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[GoblinCookie]

quick question:

WHY is Feudalism important in the concept of economy? Other than taxation from off site spots, rather than local dwarves, should you own areas.

Because Feudalism *is* a kind of economy.  In Feudalism there are a class of peasants (this includes small craftsmen not just farmers) that usually live in small villages, growing food and making stuff and there is a ruling class of lords that is seperate from them that usually lives in fortified enclaves of some kind, focusing upon government and militery matters; the two groups are symbiotic although the lords are privilaged over peasants.  The key element that Ribs&Splint cannot seem to grasp are the following two points which is also why DF is not in any sense Feudal nor cannot be unless the whole game was fundermentally overhauled, these are that in Feudalism.

1.  The peasants do not have military and government institutions of their own. 

2.  The lords do not personally produce food and goods in sufficiant quantity to sustain themselves and so depend on taxing the peasants to exist.

Recall that I have *not* mentioned stuff that most people think about when the word Feudalism is mentioned, stuff like Kings, Barons, Knights and Vassals because those are ranks or grades within the latter class, the lords.  Everyone in the vassal chain from the King down to the Squire all collectively belong to the lord class irrespective of whether they personally happen to be particularly wealthy or powerful.  The only exception is those right at the bottom of the chain, the peasants who are actually of a different class, because unlike the higher grades they actually produce things as opposed to simply serving the government & military institutions.  Without their work all the lords would starve, whether they be Squires or Kings and taxation of the peasants is not a choice for those people but a survival necessity. 

The key thing here is that that the 'feudal heirachy' is the form that a particular type of Feudalism takes, it is not the substance of what Feudalism actually *is*; as an analogy it is the form of the house rather than the bricks the house is actually made of.  If you took a different sort of society, that is the present DF Communism and forced it into a Feudal heirachy where higher settlements with leaders called Barons tax and rule over lower settlements then you would end up not with Feudalism but with a Communist government with a heirachy of beurocratic leaders that happen to be called Feudal sounding names.

It is like you were trying to build a marble house and you made it out of clay bricks instead, the result is a house but it is not a marble house.  It is a heirachy but it is not a *Feudal* heirachy because the content of the heirachy is not Feudal institutions focused on taxing and ruling over peasants but instead of largely egalitarian communal entities based upon central planning and meeting collective needs.  It is like if North Korea's 'dear leader' suddenly decided to crown himself King, nothing about this gesture would suddenly make North Korea back into a Feudal society but people who did not know better might be decieved into thinking that it was one.  In other words it is as Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/305250.html

Something is what it it is not what it called.

For christ's sake, man. You "can be a baron over your barony of hill dwarves". If you don't see that as a lord-vassal/tributary relationship,  I don't know what to tell ya. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Also, your whole argument (that you're still holding) against Splint was that the Hillocks were no less important than the Fortress, and that stating that they were was a delusion on his part. He says that the developer's comments over the years strongly suggest otherwise and you say that's not enough. I quote the developer himself stating that the hillocks are, in fact, less central to dwarven civs than fortresses, and you plow through that bit of information like it's pointless to the conversation.

Then you don't understand why I started to make fun of your arguments.

You could call that relationship a lord/vassal relationship or we could call it a provincial governor-province relationship or we could call it a city-town relationship or just a fortress-hillocks relationship.  Basically what you have created is something BETWEEN the hillock and the central government; you could call the middle-man ruler a duke or you could equally call him a province governor or anything else you feel like. 

Is the USA Feudal because there is something between the local County government and the Federal government, namely a State government?

You made fun because making fun is always easier than actually trying to understand what other people are saying and calmly asking them to clarify.  For instance I never said that fortresses were not more important that hillocks, I said that they were not politically more important but they were economically so since they are classified as markets.  I actually laid out the mechanics by which they are (economically) more important but also pointed out that these economic relations are totally seperate at the moment from political ones. 

Thus Toady and I are actually in agreement that fortresses are more important than hillocks. 

I never said "I don't like this, therefore bug." What I said was, you could end up with the Count of Somesuch in So-and-So, and right now there is no way for this guy to leave and take his rightful place in Somesuch. Because he is not your fortress/whatever's leader, he would logically depart to rule his own site, but as of right now, neither he nor anyone else can leave, ever, if they're under player control. Unless you count being shoved in a stone box or magma as leaving. This will eventually change when we can send people out.

That makes it a bug, which has yet to be fixed. We should not have two nobles besides local ruler and monarch (I don't count the admins and Mayor as nobles.) And the random fuckhead who got his post because his mom died shouldn't get promoted because the local one did (which also happens. If your count gets promoted, so do any others that happen to be in your fort.)

You do not like the fact that presently there is no neccesery correlation between fortresses and positions of nobility.  Therefore, since you insist that there must be some inherant mechanical connection in the game between fortresses and nobility, the existance of nobles anywhere else must be a bug.  You do not like it, therefore it is obviously a bug in the game, this is what seems to be implied by your reasoning.

There is also no bug in the fact that dwarves cannot leave the player fortress, it is simply a feature that has not yet been implemented in Fortess Mode but has been implemented outside of it.  Similarly the absence of traders from the nearby hillocks, mountain halls, elven retreats and dark pits is not a bug either, even though outside of Fortress Mode they would be trading with your fortress. 

Also this:
What does this even mean?? Just because DF has a "feudal" organization, it doesn't mean "large amounts of the game would have to be chucked out". I don't even know where did you get this notion from.

You said before that "if DF had a more feudal system going, the game would center around war and conquests and things like that". I reveal to you that that is exactly the creator's intentions, and the whole army arc is going to be made exactly to support this. What do we lose when this comes through? Nothing.

Just because nobles and the military become more important, it doesn't mean the more domestic aspects of fortress mode would be loss. You'd still be able to set up farms, rooms, industries inside your fort. You'd just have the possibility to care more about other sites outside your immediate domain. What's so horrible about that possibility?

1.  The peasants do not have military and government institutions of their own. 

2.  The lords do not personally produce food and goods in sufficiant quantity to sustain themselves and so depend on taxing the peasants to exist.

If our dwarves are intended to be a Feudal noble class ruling over and taxing the hill dwarves then we must chuck out the whole player directed productive elements of the game.  Production will still happen but it will be done autonomously by the AI hill dwarves, our input as the noble class is limited to laying down basic infrastructure and extracting a portion of the total product for ourselves.

Since at present hillocks have military and goverment institutions of their own and fortresses are productive institutions that are quite capable of existing without any hillocks around, there is no class division between hill dwarves and fortress dwarves.  This means that any subordination of the former to the latter does not provide the basis for a Feudal system, since neither party are taking the role of peasant or noble. 

The mechanic in question is thus more an administrative/military centralisation focused on your fortress rather than a class division, whether it involves individuals called baron or duke or not. 

That would be ridiculous. I don't know where did he get that idea from. Just because you can order troops around and conquer other sites doesn't mean you won't also be able to still handle your local matters like always.

The game won't turn into Medieval Total War or Crusader Kings just because your barony can form an army from the surrounding population.

Indeed it will not and that is actually my argument not yours.  Medieval Total War and Crusader Kings are examples of Feudal logics in action, the noble people in charge which are represented by the player do not concern themselves in detail with the production of things, only with the construction of infrastructure to support the economic efforts of the common people because that means they get more tax revenue from them in the long run.  Instead they intimately concern themselves with the details of warfare and politics, because that is what Feudal nobles do.  Two quotes from earlier in this post that are particularly relevant again.

the two groups are symbiotic although the lords are privilaged over peasants

taxation of the peasants is not a choice for those people but a survival necessity.

The relationship between a hillocks and a fortress is not a symbiotic one.  The former has the ability to raise a militia to defend itself against attack, it also has a mayor, a sheriff, potentially a baron, all in an administration centred on a purple (on the travel map) government mound, while the latter is able to grow crops for itself and produce all manner of nice items of the non-edible variety too.  It might well be possible for the hillocks government and military to be subordinated by a political system to the fortress but it could equally be the other way around.  There is a reason why our fortress could quite feasibly be ruled from the government mound of a hillocks and that is because there is no Feudalism going on. 

In Feudalism there *is* no "could be the other way around".  That is because the peasants by the very nature of their class have little or no government or military organisation of their own, unless they are rebelling in which case the creation such an organisation is the rebellion's main challenge (and why it is such a threat to Feudalism).  It was only once the non-nobles started to gather into large scale collective institutions with their own governments, that is when large primarily commercial and industrial cities start to form (not rentier, military or service cities as they depend upon feudal lord-peasant relations), that the millenia long reign of Feudalism finally started to fall apart.  That is because the symbiosis between lord and peasant ceases to exist in the arrangement, the lords have now got nothing at all to offer the new cities in return for them handing over their wealth. 

To return to the subject of DF, by having a Feudal system where hill dwarves are the peasants we would be building a Feudal system solely based upon the kind of setup that we know ends Feudalism in the real world.  The only way to mantain that arrangement is for the fortresses to disarm all the hillocks and essentially subject them to a military occupation, but here the snag; the fortress being self-sufficient does not actually need the hillocks to pay it taxes in order to survive but it does want to increase the size of it's military forces.  Disarming the hill dwarves in order to ensure they cannot avoid paying tribute drains the fortresses manpower, which is far more valuable than whatever goods the hillocks is providing the fortress through taxes; which as an economic centre the fortress could simply buy off them anyway for bargain prices.  It drains manpower both because the disarmed hill dwarves cannot be called upon to bolster the fortress's forces and because the now defenseless hillocks need troops from the fortress to protect them. 

That is why when I proposed the idea for an actually Feudal DF setup, it was something that involved "dwarf caves", these are little indentations in the ground (yes incidentally very similar to hillock mounds) that house about a dozen dwarves in them at max, appear in low savagery dwarf-friendly terrain and are not part of any site in world generation; they take the role of peasant villages for humans.  They would exist on the map prior to your arrival and as your own fortress is built right on top of them, you simply demand that they provide you with some of the stuff that they autonomously produce with no player input at all.  If you do not demand stuff from them your own dwarves will starve to death, because they utterly will not get their hands dirty doing 'peasant stuff' and they would not know how to do it even if they did want to.  The villages have a happiness level, they are unhappy about being subjected to any kind of violence by anyone, they are unhappy about being charged taxes or having members conscripted but they are happy about being built amenities like roads or bridges that allow them to trade with eachother and interact. 

If peasant villages are unhappy then they will abandon their villages and leave the map while if the average happiness of all peasant villages is high then groups of new peasants will arrive to set up new villages or occupy abandoned ones, subtracting from the peasant population of the nearby biome that they come from.  Eventually you would have well basically a whole hillocks of dwarf caves surrounding your core fortress where your own dwarves live off the backs of the peasants, producing nothing themselves but concerning themselves solely with military, service jobs and government stuff.  Additionally the same system could be used to handle animal people, their camps function as villages in the sense above except that they appear in savage biomes rather than calm ones obviously. 

[Alfrodo]

So. What does this mean in fortress?  Would you be getting tribute from local villages if you have a Baron, Count, King or Duchess?

What if you don't have any Hillocks?  Didn't your baron tax the townsfolk anyway? Would it apply to the entirety of the Society if you have a king? (Recall the offer to king option in trade)

[Splint]

So. What does this mean in fortress?  Would you be getting tribute from local villages if you have a Baron, Count, King or Duchess?

What if you don't have any Hillocks?  Didn't your baron tax the townsfolk anyway? Would it apply to the entirety of the Society if you have a king? (Recall the offer to king option in trade)

That is what appears to be the case, according to the dev stuff.

In the old Economy, the nobles indeed taxed the living shit out of even the in-fortress people. From what I can tell the king took their share as well when on-site.

[GoblinCookie]

So. What does this mean in fortress?  Would you be getting tribute from local villages if you have a Baron, Count, King or Duchess?

What if you don't have any Hillocks?  Didn't your baron tax the townsfolk anyway? Would it apply to the entirety of the Society if you have a king? (Recall the offer to king option in trade)

'Villages' are not things that exist in the game, they are a number of abstract points that exist on all map squares irrespective of whether they actually have any peasants living in them to tax.  You do not interact with them, they have no existence in world-gen at all.

Instead there are number of dwellings that actually exist, all placed around the village 'point'; these dwelling contain peasants.  No historical characters created in World-Gen live among them, all such characters are created only in sites. 

As already mentioned in length, we cannot realistically have a properly functioning system of land ownership/feudalism for our nobles or for us while we operate under a setup that is essentially 'urban islands in the wilderness'.  In order for land to be owned land must be represented as a thing and in order for said land to have any value there must be people in the land producing things. 

We start off by politically dividing the world map up between the civilizations that exist in the game.  We do that by having all the sites that exist expand the political area of control of their civilization into the surrounding unowned squares, until all the squares on the map are owned.  Territory political ownership adjusts whenever a square is closer to the site of another civilization than it is to it's present owner.

A number of peasants exists in a square.  Based upon the number of peasants that presently live in the square world-gen places the correct number of dwellings, distributed between the square's 'villages'.  Then when the site is actually encountered by the player there will be the correct number of peasants in the area for the number that there is supposed to be in the area.

The abstract peasant population is placed in squares owned by a civilization according to a population growth formula, provided that the terrain in question is suitable for them.  Savagery and hostile sites like bandit camps or towers reduce population growth, if it is not above 0 then a peasant population will never appear.

You can tax peasant dwellings directly if they happen to exist on your map, it is not needed to have a baron in order to do this.  However outside of a feudal starting scenario it is actually often wise not to tax them because if their happiness reaches maximum they will ask to join your site as fully controllable dwarves. 

You can only tax peasant dwellings off map if you have a baron or above.  If you have a baron and nobody else owns the land on the square that your fortress is built on then just having a baron will give you ownership of the land on the square.  Beyond that you have to get the king to grant you ownership of a particular square that is adjacent your own holdings and under the political control of your civilization.

Your dealings with off-site peasants are abstracted, you send at least one tax collector appointed by the baron or above off map off-map with a pack animal, cart or wagon to gather a fixed value of items that the peasants on that square owe you in tax.  In return the peasants of a given square will sometimes ask things of you, like with peasant dwellings on your map if you do not keep the peasants in an area happy they will begin to migrate to happier squares.

[Splint]

Stop. Please stop. First, you seem awfully sure of how it's going to work. Sound familiar?

In addition, since a Military Dictatorship operating on fear and indoctrination is nothing like a system based on voluntary fealty (where in the lesser nobles could feasibly kill the King or otherwise bully him into being more in-line with their collective wishes,) North Korea is a terrible example to use, as the there is no landed nobility unless one counts the military officers, and the military, headed by the Chairman, has an overwhelming monopoly on the ability to deliver violence on others in addition to a secret police to remove dissidents. Serfdom granted can be a factor in keeping people in the peasant class (I'm lumping all commoners together when I use that term,) it wasn't always the case - There were likely many a peasant village where people were free to go where they wished - if they thought they could survive the trip to where they wanted to go, which back then was easier said than done, and even then the next town or village may belong to the same lord, so it didn't matter anyway.

You brought up the US before as well as a flawed example as well. Technically, the US is a Federal Republic (with a bureaucratic chain of command and so many departments responsible for so much crap that is so overwhelmingly immense and complicated a feudal system looks positively tame in comparison.) But the US has government institutions beyond a Mayor (local leader,) Noble ("county"/state-level leader,) Monarch (Civ leader,) and Army (protects the civ as a whole.) It has: Supreme Court, Legislative branches on both state and federal level, Federal-level law enforcement in addition to local police forces, and a military able to project force beyond it's borders virtually wherever it pleases, in contrast to the State National Guard units which can't do very much outside their own states without support from other states or the Federal Government and local militia groups with no ability to operate outside the immediate surroundings of their towns and cities.

And is still at the mercy of whoever has the most money or yells loudest, undermining the "Republic" part to an extent. Even state governors have to fight with local legislatures to get anything done half the time, if not more. Feudal lords meanwhile can basically decide on things however they wish, though they'll usually have people who actually know shit to advise them on how to approach things. Discussion of these two places is a for places other than this board, nevermind this thread.

You also keep using a "bricks and houses" analogy, which doesn't take into account what's available. If you wanna make a marble house but all you have is clay, tough shit. You either have to find some Marble or you're stuck with clay. In this case the marble is the code and the clay is what's readily available. The code for virtually everything being argued and discussed over is either not there (relations between other sites besides "these exist and  we'll bore you to death with changes in mayors and hillocks being sacked every fall,") not fully there (the ability for your units to leave the fortress - they can do so, but only when you aren't actively in control right now,) didn't quite work out as well as intended (economy,) or nowhere close to even being laid out yet beyond a few token functions (commerce and trade overhauls, armies, etc.)

No, you can't build a feudal marble house from communist clay. But you can make a crude mock-up the eventual model for the house from that clay to help you remember where you wanna put what, and use that until you can find (or more, fully implement/add the code for,) feudal marble or whatever the fuck to start really building with. You also can't make a house from just clay or marble. You need a foundation, supports, flooring, roofing, glass or shutters for windows, doors, furniture, nails screws, and pegs to hold all that shit together. Right now one could say we have the supports (moving groups,) flooring (other sites and an active world,) and a foundation made of some highly common stone (the current represented "hierarchy" of nobles.) We need the rest before we can even hope to start putting a damn thing up, but at least we have our model to remind us where we might wanna put stuff and let us play around with the layout and such until we can get the rest of the stuff we need.

Much of the things you're arguing for are only how they presently are, not how they may eventually be, based on what is/was here. I keep saying this because Ribs pulled up quotes from the dev himself which were more elaborated-upon versions of that sentiment.

For example, we won't always be able to grow a mountain of plump helmets to sustain ourselves from a single room full of dry (and not good for growing a fucking thing,) sand, but a major farming overhaul isn't a priority right now. We won't always be able to subsist on cooked meals that magically last for years and years so long as you cram them in a room underground, but a major cooking overhaul isn't a big priority right now (although something getting one off the ground is coming with the recipe system mentioned in the devlogs.)

We'll eventually have to devote a great deal of space and manpower to agriculture just to sustain the fort, or alternatively, we can get our food in-part from the hillocks (either by trade or taxation if any have been built since you arrived, which I will add, are not presently built while you play as far as I know.)

Along with this, right now hillocks and other lesser sites have only token garrisons protecting them right now (presumably, these are the town's militia,) and combined with frankly terrible training - on average, world-gen troops have Competent skills (3.) Not many players that I talk to will usually chance sending troops out with that level of skill unless they really think they can win, or don't know what they're doing - and with shitty gear which seems to be dominated by silver and copper cutting weapons, they can barely do more than take on wildlife and maybe some bandits (who obviously are often equally poorly equipped and only marginally better skillwise, if they are at all.) When large armies show up, we see the results every fall: Such and such was sacked, everyone ran or died, ad infinitum if there's a war on.

However, the game will never be anywhere near some horrifying complex political fuck-about like Medieval: Total War or Crusader Kings or whatever else that plays solely from "grand scale" vs the comparative small scale of our fortress and perhaps surrounding communities and maybe the closest of hostile sites. People who want a political simulator can play games like that instead, because I doubt there will be some overly complicated web of allegiances and vassalage beyond the greatly simplified version we have (Monarch grants land, noble gets promoted based on their Fortresses' prosperity and productivity and are expected to at least try to protect the areas in their Barony, County, or Duchy, and are loyal to the Monarch.) I'd also hazard a guess at having to pay a value of goods to the Monarch, and from there just going to the stocks screen and setting this thing or that to pay your due tax to the Monarch which the liaison has some dudes pick up and leave with, probably with the aid of a pack animal or wagon separate from the caravan, and if you need to contribute troops, send someone out to arm and train some recruits, send them on their merry way to the General's army, and forget about them.

Can't say I wouldn't mind a simplified sort of limited kingdom mode though, but only if you have the Monarch present.

My educated guess is there will be some interface to set taxation, some means of sending out a tax collector as you described, and some means to raise contingents of troops based on populations, and probably sending someone to train them all with a shipment of equipment, the amount and quality of which likely impacting the success of these soldiers in battle off-screen, with some report or another on reported encounters, casualties, and if your guys won or lost (probably described as routed, destroyed, or victorious, and kept no more complicated than that initially.) I'm making a guess only, compared to how you just worded your own post with a certain degree of certainty. Personally, I don't think the off-site happiness thing will be implemented in any capacity at least initially, if it is at all.

You also say the fortresses are more/most important. Well no shit, this is Dwarf Fortress after all, not Dwarf Kingdom Simulator. The way Toady worded it at least reflects that a little better.

You can say you win or whatever. I don't have the energy to argue over this stupid shit anymore, because ultimately, it doesn't fucking matter. It is a video game. If we are going to argue let it be over something actually worth getting frustrated at eachother over.

[Ribs]

Did you read the quotes I posted before? Why do I even bother...

Rainseeker: So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

Toady: 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.

Capntastic:   So the hill dwarves are basically a conduit for your fortress to interact with the rest of the world?

Toady:   Yeah, yeah, at least in that way ... I think there will be places for your dwarves to also have direct impact, but when it comes to military stuff, and certain trade things, you're going to have to act through intermediate sites just because of the sheer numbers behind it. The deep sites are ... they act in a similar fashion for underground business, but they're also ... we haven't really planned that exactly how strange they're going to be, but they supplement your food, that kind of thing, if you don't want to farm, you can trade with them.

So there you go. Your fortress is like a castellar or palacian district within the deep sites, where the warrior nobility lives. Then, when you must go to war, you levy your troops from the peasantry. Sounds like communist heaven, right?

Also, here's a new one for you:

(...)Then there are other crops like cotton style crops where you actually end up making clothes eventually, we haven't accounted for that yet. When we get the entity populations if you don't want to make your own quern or whatever and grind your own stuff you should just be able to take your grain to a mill that's in one of the entity populations and then you'd probably have to pay some kind of millage fee

(...)That's where you can start getting into tyranny too, where it's like 'you must use the town mill, if you're in this county you have to use the town mill, you can't use your own grindstone and you have to pay the fee' and so on, and the peasants can get angry when the fees get too high and you can have peasant rebellions and all that kind of stuff. I guess the whole system can thrive on crazy ass taxes, like things that end with '-age', like millage

Reflect on those words for a bit. No one's saying that the system will be a perfect representation of "feudalism"(which is a complex an varied system by itself, even if you keep insisting that it's a very specific thing), but that the game will not, by any strech, resemble a socialist system in most instances. The game will freely allow you to exploit the peasantry (while having to deal with more prestigous classes very differently), and their relationship with you will be similar to the one people had in medieval times with their lords.

Having mills and forcing the peasants to use them is something medieval lords actually did. In fact, it was common. They also often had common lands within their domains, and forced the peasants to work there. Yes, if you overtax them they will rebel(as they very often did did in real life when nobles taxed them too much. But having a lord demanding taxes from them, and organazing them into armies when they feel like going to war is something that the peasants will be familiar with, because that's the kind of society the game is going to have.

Also, I don't understand where did you get the idea that in a feudal society the nobles didn't care about the domestic economy. They cared about what was produced in the towns and villages, and familiarized themselves with the merchants and artisans (and their respective guilds when applicable).

In the future, farming will be a lot more difficult :

With the farming slowly moving over to you having to take care of your animals and eventually farming itself should be a little more difficult ... and there's a whole monkey wrench being thrown in there with the dwarves around your fortress, the whole dwarves living in the hills and all that kind of thing later on, but if the self-sufficiency of the fortress isn't guaranteed ... It's like, you could live self-sufficiently but then you wouldn't have as many trade goods, so you wouldn't be able to engage as much with the caravans. What I'm getting at is that it should be more fun to run a fort that isn't self-sufficient now, and you should be able to ask for certain things and be able to produce higher quality goods of a certain kind so that people will come to you for them and you can then become part of the world that way, rather than being more or less separate from it with these sort of incidental trade relationships. Hopefully that's how it'll turn out, that's what we're going for. After that we're moving on to just cleaning up, adding bugs ... adding bugs, yes, that's exactly what we'll be doing. That's what's going on now, and then we'll be fixing bugs, and I'll be doing that for a while because there's hard working bug tracker managers that need to see some progress over there, and then the army arc, which will be the second major way that you can have your fortress associated to the world; not to mention all the kind of obvious adventure mode stuff that comes out that. So, it's finally going to be interesting ... we're doing grasses right now, of course, but once we get through the dwarf mode industries then we'll get back to the caravan additions and so on. There's my ramble for you.

So you'll actually be expected to depend on your surrounding villages much more for food and raw resourses. That will be the standard. The main appeal of having a self sufficient fortress will be their increased ability to resist sieges and attacks: if you have your own farm system going, you'll have to worry a lot less about running out of food even when having your fortress' entrance blocked by invaders.

[Splint]

Ribs, you sir are the man. I seem like an inelegant gremlin with a megaphone screaming I wanna touch all the levers without sources (I personally just haven't had the patience to look for stuff I read a year or more back.)

[Ribs]

Ribs, you sir are the man. I seem like an inelegant gremlin with a megaphone screaming I wanna touch all the levers without sources (I personally just haven't had the patience to look for stuff I read a year or more back.)

Nah, I just listened to the podcasts and sort of remember what they have talked about over the years. All I do is skim through the transcripts and ctrl+f for key words.

What really helps is that all the transcripts are in one place: http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_combined_transcript.html
If it wasn't for that, I don't know if I'd have the patience

[GoblinCookie]

Quote from:  DF Talk, #20


    Rainseeker: So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

    Toady: 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.

    Capntastic:   So the hill dwarves are basically a conduit for your fortress to interact with the rest of the world?

    Toady:   Yeah, yeah, at least in that way ... I think there will be places for your dwarves to also have direct impact, but when it comes to military stuff, and certain trade things, you're going to have to act through intermediate sites just because of the sheer numbers behind it. The deep sites are ... they act in a similar fashion for underground business, but they're also ... we haven't really planned that exactly how strange they're going to be, but they supplement your food, that kind of thing, if you don't want to farm, you can trade with them.

Did you read the quotes I posted before? Why do I even bother...

Of course I did Ribs!  You kept posting the exact same quote over and over like I was blind. 

Fact is that DF Talk is a weak basis to make a claim, most of them are from ages ago.  There is no reason to think that Toady's vision for the game is the same at it was in 2009, especially since the failure and abandonment of several features. 

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

This on the other hand I take more notice of and it has a whole section dedicated to the question of Hill/Deep dwarves.
     

Hill/deep dwarves

    Ability to bring extra dwarves appropriate to the starting scenario
    Entity populations surrounding your fortress in appropriate environments, both above and below ground
    Ability to move dwarves in and out of surroundings
    Relationship with surrounding dwarves
    Ability to trade/demand food in depot or similar place with surrounding dwarves

Nothing here about our Fortress dwarves ruling over the Hill/Deep dwarves and being some kind of noble class.

So there you go. Your fortress is like a castellar or palacian district within the deep sites, where the warrior nobility lives. Then, when you must go to war, you levy your troops from the peasantry. Sounds like communist heaven, right?

It actually is still 'communist heaven', because the 'warrior nobility' grow food, craft items, build stuff, well all of it.  Unless that is we want to completely overhaul the whole game at it's fundermental level so that all our dwarves do with their time is train for war and exploit the hill dwarves for everything they need; aka what they would have in order to actually be a warrior nobility, as opposed to merely being better trained warriors than the average dwarf settlement's warriors. 

Also a feudal regime does not levy troops from the peasantry.  It levies manpower and then arms & trains them into soldiers, soldiers which often find it hard to integrate back into the peasantry once the war is over, resulting in laid off soldiers often becoming bandits.  Funnily enough the quote you are so fond of pretty much rules us doing out what we must do in order to be doing things realistically. 

you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run

So we do not even see the soldiers.  As this is the case what we are talking out is something that no feudal regime would do if it actually valued it's continued existance would ever do, that is relying upon semi-independant organisations of the peasantry to raise the majority of it's own troops for it.  Feudalism depends upon the peasants themselves *not* being able to form their own armies and rule themselves, but that exactly what the hillocks are doing.  Only the subordinate nobles were ever allowed to mantain their own independant armies and that is because they are invested in the continuation of the system. 

Also, here's a new one for you:

(...)Then there are other crops like cotton style crops where you actually end up making clothes eventually, we haven't accounted for that yet. When we get the entity populations if you don't want to make your own quern or whatever and grind your own stuff you should just be able to take your grain to a mill that's in one of the entity populations and then you'd probably have to pay some kind of millage fee

(...)That's where you can start getting into tyranny too, where it's like 'you must use the town mill, if you're in this county you have to use the town mill, you can't use your own grindstone and you have to pay the fee' and so on, and the peasants can get angry when the fees get too high and you can have peasant rebellions and all that kind of stuff. I guess the whole system can thrive on crazy ass taxes, like things that end with '-age', like millage

Reflect on those words for a bit. No one's saying that the system will be a perfect representation of "feudalism"(which is a complex an varied system by itself, even if you keep insisting that it's a very specific thing), but that the game will not, by any strech, resemble a socialist system in most instances. The game will freely allow you to exploit the peasantry (while having to deal with more prestigous classes very differently), and their relationship with you will be similar to the one people had in medieval times with their lords.

Feudalism is indeed a varied system but only in the exact way that the feudal nobility is organised and the degree that they are centralised; or as I put it the house.  The fundermental substance of the system is uniform and it is that there is a small military/administrative class that does not produce enough material wealth to sustain themselves and then a large number of peasants & craftsmen that labour to produce material wealth sufficient to support both themselves and the military/administrative class.

If you take a whole stack of communist utopias and force them into a heirachical relationship where some of them owe fealty to other communist utopias, what we end up with is not Feudalism but Socialism forced in the shape of one particular form of Feudal society and very quickly the house, being made of the wrong materials falls apart or reshapes itself into a more egalitarian arrangement. 

The nature of the substance messes up the house because being internally equal it not only makes ideological sense to end the feudal arrangement but it also makes material sense for them both.  It makes sense for the master communist utopias to be able to produce material wealth and it makes sense (even to the masters) for the subordinate communist utopias to develop their own military and administrative capacities; I will explain why this is so in more detail later on.

Having mills and forcing the peasants to use them is something medieval lords actually did. In fact, it was common. They also often had common lands within their domains, and forced the peasants to work there. Yes, if you overtax them they will rebel(as they very often did did in real life when nobles taxed them too much. But having a lord demanding taxes from them, and organazing them into armies when they feel like going to war is something that the peasants will be familiar with, because that's the kind of society the game is going to have.

Also, I don't understand where did you get the idea that in a feudal society the nobles didn't care about the domestic economy. They cared about what was produced in the towns and villages, and familiarized themselves with the merchants and artisans (and their respective guilds when applicable).

The reason that it comes up is that Toady simply lifted it from real-life history without really giving much thought to whether it made sense in context, by the looks of it an old vice of his; fortunately there is no sign of this vice in the present development document.

The reason that situation turned up in real-life is that the peasants were not collectively organised to build their own mills, lacking their own administration.  If we are talking about a Fortress and a Hillocks, none of this applies. Nothing inherantly about being a hillocks keeps the hillock's government mound from rounding up some hill dwarves and then 'politely requesting' that they get to work on such a building.  If our fortress built a mill, we would not be able to get the hill dwarves to use it because it is far more efficient for them to use their own mill than it is for them to walk miles over the wilderness between their hillocks and our fortress, all while risking being eaten by who knows what nasty. 

I never said that Feudal lords did not have an interest in the economy.  I said that they were interested in it mainly as a source of taxes for themselves and they were very much capable (such as with mills) of building things to augment the economy in a general sense, particularly basic infrastructure like roads or bridges.  They did not however ever concern themselves with ordering the peasants economic activities, they had no equivilant of DF managers going about ordering that the peasants of the village produce 30 bags of flour at the mill.  Instead the lords built the infrastructure and the peasants autonomously produced things which the lords extracted some of as taxes, sometimes directly for using the infrastructure itself. 

One greedy lord may build a mill and brutally tax the peasants for using it, another generous lord might build a mill and allow all the peasants to use it for free but since he taxes the peasants a portion of their wealth he stills ends up getting more wealth as an indirect result of his free mill boosting the economy.  You can see how this fits in with most strategy games, in strategy games we tend to build infrastructure to improve the economy of an area so we can ultimately get more tax revenue out of it.  The majority of strategy games, even those set in modern times are Feudal in their logics; we can even perhaps say that a Feudal lord thinks like a stategy game player. 

There is only kind of society whose rulers concerns itself with the details of getting the peasants to produce 30 bags of flour for them and employs the equivilant of DF managers to that effect; I hope that by now I do not have to tell you what kind of goverment it is.

In the future, farming will be a lot more difficult :

I really hope so. 

With the farming slowly moving over to you having to take care of your animals and eventually farming itself should be a little more difficult ... and there's a whole monkey wrench being thrown in there with the dwarves around your fortress, the whole dwarves living in the hills and all that kind of thing later on, but if the self-sufficiency of the fortress isn't guaranteed ... It's like, you could live self-sufficiently but then you wouldn't have as many trade goods, so you wouldn't be able to engage as much with the caravans. What I'm getting at is that it should be more fun to run a fort that isn't self-sufficient now, and you should be able to ask for certain things and be able to produce higher quality goods of a certain kind so that people will come to you for them and you can then become part of the world that way, rather than being more or less separate from it with these sort of incidental trade relationships. Hopefully that's how it'll turn out, that's what we're going for. After that we're moving on to just cleaning up, adding bugs ... adding bugs, yes, that's exactly what we'll be doing. That's what's going on now, and then we'll be fixing bugs, and I'll be doing that for a while because there's hard working bug tracker managers that need to see some progress over there, and then the army arc, which will be the second major way that you can have your fortress associated to the world; not to mention all the kind of obvious adventure mode stuff that comes out that. So, it's finally going to be interesting ... we're doing grasses right now, of course, but once we get through the dwarf mode industries then we'll get back to the caravan additions and so on. There's my ramble for you.

So you'll actually be expected to depend on your surrounding villages much more for food and raw resourses. That will be the standard. The main appeal of having a self sufficient fortress will be their increased ability to resist sieges and attacks: if you have your own farm system going, you'll have to worry a lot less about running out of food even when having your fortress' entrance blocked by invaders.

This is from 2010, so 5 years ago back when Toady One and Threetoes were concerning themselves with grass; they might have developed in their thinking since then.   

There is no such thing as a self-sufficiant noble class.  As you point out, making my own case for me, a self-sufficiant fortress is stronger than a one dependant upon the local hillocks for their food supplies.  This directly works against the fundermental basis for a feudal economy & society, the peasants (hill dwarves) produce material goods and the nobles (fortress dwarves) provide militery and administrative 'services', 'in return'.  Since that is an offer that cannot be refused, we call the feudal system a class system with a ruling class rather than simply a division of labour within a society.

That means that the whole idea of DF Feudalism falls apart on a Fortress vs Hillocks basis.  In order to have more dwarves to grow food for your own fortress you would attempt to reduce as much as possible the number of dwarves needed to protect and administer the hillocks.  The more you develop the hillocks own militias and administrations, the more dwarves you would have to work in the fields and make yourself more self-sufficient.  But the more you develop them, the less they need you and the more effectively they are able to rebel; the costs of mantaining the system go up while your material need to mantain it goes down. 

This never happens with actual feudal lords because there is no option of being self-sufficient. 

[Ribs]

I-it's been f-five years, they probably c-changed their minds since then, r-right guys? lol *smiley face x 3*

Huh?

Fact is that DF Talk is a weak basis to make a claim, most of them are from ages ago.  There is no reason to think that Toady's vision for the game is the same at it was in 2009, especially since the failure and abandonment of several features.

Fact

Tell us more about facts, you seem to know all of them.

That first quote (from DF talk #20) was from 2013. They have indeed been planning this since 2009. That's over six years.. Just listen to them talk, read the FotF posts: they have been completely consistent with their vision since then.

But seriously, your whole argument now consists in blatantly denying the developer's statements because you think that they probably have changed their minds? If that's the case I think we don't need to discuss this anymore, comrad. Not even going to go through the rest of your post. Great job at wasting our time.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, StagnantSoul. What was it that we were talking about before this pointless discussion came about? It had something to do with taxes...

[Alfrodo]

And the INTERNET FIGHT actually ended with someone decking the other in the face.

[Ribs]

And the INTERNET FIGHT actually ended with someone decking the other in the face.

Not without warning. I gave him a few outs before, and not only he decided to keep going but also to provoke another guy (who was being much nicer to him than I was) into this mess. Absolute madman.

[StagnantSoul]

Dayum Ribs, I vote you for president. And yeah, my general idea was taxing and waging the dwarves based with a raw-based mechanic. So you could, say, make a cheese maker have really high wages, or really low. In a similar way as to how you change a profession's name for different civs, so this entity that really likes metalworking could pay highly for metalworking, whereas this civ that isn't that fond of metal would pay a bowyer more. Taxes and wages could be controlled at the bank or a nobles screen to change the time they're collected and distributed, so say you could have them go a whole year before pay day and be a bit cranky all year, but be ecstatic at pay day, or pay them on a bi-monthly basis, whatever you see fit. The length between pays would obviously effect their mood, and higher pay gives higher level happy thoughts. A thresher would be like "...Yay... Ten coppers..." Whereas a gem setter could be like "YAY! FIFTY GOLD COINS! I DON'T CARE THAT MY WIFE DIED!" These would be used to buy stuff like knives and clothing and rooms, or even go to school during their off time, which would need a minimum amount of dwarves wanting the same schooling. Items that dwarves buy would be 100% out of your reach to tamper with, you couldn't designate that steel knife to be melted or dumped.

New thought: Maybe have them show up at trade depots if they're on break and buy crafts and clothing they like?

[Alfrodo]

In this, would everyone get a "wage" or "salary?"

and where does that money come from?

[Splint]

Before everyone got a single base of 200 money in "credit," and had to make it work. Unless you were born in-fort, in which case you had access to your parent's income until you hit 12.

Everyone also used to receive a salary as well. Even soldiers I think were given some unalterable wage as well (cost of living coverage basically,) unless they were champions. From there, the nobles drew their income from the commoners, although they didn't need to I don't think (I think they were exempt from the economy and could just take whatever the fuck they wanted, as could champions and legendary workers.)

The main difference is we'd have some means to control at least the base wage with what Stagnant is saying I think, with them having a certain default, along with a maximum and minimum for taxing the peons that you can set to keep things manageable or make things very difficult for your poor dorfs.

Seasonal pay would probably be a good way to pay them. That or Yearly.