How about instead of having an INTERNET FIGHT (SOVIET UNION SIMULATOR vs LIBERAL FANTASY SIMULATOR) We discuss what we should do with subsidization?
Like, what happens if we want something done (say, carving a statue), and how are dwarves rewarded for it? If they even are? Does the money come from the fortress treasury? and where does THAT money come from? (Taxes, which comes from shops and the people.)
*raises shield
They would not be rewarded for it intrinsically by the mechanics. The player however could choose to implement rewards or punishments for doing/not doing work. The key word is choose, nothing is forced by the mechanics but there are issues with the initial Status Quo that have to be addressed that nudge the player towards such things.
The reason the player would do this is that it helps overcome the declining motivation to work that dwarves suffer when certain conditions are met (or not met). This should be a nudge, but not a game crushing nudge to the extent that if a player determined to keep having their dwarves work freely for free they cannot do so but they still have to take into account the price and come up with ways of sorting out the problematic conditions.
However there are drawbacks in that in order to pay people to motivate there has to be something up for sale, which means that commonly desirable items must be restricted from general availability, potentially creating poverty. While in order to punish dwarves there must be a system of prisons and there are the costs of those punishments borne by the dwarves themselves.
By "clinging to every word" you must mean "reading in between very obvious lines". If some of your dwarves have less freedom and it's more appropriate to tell them directly what to do, while others have more freedom and you can't force them into whichever labor-force you want them to do, that sounds like a class system to me.
I don't even know why I'm discussing the fact that a society that has nobles in it operates under a class system... wait and see, is what I say. If the DF society appears to be some sort of communist utopia after the starting scenarios update and not a vaguely mercantilistic feudal fantasy kingdom thing, I'll eat my hat.
No, it is a division of labor between two groups of dwarves. It is only a class system when one group is privileged over another group, this is means that they as a group enjoy power, status and material goods that are denied to other group. It has nothing to do with the range of tasks that they are expected to perform or indeed what tasks they perform at all.
If we have a carpenter dwarf 'class' that only does carpentry and then we have a woodworker dwarf 'class' that does all wood related jobs. Nothing about the arrangement inherently makes the carpenter the 'ruling class' and the woodworker the 'commoner'. It would however be a class division if things were say working under the old economy setup and the former but not the latter were [ECONOMY_EXEMPT]. That means they could have everything they wanted in the Fortress without having to pay for it; however it could equally be the generalist woodworkers that have this status.
It is the case that some starting scenarios are intended to have a definite class division but starting scenarios are clearly something that is intended to represent social arrangements OTHER than the one that we have at the moment. They have no bearing on the social arrangements of the present setup and since they are largely exceptional institutions (like prisons) they generally do not tell us much about DF society in it's normal form (unless generated AI settlements will have them).
If Toady One had initially wanted to implement Feudalism then he had implemented entirely the wrong game mechanics to start off with. What he did do was implement a handful of nobles from generic fantasy Feudalism, but there is no underlying Feudal economy meaning that what we have is a contradiction between what a superstructure that is supposed to be Feudal and the actual Communist structure that underlies it.
This means that the 'nobles' of the game end up in a social position that is far more akin to the social elites of Communist societies than the actual Feudal nobles they are named after (DF king is basically like North Korea's 'dear leader). This is because a Feudal society consists of a huge number of small peasants and craftsmen that are not collectively organised on an economic level (the very opposite of DF setup). Those few collective/public institutions that exist are owned by the government and they extract wealth from the swarm of small producers. The government is a distinct group from the small producers that produces the wealth that supports it and it's members use the majority of the wealth that they extract from the small producers primarily to support their own privileged lifestyle, with a small amount of it used to maintain and expand the collective/public institutions they run.
Basically Dwarf Fortress can never actually be Feudal unless we fundamentally change the nature of the game so that instead of focusing on producing wealth for our dwarves, we instead have a huge number of individual dwarf craftsmen and peasants living outside the fortress that bring us all the stuff we need as taxes. Instead of producing or trading for the goods our dwarves need we would spend our entire time building roads and bridges off-map, patrolling roads, building roads, building bridges, establishing temples, hunting bandits, judging criminals, punishing and above all else raising armies to fight wars.
A genuinely Feudal DF would have to essentially be another of those generic fantasy-themed strategy games obsessed with controlling territory, conquest of enemies, fortification of lands and construction of basic infrastructure to maintain or expand an abstracted economy that appears to us solely as a income of resources for use in sustaining a bigger army.
The fact that the church obviously had to compromise their beliefs with the reality of human nature is exactly why I used it as an example. The reason why the Cubans had to allow their highly skilled workers to have a much better lifestyle than the low-skilled population was also compromise. To me, some degree of "greed and selfishness" is as big a part of human nature as sexual desire. You imply that it isn't, but offer no proof. Saying that the only reason why people still behaved the way they did under communist regimes is because said communist regimes didn't have enough time to beat the evil capitalistic and classicist demons out of the recently converted heathens is not good enough for me.
What I am implying is that they would never be able to. Unless you create an Orwellian nightmare of a society where everyone is watched and anyone who shows even the slightest of "capitalistic" tendencies is dragged to a Gulag or executed on the spot, you'd have to compromise. Forever.
Remember that you do not have to prove a negative; I do not have to prove that greed and selfishness is as much a part of human nature as sexual desire, you do. Also there is a difference between basic desires to have stuff and ideological formulations like "I deserve X because I did Y".
Compromises get compromised; in both directions. There are certain compromises that have to be made but the compromises are not generally made with a fixed 'human nature' but with your ideological enemies. As a Communist your enemies the "capitalistic demons" (as you put it) have a certain amount of strength, in order to maintain a functioning society you have to make some compromises with them or else they will use that strength to wreck your society to the best of their ability. Their ability to do so is much increased if you do not have an inclination towards "Orwellian Nightmare society" though as prisons are inherently class societies this is itself a compromise of sorts, one that is still driven by the strength of your adversary.
It is not really just a question of time. It is also a question of, since compromises get compromised in what direction is the compromise going? Is it going in the direction of Communism or in the favor of the Capitalistic demons? Ideas are taught by the very nature of the institutions in which a person is part of and not just by means of consumption of culture. If you are forced to compromise and introduce or maintain an institution in which some people get more stuff than others because they personally produce more then "I deserve X because I did Y" is taught to everyone involved, regardless of whether they were actually explicitly taught this through means of cultural mediums or education.
Thing is that compromises are made according to the strength of the parties involved. But since compromises to the Capitalistic demons involve the propagation of institutions and ideology that breeds more Capitalistic demons then compromise is actually a trap, you might enjoy material gains a result of your compromise reducing resistance but by so doing you make your enemies stronger. Being stronger they can now force you to concede more ground, making them even stronger and so it goes on.
That is in my opinion why the Soviet Union fell; it is ultimately necessary to weather the storm and pay the price of your enemies best efforts in order to drive the compromise in your direction but the Soviets were too enamored in trying to win the Cold War to bear any such price and the compromise went in their enemies direction.
He has access to all the material wealth he desires? Are we even playing the same game? He doesn't, unless your fortress is some sort of paradise where everyone has quarters that feel like personal palaces, there's more than enough masterwork clothing for everyone and masterfully prepared food and drink is so plentiful that you could literal drown in dwarven wine.
For the sake of this argument, let's say that isn't the case. Let's say that the average dwarf has a 2x2 room and mediocre furniture, and clothing is scarce enough that most dwarves need to wear worn out clothes. So not everyone has access to every material good they can have. That's the catch here: scarcity. If he's so valuable, maybe he'd want to live as well as a noble. Maybe, pressured by these turn of events, the nobles would even decide to make it official and give him a title or prestigious position.
Whle dwarves "collectively" complain about not having a few things, it's only nobles that complain about not having more than the average dwarf. They also complain about "lesser dwarves" having it better or as good as them (does this strike you as particularly collectivist or socialist, by the way?). Do you really see it as impossible that some dwarves, given determined circumstances, could start seeing themselves as more valuable and start to want a better life than the rest if the peasants like nobles currently do?
In this case, unlike real Communist countries there are no Capitalistic demons left over from when the society was Capitalist or from outside cultural influences. Since there no inherent need for the Dwarf Fortress society to make any compromises with them in order that society functions, there is no ideology or institutions propagating Capitalist demons. "I deserve X because I did Y" therefore does not exist.
The shirt that the medical dwarf wants because of his "basic greed" prior to any ideological formulations of why he should have it either does or does not exist. If the shirt does not exist then he cannot demand it, if the shirt does exist it is freely available to claim and he has it already. If the fortress as a whole is short of stuff, this merely imparts urgency into the collective labors of the dwarves, causing them to work harder to make the stuff that is missing. If this still does not solve the problem then the dwarves "basic greed" will decline due to lack of reinforcement and/or cultural ideals about what prosperity means will change so nobody wants the scarce items anyway.
You actually do not understand how the nobles room demands work. Nobles do not object to other dwarves having nice rooms, they object to normal dwarves or nobles lower-ranking than themselves having nicer rooms than they personally do. They also have no objection at all to sharing their bedrooms area with any number of lesser dwarves bedroom areas, they actually 'like it' since all the beds of all the other dwarves bedrooms add value to their own room. Us giving all our dwarves their own separate individual bedrooms is actually role-playing on our part, in gameplay mechanics terms it is actually optimal for us to house every dwarf we have inside the nicest noble bedroom that we have.
The highest ranking nobles do however clearly use their personal power to secure a certain quality of life for themselves and potentially the rest of the fortress along with them. What is being taught by this is not "I did X and so I deserve Y" but instead "I should use my power to get X to give me Y". The latter lesson taught directly contradicts with the first since the former is an appeal to a higher power for what is due while the latter is getting what you want because you are a higher power.
If emigration does not exist then the medical dwarf does not have any real power to extract anything from the fortress government since they do not believe in "I did X and so I deserve Y". The moment emigration exists though then it makes sense for the more valuable dwarf workers to demand more stuff than others because their ability to personally leave the fortress gives them more leverage to influence the authorities to give them things than the average dwarf.
You say that with such certainty, that it must be true. I sincerely doubt it is a feature (is "feuture" like a "future feature" or just a typo?), because it is the sort of thing that Toady would have probably mentined, but I have no way to prove it. So if it is indeed a feature, I'll have to eat my pants along with my hat. Good day sir.
We are talking about definitions here, I speak with certainty because I know how I define things. A bug is something that a feature *has* that stops it from working properly. When a vestige of a feature that has never functioned in the game at all is located, it is not bugged since never having functioned at all in the game the feature was simply never implemented in the first place.
There never was any noble work exemption because the job of implementing it was never finished as finishing implementing a feature is defined by it working in the game.
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Topic: Alternative Dwarven Economy: Revolts, Schools, Taxes, and Industry. (Long) (Read 25114 times)