I'd think toady doesn't really intend to make it a soviet simulator. Plus, what does the title "Peasant" imply anyway? Someone who can only perform menial work until he acquires more useful skills. The lazy nobles feature was removed as a bug, wasn't it? And did toady ever state "Nobles are no longer lazy because [reason]."
While the fortresses may not "own" the filthy hillocks, it doesn't really matter. We still see a significant difference in quality of life here, and that's the point here.
Its pretty clear that some wealth variation is going to occur. and if shops are a fortress thing (Which they were, and ARE in adventure mode.) Shop keepers can probably get some significant cash if they make the right decisions.
Also, regarding the "Better Craftsmen/ harder workers get paid more." If craftsmen ever sell anything, to shops at a reduced price or directly at full, Their skills and hard work RESULT in more cash, rather than simply getting arbitrarily paid more because "they work harder and have skills".
Of course, I'm not so sure about everyone getting a salary anyway, since we'd have some craftsmen and merchants working at their own will, by the looks of it. It'd make sense for dwarves that work for the government (you, Like the bone carver who carves YOUR bolts) to get paid from fortress coffers, perhaps by a salary or per product. (Therleth, lets see, you made $3,000 worth of government goods in the last month, here's your 30%.)
*Raises shield for bashing by GoblinCookie.
Put down your shield, I do not intend to bash anyone
, strangely enough I actually agree with several of your points.
Toady One did not intend to make a Soviet simulator, we can tell that from the stories of Threetoes back from the year 0; these frequently depict rather nasty and rather unequal societies. The reason that DF is presently 94% Communist, 1% Capitalist and 5% Feudal is mostly because a system needs 'bricks' and Toady One like a lot of people only understood the house of Feudalism but not the bricks of it. So he threw down a load of Communist bricks and then attempted to build out of them what we have taken to calling the Economy and chucked in a few nobles called Feudal sounding names. The Economy broke down and the nobles fitted rather nicely into a role that resembles more the ruling families of North Korea than actual Feudal nobles.
The title peasant merely designates a dwarf that has no skills that have a named profession, the name a dwarf has carries no attached mechanics but is simply a cosmetic thing. Lazy nobles do not make sense at the moment and I am glad they are gone because under the present setup dwarves work based upon their intrinsic motivation to do so, much like Toady and Threetoes themselves rather than in return for definite payment. Why would a hard-working dwarf suddenly lose his motivation to work just because he got made mayor and why would his publically visible idleness not demotivate the other dwarves?
The existance of shops in human towns does not prove that they are privately owned, indeed the fact they never go out of buisness suggests otherwise. They were probably just assigned to mind them by the lord or lady in charge of the town, much in the same way that taverns are going to be in the next release. As for the rest of your ideas, they are really far from original and rather amount to simply declaring how things mostly work in the real world (because if they always did there would be no DF) and then declaring that Dwarf Fortress should work just like reality. I would rather that we had a variety of social arrangements for our civilization that are possible as a result of proceedural generation rather than everything always being Way X.
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.
It is not the local fortress, it is the capital city of the civilization is destroyed along with the king; that it is a fortress is an accidental consequence of the fact that the first dwarf settlement built is always a fortress AND the capital. A new capital city is created which happens to be hillocks and it continues to be a hillocks forever and even when there are bucketload of fortresses about none of them become capital. Rather than simply accept that there is no mechanic in place by which fortresses rule over hillocks, you declare there be a bug!
A bug is not something that Splint does not happen to like! A bug is when a mechanic that is in the game does not work, in this case the fact that the hillocks can be the capital of a civilization is not a bug precisely because there are no mechanics in the game by which fortresses rule over hillocks in order to be bugged!
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.
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.
Which is going to be Splint?
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.
Firstly hillocks are not 'little', the population of a fully grown hillocks or mountain halls is usually around 250 dwarves while a fully grown fortress usually has a population of 500 or so. Hillocks and mountain halls usually vastly outnumber fortresses in total number as well. The vast majority of barons (not the minority) in any large and successful dwarf civilization are found in hillocks or mountain halls, with a strong bias towards the latter; however the majority of hillocks or mountain halls still have no baron. Higher level nobles are rarely seen and when seen he is usually in the capital which is normally a fortress.
Nobility tends to spread through the existing settlements, centring on the capital. Mountain halls tend to be more likely to have barons because they are closer together both to other mountain halls and to the capital. Hillocks tend to be more spread out, those closest to the capital will tend to have the barons, those further away no so much. Secondary Fortresses tend to have barons but this is explained by their central location in relation to a large number of other dwarf settlements, so a high chance of 'catching' nobility, but since fortresses are few in number the majority of barons are found in other types of settlement.
I would not invest too much value in what is or is not visibly present in generated settlements. They are really best seen as thematic placeholders as all of them, including the fortresses would not actually function in the more detailed fortress mode.
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?
Hillocks and mountain halls have their own militia commanders, the 'outlying towns' do not therefore need protecting against regular everyday threats. Major threats will be dealt with by the general of course.
I do not settle on the other side of the map to look for enemies. I tend instead to choose civilizations that have nearby enemies to play and position myself at what looks to me like a 'strategic' location along the border but only if there are no nearby market settlements. Basically I roleplay the thinking of the monarch in charge of my civilization, taking into account the kind of colonisation behavior that we see during world-gen. I do not particularly care if there is nothing to fight, it gives me more time to build up my settlement and combat mechanics suck at the moment anyway.
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.
Not exactly, you understand how one particular type of historical Feudalism (the medieval European one) is organised. To use my bricks and houses analogy, you know how the house is put together but have a poor grasp of what the bricks that make up the house actually are. Those bricks are Feudal, irrespective of whether the Feudal house which can indeed be as you describe also exists; the problem with DF being Feudal is that there are no suitable bricks for such a society.
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.)
Yes hillocks have to be built by someone. Allowing you to do the building has no bearing on anything I have said, since somebody had to build them anyway.
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.
We are not talking about the middle ages, we are actually talking about ?000 BC when Feudalism was first established. But yes, in the middle ages the settlements the peasants live in are small and there is little or no government OF the peasants existing in a large area. Feudalism sustains itself because the peasants live in small, essentially defenseless villages with little in the way of functioning self-government and THAT is what makes them both dependant upon as well as poorly able to rebel against the local lord.
It was when large productive settlements starting to appear that were ruled by representatives of the common people, settlements that rival the Feudal lords own military settlements that Feudalism begins to fall apart. Hillocks are far too powerful, both because they have their own militias and because they are far too large, they cannot be reduced to the level of peasants. Fortresses are also far too self-sufficiant to even have a strong motive to establish Feudal relationships with Hillocks in the first place. That is because for such relationships to be sustained the hillocks need to be kept militarily weak so that it can be forced to hand over tribute to the fortress BUT the fortress is mainly going be interested in militarising the hillocks to get the maximum number of soldiers.
That is basically the relationship between hillock and fortress quickly becomes the kind of relationship that exists between a Duke and a Baron in Feudalism (military service). But there are no peasants anywhere to be seen and without any peasants there is no Feudalism and we are still living in Communism; just one that now has a set of central military commands centred on Fortresses. More centralised yes, but no less Communist; because there is still no class division between lords and peasants.
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.
Of course Splint, that is entirely the problem, they don't! I am talking about what Toady One would have to have done is he wanted to initially make his game actually Feudal, Dwarf caves are part of the hypothetical Feudal DF that isn't.
Dwarf caves would be tiny mini-sites that are scattered about the map that your fortress is built on, they usually have a population of around 10 dwarves and no nobles. They autonomously produce everything for you and you collect it as taxes, your own group of dwarves does not grow or make anything but collects everything it needs from the peasants. Your own core group of dwarves only ever work on military, government and service related occupations (they grow or make nothing), if all the peasants on the map were all to leave then they would all starve to death.
This is not the game we are playing and the reason we are not playing it is because DF is not in any way Feudal. The whole point of this excercise is to show you what a genuinely Feudal DF would look like and how the basic game mechanics are anything but. Large amounts of the game as we know it would have to be CHUCKED OUT in order for us to have Feudalism.
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.
I do not have any ideas for where the game is going, I have never been putting forward any ideas, solely criticising other people's ideas about the supposed nature of DF society. I am entirely focused upon what is actually the case now in 2015 not what it might be in 2030. Basically I am pointing out that the present game society is not in any way Feudal and the game will never be Feudal any time soon.
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.
No they are not. The only position in the local administration that the baron appoints is the champion and like the baron I have yet to figure out what a champion actually does, apparantly he 'raises morale' or somesuch.
The people who matter in the settlement are all apointed by the mayor, they do not answer to the baron at all. Therefore the defense, law enforcement, economy and hospitals of the fortress are all ultimately controlled by an elected representative of the people not the 'landed aristocracy'. Within the fortress the baron has little power, which implies his role must lie outside of the fortress. The baron is actually not listed as a site noble but as a civ one, which implies that his role is actually at the central government level.
Barons being there to lord it over hillocks does not make sense because hillocks are allowed to have barons themselves; also because not having a baron means your settlement is more independant not less. The idea of the baron as your settlements representative at the central government level makes a lot of sense.
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.)
Yes, I expect that Toady One will allow us to trade with local hillocks and mountain halls that qualify to trade with us, hopefully at the same time we will start to trade with other markets rather than with civilizations as a whole. We would presumably also be able to trade with minor elf forest retreats, dark pits and hamlets that qualify to trade with us as well. At the moment there is an inconsistancy between World-Gen and Fortress Mode in that regard.
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.
I do not really know what to say here, except that you make keep referencing to heirachies and imbalances that are not part of the game at the moment and part of me likes it that way.
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Topic: Alternative Dwarven Economy: Revolts, Schools, Taxes, and Industry. (Long) (Read 24539 times)