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Author Topic: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?  (Read 3103 times)

phil701

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Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« on: November 16, 2018, 03:49:07 pm »
I'm considering attempting this and am wondering if anyone has experience with this idea. I would organize my system into four castes:

The bottom caste would be unskilled labourers and haulers, with little regard for comfort. They would produce things like food to support the upper castes.

The second caste would be the military, which would live exclusively in barracks and train, with occasional patrol squads. Their constant training would result in a more stronger army than one split between training and work.

The third caste would be the skilled workers and artisans, working to create quality items. By having to do next to no hauling and by immediately training third caste children to be craftsmen, I could create far more and better trade and craft goods.

The uppermost cast would be the nobles, clerks, leaders, etc, with the best bedrooms and living conditions. They would do next to no manual labor and would be the pretty face of the fortress.

Would this work well? Does anyone have experience with such a plan?
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Saiko Kila

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2018, 04:03:39 pm »
I have not tried it, and not only because I hate unequal political systems (including all with VIPs and aristocracy).

The dwarves do like performing actions seemingly out of place, like a noble working in a smithy, or soldier writing a book. Also workers will be grumbling, though certainly they won't make an organised uprising yet. But things like uprising are possible in the world beyond your fortress, and will be even more fleshed out in the future updates, so there's at least hope for this fragment of sad reality.

In your scheme the artisans would be most happy probably, while nobles, haulers and soldiers will have many reason to object. Additionally children bear not much of skills of their parents, so it is possible than a scion of a mathematical genius would be imbecile (I mean, more imbecile, because even mathematical geniuses in this game are quite stupid), and should be hauling things (and cheaper ones) instead of continuing the family tradition.

By the way, most common way of training soldiers already doesn't give them much time for working, and people actively modify the schedule so soldiers can do something outside of barracks and fulfil their needs.
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Witty

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #2 on: November 16, 2018, 04:17:44 pm »
The issue with this I feel is that this sort of stereotypical human social structure don't really apply to DF dwarves. Nearly all dwarves for example love and have a great deal of respect for craftsmanship. There's no real reason for the highest strata of dwarven society to do no physical labor, because it's a generally loved and respected practice.

I feel that you should combine your third and fourth caste, making a select number of your craftsdwarves into nobles. They'll certainly have time for both jobs, as most noble obligations aren't very taxing. Depending on how happy you want your military, they could be siphoned from the upper class as well severing part time shifts, or you could make them full timers. Note though that full time military dwarves will invariably grow very upset and depressed for a lack of time to do anything else but train. 
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anewaname

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #3 on: November 16, 2018, 04:30:19 pm »
Sort of... I set up many empty squads, and begin filling them with dwarfs until all dwarfs are in a squad. There are three categories of squads... Military
 - these train 8/12 months per year and train some civilian skills while off-duty.
Skilled mood-able crafters
 - these have access to a barracks for training but have no training schedule (allowing them to train as desired but it will not interfere with crafting. They also wear light over-clothing armor for protection verse crundles and tantrum-throwing dwarfs )
Those with civilian labors enabled (miner/woodcutter/hunter)
 - these have no access to a barracks and are never called onto active duty, to avoid uniform issues. They are only in the military for grouping.

The objectives include: that manager/broker/bookkeeper/medical dwarfs are always in the third group (so they are never on-duty when needed), any dwarf can do hauling (but I use DT to turn off wood/stone/refuse hauling for squads of crafters), and every dwarf can gain happiness from using skills at some time.

So, there is a military caste, a crafter caste, a hauler/civilian-labor caste, and the game's noble caste, but there is some overlap. The important thing for me is that I can sort them in DT using squads.
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Broseph Stalin

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2018, 06:03:50 pm »
That was pretty much my MO for a while. Nobility get nice rooms, legendary and other useful dwarves get individual rooms, unskilled dwarves get to share barracks, the trash dwarves get to live in the caverns collecting things into a pile so nobody important has to venture out looking for them. The horrors it created are detailed in the Increasingly Tragic Tale of Dumplin.
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sketchesofpayne

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #5 on: November 17, 2018, 09:28:43 pm »
In the past I've done a meritocracy.  Dwarves would get care and attention from me based on their skill levels.

I would have a high population of dwarves.  As migrants came in I would enable any useful labors.  Everyone would sleep in the barracks or dormatory, everyone would eat in the same cramped dining hall, and everyone spent at least a few months a year in military training with just basic armor (mail shirt and leggings) and individual choice melee.  During a siege, anyone not doing a vital task would be activated and sent to fight.

Once someone reached 'Professional' skill level they got their own room and a nickname.  Artisans would be assigned a lighter training schedule and soldiers would get better weapons and armor.

Once someone reached 'Legendary' skill level they got one of the nice, furnished bedrooms and a personal dining room.  Artisans got a personal workshop and no longer activated to fight.  Soldiers joined 'elite' squads.

Once they reached 'Legendary +5' skill level they got a furnished tomb.
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Urist McScoopbeard

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #6 on: November 19, 2018, 11:59:30 am »
I once tried a de facto Manoral Feudalism system. The problem is that it's really a pain in the butt to keep separate estates separate.

I mean, let's do our due diligence though, I too have thought about this idea for a while. To kind of successfully emulate an estate system I think we'd probably have to solve the following problems/questions:

-- Feudalism is based on the awarding of Landed titles in exchange for military service/production of goods/et al. Depending on the level of the lord/vassal relationship. So how do we keep the production of each estate decentralized? (and prevent the accumulation of goods from multiple estates in one place, AND prevent goods from one estate from reaching another estate?)

-- How do we keep actual Dwarf labors geographically separate? I mean will Burrows work for this? It will, at the least, be a pain in the ass to update and maintain a multitude of Estate burrows. I haven't experimented too much with this.

Okay... I thought this list would be longer, but honestly I think if you answer these two questions you are good to go.

Wall of text here, I'm just thinking through this process:

First of all, there needs be some RP involved--certain assumptions need to be made about how feudalism will work in the DF world without there being any specific mechanics behind it. So let's say that your embark site is ROUGHLY the plot of land that has been awarded to the expedition leader in return to service provided to the King/Queen.

Bonus: You could clearly define through some method (either rough radius from a specific spot, or iconic geographical features) through which to make an initial burrow/claim from which the resultant fiefdoms are carved. Spots which are not initially included in the claim could be divvied up later or used as a kind of "free city"/township area which is only technically beholden to the Kingdom.

I mean this is basically the gist of a regular embark. I think any talk of a feudal system must go on to support multiple fiefdoms. Of course, the immediate goal is to expand the initial estate with shelter, services, defenses--whatever it takes to meet the basic needs of the Expedition Leader and their retainers. Determining when and who to give a fief to is a bigger challenge. You may wish to give all six other founders their own fiefs, beholden to the expedition leader or assign them arbitrarily to whomever you like.

Bonus: Maybe establish a set of guidelines by which to award land. Saving a lord, a need to acquire more soldiers for service (a March perhaps), a large distant plot of land that needs cultivating/exploitation.

At this point, you have the big fiefs laid out (or at least some of them). You could take it a step further and really tie serfs to their land by designating burrows for each farm/sharecropper.

After that idk, it's probably a matter of roleplaying, as each fief is effectively independent, you're probably free to focus on intrigue, and defending against attacks (and determining if an attack is large enough to warrant conscription from multiple fiefs). How far you take it, and whether or not you want to get temples/churches and their related tithes involved is up to you.

It's probably a pain in the butt to get taxes worked out right, whether they are paid in coin or materials. Law and Order could be complicated, especially if you have a village outside the jurisdiction of a fief.

IDK, those are just my thoughts.
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #7 on: November 20, 2018, 07:52:41 pm »
Currently DF's Dorfs don't have much reason to form such an intricate caste system within a Fortress. The most stratified you can get in importance through an average Fort is probably:
-Soapmakers
-The nobility
-Miners
-The clerk, broker and chief medical dwarf
-Forge workers
-Mechanics
-Craftsdwarves
-Elite Dwarven soldiers
-Brewers
-Everyone else

Yet even with those divisions, the gap between the bottom and top rank isn't enough to warrant any noticeable difference in treatment, except perhaps to decide who to rush into a safe burrow when a particularly deadly FB attacks. In some Fortresses a more stratified hierarchy might be more plausible, but of all my Forts, I have rarely managed to pull off a feudal caste hierarchy. I tend to try and make all of my Dwarves happy (and stoic to shocking experiences), skilled in craftsdwarfship and warfare, and all of these things require content Dwarves for the endeavour to succeed/not backfire.

In my above-ground Fortresses, I have been able to separate my Fortresses into several semi-distinct and distinct castes:
-The nobility
-The clerk, broker and chief medical dwarf
-Forge Workers
-Brewers
-Miners
-Mason-haulers & Farmer-haulers & Children-farmers
The existence of the many hauling and construction jobs in an above-ground Fort requires a large amount of Dorf hauling hours, which could be the basis for a "successful" caste system. However because I want my Dwarves to be as skilled as possible to reduce construction time, and I want all of my Dwarves to also be soldiers and so have the time to train without impacting their work efficiency, again I can't justify mistreating the backbone of my Fortress without expecting to suffer.

In my trench-Fortresses and prison-Fortresses, I have been able to separate my Dwarves into the officers, recruits and prisoners, but I wouldn't really call that a caste system as such, as everyone's in the same mud so to speak.

I think the main problem is that a feudal caste system in DF increasingly becomes obsolete as a Fortress matures. Even things in DF like farming benefit more from skilled farmers than depressed serfs, while children can train in farming if so allowed. Children also complicate the matter somewhat because all children are treated alike in DF, so you would have to use burrows and keep track of whose kids are whose to keep the castes separate.

That said, this could be the basis for a really cool Fortress idea. The way I'd do it is I'd make the Fortress a series of circles surrounding circles, each one plated in different materials. The inner circle would be the most lavish and secure, the outer circle closest to the outside world & austere. What's more, I'd find some repetitive task for the outer circle to complete in order to prop up the social order when the necessity of hauling tasks disappears - something like a manual pump stack, drawing magma from the ground to the surface, to keep the Fortress safe from goblin attacks.
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Sver

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #8 on: November 20, 2018, 09:00:30 pm »
I was going back and forth on whether or not to write up a wall of text about the feudalism being, for a large part, a form of military and legal organization, but now I see that Urist McScoopbeard already did it pretty well, so I'll just drop my little something here.
Spoiler: For those interested (click to show/hide)
It's an attempt to create a believable, even if DF-ish, feudal nobility system for humans. The central idea was to make nobles actually useful and desirable to get, instead of them being nothing but the usual annoyance, by making them neccessary to unlock certain mechanics, such as an organized military. Also, to make the whole system a bit more engaging, with mandates, demands and succession that loosely simulate the political weight of hereditary land owners and elected representatives of certain groups, such as craftsmen. As a bonus, this system gives three possible development paths for the fort to take:
1) Lay low (limit the population to <80) and live with a fairly undemanding reeve, their peasant helpers and a reasonably sized, but disorganized militia.
2) Grow, accept a barony and have lots of demanding nobles, but with a large and organized military.
3) Grow, but keep your distance and enjoy the guilds "seizing control" of the fort, with very few mandates, but a non-existent military (aside from a small merchant guard) - that is, until your fort is large enough to be considered a city and field their own militia.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2018, 09:09:06 pm by Sver »
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Urist McScoopbeard

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #9 on: November 21, 2018, 01:34:51 pm »
More Nobles is def better in the situation, especially if they carry some administrative benefit, however the limiting factor is still the designation, distribution, and stratification of geographical hierarchies methinks.

The initial most central lord and fief is the easiest, especially considering you're gonna want to build densely and defensively--I.E. a manor/castle/walled village. It gets a lot more complicated when you want to start emulating the land-for-service agreements that are for better or worse (it has sometimes been described as an historically inaccurate blanket statement) the defining trait of Feudalism.

Knights need land, estates, etc. those might grow into Baronies of their own. Serfs need farms, etc.
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Sver

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #10 on: November 21, 2018, 04:10:59 pm »
Until the economy system is back, such effort is mostly vain, unfortunately, as there are very few things that can be privately owned yet. Not even the sites themselves are owned really - a baron's hold over it is very loose, and the slightly-more-meaningful political power rests in the hands of a mayor (talking vanilla dwarven nobles - in my system that would be a reeve or a castellan). You can streamline the distribution of resources using the burrows, linked stockpiles/workshops, owned rooms (including statue gardens) and simply locked doors - although, it can get pretty tedious to keep up in highly populated and/or long-running forts.

The most egregious problem, in my opinion, is the lack of meaningful resource shortage. Separate farms and "serfs" working on them kinda loose their point if a single 10-tile farm can feed an average-sized population for all eternity, another such farm can keep them all clothed, and the remanining needs of each average fort-dweller can be permanently satisfied by ~20 logs and/or rocks.

Ultimately, it all ties down to roleplay. You can forgo actual farms and limit everything to plant/fruit gathering, making yields much smaller and more variable from season to season and from landpiece to landpiece. You can limit local production altogether and center your fort around aquiring tributaries to sustain and expand the military that you will use to vassalize even more (quite early-feudal). You can distribute armor and weapons depending on social rank, e.g. assumed wealth, instead of general availability that tends to put everyone in full plate. You can assign military service and training schedules in a similar manner: personally, I use winter-only for the baron, all year for knights and once a season for guards, while commoners don't train, normally, but can get some in times of need, such as when I need to pad my raiding force.

By no means it will be a realistic simulation of feudalism, but it can be a fun themed roleplay regardless.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2018, 04:13:40 pm by Sver »
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Zac

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #11 on: November 25, 2018, 11:05:35 pm »
I did try several variant of the idea. I'm not sure that talking about "feudalism" is really pertinent tho, it's more about trying to simulate whatever the society of the fortress could looks like.

My take on it was that my dwarves being creatures of law and order would want to make everything remotely important to the fortress life into a form of institution. So for example if my fortress survive mostly on hunting at the start of the game I will think of my 2 or 3 crossbowmen as a "hunter guild", over time I will build them a guild house where they will be housed along with their families complete with their own hall with trophies on dispay. As the rest of the fortress burries itself underground the guild with then grow to include most surface workers, fishers, woodcutters, etc, along with a master bowyer and the beastmasters and in time of war the guild will provide the fortress with an elite squad of crossbow and war beasts. There will also be an internal hierachy inside the guild with the "core profession", in that case hunters, being the most prestigious and the most senior member of said profession being given a title of guildmaster. The point being that I don't start with a hierarchy that I try to enforce on my dwarves, I just try to formalize what they are already doing.


In an other fort, beastmasters could be their own separate guild rather than a secondary job in another guild, when a profession is secondary I tend to make a point of having redundancies just to mark the fact that each guild is its own entity. So for example I woud have one bowyer for the hunters and another one working for the military and if I decide to make a beastmaster guild after the hunters have got their own beastmasters obviously they wont want to get rid of them and obviously the beastmasters guild will be pissed about another guild infringing on their monopoly so I will decide on weird compromise where the hunter guild can train grizzly bears for both war and hunting because they've always been doing that but they can only train polar bears for huntings and war polar bears have to be trained by the beastmaster guild while tigers must be trained by the beastmasters guild no matter what, something like that. That way all the tedium of setting burrow and ownership becomes dealing with the weird and quirky traditions of my fortress in my mind, which makes it much funnier.
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WJLIII3

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2018, 02:05:06 am »
Soldiery never settles near the bottom of a caste system, for just about the reasons you'd expect. Other than that complaint, sounds cool.
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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #13 on: December 03, 2018, 10:44:23 am »
i came across that thought a many times when thinking of a new way to build a fort.
creating a Keep for the highest noble and adding additional rooms or houses around it for the others, creating houses for the workshops and farmsteads.
but no matter how i put it, it would look unlikely to actually work out in DF for various reasons:

medieval communities grew from small feudal systems with a low title noble holding only one small fief with some peasants and/or workers.
that noble was given that fief in return of some responsibilities : taxes, the duty to send troops in aid of his lord, protection of his own fief, protection of any travelers through his fief;
they then built a castle, which could consist of no more than a house with crenelations/arrowslits and at least one room with the bare necesseties for living: a fireplace, a storage, a bed, a table with places to sit around it.
the farms of his peasants and the homes of his workers would sit somewhere near/around it and they would run to him if danger came.

this would be the moment where the FUN begins and your dorfs get slaughtered and only 1/10 reaches the keep safely and you close the main gate and just wait for the werebeast to wander off. you bury the dead and hope no keas or lemurs wander in next.
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Sver

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Re: Hase anyone tried organizing their fort into a feudalistic caste system?
« Reply #14 on: December 03, 2018, 11:04:51 am »
Not necessarily so. For one, there were motte-and-bailey castles, where the peasants' part was also fortified, even if to a lesser extent.
Also, it is the lord's duty to organize proper protection for peasants: patrols, guarding posts etc. Since any DF fort is basically a war-torn frontier (from a realistic perspective), the peasants themselves could very well be mandatorily armed (historically, they stashed their weapons at home, but that's too cumbersome to manage in DF) and trained, much in the same way the English did, for instance.
Finally, individual/family houses, fences and locked doors stall most enemies long enough for the military to arrive. Werebeasts in my forts of such desing were particularly keen on trying to demolish (floodgate) fences, transforming back and getting trampled.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2018, 11:07:53 am by Sver »
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