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Author Topic: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations  (Read 2954 times)

FantasticDorf

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Hello Toady

This problem in the title is a lot like the issue regarding when Beak dogs couldn't be interacted with when pulled back from raids, in which things player's dont see offscreen eventually come back through agency of mechanics used by the player or expanding knowledge of how the game works and how you yourself can interact with it.

Troll population and in general tower population is a well known problem, however root of the problem is that the way food is managed, even while despite goblins not requiring sustenance themselves.

Why does this happen?

Well through some modifications, i have managed to establish that dark tower food simulations work like all other civilisations in which the number of livestock and crops relevant will help aid the flow of how much food is availible and the excess is turned into population, roughly keeping in line with how much food is required increasing the livestock and/or crops.

However, trolls themselves are eating despite their masters not needing to and  raise over the critical level of population due to a abundance of food and unlimited access to (own, through cannibalism ethic) troll numbers. The livestock damages the food simulation by artificially chartering false population growth.

1 adult troll = 40 meat of muscle, disregarding vital organs = (/4 (1 meal per season) equals 10 square meals for a goblin a year and shared between another troll also eating the food supply 5 square meals

Trolls are also virtually immortal and hence do not naturally circulate out of the population by natural causes either, especially over a short period of time.

How would we go about fixing this?

My own presented solution were to make as the title suggests, Trolls (and Ogres, another large creature pressed into goblin civs) largely inedible by removing the capacity for the muscle mass harvested from them to be eaten (passively by other civilisations rather than dwarves)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is then added to the localised body plan of the creature to replace its muscles without causing any particular changes to its physiology, only edibility.

And to make them spawn inside the goblin civilisation with exclusivity contrary to the current rules of how they are obtained, the new ANIMAL tags as that is all that would be required, while also allowing [PET_EXOTIC] to function on beak dogs so they aren't snatched away for no valid reason.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Conclusion

When these are adressed with the recommended raw changes anecdotally and goblins are set to be carnivores to use the population food models

Quote
  • Troll and goblin populations remain within cap more often and do not overpopulate in scale with food demands, relying on beak-dogs, on site hunting and the limited supply of in-fortress Trolls for food.
  • The civilizations have more fluid mechanics related to starvation, as if all the beakdogs and trolls are killed in the area without local creatures to hunt or overdedicated to war, goblin populations will stagnate and starve naturally.
  • Elves are revealed to be cheaters, but that's what you get for living in the middle of a forest.

Hence i think that all Trolls & Ogres (plus probably blizzard men) should have inedible muscle mass similar to this code since goblin civilizations are abusing them and there are enough food simulations to support goblins as full carnivores to keep the numbers in check with gameplay nuances to doing so.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2018, 02:10:20 pm by FantasticDorf »
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #2 on: December 05, 2018, 06:41:38 am »

Dwarf Fortress goblins don't presently eat anything.  Their numbers are only limited by the maximum site population, which is 10,000 for dark fortresses and 200 for dark pits.
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scourge728

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #3 on: December 05, 2018, 07:19:56 am »

If I'm understanding correctly, they still keep the trolls as if they eat, and the trolls do need to eat, meaning more trolls are spawned

GoblinCookie

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #4 on: December 05, 2018, 07:24:43 am »

If I'm understanding correctly, they still keep the trolls as if they eat, and the trolls do need to eat, meaning more trolls are spawned

The trolls are considered livestock, the food requirements of livestock is not presently a thing in world-gen.  The numbers of livestock, edible or otherwise tends to be set to a given number, so we often have the exact same number of horses, chickens, turkeys and so on.  The only problem I see with this is that trolls I guess may be more memory intensive than livestock to keep track of because they use the full personality model rather than using the animal model. 

Really of course trolls should be considered people and compete with goblins for people-slots. 
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #5 on: December 05, 2018, 12:30:48 pm »

In the original message i addressed that trolls were eating other trolls from the livestock position, removing [NO_EAT] from goblins and applying the fix to have the immense size of trolls yield less made the civ's eat and grow less aggressively as a re-iteration. A big problem with having them inhabit 'people slots' is that goblins eat 'people' which trolls are close enough to goblin industry to justify as a meal, workhorse and second class citizen rolled into one.

* Lifespan
* Size
* Availiblity

Quote
The trolls are considered livestock, the food requirements of livestock is not presently a thing in world-gen.

Only sentients eating matter, so to that i would say its unpolished to its definitions, and simply tapping goblins into feeling hunger adds to the game's fluidity and makes use of its mechanics anyway, to make a more purposeful reason not to dump all your war-animals in a siege at once given goblins do have the hunter profession to support themselves otherwise.

Quote
The numbers of livestock, edible or otherwise tends to be set to a given number, so we often have the exact same number of horses, chickens, turkeys and so on.

Viewing this problem, it is well co-ordinated to have exact numbers of trolls & beakdogs when visualised in third party legends viewers on problem sites in the hundreds or thousands when civilian population is also high. If the system was working by letting goblins properly judicate their supportable numbers and the false population growth of goblins was halted for a site, it'd be more reasonable.

10,000 for dark fortresses and 200 for dark pits.

This is a player inconsistency if they were to modify RAW's, each site can actually support 200-250 max, the additional overdraft are incidentally not meant to be supported. There's not enough actual room to support a bigger population on site leading to overpopulation lagging the game, and the intensive amount of livestock also spawned.

If at such point they should really tip over into ~250 capacity, there's more than enough reason for them to emigrate to found more pits for population control.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2018, 12:43:59 pm by FantasticDorf »
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2018, 12:12:20 pm »

Just a update only partially relevant to the OP hence a seperate post, im poking around to seeing how i can stop elves overpopulating with livestock and their own numbers.

Big problems consist of:
Quote
* Like goblins-trolls dilemma elves are immortal and do not eat, but the site still consumes food (see below) and needs herbalists due to it being a type of 'farming role' for a lack of proper agriculture.

* Elves meat industry is outlawed by [ANIMAL_KILL] apprehension, so livestock are not consumed by them but are still part of the passive food simulation on all sites.

[*A] Animal-people citizens (that migrate in) on site eat and drink correctly but scale up with population so it should work correctly

[*B] Animal people find their way into elven livestock due to [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] for unspecified reasons with problems that brings, and bring more strain on food and therefore animal usage like the goblin-troll example.

* [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] is a really cheaty hack for their prowess of taming animals and often drops every animal within 7 tiles to upset the imagined livestock = population balance and other wg.upsets with overpopulation of animals to citizens, such as 100's of various animals to 10 elves (due to likely population crash) causing raiding deadlock for the player without warning.


Short of slapping [NATURAL_SKILL:TRAINER] onto all elves to make them all masterful beastmasters, [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] is a stickler because without it the elves lose a cruicial element of how they handle themselves without the obvious beast taming magic to fill the gap into not just being primitives clad in wood vests.

Trying [ANIMAL] i reckon would bring some success but i've not managed to handle anything just yet, for starters i tried adding a new creature class onto the animal-person c-variation default so that they wouldn't be affected by [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] without removing it, peacefully taking animal-people out of the livestock pool for elves.

Code: ("for c_variation_default) [Select]
[CV_REMOVE_TAG:CREATURE_CLASS]
[CV_NEW_TAG:CREATURE_CLASS:ANIMAL_PERSON]

Code: [Select]
[ANIMAL]
[ANIMAL_CLASS:MAMMAL]
[ANIMAL_FORBIDDEN_CLASS:ANIMAL_PERSON] //see above
                [ANIMAL_ALWAYS_MOUNT]
                [ANIMAL_NEVER_WAGON_PULLER]
                [ANIMAL_ALWAYS_SIEGE]
                [ANIMAL_ALWAYS_PET]
                [ANIMAL_ALWAYS_PACK_ANIMAL]
[ANIMAL]
[ANIMAL_CLASS:REPTILE] //example class
[ANIMAL_NEVER_MOUNT]
[ANIMAL_ALWAYS_PET]
[ANIMAL_NEVER_PACK_ANIMAL]
[ANIMAL_ALWAYS_SIEGE]
[ANIMAL_NEVER_WAGON_PULLER]

Once the errant animal people livestock are dealt with, the way [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] collects i have also limited with mammal & self made reptile indexes (because giant anacondas are not very fast for mounts, and giant butterflies are not very strong) but theres definitely i could do more with here to fashion a decent army and smoothen up the gameplay.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2018, 11:03:05 am »

In the original message i addressed that trolls were eating other trolls from the livestock position, removing [NO_EAT] from goblins and applying the fix to have the immense size of trolls yield less made the civ's eat and grow less aggressively as a re-iteration. A big problem with having them inhabit 'people slots' is that goblins eat 'people' which trolls are close enough to goblin industry to justify as a meal, workhorse and second class citizen rolled into one.

* Lifespan
* Size
* Availiblity

No, if we require them to eat the goblins eat livestock like everyone else.  The trolls simply count as livestock, the only difference that goblin ethics makes is that trolls are considered edible. 

Only sentients eating matter, so to that i would say its unpolished to its definitions, and simply tapping goblins into feeling hunger adds to the game's fluidity and makes use of its mechanics anyway, to make a more purposeful reason not to dump all your war-animals in a siege at once given goblins do have the hunter profession to support themselves otherwise.

Sentients aren't even a tag.  The citizens eat the livestock if they are edible and not sentient, the livestock themselves don't eat anything.  It's total number of citizens against the total number of livestock that determines how much food the livestock provides for the citizens.  Which is irrelevant because goblins don't eat anything. 

Viewing this problem, it is well co-ordinated to have exact numbers of trolls & beakdogs when visualised in third party legends viewers on problem sites in the hundreds or thousands when civilian population is also high. If the system was working by letting goblins properly judicate their supportable numbers and the false population growth of goblins was halted for a site, it'd be more reasonable.

The only thing that controls the goblin numbers is the total number of people-slots in the fortress.  The livestock fill up livestock slots, each type of livestock takes an equal % of the total number of livestock allowed on site.  Because goblins have such a limited number of competing forms of livestock available to them, we end up with a lots of trolls. 

This is a real problem because trolls are [CAN_LEARN] creatures, which causes them to use them more complicated AI associated with intelligent creatures.  This means that per memory requirements they are best of taking people-slots alongside the goblins, at the moment we have a ton of goblins because goblins don't eat and a ton of trolls because they don't eat either. 

If every troll replaces a goblin as a person and goblins have to eat, the whole population problem goes away. 

This is a player inconsistency if they were to modify RAW's, each site can actually support 200-250 max, the additional overdraft are incidentally not meant to be supported. There's not enough actual room to support a bigger population on site leading to overpopulation lagging the game, and the intensive amount of livestock also spawned.

If at such point they should really tip over into ~250 capacity, there's more than enough reason for them to emigrate to found more pits for population control.

The number of pits is ultimately limited by the site cap and the amount of space in the world.  You can't solve population problems by simply expanding because the more you expand the faster your population grows and the faster you expand. 

The absolute cap for sites other than dwarf fortresses is 10,000 for major sites and 250 for minor sites.  Dwarf Fortresses on the other hand have 500 for major sites and 250 for minor sites.  The key thing is that the majority of sites in the world essentially never reach anything like the absolute cap because there isn't enough food; but not goblins.
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scourge728

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #8 on: December 08, 2018, 01:35:56 pm »

Goblin, a question for you, if what he said isn't true, why does it work?

FantasticDorf

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #9 on: December 08, 2018, 01:46:54 pm »

No, if we require them to eat the goblins eat livestock like everyone else.  The trolls simply count as livestock, the only difference that goblin ethics makes is that trolls are considered edible.
Really of course trolls should be considered people and compete with goblins for people-slots.
A big problem with having them inhabit 'people slots' is that goblins eat 'people' which trolls are close enough to goblin industry to justify as a meal, workhorse and second class citizen rolled into one.

Trolls are also edible to trolls because they co-exist inside the goblin civ and abide by its ethics, a quick [SITE_CONTROLLABLE] modification onto the evil entity establishes that quickly even from their impoverished position, the difference from simulated fortress mode is that even abstractly all sentients eat in the food network (unless they dont eat at all)

Sentients aren't even a tag.  The citizens eat the livestock if they are edible and not sentient, the livestock themselves don't eat anything.  It's total number of citizens against the total number of livestock that determines how much food the livestock provides for the citizens.  Which is irrelevant because goblins don't eat anything.

I feel confident in saying this is false; anything above [SLOW_LEARNER] and [CAN_SPEAK][CAN_LEARN] which can be shortened into [INTELLIGENT] in raws is considered and treated differently as a intelligent being, though slow learners have more animalistic attributes. These facts don't stack up to the evidence i have seen, tried and experienced with provided examples to try for yourself by carrying out my suggested raw modifications.

The only thing that controls the goblin numbers is the total number of people-slots in the fortress.  The livestock fill up livestock slots, each type of livestock takes an equal % of the total number of livestock allowed on site.  Because goblins have such a limited number of competing forms of livestock available to them, we end up with a lots of trolls.

This feels like a repeat of what i have already laid out, ignoring the fact that im trying to explain the ratio works both ways in that more trolls from the uncontrolled behaviour breeding seperately goes over the possible maximum site capacities by feeding back into the population food network raising the cap and that this is seen when the cap raises to thousands and the visible effects of overpopulation as my working theory to how this happened supported by my findings and experiences.

If every troll replaces a goblin as a person and goblins have to eat, the whole population problem goes away.

This was the entire point of the thread, to the extent.  ::)

The number of pits is ultimately limited by the site cap and the amount of space in the world.  You can't solve population problems by simply expanding because the more you expand the faster your population grows and the faster you expand.

The absolute cap for sites other than dwarf fortresses is 10,000 for major sites and 250 for minor sites.  Dwarf Fortresses on the other hand have 500 for major sites and 250 for minor sites.  The key thing is that the majority of sites in the world essentially never reach anything like the absolute cap because there isn't enough food; but not goblins.

I can be willing to admit i was wrong in the point you quoted after re-checking, but trolls are more prevalent in towers, and this does not affect every tower or pit, signifying a specific point horizon when it starts to spiral out of control triggered by normal growth often in the capital, feeding back into abnormal growth past its set limits.

Food and goblins is true, carnivorous lifestyles do have disadvantages as i pointed out in the quoted text before the conclusion of the OP about starving goblins with very little food to hunt (such as living on glacier), and dissapointing beak dog & troll numbers on the tiny pits middling at 50 population theabouts.

EDIT - all this longposting and nitpicking is sending my head in a spin.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2018, 02:01:44 pm by FantasticDorf »
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #10 on: December 11, 2018, 08:45:06 am »

Goblin, a question for you, if what he said isn't true, why does it work?

What works?

Troll meat is produced by goblins and then exported to other civs (because ethical restrictions are ignored in exporting) which presumably helps increase their population.  That in turn increases the population growth of the other civs, which means more babies for goblins to steal, which means even more population for them.  Then the troll meat helps to keep alive the extra stolen population and the population of other civs crashes because the goblins are now feeding stolen population rather than exporting it the other population. 

Trolls are also edible to trolls because they co-exist inside the goblin civ and abide by its ethics, a quick [SITE_CONTROLLABLE] modification onto the evil entity establishes that quickly even from their impoverished position, the difference from simulated fortress mode is that even abstractly all sentients eat in the food network (unless they dont eat at all)

They aren't treated by the game any different from cows, chickens, turkeys and so on.  The game does not work on sentientsVSnon-sentiants, it works on citizens VS livestock. 

I feel confident in saying this is false; anything above [SLOW_LEARNER] and [CAN_SPEAK][CAN_LEARN] which can be shortened into [INTELLIGENT] in raws is considered and treated differently as a intelligent being, though slow learners have more animalistic attributes. These facts don't stack up to the evidence i have seen, tried and experienced with provided examples to try for yourself by carrying out my suggested raw modifications.

The game does divide creatures in actual play into sentients and non-sentiants.  However in game it does not do that much when they are offloaded, such as in world-gen economy. 

At one point I added in a non-sentient caste of creatures for the citizen race.  In world-gen they did all sorts of things they should not be doing as non-sentients but when they were actually loaded they did not do much and were quite broken, not displaying their names despite having them. 

This feels like a repeat of what i have already laid out, ignoring the fact that im trying to explain the ratio works both ways in that more trolls from the uncontrolled behaviour breeding seperately goes over the possible maximum site capacities by feeding back into the population food network raising the cap and that this is seen when the cap raises to thousands and the visible effects of overpopulation as my working theory to how this happened supported by my findings and experiences.

The trolls don't eat anything because they are simply treated as livestock, since world-gen ignores the sentiantVSnon-sentient distinctions that exist in play.  The trolls have a large population cap because they generally the only livestock (aside from beak dogs) goblins have.  The cap is thousands, hence the troll population reaches thousands; it is not because they are feeding trolls to themselves that this happens but simply because their populations are treated like livestock and there are few competing types of livestock in a goblin pits.

This was the entire point of the thread, to the extent.  ::)

The whole thread was based upon a false premise.   :(

I can be willing to admit i was wrong in the point you quoted after re-checking, but trolls are more prevalent in towers, and this does not affect every tower or pit, signifying a specific point horizon when it starts to spiral out of control triggered by normal growth often in the capital, feeding back into abnormal growth past its set limits.

Food and goblins is true, carnivorous lifestyles do have disadvantages as i pointed out in the quoted text before the conclusion of the OP about starving goblins with very little food to hunt (such as living on glacier), and dissapointing beak dog & troll numbers on the tiny pits middling at 50 population theabouts.

EDIT - all this longposting and nitpicking is sending my head in a spin.

Towers?  You mean dark fortresses surely? 

Trolls will be more prevalent in a dark fortresses because the livestock cap in dark fortresses is simply larger.  Since trolls are deployed by goblins on the battlefield, it is quite likely the goblins will have fewer trolls than the maximum due to attrition, plus trolls can be killed by megabeasts as well in raids. 

Without livestock or agriculture the prospects for regular things that need to eat are pretty grim, since the game economy has a very low estimate of the productivity of hunting+gathering, the trick to carnivores is to make sure they have starting livestock.  Goblins on the other hand do not 'starve out;, they only ever die because something is actually killing them off. 

In my mod I have a whole dark pits civilization (the Itarin) that have no food production jobs and no livestock whatsoever.  Their populations are typically massive by the end of world-gen because like vanilla goblins they don't need to eat anything.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #11 on: December 11, 2018, 10:01:47 am »

Goblin, a question for you, if what he said isn't true, why does it work?

What works?

Troll meat is produced by goblins and then exported to other civs (because ethical restrictions are ignored in exporting) which presumably helps increase their population.  That in turn increases the population growth of the other civs, which means more babies for goblins to steal, which means even more population for them.  Then the troll meat helps to keep alive the extra stolen population and the population of other civs crashes because the goblins are now feeding stolen population rather than exporting it the other population. 

The whole thread was based upon a false premise.   :(

As is your response, as it appears that you haven't tried my solution to validate it and then come back here with empiracal evidence with everything i provided even in RAW code format to try, im here if anybody would like to step in to offer advice, as well as just pinging me on a DF Discord site or ill consider just dropping my entire DF folder or mods for you in DFFD given that its virtually ready to release as is.

I take your meat exports with a extreme grain of salt as while things are handled in quantities the trade networks aren't that expansive* and are mostly locally centralised for worldgeneration activities, traders do not make rounds distributing to civ's currently in fortress mode as i know of and if the towers were being over fed, the solution is still the same by taking the meat out of Trolls to nip the exploit in the bud.

(for one goblins do not have trading animals, though dark fortresses are connected abstractly to pits and two, goblin civs do not interact with each other normally in any way i've seen so ill assume you meant sites)

They aren't treated by the game any different from cows, chickens, turkeys and so on.  The game does not work on sentientsVSnon-sentiants, it works on citizens VS livestock. 

---

At one point I added in a non-sentient caste of creatures for the citizen race.  In world-gen they did all sorts of things they should not be doing as non-sentients but when they were actually loaded they did not do much and were quite broken, not displaying their names despite having them.

This kind of behaviour is exhibited by trolls all the time as simple livestock doing out of place civilian things like claiming rooms and telling stories in the tavern (contrasted to a lack of voice oddly enough) and is a issue amongst people using semi-sapients tied to the fortress in fortress mode and on observation the many trolls with professions in adventurer mode. Besides this i dont see how adding non-sentients to be citizens would even be expected to turn out well, because semi-sapients have crossed the threshold needed but simply aren't full like the game expects and wants.

The trolls don't eat anything because they are simply treated as livestock, since world-gen ignores the sentiantVSnon-sentient distinctions that exist in play.  The trolls have a large population cap because they generally the only livestock (aside from beak dogs) goblins have.  The cap is thousands, hence the troll population reaches thousands; it is not because they are feeding trolls to themselves that this happens but simply because their populations are treated like livestock and there are few competing types of livestock in a goblin pits.

Im not giving up as much as becoming very tired with your flat rebuttals of whatever i say but as the point of the thread just try it for yourself and notice the curbed difference with a little bit of open mindedness. Or we could do it the other way and just mod in more creatures to disperse the numbers under goblin control with [ANIMAL] tags if that's what you're driving towards.

In my mod I have a whole dark pits civilization (the Itarin) that have no food production jobs and no livestock whatsoever.  Their populations are typically massive by the end of world-gen because like vanilla goblins they don't need to eat anything.

Well there you go, that's a civilian population breeding anyway out of control, but a side-point of the suggestion thread is to always be aware that whether they are using the models or not, the food networks will always be active and influencial, though you would have to check some other numbers besides like approximate children to eternally lived spouse couples and child maturation. (the new divorces might break thing up a bit more to stop eternal spouses having two pages of children)

Overladen sites can pose to be a problem, so here's how you fix it in that food was pointed to be the issue in the OP and summarily control over it to be the solution or least a self limiter.
« Last Edit: December 11, 2018, 10:05:46 am by FantasticDorf »
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #12 on: December 12, 2018, 01:19:39 pm »

Without meaning to bump innescantly, balancing elves is still a merticulous process but [ANIMAL] tags to remove the animalpeople from [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] is a success as long as the creatures defined within [ANIMAL_CLASS] are allowed by the civilization

You can use [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] and [ANIMAL] entity tags together to make them instantly convert any classes of that animal they are over, then use from c_variation controls the convert tag with master and target to remove and replace original creature class tags so that the new animal person variants can be automatically excluded from future [ANIMAL] checks and explicitly banned.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Word of caution: Refugees from conquering (which the elves are very good at with animals in tow) can also jump the food model, once its loose it doesn't stop. Up to 80 humans were living inside a anomaly settlement of 2000 elves in one of my largest and war-prone elf nations even after my modifications and the distribution of animals was around 400 in the highest and 80 for the lowest.

So unless i manage to slow down or stabilise the rate they learn tactics their nation which is spread very wide and far in equal distribution won't have any overpopulated places like this.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #13 on: December 13, 2018, 07:52:03 am »

As is your response, as it appears that you haven't tried my solution to validate it and then come back here with empiracal evidence with everything i provided even in RAW code format to try, im here if anybody would like to step in to offer advice, as well as just pinging me on a DF Discord site or ill consider just dropping my entire DF folder or mods for you in DFFD given that its virtually ready to release as is.

I take your meat exports with a extreme grain of salt as while things are handled in quantities the trade networks aren't that expansive* and are mostly locally centralised for worldgeneration activities, traders do not make rounds distributing to civ's currently in fortress mode as i know of and if the towers were being over fed, the solution is still the same by taking the meat out of Trolls to nip the exploit in the bud.

(for one goblins do not have trading animals, though dark fortresses are connected abstractly to pits and two, goblin civs do not interact with each other normally in any way i've seen so ill assume you meant sites)

Because reducing the amount of troll meat modifies the economy of the world in general, it may well have a knock-on effect that loops back to ultimately effect goblin (and troll) numbers.  You are not isolating your variables (because you can't), which means that while you may be able to demonstrate a correlation between two things, you won't prove your hypothesis in the slightest.  What you are doing is almost a textbook example of how empiricism and rationality are not the same thing. 

Remember that the economy functions during world-gen, it only only gets 'frozen', along with the maximum population numbers for each site when the world is finished.  Here is the thing, trolls count as livestock which means that all those goblin sites are producing a great deal of troll meat.  Since goblins however don't eat anything, 100% of that troll meat is exported which means the total amount of troll meat being exported is *not* going to be negligible as you say.  All major sites trade with each-other regardless of politics, that is a basic fact you can find out by asking people in adventure mode. 

Goblin populations will always rise to 10000/250 per site.  But the other civilizations numbers are constrained by food supply to be less than that.  The means that if the goblins dump troll meat onto the markets of the other civilizations, then the numbers of those civilizations goes up.  If the other civilizations are stronger, then the goblins will be less inclined to go to war with them but they are not so much stronger as to be inclined to go to war with the goblins.  Since war is the only thing preventing both goblin and troll numbers from reaching their max, we can now see how reducing food output per troll can ultimately mean fewer goblins and trolls, even though neither eat anything. 

This kind of behaviour is exhibited by trolls all the time as simple livestock doing out of place civilian things like claiming rooms and telling stories in the tavern (contrasted to a lack of voice oddly enough) and is a issue amongst people using semi-sapients tied to the fortress in fortress mode and on observation the many trolls with professions in adventurer mode. Besides this i dont see how adding non-sentients to be citizens would even be expected to turn out well, because semi-sapients have crossed the threshold needed but simply aren't full like the game expects and wants.

There are no semi-sapients in the game.  The game works on the stark binary of livestockVScitizen, non-sapient VS sapient.  When the game is offloaded, such as in world-gen it works on the former basis but when the game is onloaded it works on the latter basis, this creates silly situations I agree and was a very poor design decision on the part of the devs.

Trolls have professions because they have the [CAN_LEARN] token, which controls learning work skills; that is entirely intentional.  However if you have either [CAN_LEARN] or [CAN_SPEAK] (or both) then the game uses a special sentient AI which is not otherwise used, but only when the game is onloaded. 

Im not giving up as much as becoming very tired with your flat rebuttals of whatever i say but as the point of the thread just try it for yourself and notice the curbed difference with a little bit of open mindedness. Or we could do it the other way and just mod in more creatures to disperse the numbers under goblin control with [ANIMAL] tags if that's what you're driving towards.

It is really not easy to dealing with a whole thread built entirely on false premises and misunderstandings.  Goblins don't eat anything = FACT, Trolls as livestock don't eat anything = FACT.  Given you made a whole thread premised upon the opposite of basic facts about the game, I don't see how the response can be anything but flat rebuttals. 

Well there you go, that's a civilian population breeding anyway out of control, but a side-point of the suggestion thread is to always be aware that whether they are using the models or not, the food networks will always be active and influencial, though you would have to check some other numbers besides like approximate children to eternally lived spouse couples and child maturation. (the new divorces might break thing up a bit more to stop eternal spouses having two pages of children)

Overladen sites can pose to be a problem, so here's how you fix it in that food was pointed to be the issue in the OP and summarily control over it to be the solution or least a self limiter.

Food networks have no direct effect on the numbers of a creature that eats nothing.  It makes a *big* downwards difference to goblin numbers if you make them have to eat, trust me on that because I have done it.  I have a dark pits creature that doesn't eat and neither does it have a food supply, confirming that food supply is truly irrelevant to vanilla goblin numbers.

The civilian population is not 'breeding out of control'.  The population always breeds up to a given number, that number is normally set based upon world-gen food supply but is also capped to 10,000/250 in the case of dark pits regardless of food supply.  There is a hard cap based upon type of site and a soft cap based upon the food supply, for creatures that don't eat only the former applies.

The population will rise to the cap UNLESS something specific reduces the number below that.  Typically that means war and presently war is good at killing lots of people off even on the winning side. 
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thompson

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Re: Bugfix Suggestion: Troll inedibility to control dark site populations
« Reply #14 on: December 16, 2018, 01:44:59 am »

Hi Goblincookie. How do you know trolls don't eat anything? Has Toady clarified this specifically? Is there a thread you could link us to?
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