This is why I bought up language comprehension because if your insulted "polity" in a language you don't understand it can't effect your mood, first you have to understand the insult then you can feel offended.
Whether the way they respond to an insult is proper or not is subjective, in ancient times an insult could lead to a duel to the death and that was the "proper" response so the people who "fly off the handle" first understood they where insulted and then based of their personality facets react in an instinctual way.
No, insulting people and otherwise verbally bullying people does hurt them regardless of what they do in response. You are right that person has to understand the language but the process of understanding language is a subconscious one not a conscious one, so that person who is insulted is hurt by being insulted whether they want to be or whether they admit to being affected or not.
This is why people everywhere lash out in response to an insult, whether verbally or otherwise. That is because words have an emotional effect prior to any rational decision being made, a person becomes angry because the words when understood transmit anger; if they do not retaliate it is because they have repressed the emotional effect, not because the word has failed to make them less calm.
Some societies understand this and so sympathise with the victim that lashes out while others side with the bullies and 'blame the victims' for getting hurt.
Yes and no, pheromones in all animal trigger automatic subconscious responses based on that creatures brain chemistry so if the only type of communication is though pheromones you get a "brain washing" effect where individuals are subconsciously brought in line with the "social" norm.
That is true also of words and pretty much all forms of communication used by anything ever. Surely you understand that words have an emotional 'charge' than can effect other people and are not just cold information transmitters. If a person hears a word with an emotional charge and understands it, then their emotions will be affected whether they want to be affected or not.
And I see pheromone as being primarily biological, their cooperation is because of "brain washing" individual behavior out of their workers to a greater degree then words alone can do.
Ants are 'conscious' of pheromones in a similar fashion that we are conscious of basically the written word. When an individual ants goes off on it's own to scout for food they 'paint' a trail of pheronomes leading back to the ant colony. The other ants in are not affected in some mysterious chemical way, they actually deliberately follow the trail as if they can 'see' it in order to arrive at the food.
Since are evidently able to make deliberate decision based upon pheromones that are laid down deliberately by other ants, thus the idea that the pheromones have some magical brainwashing power because humans are unable to detect how pheromones are influencing them is quite baseless. Humans do not have any awareness of the pheronomes that they emit nor of their effect on others, ants on the other hand use pheronomes in a deliberate fashion.
And I've rejected your stance, I feel like they live as Romans in the caverns and the fortress is their Rome. What your basing your stance on is what I think is just a place holder for future developments in which smaller less populated site support larger sites.
Their no reason to think that the current site are the finale sites because Toady has shown the willingness to completely rework a system that doesn't fit in with his goals for DF, I think that Toady will reduce the overall size/population of hamlets and replace them with smaller more "scattered" about sites if that necessary for the "capitalistic" economy to work even if he has to completely scrap the current site system to do so.
Everything I am saying is based upon the core game mechanics, that is the fundermental structure of the game. You in response conjure up an entirely imaginery DF whose core mechanics bear no resemblence at all to any presently existing reality.
There is something called the site limit that gets in the way of ever implementing a large number of scattered about sites.
I don't think fortresses will remain self-sufficient if it gets in the way of dev goals working "just right".
The dev goals so far have always been about developing the internal life and productivity of the fortress. If the idea is to turn all the dwarf fortresses into palaces with a ruler with a retinue of guards and servants, then why bother at all with all that?
Not currently but in the future I think it will.
DF will never become Crusader Kings and if it does then I will stop playing the game.
Where did Rome's population come from?
Nobody actually knows and it does not really matter.
So what I was saying about adjusting what a fortress actually and what sites exist can make them into Romans was partially correct, which is what I'd prefer over socialist hutterite dwarves even if it requires a three year development and a total rewrite of world gen sites functionality.
If the devs had wanted to do that, then why did they not simply do it? They have chosen to develop the productive elements of the game while leaving the political elements of the fortress interacting with the hillocks entirely undeveloped.
Part of the supply and demand development is that world gen sites can run out of resources and founding a new "fortress" can be the result of the old fortress running out of resources and the offings is your sending back is the "rent or extracted surplus", I can easily see a future where your required to give "offerings" and failure to do so result in a siege from for parent civ, the king demands that you pay your taxes.
That makes absolutely no sense. If the existing fortress runs out of resources it obviously cannot afford to build any new fortresses.
It also cannot afford to besiege the new fortress for not paying taxes since it does not have the resources to sustain the army to do so.
And once digging sieges and attacker are in a single fortress is too weak to hold off the dwarven kingdom when the king demands his taxes be paid, its either pay taxes or face the world with no support (new migrants from the home civ) and a new enemy civ that want to take over your site.
Yes, we definately need to develop the central government. However this is quite different from individual peasants paying their taxes because as already mentioned, if sites pay taxes to sites what we end up is a site-based legal system rather than an individual based one.
"Those who pay the piper pay the tune" remember?
This is where your parent civ cuts off your supply of traded fresh food, stops immigration happens by sieges you on both the surface and in the caverns just starving you out for not paying your taxes to the crown.
All of which costs them far more than it is worth.
You have no reason to pay taxes and they have no need of your taxes. The capital city can quite happily support the monarch and his court, while the various barons can be supported by the local sites that are the barons of. Hence the central goverment can survive in peacetime without any need of taxation, the only context in which taxation would actually make sense would be in wartime in order to support the troops drafted from the various sites.
Just like you can objectively say murder is illegal in America but that doesn't make killing another human being objectively illegal because what is classified as murder varies case by case.
There are things which people think are unjust, irrespective of whether they are or not. What I was saying is that it makes sense for the people trying to defend that thing to claim that that thing is the result of an objective reality beyond human control.
Even if you can prove a system as a stems from some inherent objective facet of reality doesn't make the system just, that's a naturalistic fallacy. This is why I've said that my personal preference is having greedy capitalistic dwarves because its not a just system, its an entertaining system to play with.
The trick is not intended to convince the other side that the institution is just. It is merely designed to demoralise them by making it look like they are up against something more solid and permenant than simply the people who defend the insitution.
The enemy is not convinced to switch sides, it is merely convinced that resistance is futile.
Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution in objectively observable though fossil record and DNA testing.
There is no such thing as an objective observation. You can observe things that are falling but no observation of things falling is ever an objective reality of a falling object.
That is because an objective thing is something that exists independantly of being observed. An observation cannot exist independantly of being observed.
Its the basis kind of like the foundation of a building, the foundation of a building doesn't need the building on top of it but the building does need to foundation and the "changes" are either renovations to the old building or knocking it over and building something new in its place but either way you constrained by the limits of the foundation.
The society is the foundation for the biology not the other way around. The ant society created the ant biology pretty much entirely to the order of the needs of ant society, even the majority of individual's own personal ability to reproduce ended up being biologically erased for the greater good of society. So even the propogation of the individuals own genes cannot prevail against the needs of society.
I think I might agree with this, I just see humans and by extension dwarves as still being in the "stretching" phase and find the idea of adapting our biology to a temporary society as a bad evolutionary path, remaining mostly as we are and building and destroying society continually as in the past is the best path forward for the species as a whole, basically never binding ourselves to any one society type completely.
I feel that capitalism is far more fluid society type then socialism, there's more potential for it to change, succeed or fail all of which helps drive us forward as individuals but with a "perfect socialism" system that "drive" is gone and only thing that remains is the "common good"... no thank you.
Change is only a good thing if it is change from a less perfect state to a more perfect state. A perfect socialist society does not need to change being it is already perfect, any change implies a degeneration into a worse state. Since the present dwarf society is presently perfect for the needs of a dwarf fortress, any change to it is a change towards a worse state of affairs that works less well and has more problems. The question that needs to be asked is what forced the fortress to adopt a less perfect system than what we have at the moment?
If an adventurer refers to a player controlled creature in adventure mode then a "fortress" only refers to a player controlled site in fortress mode and staring scenarios will make some types of fortresses that are incapable of surviving without extracting rent/taxes for instance a temple "fortress" will surviving on the tithe form local sites giving some of the framework necessary to make the civ capital a dwarven Rome
What I've been trying to say is that I feel Toady will make such a change in the long run because if this type of relationship between sites doesn't occur then toady will have to give up on some of the development goals he has and I think he's proven that he is willing to take a long time to completely redevelop a system that to meet his goals.
To be realistic several starting scenarios will have to be dependant upon an external source of income, (at minimum the prison colony and militery fortress) should recieve an external source of income from an outside source and there is a quote from the dev page that covers the potential self-sufficiancy dilemma.
We'd rather see the labor list removed entirely in many circumstances, depending on fortress citizen status, but that'll have to wait until starting scenarios are completed.
In order to keep certain sites from becoming self-sufficiant he is planning to actually remove the standard labour list from particular individuals so the player cannot simply assign them to do labour and sustain the fortress in the normal sense. However the way he is doing it does strongly suggest that the normal fortress is going to continue to be independantly viable in surplus value terms because external mechanics are being used to keep certain people working in certain scenarios.
It is not the relationship of some sites being dependant on other sites that prevents Feudalism/Capitalism from arising as it did historically. It is that the sites do not depend upon individuals that exist seperately of the sites, that is scattered peasants. If Rome is dependant upon individual peasants then the laws and economy is based upon the individual, the question that goes through the rulers minds is
"How much Socialism do we need to ensure the welfare of the individual?". If Rome is instead dependant upon peasant communes then the question is now
"How much Capitalism to we need to ensure the welfare of Rome.
I disagree, its the different from helping someone because its the "right" thing to do and helping them because there's a potential reward.
Most people help other people because it makes them feel good inside or because it makes them look good in the eyes of others. Not many people help people because it is the right thing to do without feeling good about it.
People refrain from helping other people normally because they feel the cost is too great, because they do not care about the welfare of the people they would be helping or because they have believe that they would only make things worse *by* helping.
I disagree, I see altruism as taking an action that has no potential reward worth its expenditure in effort but caring about offspring does have a benefit worth its expenditure, in ants it provides workers for the colony whom in turn work for the "greater good" of the colony (the queen).
No, Altruism is not privilaging yourself and your own needs over those of others. Expending more effect than the reward of that effort is worth is simply 'negative value production', rather like taking a priceless metal artefact and pressing the Melt button on the keyboard.
Offspring are negative value producers, they start off consuming more value from their parents or other carers than they produce. Only when they grow up do they produce surplus value, but they will want to spend that on their own offspring rather than their own parents.
I understand what your talking about I just think about it as "what would I do if I stood to lose billions dollars" the answer "whatever I had to" after all "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king".
There is no need for the intellectual property companies of the Star Trek to have gone to the grave peacefully. They also likely succeeded for a while, but could not withstand the inevitable in the end.
what I was saying is that even if we could build an artificial hive mind with technology based telepathy (free WiFi in your head) there would be enough opposition to that system that it would never "get off the ground", I for example would oppose it because I'd oppose the very idea of group telepathy and would rather live with the "shoddy substitute".
Yet we all happily edit wikis of various kinds, which are the informational equivilant of hive minds. It is rather more likely that people would gradually transition towards the hive mind essentially by accident than that they would one day decide to implement it.
I feel that it has the potential to decrease it.
What does?
Yes and no, I consider my a unique individual and while many people my be similar none are exactly the same and so even though I'd still be a separate "me" from the other 999 but each "me" is worth less (0.0001) then if there only one me (1.0), so even if there was only one identical copy of me I'd want to destroy him and as much as he'd want to destroy me, in the words of highlander "there can be only one".
So you want people to disagree with you?
I think Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are meant to represent scattered peasants and not be centralized communes, they don't do it very well but the game is still in early alpha and there's time to change that.
That is why I do not generally argue based upon them, we do not really know how they internally work. However as far as we know they are based upon the fortress society that created them, which means the centralised settlements make total sense.
I think that changing values in those core mechanics could do it.
Toady already reduced the amount of stone mining can produce and he could reduce it further.
Change how crafting works from increasing the time crafting takes to adding "failed" crafts that waste raw resources and produce nothing.
Make skill gain rates a lot slower so it takes 40 years or more to go from novice to grand master and still take 20 years with a strange mood.
Have dwarves in the fortress consume what the fortress does produce. (children will apparently play with toys next release, musicians are a thing)
Give all items xXwareXx rates and have all items "break" with use. (children break toys, musicians break instruments)
Add workshop zones and make them require tools that wear out faster the more there used.
Lower quality good wear out faster. (a normal hammer lasts about 3 years with regular use and masterwork about 30)
basically what he would need to do is lower dwarven production and add on site consumption of potential trade goods and adjust values of both until you get large fortress sites collapsing from internal demand outstripping the production of both food and trade goods and then he can start working on the economy's return, hence all the talk about installing the framework first.
Those measures would certainly make the player fortress poorer, but would not inherantly change the communal nature of the society. Only when the fortress can only survive by taxing individual peasants scattered across the fortress land as opposed to other sites do we end up with Feudalism (and hence Capitalism). That however would require inverting the present messed up situation where the fortress worker's appear to be enormously more productive with anyone else's with the opposite messed up situation where your workers are massively less productive than anybody else's.
Basically, if your worker's cannot produce surplus value then why would the peasants/hillocks/mountain homes worker's be able to afford to support you?
I feel that the ultimate goal of DF is to create the dev's ideal game and if that results in you being unhappy with anachronism then tough and if it result in me being unhappy with hutterite dwarves thats equally tough.
Anachronism is generally added in without thought.
The new site types aren't the answer in and of themselves, add new sites alter old sites change the mechanics of fortress mode are all a part of the framework that goes into making fantasy kingdoms with a fantasy trope economy.
The new sites are generally there to de-abstract the world economy. For instance we know that humans have metals, but in order to have metals they must have mines and where are the mines?
The mayor taxes the hillocks then the baron taxes the mayor and the king taxes the baron, if the peasants don't pay the mayor then the mayor doesn't pay the baron and the baron come in with is military to seize the taxes and "punish" the mayor, thus order and civil society is maintained.
The peasants elected the Mayor. The hillocks is also a replica of the Fortress that created it, if the fortress that created it works in a certain way then the hillocks will replicate on the surface the underground society of the dwarves.
Why buy for what your military power suggest you can take for free, hillocks don't have much in the way of military so they need fortress based armies to fight of goblin and elven armies and to get this protection they must pay taxes.
Nothing at all prevents hillocks from having a strong military, they even have a militia commander of their own.
Its about developing the game to be closer to what the devs want it to be and if crusader king DF is closer to what the dev's want then it is the same thing because both require changes that alter an aspect of gameplay people are familiar with and potentially fond of.
If the devs had wanted Crusader Kings they would have made it. As it stands they have focused on the mechanics that of least interest to Crusader Kings, (how the peasants produce the stuff) and ignored the planned mechanics that are of interest to Crusader Kings.
No doubt about that but Toady will do whatever he wants and if that requires 10x the work of want I want then he'll do 10x the work, this was actually one of your first complaints.
What makes you think that Toady One is on your side and wants everything that you want?
I can see the smoke removal but they have oxygen from cavern trees and wood from those same trees.
Fungi do not produce oxygen.
You said that socialism turned poor broken counties into a superpower and so did Hitler I feel its a relevent comparison.
and socialist countries might have moved forward from where they started but they never really matched their competition so it certainly didn't make them more competitive.
Socialist countries tended to end up right in the middle between the richest Capitalist countries and the poorest ones. If the wealthy Capitalist countries feed off the poorer ones, then that is exactly what you would expect.
I say that if you kill the competition you win by default and winning is winning whether its by an inch or a mile or your opponents untimely demise.
If the competition is actually a war then yes, otherwise you just end up in prison.
It is separate from the merits but not the functionality, capitalism was functionally better at destroying it competition
Correct. However that may simply be that Socialism had not evolved an effective counter to the strategies used against it, whether ideological or strategic.
I'm not really worried because I'm confident that Toady will make a system that enables the full extent of inherent dwarven greed to be represented.
Dwarves are only slightly more greedy than humans.
That does make sense with just a high competition and median greed value it could work, money is basically a score point system anyway.
The consistant losers however are likely to get depressed and maybe kill themselves. So even using competition as a means of motivation is not without it's casualties.
Nope I don't.
gotta say that I've never heard that saying before.
Maybe it's a British saying not an American one.
The difference is that whether the site is 20, 200, 2000, 20,000 in size the site is a collective thing. This means that any legal system or economy tends to be written to maximise the welfare of the site. The individual producer has few rights, especially property rights in the resulting system because the site has basically no reason to give such rights to anybody.
If the site is dependant upon the wealth produced by the individual taxpayer because *it* cannot manage to collectively produce surplus value, then the site is rendered dependant upon private production. Since the site cannot survive without taxes, they have no power to defy these people and therefore indulge them by making sure to give them the greatest amount of rights and privilages possible.
The initial seven are colonists and their colony is funded by the crown but as the site start actually producing value the crown wants its investment back plus interest resulting in a certain level of value in "offerings" to the king being demanded and perhaps only of certain types of goods... like a mandate on your whole fortress from the king.
Now your site is producing surplus value again.
its the difference between manslaughter and murder, if poverty stricken peasants are a side effect of the economy that's manslaughter but if there existence is the goal its murder, I see the demon as wanting there to be poverty stricken peasants because it enjoys their suffering (me ) while in the other society their just "collateral" damage.
I doubt the poverty stricken peasants care much for the difference.
They are also as boring as the Amish.
I do not know any personally, but I would imagine there are plenty of conflicts going on.
You get grey and grey when there's no white or black left to mix and all that's left is grey.
You have what I like to call 'colourless fiction'. Since everybody is the exact shade of grey, all conflicts have no real meaning and no third parties (like the reader) have any reason to care about the outcome.
I did say that I declare the virus to the winner.
Yes you did.
True Goblin defiantly are but I do feel that the player civ is supposed to be like an empire as well.
Fantasy dwarves are normally supposed to be more Switzerland than Rome; defensively minded, greedy and isolationist.
True its not completely gone but I feel that its closer to the total collapse end of the spectrum then the big success end, also true about countries not being 100% capitalist but for the ones that are capitalist I feel that most of them are over 50% capitalist.
Well you could say it is like an evolutionary arms race. What if the collapse simply killed off the weak links that had not developed properly effective ideological defenses, while leaving the stronger variants alone?
Ah I get you now, your saying that the PC is also a mercenary and being hired by him is dangerous but you seem to ignore that "adventurer" only means "player controlled character" not that you actually do any adventuring.
Edit:with the addition of bards and traveling musicians will there be followers who's motivation is not death and glory?
Yeah, you can have your performance troupe that just wants to perform, with no wanna-die checks at all.
The life of a merchant or travailing bard then that not as dangerous and that's where "hiring" was mentioned in the dev page so I suppose it depend on what your hiring them for because even if the "legendary mercenary" hires you if its to do something like guard his private property or look after his sheep that's no more dangerous then standard hamlet life with the added benefit that anyone with commonsense won't won't to anger Urist Mcgoblingenocide the slayer of Demons, Dragons, Night Creatures, Hydras and owner of a very nice mansion over in the hamlet of TradeIorn.
This is a genuine problem. How do we end up with the correct henchmen for the lifestyle that the player character has to offer?
While they did expand faster then I originally thought Scientology still did better and that stuff just plain crazy with no sense to it at all.
Religions tend to be just plain crazy with no sense at all (to those who do not believe in them). Scientology has the advantage of being perfectly well adapted for Capitalist society, since it worships money. Scientology on the other hand never manages to create a whole society according to it's program, but since it believes so devoutly in
$, is that really a loss?
I still say that because it propagated its own values that it was at lest partially successful, The attack dog succeeded in ultimately killing its enemy because its values helped form the nations that defeated the one that defeated it.
A society is not exactly the same thing as it's values, values are simply something it has. The whole project was a success from the point of view of the virus, but the attack dog was destroyed even if it's virus went on to make many more attack dogs of those who killed it. The same thing happened to the Persian Empire when Alexander the Great smashed it was equally ludicrous ease given how strong (on paper) it should have been.
Raw defined starting point would be nice, you start where you want and I start where I want.
The starting point is sort of arbitery really, as unless you intend to play say in Yr 10 every society will have adjust it's economic institutions to fit it's current values and dominant creature personality anyway by the time that world-gen finished.
Think of like how Liberal Crime Squad works, there the team shows they can manage the evolution of political/economic systems. The main difference is that by default, rather than everybody starting off Conservative, everybody starts of as Elite Liberal; which essentially means things work as they do now. But unless the creature has a suitably extreme 'left-wing' values/personality policies will then shift towards mere Liberal or even further if the creature has 'right-wing' values/personality. You can however custom start it so that particular policies start off at a value above 0 but things will naturally shift towards the proper value.
The main difference is that while the policies in Liberal Crime squad are measured seperately, the economic policies are clustered around 4 pillars, with a seperate 'health' value and help to hold the pillars up but these policies all exact a 'seperate' toll from society. These pillars relate to four basic concerns that the fortress economy would face.
1. Production: How do we get the dwarves to produce sufficiant wealth rather than lazying around.
[CRAFTSMANSHIP] [SKILL] and
[HARD_WORK] help increase production while
[MERRIMENT] [INTROSPECTION] and
[LEISURE_TIME] undermine production.
2. Regulation: How do we get the dwarves to produce the right kind of wealth rather than doing just what they want.
[SELF_CONTROL] [HARMONY] and
[COOPERATION] increase regulation while
[INDEPENDANCE] [COMPETITION] and
[ARTWORK] undermine regulation.
3. Distribution: How do we make sure that goods are distributed 'fairly' rather than being corruptly hoarded by the powerful.
[SACRIFICE] [SELF_CONTROL] and
[FAIRNESS] increase distribution while
[FAMILY] [FRIENDSHIP] and
[POWER] undermine distribution.
4. Hospitality: How do we made sure that visiting outsiders are cared for without being taken advantage of.
[LAW] [TRUTH] and
[DECORUM] increase hospitality while
[COMMERCE] [ELOQUENCE] and
[CUNNING] undermine hospitality.
Economic policies are clustered around these four pillars. Sites can come to grief is basically four ways, their beings do not produce enough (production), their beings refuse to work in a unified way (regulation), the powerful corruptly hoard all the wealth or outsiders smuggle their wealth away (hospitality). All four pillars when undermined result in a loss of site productivity and policies get enacted as a result of the site coming to realise both that it has a problem and the problem is not universal. This can happen in two ways, the first way is for them to trade with another site that has fewer maluses than they do and the second is when the people 'in charge' cannot get all their basic needs (food, drink, clothing).
The economic policies that are implemented to 'solve' the crisis depend upon a mixture the values of the civilization and the personal values of the ruler (s). These policies mitigate the damage done in economic terms but also create new problems; the most extreme policies have the greatest effect but cause the largest amount of problems. Policies are repealed or moderated when a suitable ruler comes to power whose has values opposed to the core value of the policy, provided that it's repealing does not make the site uncompetative. When policies exist that are at odds with the values of the population there is an increased chance of the ruler being overthrown, the more extreme the policies the more that is so (this helps to bring a ruler into power to remove policies.
I have to say that if the "superior utopian society" gets consumed from the inside by the dystopian one then its not all that superior imho
This brings us back to the whole question of biology. If the reason the creature is bad is down to values (nurture) then the superior utopian society can simply indocrinate the newcomers, who are not very well disposed to their old society anyway but if the creature is bad because of it's personality (nature) then they have a problem.