No, a King normally ends up living in a hillocks or mountain hall because the initial fortress of the dwarf civilization is destroyed by a forgotten beast or megabeast a few years after the world is initially created. The original King is normally killed off and a new King is crowned *in* the hillocks, rather than for instance one of the other fortresses.
And why is this? Because the local fortress was destroyed. The same can happen if you happen to have some noble's heir in your fortress. The Count of Bookwaves was killed in a bandit raid, and suddenly you have a count you weren't expecting to have in Clutchtown half a world away. And you're stuck with this shithead unless you or someone/something else kills them. Even after you elevate one of your own.
Obviously this is a bug, and they aren't supposed to be there. Likewise, various other nobles can presumably be intended to be living either in larger hillocks, or in Fortresses.
We already have a political system, it is just not a Feudal one and one that your settlement is largely exempt from as long as you keep on playing.
There is no political system in place. However there
is the signs of one meant to be implemented in the future. And eventually (a guess,) you may need to become part of the system if you want the hilldwarves you need to form your larger armies to come and set up near you. Otherwise, they may not feel safe enough to do so.
You are not better or worse or the same as a hillock when you start off. Because a hillock is just a type of settlement, it tells us nothing about the status of the settlement and hillocks can even have barons of their own, although not brokers, managers, captains of the guard or hammerers.
A hillocks can have all the wealth or population in the world but it is still a hillocks.
Actually, hillocks have no markets, few soldiers, and no mines. They're outlaying farms that, in my own experience, are typically run by a Mayor. The implication is clear that these sites provide for the larger ones which while deep-reaching, seem to have virtually no farms, only space to store goods, house people, and a market for people to come to buy, sell, and trade. Eventually these places may also have libraries/academies, and will have taverns next release. Reclaiming a worldgen fort will reveal massive numbers of small apartments for the rank and file alongside spacious rooms meant to store goods or possibly house the upper nobles and their family. They don't, in fact, have farms, and generally have much more soldiers than a hillock will in a healthy civ.
Starting out, your dwarves are living no better than hilldwarves, in little holes in the ground or small huts. No law, no place to drink, and unless you brought a trained soldier with you, literally no protection besides a hatch, door, or maybe a dry moat.
I have very rarely if ever, encountered "upper" nobles in hillocks of
healthy civs. I'm sure some may reside out there as well, either because they gained the title from deceased family, or because their civ is taking a beating. I'm fairly sure hillocks are meant to have lesser admins though, particularly the hammerer and a local sheriff, rather than a guard captain - the Fortress Guard is just that, the
FORTRESS guard. They're meant to enforce law and order in large population centers, not the little towns. The local sheriff can handle that. Granted that they don't appear to be implemented right now, otherwise hillocks and similar places would have a dedicated "jail mound," operated by the local sheriff.
Speaking of which, a jailbreak would be an interesting way to take over a site.
I do not know where you get your statistics for the 'typical player' from though
There are none. Most players seem to settle as far away from the home civ as they can, to maximize the chances of enemies coming to them rather than attacking random hillock 18 for the 10th time in a row. Players want to fight things, not be left sticking their thumb up their asses with nothing to use all their complicated goblin grinders on besides giant badgers and elf merchants. If you settle near other dwarf sites, then chances are they will be prioritized over you. This makes sense if you look at it like they're meant to be supporting the fortresses - cut off its food supply and source of recruits.
Other players have complained about this, I have complained about this (and even made a suggestion to try and counter this idleness for player controlled sites,) and the only solution I've been able to find are to ramp up the number of hostile races, and settle as far away as you can while still having some trade partners. Otherwise all you'll hear is how buttfuck nowhere hillocks x,y, and z got pillaged and people ran away from the goblins because there were few/no soldiers to protect them. And even then, the hostiles civs may prioritize killing eachother off over attacking the intended target: Us.
Hmm. I wonder who was supposed to make sure the outlying towns were protected besides the General? The local noble perhaps?
Because nothing can be accomplished until you understand what Feudalism actually means, what I am describing is Feudalism at it's simplest and most sandbox level.
I do understand what feudalism is. King grants lands to vassals who swear fealty to the king, who in turn grant land to those below them and so on. Unless there's a major threat however, a local lord is expected to be able to enforce the law, collect due tax, and defend his land without the lords above him holding his hand. If you can't protect your lands, fail to answer your liege' call to arms, or pay what tax you may be expected to pay, you might be stripped of your land so someone more suitable may govern it instead. You are otherwise left to your own devices.
At present, all fealty goes to the Monarch only, as he/she is the one who grants land to a dwarf, with the Count, Duke, and Baron being ranks based on importance/productivity of the settlement, rather than Dukes appointing Counts, and Counts appointing Barons. Right now, admittedly, the game more closely resembles a confederacy of autonomous locations though, with nobles acting more like annoying appointed governors, as the civ as a whole only shares a common currency and manpower in times of war right now.
This last bit about being removed is obviously going to be limited to having a new one assigned at random migrate in to replace the dead one if there's no available heir. Since incompetent nobles often end up dead nobles in player-controlled sites.
That there is no local population is why at the present the game CANNOT represent Feudalism,
Not until the game is further developed to allow new hillocks to be built near your own forts (at present they will not ever build them nearby your forts as far as I can tell, only world-gen ones.)
I am not talking about settlements, I am talking about PEASANTS. You cannot have Feudalism without peasants, it is just not possible; since there are no peasants.
Because barring scenarios, there never will be until after the fortress is established. You are the local stronghold, the local bastion of the government's influence around which other dwarves settle.
Unless peasants in the middle ages just lived in grass spread about like free-range children, they lived in settlements. For the dwarves, this means the hillocks. At present, nobody besides kobolds, tribals, and bandits live like that. Everyone else lives in their lesser or major sites/settlements, with houses/mounds/holes in the ground of varying sizes housing the populous, at least for the sane people who aren't racist against those of us who don't know how to climb.
The "dwarf caves" are tiny little indentations into the ground where the dwarf equivalent of peasants live, there would be at most 10 or so dwarves living in them. In the hypothetical Feudal DF that Toady One could have initially made but did not these peasants produce the goods without player involvement that the player, without getting his hands dirty with actual work collects to support his dwarves. These peasants do not belong to sites, they are just there (a lot like animal people) and are essentially defenseless should a single squad of goblins or come along to torment them. When you turn up they join your site 'in a manner of speaking' but are still beyond your control in their labours and you only really see them as a source of resources for your real dwarves (who are mostly soldiers).
Dwarves do not, even in the major fortresses, live in "caves" as you call them. They either live in little communal mounds/pits in the ground out in the smaller settlements, or in apartments big enough for a dwarf or two. Humans live much the same, though sharing houses of various sizes instead, as I'm sure you've observed.
Your fortress is mainly home to soldiers and craftsmen. Seriously. how many players have fortress composed of simple farmers? My guess is most don't. You have woodworkers, engravers, masons, craftsmen of all kinds, smiths, and soldiers, with a small number of farmers making use of the game's currently broken and unfinished farming system.
Right now you can only provide such ample supplies of food and drink without much help, is due to a combination fo fruit trees (if you don't clear cut them,) and farming/cooking being hideously broken. Or if you must say "It's supposed to be like this!" then these are broken as a convenience to the player, and that's something I can accept until the game is further developed.
Right now, the peasants are indeed just sitting there tending their fields and twiddling their thumbs because much of the needed code is not in place and never was, because these were too far off to really worry about yet since Fortress mode is always at the forefront over all else in the game. I'll address this more further down.
You cannot make confident pronouncements about how DF Society is based upon nothing but your guesses as to how it will be in the future. Nor for that matter can you do so based upon how it was in the past.
Yes but you should keep this seperate from making grand prenouncements about the nature of dwarf society
Actually I'm allowed to do so precisely because of that. I may be totally off the mark, but I';m still allowed to claim what direction I personally think the game is heading in, based on past, present, and possible future content. You too, are free to do so. That's why this argument is even in progress because you have your own ideas of where the game is going, though based more strictly on what is
presently in place and actively part of the game while you play, as opposed to everything.
I personally find it somewhat short-sighted, but it's still completely understandable. Likewise I may be looking much too far ahead for my own good, but I also have understandable reasons for that. And I would like to say, I don't make these statements from a position of arrogcane of anything.
It's a bitch trying to maintain a level of composure during discussions like this because I'm generally a very angry person when I see poor planning or what I perceive to be an error in thinking that someone is trying to impress on others, or I feel I'm being talked down to.
Granted, on the second point, I'm doing much the same thing and it's shameful but we as humans in the real world, are prone to doing such stupid things.
The function of barons is presently somewhat of a mystery. However we can tell something about what barons do based upon the texts in the game. Having a baron has something to do with "integration into the realm", the exact words for rejecting a baron are.
"We would rather keep our distance from the homeland."
A baron is basically your settlements representative to the central government and conversely it's representative in your fortress. If you have a baron you have more say in what the central government does but also less autonomy from the central government's decisions. A DF baron, unlike a Feudal one is something that a settlement voluntarily accepts or rejects and not something imposed on it from above by royal decree.
Based upon this I would say the baron's eventual function would be to allow us to influence the decisions of the central government our our civ.
It's no mystery, they're intended to be a local leader, making the major decisions for the area, while the mayor takes care of hearing the common rabble and passing up anything important to them and governing in the Baron+'s absence.
By that logic, without a noble, you have next to no say in the goings on of the civ and conversely, they have no say (or obligation) to you. The Liaison specifically says they have arrived empowered to elevate your colony as an official part of the realm. Without that, we might not be allowed to raise an army of our own to go fight stuff nearby, we'd still be dependent on imports from price-gouging merchants, and nobody may want to settle nearby because for all intents and purposes, your fort is just some backwater outpost nobody else but you cares about.
Attaining the levels of prosperity needed to warrant such a thing is meant to be treated as a reward, and later on, it will be reflected as such. Otherwise they never should have been included at all, since Mayors can otherwise do the same shit but on a local level rather than influencing the whole area around the fort.
Now, how much "lording over others" you do, may be the area you're left to pick for yourself, as an additional screen may be added at a critical mass of hildwarves allowing you to set taxation, conscription, and whatever else and letting the hillocks' mayors carry out your orders.
I cannot think of a way to say this without boasting but: understand that I have a considerable knowledge of the mechanics that I am talking about from having extensively play-tested my mod.
First, good on ya for making sure your stuff worked. Second off, none of us know shit about the mechanics on shit unless we can understand the code. Which few do. I'm not one of them. They may not be intended to trade with just anyone, and that's just how it is now and might be changed later.
The only sense to which hillocks are presently subordinate to Fortresses is that the latter are markets. Market is not a question of that *having* markets in them, it is type of settlement that is what you call 'major settlements' actually are. There are at present no political mechanics in the game at all that subordinate hillocks to fortresses and the commercial relationships are totally seperate to the political one's. The only reason that hillocks tend to trade with fortresses is solely because they are generally close together.
That's still a dependency. And the reason they tend to trade with Fortresses, is because they are closer, yes. Because they belong to that civ, they will naturally be closer to a fortress than a market town or dark fortress usually.
As the game gets more complex, we could very well see reports from liaisons to the effect of hillocks suffering some kind of punishment for trading with an enemy of the civ, and those that spring up near your own forts will eventually be obligated to raise troops when you want to go a conquering, though you'll probably be the one to equip them (I'd prefer we be the one to equip them anyway - world-gen troops tend to use the worst ever shit otherwise.)
The 'arrogance' is due to the way you tried to argue with what I was saying based upon what is concretely the case at the moment with your guesses as to how the game might be in the future; you asserted guesses to argue with facts.
But that doesn't mean it won't be implemented when a suitable means is there, which at present it isn't, but is getting closer than it was back in the olden times of 2D or early 3D. And you sir, likewise, have been coming off as needlessly aggressive over the interpretation of a video game. I'm not helping and I know it, but I'm too proud a chucklefuck to back down when I have sufficient reason for why I'm making these assumptions and assertions.
Right now, we as players cannot send out someone to collect due taxes, raise troops to deal with local bandits or whack the local goblins in the dick, enact mandates regarding infrastructure, or hell, even just go and fetch something. We have the active world, and groups moving about it, but we do not yet have the means to make those things happen ourselves. But we will eventually, by Toady's own admission. But ultimately, our focus is on our fortress.
Not because that's not the way the political structure is, but because we simply can't because the needed programming doesn't currently exist. This goes a long way to explain why the dirty hill people and small villages don't have many soldiers protecting them from bandits, if they have any at all. Like us, they simply can't call for help from the local fortress or less endangered towns yet. Using the Count example at the top, they should logically leave your fortress since it isn't their holding, but they don't, because right now they literally can't.
A consequence down the line of not sending troops to help surrounding communities could feasibly be vastly reduced food and drink imports or a horde of refugees you have to put up with for example. because you, as the nearest Fortress, failed to protect them as you were expected to.
I know I didn't cover everything, but I've covered enough. This argument is going to continue until one of us takes our ball and fucks off, and as infuriated over this whole debacle as I am, I'm not likely to back down.
Also, Ribs is choosing mockery for the precise fact that you're arguing somewhat more aggressively than I am. Personally, I'm about ready to make a little comic with two dudes labeled GoblinCookie and Splint beating the shit out of eachother with signs and telling eachother to eat a dick and reinitiate the sign-fight when one doesn't concede.
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Topic: Alternative Dwarven Economy: Revolts, Schools, Taxes, and Industry. (Long) (Read 24884 times)