There was no "rational" debate. A civil argument, maybe, but not a debate. We weren't weighing pros and cons of adding this thing or that, but were arguing like a collective trio of morons over what were possible future additions and what was currently here, based on a combination of past, present, and possible future content, along with first-hand observations in-game, and possibly in addition to political interpretations.
I personally remained civil for the most part, and even in a debate one can at least try to see the reasoning the other party has. From what I saw, your reasoning about things stemmed largely from "this is how the game is because this is how the currently game is," "it's been x years since this dev statement or that," and "If they wanted to make a feudal society they'd have done that from the get go," discounting the fact that in it's earlier form, the game was hideously complex and broken in many areas, and it was a nightmare just getting enough food to not die of mass starvation come winter, and once the economy activated, you had to near-scramble to make sure everyone had enough work as time went on so they could pay their rent and afford food.
In the present state however, you'll only want for sustenance if you deliberately settled in a desolate place with no seeds, making even caravan visits for anything other provoking enemies to come for your wealth and importing metal and rarer cut gems pointless.
That is fundamental problem with discussing the DF universe. The game is eternally unfinished meaning that we cannot just point to what is as how things actually are but neither can we point to the 'future' because we do not know how the game will actually develop or how the planned features will actually be realized or when.
I tend to take "what is" as a combination of what appears in the game, what appears in world-gen and what appears directly in the design document.
You also decided on using countries that have no tangible relation to the argument at hand being pulled up as examples (a fear/forced indoctrination-based police state, and a broken Federal Republic - neither one of which have anything to do with anything here other than the former being on paper, a communist state - and a horrifically corrupt and inhumane one at that.
I used them because they were relevant to the argument at hand in context. North Korea is a Communist economy with a hereditary ruler while America is an example of a regional hierarchy of governments that is not Feudal. I never said that those societies were otherwise similar to DF and there is no regional hierarchy at present, that is just an idea.
What I was saying is that a hereditary leader does not mean you are not Communist and having a regional hierarchy where there is something between the local government and central government does not mean you are Feudal.
We aren't hanging onto it as "sacred writ." We're tangibly showing you precisely why we have reasons to interpret implied connections of a particular nature in addition to what we can perceive due to the titles, nature of how they're acquired, and what role and purpose these nobles would serve beyond being annoying (at present, they serve no purpose other than a benchmark of your productivity, so why keep them in at all if not for a reason further down the line?) Even if that's not how the game works right specifically now.
Dwarf Fortress is not a one man product. There are two people in the team, it is Threetoes who actually comes up with the general vision and Toady One who actually comes up the mechanics to turn them into an actual game. If we are asking Toady One about the general vision for the game then essentially we are really asking Threetoes.
The mechanical limitations and need for coherent gameplay however force Toady One in the end to shape the raw ideas into something that makes sense in context, the raw ideas existing as they do only in the imagination have no mechanical limitations and can therefore be limited only by Threetoes vast imagination.
Even if they had 1000 years to work on the game the raw ideas would never be implemented in their pure form.
However, I also conceded that while this is what I'm guessing may be (a simplified feudal system wherein you may at least in part be dependent on surrounding communities that are built post-foundation for both necessities and a source of recruits, while they depend on you to protect them from threats that don't warrant the General's attention,) it may not necessarily be what will be. But until Toady makes a statement to otherwise, his own word is the most relevant reason to make certain assumptions at all.
The game will never make us
fundamentally dependent upon surrounding communities but that would be needed for Feudalism to
actually exist. Nor will it ever make the subordinate communities completely defenseless to the extent that the only way to keep a single squad of goblins from killing them all is to send your own squads of dwarves off to protect the settlements.
Nothing about these mechanics in themselves actually change the nature of the society from what we have at the moment to a Feudal one. They merely constitute a
slight centralization of the egalitarian social arrangements that exist.
Additionally, because these titles imply feudal nobility, from that alone one can make a reasonable assumption about the future economic and possible political nature of dwarven civs much later in the game's development, irrespective of what is currently in place. If they aren't intended to imply such a connection, they'd be renamed to something else (Councillors, Governors, or something like that,) that more closely resembles the current communist mostly-egalitarian confederacy set up at present.
I could also say you just insulted both me and Ribs, for the second time at least, even if exceptionally politely (which is better than what people elsewhere would have done.)
A creator of fiction does not create ex-nihilo, he or she gets his initial ideas from somewhere. So to start off with we always have something that existed before, we have Kings and Barons because the inspiration for the work is the generic standard-issue Feudalism lite epic fantasy setting.
However any creator of fiction worth anything goes beyond this and has a world where things are so not because they are the case in the source but because it makes sense in context. This means not using the generic Feudal baron and lifting everything from other sources but creating a DF baron who has a unique character based upon the actual context, the
"communist mostly-egalitarian confederacy" as you put it.
From little we can gather from the in-game text, Toady One has actually done this. The baron is not something imposed from above on your settlement but is something that your settlement is granted the honor of having. Not only that but the person who the king makes a baron is a person chosen by the settlement, the settlement's acceptance of a baron is their "integration into the realm" while rejection is "keeping their distance".
We see now that the DF baron is supposed to function as a '2-way mirror' for the central government. He gets to represent the settlement at the central government level but at the same time he is responsible for seeing that the settlement follows the rules of the central government. If you have a baron you have more say over what the central government does but less autonomy from the central government. The baron does not do anything because the central government stuff is not implemented but his presence would be essential to it's workings.
How was what you were arguing for (the current nature of the game, which is partly due to various things being in need of massive overhauls that are not even on the Dev's immediate radar right now, due to Taverns, scholars, and such being the current focus,) contributing anything either? Suggestions are about things for the future of the game. Feudalism lite seems to be what the future entails for the game, based on dev statements, first-hand observations, and guesswork based upon all sources available, in code and in content - past, present, and possible future. I've gone back through the thread, and you have not taken into account past or future, only present.
I at least did have some ideas regarding handling debtors, possible forced replacement of site leaders that are "incompetent," the payment of taxes to the monarch by way of a value of goods you select yourself, from the stocks, or hell, even just giving a few stacks of gold or silver coins to meet the value (if you owe 7500 money in tax, just set a single full stack of gold coins to pay, since each coin is worth 15 money,) the use of sliders - however flawed that idea would be - to set taxation of areas you control (possibly using a similar system to how you place orders with caravans?) And how militarized they are.
All I've actually seen from you, is in regards to how we'd collect any taxes - sending someone out with a wagon or pack animal to collect the goods. Which I think is a great idea that none of the rest of us had mentioned, and the code could be partly reused for sending trainers out with shipments of equipment when you want to raise a group of soldiers off-site.
I was speaking in relation to attempts to use DF Talk as holy writ to back up an argument. The reason it falls flat is the reason I gave, if we come up with an argument and then people use DF Talk to shout down the ideas then we are in an echo-chamber. The existing ideas of Toady & Threetoe did not just pop up out of nowhere, our job is to add new ideas and get rid of bad ones, not recycle the ideas that they had X years ago.
I started from a position of arguing from the present because people kept arguing for new ideas based upon a context that was *not* the present. For instance none of your ideas make any sense based upon the present context at all but instead require the whole gameplay be overturned, essentially they belong to the old economy setup that was removed. It directly competes with any further development of the game economy as it presently works.
I did not merely come up with an idea about pack animals, that is a minor element of a wider arrangement by which we tax the peasant population of a given area. I am specifically *not* talking about hillocks, they would pay their taxes in order to use your fortress depot to trade. I am talking about going beyond the
urban islands in the wilderness which renders land ownership not a meaningful concept and also makes Feudalism virtually impossible to sustain. This is done by having peasants live outside of actual sites *in* the land which the sites then own, taxing the peasants and dealing with threats in their area.
Instead, you've largely argued things don't exist because they don't exist at present (as in, like things we have now - moving groups, active world, actual values for civilizations and individuals,) the code did not exist before the current version. YOu also argued that certain bugs - like lazy nobles not being lazy, aren't bugs, but unimplemented features as of v34+. They were lazy before, and now they aren't, and they aren't supposed to be active members of the workforce. However it hasn't been addressed because unlike the size bug for example, it isn't a gamebreaker bug.
Those are not ideas that make sense, the game is not broken as a result of the nobles not being idle instead the game is actually much improved for a number of reasons. What you propose is the sort of bug fixing that would make the game worse.
1. Idle nobles make no sense when labor is based upon intrinsic motivation to work (they do not get paid or punished for idleness). If the people are free to choose not to work and the people telling them what work to do are seen to be idle then they will ignore them and be idle as well. The arrangement makes no social sense, when fortress prosperity depends upon voluntary labor then those in charge benefit from being seen as uber-volunteers.
2. It has gameplay consequences that mean that the optimal strategy is to appoint the most ignorant 12 year old rather than somebody who you would realistically want in charge of anything at all. A direct conflict between role-playing and mechanics is not something we want to exist if we can avoid it.
3. It makes no logical sense, you the player *are* the nobles. The people who run the fortress somehow cannot choose to personally do any work.
4. We can already do it anyway by deactivating all VPL labors for our nobles; those who think that nobles should be lazy can have lazy nobles already. The mechanic exists solely to restrict those who do not believe in it.
As I've said, the game's civs as a whole more heavily resemble right now, a bunch of egalitarian confederacies of autonomous sites that have no use for eachother in any capacity. However, based on implied connections, dev statements, and stuff that was dummied out or in need of repair because it was just frustrating, had some kind of conflict in the code with something else, or severely hurt the game's ability to function, we can assume we won't always have it like that.
Confederacies of autonomous sites is how the game is set up in it's core mechanics. It also makes sense because it maximizes the ability of the player to create their own fortress according to their own vision. There is also nothing wrong with it, the Swiss did quite fine with it for many centuries.
Why have hillocks surround the fortresses, made out of dirt, with virtually no protection beyond a token handful of poorly equipped soldiers, if not to have them serve some other function later on? Why have nobles at all when Mayors can do everything? Why have soldiers if we can kill everything with traps? Why keep coins as something we can make, if the economy isn't going to return in a more functional form? Why can't we interpret the game's future as being more semi-feudal than communistic(I say semi, because we as players still need to have some degree of autonomy and agency over our forts,) and instead must believe it will always be red sickle and star flags and commie hats mas you at least seem to think it will be?
We also have fortresses whose inhabitants would, if it were actually in fortress mode promptly die of thirst. I do not take the actual setup of the generated sites to actually be what is really *not* there. What they *have* is government mounds but peasants in Feudalism do not have their own governments on that kind of scale.
Hillocks are far from defenseless in adventurer mode. Like all sites, if they come under attack they will spawn extra squads of soldiers recruited exclusively from the local population and armed with equipment drawn from the entity's 'invisible armory'; the reason that fortresses appear to have more soldiers is because the fortress guard always being active. Going through the world-gen history on most worlds we can read of many battles fought in hillocks that the dwarves won and of dwarves that lived in those hillocks dying in defense of their home.
The game would not be semi-Feudal if fortresses gain the ability to gain the allegiance of hillocks. It would be no more Feudal than it is at the moment but a whole load of people will think that it is and I will waste many hours pointing out that why it is not. The reason is that in Feudalism the relationship between the peasant and the noble is a class distinction, that is they do different things.
The proposed relationship between a fortress and a hillocks is actually just a hierarchy. Feudalism needs a distinction between peasants and nobles but there are no peasants in the setup because the fortress can potentially survive independently and the hillocks can potentially defend itself independently. What is worse is that over time the hillocks becomes more similar to the fortress since it is directly in the interests of the fortress to reduce it's costs and increase it's strength by arming the hillocks under it's control.
I can say the same for current features. Why would we have fruit trees if we can just grow plump helmets and live off nothing but those? Why are some dwarves suddenly more willing to stand and fight or ignore things that they would have run away from no matter what before? Why have a Fortress Guard and Hammerer if it's only purpose is destructive to the fortress (even though they also detain violent non-child tantrum-throwers and can now reliably bash vampire brains in?) Why have dwarves tantrum at all? Why have a CMD to oversee the hospital when any old shlub can patch someone up and call it a day?
This is the dilemma yes. We know the game is not presently complete but we also know that it never will be. However there are some things I do not want to ever see, I do not want to have a fortress where my dwarves starve to death because some kind of demented IMF code insists that nobody can eat unless they can afford to buy it.
Author
Topic: Alternative Dwarven Economy: Revolts, Schools, Taxes, and Industry. (Long) (Read 25107 times)