are player-focused fortresses of public goods and player direction as we initially saw them in early versions, and a yet-unrealized notion of dwarf-focused fortresses of private goods and dwarf direction. The overall notion of this post is to build upon THDR's system of value, and then allow dwarves to act on their market perception to an extent that the player will determine. )

Before we launch into 'communist' or 'capitalist' dwarf debates, I'd like to pre-empt it all by saying we are merely imprinting our own perceptions onto a sandbox game. Any economy system should reflect that sandbox style as well. That said, it would be wrong to claim that the dwarves are communist simply because the economy is presently disabled, just as it is wrong to assume they are capitalist because all dwarves base their happiness on the monetary value of the objects they interact with. However, it is clear that the game is heavily geared towards public works and public resources, as private ownership extends no further than clothes and the occasional craft. I feel all of this can, and should, change.

Dwarves, to put it simply, need to have more control over their own economic activity.

"th;dr" makes excellent points about the importance of dwarves acting on their perceived value of objects rather than the intrinsic value of objects as defined strictly in the raws. To some degree this already exists so far as I know, as dwarves who like oak will be happier with a oak door to their bedroom than a maple door. Yet consider the dwarf who is assigned a bedroom with a maple door. Presently this dwarf will go about his entire life merely content to have a door at all, even if dozens of masterpiece oak doors sit unused in stockpiles. A player has satisfied the needs of one dwarf to some small extent and can focus on other concerns than searching each dwarf's preferences and matching them to bedrooms. Our current, top-down, 'communist' fortress.

However, consider what could be. The dwarf could weigh his own preferences and dislikes against his personal possessions and determine once every time interval, by the worst mismatch on the grid, some item to acquire or replace or improve. If our dwarf sees his maple door and determines there are oak doors in the fortress, he could, of his own volition, get an oak door from a stockpile and replace his maple door. Likewise he could replace his bed, his cabinet; any placed furniture, the dwarf could replace in the same spot. He could also create a job for a craftsdwarf to come to his door and engrave it with an animal he likes or a picture of himself. The player merely ensures the needed infrastructure and resources are on hand for the dwarves. A future, bottom-up, 'capitalist' fortress.

Of course, what enables 'capitalist' activities is a point to consider. There is presently a mechanism by which we assign workshops to individual dwarves or particular skill levels. This screen can be adjusted to make workshops 'private shops' as well, in which an assigned dwarf or a dwarf which claims the shop begins generating his own work orders. Our homeowner might not be able to find any oak doors in the workshop, but knows there are oak logs in a public stockpile. He can request a work order of a carpenter who owns a shop. The carpenter will then produce the door, store it in his shop, and the homeowner will later drop by to cash-and-carry his purchase. Greedy, law-breaking dwarves might even try to steal money or goods from the shops. 'Capitalist' fortress.

Or we can leave things as they are, with idle shiftless masses of laborers adrift in an alcohol-induced torpor, occasionally receiving direction from an unfeeling overlord to create thirty wooden doors, quality be damned, to meet a quota for a plan never revealed to the underlings. 'Communist' fortress.

Another interesting concept is that of dwarves personally using the caravan to make purchases from their own coin piles, storing favorite foods and drinks in their rooms or buying various trinkets. Dwarves with private shops may even try making things specifically to trade based on the trade agreements with the mountainhomes. Things that the player might never consider buying from a caravan (reindeer leather mittens?) could be top on a dwarf's personal wish-list, and allowing dwarves to access the depot directly will improve dwarven happiness.

Naturally public (our current stockpiles), private (stockpiles of goods 'for sale'), and reserved (stockpiles exclusively for player use) goods need to be sorted out. All goods can start public as a matter of course, then as economic activity begins the player may flag stockpiles for private or reserved status. This change can take place after the appointment of an officer or some event, such as the mayor replacing the expedition leader. The appropriate noble could also have a setting as the book-keeper does determining the economy's on-off switch, or any gradients between. Various classes of goods and economic activity could be flagged for private practice; a player wishing to control the food supply in a crisis may disable economics for foodstuffs.

Should a player elect to open private industry, he may find himself needing to pay soldiers and resources gatherers. Money can enter the 'fortress coffers' by directly minting coins or through the sale of raw materials into shops. The tax collector can also extract a 'sales tax' on shops, making legendary craftsdwarves very lucrative for the fortress coffer.

The net result is that dwarves in a thriving 'capitalist' fortress will keep themselves busy producing goods to make other dwarves happy without direct player involvement, freeing the player to focus on higher goals (consider the clothes industry. Do you really enjoy managing that?). The trade-off, of course, is that those resources and dwarf-hours cannot be expended by the player, reducing the player's ability to reach those higher goals.

And of course, how 'capitalist' or 'communist' you want your fortress to be can be configured by your actions in game. If you want to let dwarves manage their own clothing, establish a few private clothier's shops and looms and a steady crop of cotton. If you think no dwarf should ever go thirsty for lack of booze, keep the still public, drawing from public food and giving to a public booze pile.

I think it would be a stellar game mechanic. Consider a dwarf hunter who realizes his bank account is low and heads out to the woods, hauls in a deer, and sells it to a butcher. The butcher then slices and dices the carcass, selling the bones to a craftsdwarf who is visited by the hunter who buys more crossbow bolts. Meanwhile cooks, tanners and leatherworkers all whirl into motion producing food and clothes for the fortress as a whole. In a truly robust economic model, all of this activity can take place without player intervention.



Whole body was a quote; I took it out of the quote box for readability.

[GoblinCookie]

And, as I said, like it or not there is no evidence that when the economy is reintroduced, it will go back to being some variation of that briefly experimented system. From what we've seen from the developers perspective, they enjoy the idea of having coins in the game. Also, of having classes:

   Toady:   Yeah. We usually don't do this. We don't put up goals that are in order, but we got... The new dev pages should be posted as this talk is posted, so you can go over there now if you want, or just go check it later at the main Dwarf Fortress page, under "Development". And you'll see that there are four sections. Most of them are old sections, but they've been refurbished and moved to the top, in order. So the first thing we're going to work on (this is probably starting at the beginning of December) is job priorities. So we've been saying this for a long time now, as one of the top vote-getters on "Eternal Suggestions", and it's time to get some work done there.
We had to do some work to figure out what people wanted here, because the original suggestion was very general, and pointed in different directions, and had different approaches, and it wasn't really settled. So we have decided, first off, that we're not really working to change VPL [The labour list for each dwarf. Seen by pressing v-p-l near a dwarf in the game - Ed.] at this moment. We have some things that we're going to do later (we'll get to that in a moment) that will point toward big changes toward VPL. But the first push on job priorities is just going to be about the basic 'job selection' model. So right now, as people know, the jobs pick the dwarves, and that leads to bad selection sometimes. The job will just snatch up the first, nearest qualified dwarf to do the job, regardless of whatever jobs that dwarf might want to do, and that can lead to some really sub-par selections.
And there's a kind of symmetric problem if dwarves pick jobs. They'll pick jobs that another dwarf might be better suited for. So you can't really have jobs picking dwarves or dwarves picking jobs; you need to have a system that merges it all together and has a delay incorporated so that things can work themselves out. Not a big delay, almost unnoticeable, but just enough to get the right dwarf to the right job. And this will allow you to do things like taking a skilled dwarf, that you'd normally be forced to turn off their hauling, so that they would do the jobs you want them to do. And now you'd be able to leave their hauling on, for instance. They do hauling when they were truly idle, but they would still be able to go do their appropriate jobs when they were available. And by the same token you wouldn't have... We noticed that a lot of people were setting up this 'peasant class' of dwarves, unskilled dwarves, that were just set up for hauling. That should be a little less necessary now.

Threetoe:   Except now we're going to be working with the last of these projects will be to implement new peasant classes of dwarves.

Toady:   He he he. Yeah this is the kind of VPL change we were talking about. It should be exciting to see the status of your dwarves realized. And certain ones you'll be able to control more than others. Now there will be a circumstance under which you can control any dwarf to a large degree, and that's going to be the new 'Do This Now' prioritization for jobs, which will just snatch up the nearest dwarf that can do the job (like pulling a lever), and force them to do it. They'll drop what they're doing and save your fortress. Might stress them out a little bit, depending on the kind of dwarf, but you'll be able to do that finally. And furthermore we are mindful of things like the trading jobs, the harvest, and so on, and hopefully that'll be handled with the new job selection model overall.
We are trying to stay away from spreadsheets and numbers approaches that kind of open up every single job to be ranked, you know, according to different numbers for each dwarf or workshop because that is unmanageable when the number of dwarves get high.

Threetoe:   Also, it's a hint where we're going with this, which is to get rid of VPL all together, eventually.

By 'classes' they may or may not mean anything aside from "division of labour", that is a simplistic way of assigning VPL status without having to do so via pressing those keys.  Hence the final aim here being getting rid of VPL altogether, not because we are replacing the mechanics altogether but because we are simplifying management of our dwarves by dividing them up into potentially user-defined classes that have their labours defined already. 

So instead of having to trawl through 10 dwarves VPL's in order to activate all their woodworking labour and deactivate the other labours, I instead assign them with 10 clicks to my woodworking class which has those labours activated/deactivated.  That we can all agree is a far quicker means of running things than VPL, hence VPL is not redundant and can be got rid of. 

...now we're discussing ideology. I honestly believe that greed is part of human nature. The feeling of deserving more for working harder is also part of human nature. Wanting your close friends and family (or clan, whatever it is) to have a better life, and trying to have them inherit whatever property you could provide them to give them a better life (as opposed to just accepting that the state should redistribute whatever they earned for the "greater good") is part of human nature.

I've talked to Soviet Union expats in the past. The Soviets tried to make a society where all the workers were equal. It didn't work. You know why? A lot of families did their best to avoid that the forced equality. They would bribe people, contraband products, cheat the system, everything to give a better life to themselves and their families. I've met a USSR born woman who had all sorts of private tuition and privileged housing when she was a child, provided by her parents. They used all the powers they had to make sure she had a better education than most, worked hard at it, and helped her a lot. It was far from an "equal opportunity society", even for those not in power.

Same thing with Cuba. Officially, a high-skilled worker such as a doctor or an engeneer recieves almost the same salary and benefits as a low-skilled laborer. They pride themselves in the fact that a doctor makes 800$, while a janitor makes 600$. In practice, it doesn't work like that. There are zones and neighborhoods in Cuba where these people have more or less a middle-class standard of living (for third world standards), and enjoy better accomodations and more access to resources than other people.

They really tried to make workers in Cuba equal under the communist regime. They couldn't. Do you really want to have this discussion, though? I don't think this is the thread or even the board for it.

Yes greed in the vague sense of wanting more than you presently have is part of 'human nature'.  However the idea that "I personally worked hard so I personally should get stuff all to myself as a reward" is an ideological belief not mere greed.  I did not bring up ideology, you brought up ideology when you conjured up the figure of the mason that believes as part of his personal ideology he should get more because he is so hard working.  This is quite different from simply saying the mason wants "more stuff" like everybody else. 

Your real-world examples are not really valid because both the USSR and Cuba were once Capitalist countries and exist/existed in a world of Capitalist countries after they had their revolutions.  There is no reason to think that just because a country has a Communist revolution all the people who believe in ideas hostile to a successful Communist society will suddenly lose those ideas, especially given they recieve reinforcement from the rest of the world.  It is also borne out by historical experiance that those people are capable of undermining and actually overthrowing a Communist regime decades after the revolution (USSR). 

Nobody has taught the dwarves of DF that they should do anything other than work as hard as everyone else and take what they want from the communal stockpiles.  Greed in this context means "I will take more stuff from the stockpiles" and hard work is "the fortress needs X hence I do X".  Somebody has to forge an ideological link between greed and hard work, so that I "deserve more stuff from the stockpiles because I worked hard".  Real-life Communist countries starts off with a bunch of unreformed people that have already got that ideology in their head left over from when they were Capitalist countries. 

In DF this was never the case, so we have no problem with those types.  The only way for the system to break down as a result of such people is for somebody to do something that introduces the ideology into the fortress in the first place, or for such people to arrive from a 'Capitalist fortress' somewhere else.  The former instance requires to percieve of a motive why under a Communist system the leadership would 'accidentally' introduce those ideas by means of something that serves the ends of their own system. 

Again, if the only institutions that the game recognizes are those, then those are the only ones. Anything else and you're roleplaying. "Like most people in his group (dwarven civilization), Urist respects commerce, values craftsdwarship above all else and despises nature". That's what the game is telling you. You can ignore that and pretend that all your dwarves hate commerce and are tree-loving hippies and made a society that works with that in mind, and the game even supports you in doing so to some extent, but you're going against the norms and values that the game set up for you from the beginning.

I do not leave the law enforcement slot empty because I am role-playing.  I leave it empty for gameplay reasons because the law enforcement institution is an entirely destructive one that serves no purpose.

I'll need actual proof that it's a feature in order to believe it. It's probably in the bug-tracker, so maybe I'll go take a look at it later to see if Toady had anything to say about it.

It is an abandoned feuture.  A bug is when an implemented feuture does not work properly, a feuture that has never worked at all does not count as a bug.  It also a feuture does not make any sense, for three reasons. 

1. Those in charge of the fortress cannot be forced not to work if they want to. Since you the player represent the government, why would you (the government) be unable to do the work that you wish to do, simply because of your office?
2. It sets a bad example to others reducing their own motivation to work and making the fortress (and hence the leadership) poorer.

Before we launch into 'communist' or 'capitalist' dwarf debates, I'd like to pre-empt it all by saying we are merely imprinting our own perceptions onto a sandbox game. Any economy system should reflect that sandbox style as well. That said, it would be wrong to claim that the dwarves are communist simply because the economy is presently disabled, just as it is wrong to assume they are capitalist because all dwarves base their happiness on the monetary value of the objects they interact with. However, it is clear that the game is heavily geared towards public works and public resources, as private ownership extends no further than clothes and the occasional craft. I feel all of this can, and should, change.

Dwarves, to put it simply, need to have more control over their own economic activity.

"th;dr" makes excellent points about the importance of dwarves acting on their perceived value of objects rather than the intrinsic value of objects as defined strictly in the raws. To some degree this already exists so far as I know, as dwarves who like oak will be happier with a oak door to their bedroom than a maple door. Yet consider the dwarf who is assigned a bedroom with a maple door. Presently this dwarf will go about his entire life merely content to have a door at all, even if dozens of masterpiece oak doors sit unused in stockpiles. A player has satisfied the needs of one dwarf to some small extent and can focus on other concerns than searching each dwarf's preferences and matching them to bedrooms. Our current, top-down, 'communist' fortress.

However, consider what could be. The dwarf could weigh his own preferences and dislikes against his personal possessions and determine once every time interval, by the worst mismatch on the grid, some item to acquire or replace or improve. If our dwarf sees his maple door and determines there are oak doors in the fortress, he could, of his own volition, get an oak door from a stockpile and replace his maple door. Likewise he could replace his bed, his cabinet; any placed furniture, the dwarf could replace in the same spot. He could also create a job for a craftsdwarf to come to his door and engrave it with an animal he likes or a picture of himself. The player merely ensures the needed infrastructure and resources are on hand for the dwarves. A future, bottom-up, 'capitalist' fortress.

Of course, what enables 'capitalist' activities is a point to consider. There is presently a mechanism by which we assign workshops to individual dwarves or particular skill levels. This screen can be adjusted to make workshops 'private shops' as well, in which an assigned dwarf or a dwarf which claims the shop begins generating his own work orders. Our homeowner might not be able to find any oak doors in the workshop, but knows there are oak logs in a public stockpile. He can request a work order of a carpenter who owns a shop. The carpenter will then produce the door, store it in his shop, and the homeowner will later drop by to cash-and-carry his purchase. Greedy, law-breaking dwarves might even try to steal money or goods from the shops. 'Capitalist' fortress.

Or we can leave things as they are, with idle shiftless masses of laborers adrift in an alcohol-induced torpor, occasionally receiving direction from an unfeeling overlord to create thirty wooden doors, quality be damned, to meet a quota for a plan never revealed to the underlings. 'Communist' fortress.

Another interesting concept is that of dwarves personally using the caravan to make purchases from their own coin piles, storing favorite foods and drinks in their rooms or buying various trinkets. Dwarves with private shops may even try making things specifically to trade based on the trade agreements with the mountainhomes. Things that the player might never consider buying from a caravan (reindeer leather mittens?) could be top on a dwarf's personal wish-list, and allowing dwarves to access the depot directly will improve dwarven happiness.

Naturally public (our current stockpiles), private (stockpiles of goods 'for sale'), and reserved (stockpiles exclusively for player use) goods need to be sorted out. All goods can start public as a matter of course, then as economic activity begins the player may flag stockpiles for private or reserved status. This change can take place after the appointment of an officer or some event, such as the mayor replacing the expedition leader. The appropriate noble could also have a setting as the book-keeper does determining the economy's on-off switch, or any gradients between. Various classes of goods and economic activity could be flagged for private practice; a player wishing to control the food supply in a crisis may disable economics for foodstuffs.

Should a player elect to open private industry, he may find himself needing to pay soldiers and resources gatherers. Money can enter the 'fortress coffers' by directly minting coins or through the sale of raw materials into shops. The tax collector can also extract a 'sales tax' on shops, making legendary craftsdwarves very lucrative for the fortress coffer.

The net result is that dwarves in a thriving 'capitalist' fortress will keep themselves busy producing goods to make other dwarves happy without direct player involvement, freeing the player to focus on higher goals (consider the clothes industry. Do you really enjoy managing that?). The trade-off, of course, is that those resources and dwarf-hours cannot be expended by the player, reducing the player's ability to reach those higher goals.

And of course, how 'capitalist' or 'communist' you want your fortress to be can be configured by your actions in game. If you want to let dwarves manage their own clothing, establish a few private clothier's shops and looms and a steady crop of cotton. If you think no dwarf should ever go thirsty for lack of booze, keep the still public, drawing from public food and giving to a public booze pile.

I think it would be a stellar game mechanic. Consider a dwarf hunter who realizes his bank account is low and heads out to the woods, hauls in a deer, and sells it to a butcher. The butcher then slices and dices the carcass, selling the bones to a craftsdwarf who is visited by the hunter who buys more crossbow bolts. Meanwhile cooks, tanners and leatherworkers all whirl into motion producing food and clothes for the fortress as a whole. In a truly robust economic model, all of this activity can take place without player intervention.

Well essentially the economy debates are largely driven by how comfortable we are with 'communism' and 'capitalism' being depicted as systems.  The driving motive behind people like Ribs, as shown by their above criticisms of Cuba/Soviet is that they sincerely believe that a Communist system cannot ever work because of 'human nature', hence any depiction of such a system is unrealistic/because the game is unfinished.  They are driven to propose ideas that they think will 'properly' finish the game by replicating Capitalism and Capitalist ideology, progress in the game to them means the implementation of Capitalism, which they believe in in RL. 

As I have demonstrated in Dynamic Consumer Demands however it is not neccesery for us to introduce internal commerce in order for us to have dwarves control their own economic activity independantly of the player. 

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=150555.0

At the moment the consumer demands of dwarves are limited and fixed.  They demand food, drinks, clothing, chairs and beds but that is it.  The fixed nature of the demands means that the game is hardest at the start since once things are set up for dwarves to meet all their own fixed demands, the game has essentially been 'won'.

I propose that the demands of dwarves be made dynamic, if all the basic demands of a dwarf (the one's already effectively in the game) are met then they gradually develop new demands based upon their personality; sort of similar to how noble's mandates work at the moment.  Once these demands are met then new demands are created and when they in turn are met even more demands are added (and so on).

Since it would be difficult for the player to keep track of so many demands I also propose that we introduce an unmet demands screen.  When a dwarf has a demand they initially try to satisfy that demand from the stockpiles without informing the player, but if they cannot do this then they will travel over to the office of a noble (so a manager, bookkeeper, mayor or baron) and inform them as to their unmet demands.

All the demands that have been logged by the individual dwarves then appear on the demands screen.  The demands screen is linked to the manager so that the player can at the press of a button send a group of identical demands over to the manager without the player having to remember the demands themselves and log them in.  These demands would still need to be managed by the manager using their manage work orders labour.

There is great potential here for automation.  Rather than having to manually go through the demands screen in order to meet a particular type of demand, the player can instead set particular types of demand to be sent to the manager screen automatically.  This can be done with presently existing demands on the screen but it can also be done for hypothetical demands, though this would require the player to manually enter them in.

By implementing this system of centralizing and automating demands, the basic framework for a future AI settlement would also incidentally be laid down. Since the greater part of the work of managing the fortress has now been automated the other necessary AI scripts can simply be tagged on to the demands automation script in order to create an AI capable of managing a settlement.

Dynamic demands are themselves also necessity for the development of a realistic world economy, since otherwise it will likely crash due to lack of demand.  When combined with automation of production orders we also have the basis for further economic developments in fortress mode since dwarves are now capable of developing demands independently of the player and meeting them autonomously.

We can just introduce the automation of manager work orders by which dwarves develop demands and the player allows certain kinds of demands to be logged by the manager without the player even needing to be made aware of any of it.  Hence the central dualism of your post does not exist, we are not necceserily choosing between the present 'Player does everything' arrangement and the implementation of 'Capitalist Fortress' where dwarves are autonomous free agents.

[StagnantSoul]

A middle ground between the two might work out, or it could fail miserably. Especially on dwarves getting their own furniture. That sounds like it'd cause a major headache. Also, the player does not represent the government, the player is an unseen force.

[Splint]

A middle ground between the two might work out, or it could fail miserably. Especially on dwarves getting their own furniture. That sounds like it'd cause a major headache. Also, the player does not represent the government, the player is an unseen force.

I was under the impression the player was effectively the leadership of the fortress as far as what is actually done: For example, for you to have soldiers, you need a commander. Ergo, the commander is actually the one issuing orders and setting schedules for the men, while the soldiers either abide by his or her recommendations or pick wargear on thier own (by way of the player assigning it or making uniforms,) and he/she is the one who selects squad leaders, while the soldiers are either volunteers (early on,) or conscripts made to serve by the civilian leadership, and may go along with it because unless the "commander" (the player) decides otherwise, they get free reign to select thier own rations - including highly expensive foods and drinks - simply on the grounds they're part of the military. Unless economic activation says otherwise.

A Mayor, EL, or Noble is actually the one who puts in the order for 30 beds and doors, because "they" were the ones who made the order, and appointed the manager to make sure they're distributed and carried out quickly, and how things are built, while the Guard Captain once selected by the leadership, is actually hands out convictions and carries out most punishments based on thier knowledge of Dwarven Law (which is presumably  taught to children by thier parents so they know not to cross the fortress guard when they grow up.)
At present, they do thier job mostly infallibly, if there's sufficient witnesses to a given crime, but sometimes mistakes do happen because "they" either jumped to conclusions or had to guess based on the little evidence and witnesses available.

Obviously "they" means the admins and nobles being referred to.

[Alfrodo]

A middle ground between the two might work out, or it could fail miserably. Especially on dwarves getting their own furniture. That sounds like it'd cause a major headache. Also, the player does not represent the government, the player is an unseen force.

I was under the impression the player was effectively the leadership of the fortress as far as what is actually done: For example, for you to have soldiers, you need a commander. Ergo, the commander is actually the one issuing orders and setting schedules for the men, while the soldiers either abide by his or her recommendations or pick wargear on thier own (by way of the player assigning it or making uniforms,) and he/she is the one who selects squad leaders, while the soldiers are either volunteers (early on,) or conscripts made to serve by the civilian leadership, and may go along with it because unless the "commander" (the player) decides otherwise, they get free reign to select thier own rations - including highly expensive foods and drinks - simply on the grounds they're part of the military. Unless economic activation says otherwise.

A Mayor, EL, or Noble is actually the one who puts in the order for 30 beds and doors, because "they" were the ones who made the order, and appointed the manager to make sure they're distributed and carried out quickly, and how things are built, while the Guard Captain once selected by the leadership, is actually hands out convictions and carries out most punishments based on thier knowledge of Dwarven Law (which is presumably  taught to children by thier parents so they know not to cross the fortress guard when they grow up.)
At present, they do thier job mostly infallibly, if there's sufficient witnesses to a given crime, but sometimes mistakes do happen because "they" either jumped to conclusions or had to guess based on the little evidence and witnesses available.

Obviously "they" means the admins and nobles being referred to.

I believe toady said several times that you are "the will of the nobles."

Nobles you arrange accidents for.

[StagnantSoul]

Seriously? I've never heard that, only that you're an unseen/divine/godly force. Even that you're Armok.

[Splint]

Dunno where I even got that from really. Probably extended from the concept of "Will of the nobles" (if you define noble loosely to include the Mayors and such,) since I don't like the idea of the player being Armok during fort mode gameplay personally. During worldgen though? Damn right that's what the player is.

At any rate, the nobles being the shot callers certainly makes many rather... unsound decisions we players make, make slightly more sense. After all, a Mayor isn't going to know shit about shit when it comes to building a fortress really unless they studied the architecture of thier home fortress, and a Baron isn't actually going to have any idea if dozens of dwarves will die (and they probably will,) because they told the engineers "No, I want the tracks here, damn it, and damn your fancy skills and expertise! Speaking of, I want this four to help out with setting up the levers and tracks." The engineers then obey, and with the help of four idiots who don't know what they're really doing, lay a minecart system that results in six run over pets and four dead children and a hunter in the first month of operation.

All because the Baron wanted a track system where they wanted it and din't care if it was built competently or not. He wanted a cart system like all the other fancy forts.

[GoblinCookie]

Dunno where I even got that from really. Probably extended from the concept of "Will of the nobles" (if you define noble loosely to include the Mayors and such,) since I don't like the idea of the player being Armok during fort mode gameplay personally. During worldgen though? Damn right that's what the player is.

At any rate, the nobles being the shot callers certainly makes many rather... unsound decisions we players make, make slightly more sense. After all, a Mayor isn't going to know shit about shit when it comes to building a fortress really unless they studied the architecture of thier home fortress, and a Baron isn't actually going to have any idea if dozens of dwarves will die (and they probably will,) because they told the engineers "No, I want the tracks here, damn it, and damn your fancy skills and expertise! Speaking of, I want this four to help out with setting up the levers and tracks." The engineers then obey, and with the help of four idiots who don't know what they're really doing, lay a minecart system that results in six run over pets and four dead children and a hunter in the first month of operation.

All because the Baron wanted a track system where they wanted it and din't care if it was built competently or not. He wanted a cart system like all the other fancy forts.

As I understand it the player himself is Armok, an immortal god-like spirit with the power to possess a single individual and make them do 'strange' things, likewise with a dwarf government.  Armok is not omniscient, there are plenty of things that Armok does not know and legends mode is where we go through Armok's knowledge as to what has happened in the world.  At the end of World-Gen Armok enters the world, which is why there is so much more detail after world-gen than before, nothing has actually changed in reality but Armok knows more now.

In adventurer mode Armok is at his most focused, tied very tightly to a single individual who is essentially his puppet.  In fortress mode Armok is bound to all dwarves that belong to the site government but his influence is not so strong in this less focused state.  Armok is 'felt' by the dwarves, inspiring them but also unhinging them somewhat, this is why we end up with strange moods that produce artifacts or madness but we do not have strange moods outside of fortress mode.  When we retire our fortress or adventurer, Armok has retreated from his vessel but has left the door open to return later; Armok cannot be in two vessels at once. 

I do not think that Armok functions as a genuine hive-mind for the fortress.  The reason is that would require Armok to be able to possess 100s of people at once, which would allow Armok to wipe out whole existing civilizations by taking the whole population over and causing them to commit suicide.  Instead Armok is centred on the mayor/expedition leader and then extends his influence outwards to the other government officials and then to everyone that is under the command of those officials.  Armok has no control over those who are not presently loyal to the site government, such as enemies, visiters or wild animals.

[Ribs]

By 'classes' they may or may not mean anything aside from "division of labour", that is a simplistic way of assigning VPL status without having to do so via pressing those keys.  Hence the final aim here being getting rid of VPL altogether, not because we are replacing the mechanics altogether but because we are simplifying management of our dwarves by dividing them up into potentially user-defined classes that have their labours defined already. 

So instead of having to trawl through 10 dwarves VPL's in order to activate all their woodworking labour and deactivate the other labours, I instead assign them with 10 clicks to my woodworking class which has those labours activated/deactivated.  That we can all agree is a far quicker means of running things than VPL, hence VPL is not redundant and can be got rid of. 

Not really. Here's what he said:

Threetoe: Except now we're going to be working with the last of these projects will be to implement new peasant classes of dwarves.
(...)
Toady: Yeah, we would really like to restrict VPL possibly to a smaller number of dwarves that are actually the types of dwarves you would be ordering around like that. And we're also aware of kind of the 'work crew' approaches that people have, and that will also be something that is under consideration when we do understand 'fortress-citizen' status a little better.
But for now we're just focusing on these kind of large problems. Those two things, the 'Do It Now' prioritization and the overall job selection mechanic, should help with most of the major problems. We have some other small ideas, kind of along the lines of the little suggestions we've been doing, like workshops being able to steal from hauling jobs if the item is nearby. We're also going to look at some of the mining suggestions, like ordered mining or vein mining, that kind of thing.
And so it should be an interesting set of job priority changes that'll do a lot of good. Just keep in mind that when we do get to the fourth section of the new development notes, the starting scenarios, there's going to be further changes to job priorities that should really make the whole experience more interesting and dwarfy.

You're not seeing it because you don't want to. The idea is that citizen status is not equal to all individuals. In some situations, depending on the starting scenario you're going for, you'll have different levels of citizenship and status for different classes of dwarves. Some will be peasants/serfs, that are the type of dwarves you can order around, others will be more higher status individuals whom you'll have less direct control of. For the nobles, we'll probably go back to having no control whatsoever. Of course, deppending on the starting scenario, the rules for control will be different. Probably when you are just beginning a settlement, you'll always have direct control over your dwarve's activities like if you were the captain of a ship and they were crew members, but later on you'll have less control over your dwarve's activities (as Toady described before).

Your real-world examples are not really valid because both the USSR and Cuba were once Capitalist countries and exist/existed in a world of Capitalist countries after they had their revolutions.  There is no reason to think that just because a country has a Communist revolution all the people who believe in ideas hostile to a successful Communist society will suddenly lose those ideas, especially given they recieve reinforcement from the rest of the world.  It is also borne out by historical experiance that those people are capable of undermining and actually overthrowing a Communist regime decades after the revolution (USSR). 

Nobody has taught the dwarves of DF that they should do anything other than work as hard as everyone else and take what they want from the communal stockpiles.  Greed in this context means "I will take more stuff from the stockpiles" and hard work is "the fortress needs X hence I do X".  Somebody has to forge an ideological link between greed and hard work, so that I "deserve more stuff from the stockpiles because I worked hard".  Real-life Communist countries starts off with a bunch of unreformed people that have already got that ideology in their head left over from when they were Capitalist countries. 

That's just magical thinking to me. First of all, Russia wasn't exactly the prime example of a 'capitalistic country' back when the bolsheviks took power. It certainly wasn't Britain, and in fact it wasn't even Germany: it was a backwards, borderline feudal country with an old-style monarchy. But I digress.

What you're implying there is figuratively like saying you could reform a society into not lusting for sex. The christians tried that. They had over a thousand years to do it, and they certainly suceeded at making it into a taboo. But do you think they stopped the majority of people from masturbating? Did cheating on yours and other's spouses was unheard of during the middle ages? Did they get rid of homossexuality?

What they did was to convince people that all those things were a lot more reprehensible than european societies thought before christianity came along. Same thing with the idea of usury(in the context of moneylending) and a lot of other things that were seen as mortal sins by the church: they were strictly forbidden, but coexisted with those societies.

They had over fourteen hundread years to "reform" society, and they did to some extent. But they could never get rid of human nature; they could supress it and shame people into feeling of behaving in a way that was contrary to the christian dogma, but never even got close to getting rid of certain institutions or customs.

Communism, to me, tries to do exactly what the christians did back in those times: it's a dogmatic, utopian belief that attempts to change human nature. If the USSR hadn't fall, and lasted for another thousand years, I'm sure that people would be a lot more 'reformed', as you put it. But you'll never convince me that most people who work harder don't feel more entitled to earn more, no matter how effectively you brainwash the masses.

Imagine you only have one dwarf in your fortress with medical skills, and for some reason you can't import another one. Everyone comes to him seeking help. He's constantly busy. How long would it take for him to realise his own importance? Or even better, for others to realise that. People would probably start sending him gifts. Maybe you mayor, seeing his importance, would decide to give him better quarters. Perhaps they would start treating him and his family better. If he has a greedy personality, maybe he'll even start demanding more oce he sees how valuable he is. That's just human nature.

It is an abandoned feuture.  A bug is when an implemented feuture does not work properly, a feuture that has never worked at all does not count as a bug. 

That's ridiculous. There are plenty of old bugs the didn't get fixed simply because Toady never got around to it. Hundreads, to be honest.
here's another one: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=2512
You can manually replace mayors, and have been able to for a long time. These things are not a features. It even says so in the wiki:

"The selected baron(ess) may still perform useful labour from his/her normal life (as a miner, for example). However, as the baron is supposed to be a lazy noble, this seems to be an unintended, broken behaviour in all 0.34.xx versions (so far) and might be fixed in future releases."

Of course, the only real way to confirm it is to ask for Toad directly since he hasn't adressed it in the bug tracker (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7977), like he hasn't several other bugs.