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 sweethttp://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/305250.htmlSomething 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.