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[FantasticDorf]

Much of the content from the (Army?) and villian arc was kind of skipped over in favor of the nessecary tooling for the steam release, so this suggestion is just supplimentary content that deals with the management of a particular site and also reworks a slight amount the way that the ease the apparent lack of objectiveness of amassing a large amount of conquered sites mainly for the merit & to pursue landholder populations by making it harder.

A initial change is that all of your conquered sites and sites can be interacted with from the 'L'ocations screen, and that the general measure of "site happiness" will influence how easy your occupation is accepted by the residents, in needing more stationed dwarves drawn into periodic battles, and to try and avoid internal traitors who will weaken your site defence if anybody comes to their rescue or outright join the side of the opposing force.

A opposite effect of a happy site ownership would be more supplimentary militia soldiers more than the actual manifest of soldiers & citizens you have sent appearing to help mount the defence, taking arms according to their most prominent skill. A occupation would also no longer contribute to offsite population before some relevant steps, since it is a provisionary government.

So i present the three i's and r's.

Investigate: A messenger will be dispatched to this site and return with details of interest, such as the presence of known people who have escaped the authorities, local rumors, and snippy exerpts on site mood & local problems.
Infiltrate: A spy will be sent out in the guise of a vistor (you can control the desired disguise and they'll dress appropriately to the desired archetype to decrease visibility, monster hunters, fake diplomats, drunks - dwarves enjoy drunk disguises, it only needs coin) to act on a mission that has been pre-arranged with the dungeon master plotting at their desk, once they've met the dungeon master in their office and collated their disguise they'll leave the map to orchestrate the mission.
Integrate: After all claimants have been destroyed (possibly the previous owners in entirety), or after a period of 5 years unchallenged occupation the claim has expired, everyone who accepts a dwarven hearth-citizenship in the city are allowed to stay, with those who disagree being persecuted and made to leave the settlement, de-toothing a large non-conformist cultural element and removing some negative sentiment the occupation itself may have caused.

• Integration re-iterates the importance of citizenship and sails to a point where it no longer becomes a occupation but rather a naturalization, laying a claim on that site imparted to your site & the leading ruler position so that if its attacked in the future, you and your parent civ have a legitimate claim to follow it up as a just cause for war, and dont have to re-apply for occupation.

Return Site: If the previous owners still exist, sites can be returned for a boost to relationship standing down the occupying force and sending the overseer home. After peace has been established alternative in the due course of a war, the owners may make counter-demands to return the site peacefully through diplomatic talks.

• If the previous owners do not exist, and you decide to release a site to a choice of relevant claimants on a list, a vassal will be spawned of that particular culture, if they own any more settlements who you are presently occupying, they will try and negotiate those from your control, and resettle ruined areas they had previously claimed.

Raze (& Abandon): Sometimes the occupied site for fear of insurrectionalist forces will simply be untenable or extremely uncomfortable to live in, in which case it is much more convenient to actually destroy the site and cut your losses. Following input criteria, the entire site will be put to the torch, gathering up remaining goods, animals in cages, artifacts and freeing prisoners like the result of a squad-raze, as the overseer and remaining dwarves return in a caravan to make a final offering at the trade-depot.

Recolonize: Integrated and claimed sites that have since been destroyed can be resettled, demanding at least 7 nominated dwarves who will take logs and adequate provisions to the nearest trade depot, construct a wagon then leave the site with a prompt whether you want to follow them.

These all together would help make a more inclusive remainder of arc and keep the pulse of the fortress and wannabe conquerors hands full and engaged with the activity occuring.

[NW_Kohaku]

While most of these are fine, and several are pretty basic strategy game stuff, the "integrate" one in particular stands out as a problem.  While yes, it is technically possible to just have a "choose now, my kingdom forever, or the highway" choice, there are several things that stick out to me immediately.

First are questions about the honesty of anyone answering that kind of choice.  Even beyond someone who would just be outraged at being threatened with removal from their land (and you're often going to be threatening to disposes peasants who have literally nothing else to their names) that would lie and then immediately begin plotting sabotage, there are those who would be cowed into proclaiming loyalty under threat that are not truly loyal to your cause.  Basically put, it's not a very good way to accomplish the stated goal unless you're willing to outright force the natives off their land with military force, which is probably going to have some political ramifications with anyone of a shared race.  (Even if not as serious as the ones in the real modern world would have.)

I should also note that driving people off their native lands unless they agree to the eradication of their identity as a people is considered a form of genocide, so this is literally a genocide option.

Second is that, unless you're going for the even more nakedly genocidal option of killing or expelling everyone who isn't of your own race just to be sure you got all those who were potentially lying out, you're not really describing any method by which real integration takes place, just that those who disagree are forced out of their homes.  Considering the extremely short timeframe, this sounds a lot like re-education camps, however, and trying to eradicate a culture through forced re-education is also genocide.  (See the Uighurs, and "lost generation" of Australia.)

The ways in which cultural mingling take place and can be encouraged and discouraged through official policy are subtle and interesting to see modeled.  To go to a game I've played to death, Crusader Kings 2, you can directly cause religious integration through proselytizing, although the success rate of such depends upon the perceived moral authority of your religion and that which you are trying to pull people away from.  (And I further always wished CK had a more in-depth system where there weren't abrupt changes from one religion to another, but a more gradual one with fractions of a population converting at a time.)  Cultural migration is even more subtle, being dependent upon both random chance and keeping every ruler of a country of your own culture (meaning you have problems when local mayors of the existing culture are elected).

The Muslims, when they took over parts of the world, for example, pursued conversion through instituting a Jirza tax.  Basically, Muslims would get a tax credit for being Muslims, while taxes were raised on everyone else.  Add to this that only Muslims could expect to advance socially and politically, and you have a more subtle but still quite powerful reason to adopt the culture of the oppressor.

In fact, many cultures and languages are disappearing through what could be described as the incidental genocide of capitalism.  Even languages like Gaelic, much less Native American tribes are going extinct simply because there are no economic opportunities to be found in speaking the languages of the minority when the majority possess all the capital.

[NEANDERTHAL]

I like this suggestion, it would be good to make conquering and using sites more involved and diplomatically complicated. We already violently invade and occupy sites, we should be able to wrestle with the populace in order to successfully benefit from the occupation; if that means exercising the "literal genocide option", so be it.

[FantasticDorf]

I should also note that driving people off their native lands unless they agree to the eradication of their identity as a people is considered a form of genocide, so this is literally a genocide option.

Spoiler: "my reaction after reading this" (click to show/hide)

Without trying to get ugly compared to real world parallels, what you're claiming puts a total eye shutter of cognitive dissonance that comes with the typical violence DF players inflict gruesome wounds on perfect strangers, wordlessly murder and rob with mechanial machine traps, ressurect them into necromantic thralls, run out indigenous populations of natives or what 'Raze' and 'Pillage' do in context isn't much the same that could push a particular creature's existance to the brink.

I suppose my idea was more centred around the idea of a romanticised form of Roman citizenship, its a priviledge offered to the few who wont refuse and honor to uphold it, as for persecutions using the model that religious persecutions happening all the time they're allowed to leave and i wouldnt expect any kind of violence unless they were [ABUSE_BODIES] or other vindictive sorts. Active intelligence surrounding the area will pick out plot members of interest who removing or placating them somehow allievates site loyalty problems, and in the coming upheaval of persecution they will fit their due punishment to whatever fits the bill of the crime, for dwarves version of absolute justice it may end up with a capital treason sentence or unless a insurrection ethic is put in, maybe something else like exile.

If its a forest retreat or dark pit, adding it to your holdings without just destroying it casting it aside is going to be a lot of different exercises in patience and properly militarily preparing the site ahead of time to contain unrest. Is more what i was trying to convey in my original statement.

Code: [Select]

* Dwarves do not tolerate the site nor like the conditions -10
* This is a aggressive occupation, we didnt start the war - 10
* Many of the remaining citizens disagree with Dwarven cultural views -10/15/20+
* The garrison is too small compared to possible insurrectionalists -10/15
* Local inssurection leaders are stoking plots or there are plots currently underway - 5/10/15+

And all this together makes mostly moving out towards normality post integration much easier as most non-villian networks (which some might be permeated by plots not actually being result to your actions, a necromancer might just be seeking to cause dissent to harvest bodies), and directs the player more towards conquering of their own default site type or amongst the civ's "likes" and "tolerates".

[FantasticDorf]

Draws me onto my additional elaboration point about claims -which i did allude in my opening post as to being one of the key reasons to bother integrating in the first place to and that already exist in some capacity for DF regarding land.

Within your own fortress, land-holders recommended to your fort hold a personal claim they can exercise should anything happen and they are made to flee the fortress, allowing them to muster power in another site with intent to enforce the claim or reclaimation over any ruins or occupied site that your fortress has now become. This extends to include any dwarves who come under a windfall of a inheritance of a title from abroad, through close family and lines of inheritence finally having a purpose.

This opens a small subset of options you can follow based on the status of the claim, which after some negotiations via messenger, the site can become one of your direct holdings, cementing your claim in case of the residing noble at your sites sudden death passing the title, or splinter off into a vassal state (in which the noble will run back home to rule)

Of course when you obtain a monarch, you have the option to follow up your similar claims through them and this adds a layer above interacting with singular sites, as you control the entity of the entire kingdom at large -pressing any existing and newly forged land-holders into a vassal & trading relationship to replace the parent-civilizations place.

When you change fortress this is reset, because you will have become a new site government of no significance, and your old site as the unifier will preside over you as the new parent civ.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not new to Dwarf Fortress, I know exactly what kind of fun (distinct from Fun) players are likely to try getting into.  That said, what players can get away with is generally an exploit of the system, not the intended function.  When players learned that you could butcher mermaid bones and use them to make high-quality crafts, but that you would need to find a way to circumvent the dwarven aversion to actually butchering sentient creatures, players tried it out, but Toady then responded by taking away the value of mermaid bones.  Players can be as evil as they want, but Toady doesn't make "evil" actions the default course of dwarven behavior, and putting what is effectively a genocide button on the interface as the way to integrate another culture is probably beyond what Toady is going to be interested in doing.

The Roman colonization of other lands is also one I considered mentioning.  Romans, when they conquered a new land, often would enslave half the population of a city, sending them to the other provinces, then moving in people they displaced from other provinces.  That way, they figured, they were preventing popular uprisings of people of a single conquered culture because now the population was mixed with multiple other cultures, and they wouldn't be so able to easily unite with the other displaced peoples against their common Roman enemy.

It's also worth pointing out that by the time of the fall of Rome, almost 90% of the population of Rome was enslaved, which had an awful lot to do with its economic and military collapse.  (As most of the laborers and potential soldiers were slaves, so they had to hire "barbarian" tribes as mercenaries to be the Roman army for them, and were almost constantly facing slave revolts.)

Rome gets a lot of praise for "bringing civilization to the barbarians", but it's worth noting that most of that was written by the Romans themselves, or people whose only view of history came from reading the writings of the Romans.  They kind of swept the important parts under the rug, and declared they were "greeted as liberators" wherever they went.

What Rome did have in its advantage, however, was that (even during the gutting of Rome, up until its sacking by the mercenaries that finally went unpaid) most of the "barbarians" at its borders did have a respect for Roman civilization, or at least the image of it they had in their minds.  This was built up over the way that they had vastly more land, wealth, and military organization than most of their neighbors (after having crippled or consumed all the other empires in the Mediterranean).

The problem then, however, is that you're just kind of porting that idea of people thinking Rome is a Great Empire into DF and applying it to dwarves regardless of whether it is actually true or not.

Shouldn't your civilization have a reputation?  Shouldn't there be something where there is a respect for your civilization that might be increased or decreased by certain actions the player takes, or milestones the civilization has achieved?

If you want to go with an idea that conquered peoples will want to join dwarven civilizations because they see it as a Great Empire, then the effectiveness of that should be attached to how many Great Works your civilization has built, for example.  Or the size of the army or kingdom.  Resounding military victories in the recent past should be temporary bonuses to the respect of the citizenry towards your empire.

Likewise, there should be tracked the number of atrocities you've committed, how badly you go against the cultural ethics of the conquered, and of course, how much proganda the enemy has dropped on their people motivate them against you.

Rather than just punch an "integrate" button, it would likewise make more sense to try to sway the subjects of occupation to your side by promising them a better quality of life or other benefits.  Giving out free food and matching it with propagandistic entertainment (bread and circuses, if you will) to at least quell uprisings, if not overtly bring people into line.

Christianity, for its part, is filled with traditions that are really just Christianized pagan traditions.  The date of Jesus's birth was almost certainly during the Summer, but it's put in December because that made it overlap with a Roman pagan holiday.  Pork being suddenly declared to be "pure" and Christianity not having dietary restrictions like Judaism was mostly just to get Germanic peoples that loved their pork to join.  Halloween is basically made to take the place of pagan holidays related to Samhain.  Rather than just demanding that everyone bend to them, Christianity overtly warped itself to try to drag others into its cultural sway.

It would be more interesting to see some sort of option where you can issue edicts (if you have the king) that would try to change cultural norms or create holidays or traditions that appeal to other cultures to try to entice them into playing by your new version of a holiday that is syncretic in nature, even at the expense of unhappiness among your own culture for bending to foreigners.

Broadly speaking, I find "just wait five years, then kick out anyone who isn't grateful" to be a really boring way to represent one of the most fascinating processes in history - the dissolution of one cultural identity into another, and the formation of a single, cohesive cultural or national identity.

[FantasticDorf]

The Roman colonization of other lands is also one I considered mentioning.  Romans, when they conquered a new land, often would enslave half the population of a city, sending them to the other provinces, then moving in people they displaced from other provinces.  That way, they figured, they were preventing popular uprisings of people of a single conquered culture because now the population was mixed with multiple other cultures, and they wouldn't be so able to easily unite with the other displaced peoples against their common Roman enemy.

It's also worth pointing out that by the time of the fall of Rome, almost 90% of the population of Rome was enslaved, which had an awful lot to do with its economic and military collapse.  (As most of the laborers and potential soldiers were slaves, so they had to hire "barbarian" tribes as mercenaries to be the Roman army for them, and were almost constantly facing slave revolts.)

Interesting point, but only that it actually puts up the point about what happens with the fate of races who are conquered by non-dwarven slaving entities such as humans; Having too many slaves distributed across their kingdoms secured from conquered settlements could actively worsen their site happyness and leave them more open to insurrections and a less enthusiastic defence unless its suitably balanced out.

• Also leaning into the point that instead of persecuting troublemakers and letting them go, they may just decide to enslave a good majority instead when they integrate, counting it amongst their war-spoils.

• Elves and other races that devour intelligent races may even attempt to eat them in a great feast of defeated foes

I dont expect goblins to spare any settlement of the dwarves (yours or anybody elses) the come across, i expect them to maim, slave, eat & raze everything in a trail-blaze, destroying as many settlements as they can like a force of destruction, with lots of small sites suddenly beginning to start vanishing with ruins in their wake with grandiose grisly monuments in their wake.

Suddenly being asked to simply leave and join a refugee group as a innocent doesn't seem so bad.

The problem then, however, is that you're just kind of porting that idea of people thinking Rome is a Great Empire into DF and applying it to dwarves regardless of whether it is actually true or not.

Shouldn't your civilization have a reputation?  Shouldn't there be something where there is a respect for your civilization that might be increased or decreased by certain actions the player takes, or milestones the civilization has achieved?

If you want to go with an idea that conquered peoples will want to join dwarven civilizations because they see it as a Great Empire, then the effectiveness of that should be attached to how many Great Works your civilization has built, for example.  Or the size of the army or kingdom.  Resounding military victories in the recent past should be temporary bonuses to the respect of the citizenry towards your empire.

Likewise, there should be tracked the number of atrocities you've committed, how badly you go against the cultural ethics of the conquered, and of course, how much proganda the enemy has dropped on their people motivate them against you.

This does tie into viable system in DF where a entire entity could have a reputation permetating from your site or ascended kingdom status to set you apart from other dwarven civilizations, to such a extent you may end up being disowned for being a trouble-maker or being sat down for diplomatic talks prohibiting you from doing activites (by getting caught) without consequences. Every rumor regarding world activities getting out damaging or possibly improving your reputation with acts of kindness (finishing a war with tributatary status, then releasing towns, dealing fairly with diplomats etc) more and more.

• DF already has a entity strength gauging system, its reasonably invisible, but entities will not begin wars against entities like dwarves unless their convictions are very strong or they have superior forces/they are called in as allies. Extreme examples of this culminate in watching necromancers having wiped out normal civilizations declaring wars against the angelic residents of vaults.

Romanticising Rome is very easy as a archetype, as you've succinctly put out, i dont envisage in strict terms because im sure a player could modify something bigger or smaller to scale entirely individual to them in their own minds, but only by projected rate of expansion do i draw a comparison to what a successful DF player's personal empire could be. you could alternatively simply attribute some things like you've said to the Muslim Ottomans, who expertly capitalised and integrated many different cultural groups of people with tolerance, installing taxes upon them and employing them into their armies as lowerclass freemen (unlike the mamluks who used slaves) but were also known for their brutality in war, especially in coastal raids.

Rather than just punch an "integrate" button, it would likewise make more sense to try to sway the subjects of occupation to your side by promising them a better quality of life or other benefits.  Giving out free food and matching it with propagandistic entertainment (bread and circuses, if you will) to at least quell uprisings, if not overtly bring people into line.

Christianity, for its part, is filled with traditions that are really just Christianized pagan traditions.  The date of Jesus's birth was almost certainly during the Summer, but it's put in December because that made it overlap with a Roman pagan holiday.  Pork being suddenly declared to be "pure" and Christianity not having dietary restrictions like Judaism was mostly just to get Germanic peoples that loved their pork to join.  Halloween is basically made to take the place of pagan holidays related to Samhain.  Rather than just demanding that everyone bend to them, Christianity overtly warped itself to try to drag others into its cultural sway.

It would be more interesting to see some sort of option where you can issue edicts (if you have the king) that would try to change cultural norms or create holidays or traditions that appeal to other cultures to try to entice them into playing by your new version of a holiday that is syncretic in nature, even at the expense of unhappiness among your own culture for bending to foreigners.

Yes this may be true, but it could be the collated efforts of what 'integrate' is meant to represent, extended reach of diplomacy or/and reputation & problem solving on a local site level via 'investigate' to generate quests to kill bandit forts, stop plots of towards the assasination of local leaders and other nuisances -since a site that likes you shoudnt have to offer any resistance to its integration at all with no expulsions or pusnishments if there's no malign activities occuring and assuming citizens agree to be brought round to your way of thinking.

Broadly speaking, I find "just wait five years, then kick out anyone who isn't grateful" to be a really boring way to represent one of the most fascinating processes in history - the dissolution of one cultural identity into another, and the formation of a single, cohesive cultural or national identity.

Ill be perfectly honest; thats a valid opinion and it is a interesting process but most DF players i dont think have the patience to raise animals/children in the scope of 10 years or even indeed reach their forts demise within the first 5 years outright, and the 5 years is more for the claims-paperwork to be put together and a benchmark of commitment to protect and uphold the occupation so that its not a instantenous snowball either.

[NW_Kohaku]

Interesting point, but only that it actually puts up the point about what happens with the fate of races who are conquered by non-dwarven slaving entities such as humans; Having too many slaves distributed across their kingdoms secured from conquered settlements could actively worsen their site happyness and leave them more open to insurrections and a less enthusiastic defence unless its suitably balanced out.

• Also leaning into the point that instead of persecuting troublemakers and letting them go, they may just decide to enslave a good majority instead when they integrate, counting it amongst their war-spoils.

• Elves and other races that devour intelligent races may even attempt to eat them in a great feast of defeated foes

I dont expect goblins to spare any settlement of the dwarves (yours or anybody elses) the come across, i expect them to maim, slave, eat & raze everything in a trail-blaze, destroying as many settlements as they can like a force of destruction, with lots of small sites suddenly beginning to start vanishing with ruins in their wake with grandiose grisly monuments in their wake.

Suddenly being asked to simply leave and join a refugee group as a innocent doesn't seem so bad.

Just to be clear, the main thrust of my problem with the OP version of integration is more that it seems to be a one-size-fits-all process.  I fully agree with setting up different processes by which occupied peoples are "convinced" to adopt the culture of an occupier over time that underlines the cultural values of the conquerer.

That said, I'd add on to the goblin way of conquest that they aren't a "burn everything, kill everyone" type of culture, but the embodiment of a "might makes right" philosophy, and one of the things I find most interesting about their way of warfare is that most of their heroes tend to be kidnapped children of other cultures turned back against the land of their birth.  Hence, I'd think the way that goblins might treat the conquered would be like Heath Ledger's Joker -

"Now, our operation is small, but... [grabs a pool cue] there's a lot of potential for aggressive expansion. So, which of our fine gentlemen would like to join our team? Oh! There's only one spot open right now, so we're gonna have tryouts." [Joker snaps the cue over his knee and tosses it down between the goons/hostages.]

One of the things back in the old development track was a power goal ("Beast of Burden") about how he wanted goblin children sitting in a wagon taunting captured slaves and making them pull them around on wagon rides, which gives a good idea of the flavor of goblin conquest.

Something similar can be said about elves - they do eat the dead, but they don't make people dead just to eat them.  (Goblins might, though.  Goblins don't even need to eat, but do it anyway because Might Makes Right, so if someone with authority to get food (even living humanoid slaves) can eat and wants to, screw it.)  They are instead defined by adherence to the nature spirits, and the nature spirit's self-parody level views of the ways of nature.  Hence, survivors of an elven takeover certainly are likely to face "my way or the highway" choices of abandoning any and all wood products not made by their elven overlords, including a complete ban on soap, clear glass, and any non-imported certified magma forged metal.  Being as they go to war over this stuff, it's safe to say violators will be terminated.  (Also, liars are to be executed, apparently.)  (And yeah, this is also obvious genocide.)

Speaking of which, you would also expect necromancers to largely create some sort of Logan's Run state where having kids while young is encouraged, but those over a certain age are culled and put into the undead horde before their bodies go past their prime...

This does tie into viable system in DF where a entire entity could have a reputation permetating from your site or ascended kingdom status to set you apart from other dwarven civilizations, to such a extent you may end up being disowned for being a trouble-maker or being sat down for diplomatic talks prohibiting you from doing activites (by getting caught) without consequences. Every rumor regarding world activities getting out damaging or possibly improving your reputation with acts of kindness (finishing a war with tributatary status, then releasing towns, dealing fairly with diplomats etc) more and more.

• DF already has a entity strength gauging system, its reasonably invisible, but entities will not begin wars against entities like dwarves unless their convictions are very strong or they have superior forces/they are called in as allies. Extreme examples of this culminate in watching necromancers having wiped out normal civilizations declaring wars against the angelic residents of vaults.

Romanticising Rome is very easy as a archetype, as you've succinctly put out, i dont envisage in strict terms because im sure a player could modify something bigger or smaller to scale entirely individual to them in their own minds, but only by projected rate of expansion do i draw a comparison to what a successful DF player's personal empire could be. you could alternatively simply attribute some things like you've said to the Muslim Ottomans, who expertly capitalised and integrated many different cultural groups of people with tolerance, installing taxes upon them and employing them into their armies as lowerclass freemen (unlike the mamluks who used slaves) but were also known for their brutality in war, especially in coastal raids.

Well, I probably should expand upon what I mean by "quality of life".

Currently (and I know I shouldn't pound what's current too much here, because of what I'll say later, but this is something to alleviate a current problem), fortress wealth is largely bad for the player.  It causes megabeasts to attack, larger sieges, and makes giant floods of migrants want to come to your fortress.  (Toady seems to think the last one is a benefit, but it definitely isn't!)  Making things like fortress wealth make people want to join your culture in much the same way as making dwarves want to immigrate to your fortress is a fairly easy way to tie some existing systems (which could also use some fleshing out and rebalancing, obviously) into this new system. 

This would also, inversely, mean that having dwarves die in your fortress be a minor ding to your cultural attractiveness rating, so you have a further reason to take good care of your dwarves.

Broadly speaking, it makes games much more interesting to have all the various mechanics from other parts of the game interact so that they can help make more emergent stories.  ("Introducing humans to subterranean living was going well when we showed them the splendors of our dining halls and how we had all the masterwork quarry bush leaf roasts we could eat until Urist's cat killed so many rats that they created miasma clouds and started the Great Tantrum Spiral of 812...")

You just need to add in the parts about how building new sites, especially megaprojects like tunnels between mountainhomes or even having some designated monument on a fortress can be part of some sort of cultural glory meter that also makes your culture seem attractive to the people of other cultures.  Adding options to create new off-site monuments would then also be more attractive, as well.

Yes this may be true, but it could be the collated efforts of what 'integrate' is meant to represent, extended reach of diplomacy or/and reputation & problem solving on a local site level via 'investigate' to generate quests to kill bandit forts, stop plots of towards the assasination of local leaders and other nuisances -since a site that likes you shoudnt have to offer any resistance to its integration at all with no expulsions or pusnishments if there's no malign activities occuring and assuming citizens agree to be brought round to your way of thinking.

One of the things I'd like to see is several options in this kind of push for cultural drift.  To go back to the goblin conquest topic, a severely harsh (and genocidal) "my way or the die-way" push to make a population abandon its culture and adopt yours is an option that would also hasten the process of drift, but also one that involves decimating the population and almost certainly engendering resentment both abroad and in the population being forced into re-education that would require more guards as it is carried out.

Conversely, a hands-off approach where your culture tries to be as tolerant as possible would alleviate most of the problems, provided your civilization isn't still at war with their home civilization, but also result in a much slower drift, provided you aren't employing other means to hasten the process along.  (Again, I'd also like to see something like propaganda efforts, where you build taverns, send in bards telling stories or sharing dances that are designed to get others to adopt parts of your culture.  Sending in food subsidies, etc.)

Ill be perfectly honest; thats a valid opinion and it is a interesting process but most DF players i dont think have the patience to raise animals/children in the scope of 10 years or even indeed reach their forts demise within the first 5 years outright, and the 5 years is more for the claims-paperwork to be put together and a benchmark of commitment to protect and uphold the occupation so that its not a instantenous snowball either.

In this case, I think it's best not to be constrained by how the game is played now when talking about suggestions.  Sure, people get stuck in the weeds with the game now, when there are few mechanics for the world outside the fort, but it's entirely possible for players to build mostly self-contained hermit fortresses that are designed to run fast, much less some sort of Generation Fortress, and I don't think it's Toady's intention for players to play a game for only 5 years before abandoning a game because of FPS death at the very least.

Beyond that, there have been many suggestions for a "Kingdom Mode" (I even had a thread on it way back when), where players can play as just the king rather than running the fortress (or at least, mostly leaving the fortress on autopilot) or while having heavy time acceleration while in Adventurer Mode, so that players can play a game more on the level of a grand strategy, once the world mechanics are developed enough.

However, to pull it back a bit to even if we accept that few players go past 5 years as we stand, that still implies that few players would use the integrate you're suggesting right now.  What I'm more opposed to is the fact that it's a set period of time rather than the exact time scale.  We could make things happen absurdly quickly, and cut down the cultural drift time by an order of magnitude or two if we wanted, but the point I'm making more revolves around having the player's actions in various other aspects of gameplay impact the rate at which they can expect to influence other people to adopt their culture.  Hence, if you have a very wealthy fortress with lots of amenities, low deaths, and a high amount of immigration pull, this process could start cultural drift on at least a percentage of the population within the first year (and possibly make the culturally drifted population be in the pool for immigrants, at that).  The point is, again, more of one where player actions, the degree of difference between the original cultural values and your own, and some things possibly beyond player control to be good or bad events that impact your play determine rate of cultural drift.

Likewise, in the current game, it's possible for you to domesticate wild animals through generations of taming.  This is something that takes well beyond the timescale of typical forts, but even if the player never reaches the end of the road, the journey itself can be interesting.  Having pits of moderately tamed crocodiles to dump goblins into is a fun thing even if you never reach full domestication.  Having integration be a process by which you can gradually draw down required garrisons until you don't need any or they outright start providing troops of their own gives players a sense of progress you don't get when you just flip a town from unruly to pacified in a single go.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

I have two things to add:

1. There's a small thing that annoys me with conquests. It is that the squad automatically become citizens there, so they become civilians. You need then to call them home, and when they show up on the edge of the map they're civilians so they drop all their soldier gear on the edge of the map and does the first job they have to do. It generates a lot of hauling to the edge of the map to get the steel gear back.

I'd prefer if they remained being a squad and returned like after a raid. And then I'd just assume the site does not revolt in the absence of soldiers there, because they got so frightened by your awesome army that the sheer fear keeps them docile.

At the very least, I want them to return AS soldiers, so they don't dump their gear on the edge of the map.

2. Occupied forts should produce or require products, depending on the site. The general aim for me would be to have a screen where you have a lits of possible products and then tell the site to produce them - steel bars, green glass, balista bolts, whatever the site can make - and you'd get a caravan once a year where they delivered the goods in the depot.

On the other hand, the site should possibly have needs, for instance if they for some reason cannot make booze or food. Then YOU need to send them a caravan.

There should be a chance of mishaps at site, so you get a messenger saying "All our food got destroyed by some goblins, we're starving now and you need to send us X units of food or people start dying." or "We can't make clothes and we have no more trousers, please send us trousers."

ATM the only benefit of conquering sites is that you can expel dwarves to there, so use it to hold depressed dwarves you don't want to deal with or keep them in reserve. But there's no difference to having 1 conquered site or 20. If they made some goods, even if just a few, it would motivate you to start building an empire.

[FantasticDorf]

1. There's a small thing that annoys me with conquests. It is that the squad automatically become citizens there, so they become civilians. You need then to call them home, and when they show up on the edge of the map they're civilians so they drop all their soldier gear on the edge of the map and does the first job they have to do. It generates a lot of hauling to the edge of the map to get the steel gear back.

I'd prefer if they remained being a squad and returned like after a raid. And then I'd just assume the site does not revolt in the absence of soldiers there, because they got so frightened by your awesome army that the sheer fear keeps them docile.

At the very least, I want them to return AS soldiers, so they don't dump their gear on the edge of the map.

Personally i think this might be improved if dwarves had a reason to use the offsite's caravans take back people & items to drop off in your depot, such as the contents of the original missions plunder as warloot, i agree the corner thing is very annoying. Maybe some screen popup of occupied tributaries to see what they've got ready to offer can help before you run a messenger over there and claim it periodically.

At least if they're going to change into plainclothes, it'd be nice if the gear was neatly folded up and transported in a caravan/pack animal with escort provided by site citizen psuedo-merchants.

2. Occupied forts should produce or require products, depending on the site. The general aim for me would be to have a screen where you have a lits of possible products and then tell the site to produce them - steel bars, green glass, balista bolts, whatever the site can make - and you'd get a caravan once a year where they delivered the goods in the depot.

On the other hand, the site should possibly have needs, for instance if they for some reason cannot make booze or food. Then YOU need to send them a caravan.

There should be a chance of mishaps at site, so you get a messenger saying "All our food got destroyed by some goblins, we're starving now and you need to send us X units of food or people start dying." or "We can't make clothes and we have no more trousers, please send us trousers."

These kind of exercises would be nice, perhaps as a consequence of neglecting bandits and giving yourself some easy diplomatic mission to handle for a greater benefit, like the OP detail about site mood kind of indirectly than just running over the bandits and removing them immediately, or sending more soldiers due to local zombie/monster threats.

ATM the only benefit of conquering sites is that you can expel dwarves to there, so use it to hold depressed dwarves you don't want to deal with or keep them in reserve. But there's no difference to having 1 conquered site or 20. If they made some goods, even if just a few, it would motivate you to start building an empire.

Its funny you mention this, because this is often the case more post-embark the populations will arm themselves with dwarven customs & material production, but the materials and "labor" doesn't update anytime sooner than this. Kruggsmash had a example of this in one of their successive forts set some time apart from each other, conquered goblins re-emerged post being conquered wearing the vestiges of dwarven idoltry over their heavy armor.

It does matter in the greater scope of political power, but its more for the next playthrough. You can for instance pick a fight with your old fortress's little conquered network as another dwarven civ and duly undo all their work and face the consequences of a large pool of nonhistfigs thrown at you.

[NW_Kohaku]

In games like the old Sierra Citybuilder series (Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor...), you would be forced to trade with neighbors for resources like beer because every city needs alcohol, but for some reason, your patch of the Nile can only grow chickpeas and figs.  A problem with having to trade for things in DF is that there aren't very many resources that are unique to specific sites that would force trade, and most of those that are potentially unavailable at a site are either ones that most players would avoid ever embarking without (such as iron ore), or totally redundant (such as any other metal, gem, sand, or clay).  Even with food, every type of temperate food grows in a temperate region so long as you have access to even a single murky pond, and even without it, extra food variety is broadly redundant, anyway.  Hence, barring not having iron ore, and as long as towns don't bring tamed rare animals to trade, there's little to trade for, and most towns are going to be similarly self-sufficient, albeit a lot of them would likely trade for steel.

There's also the major looming issue that the way that value is calculated in DF tends to create stupidly imbalanced trades, with a single masterwork quarry leaf roast being worth more than a whole castle.  This is exacerbated by the fact that players can easily purchase raw materials dirt-cheap for 1-3 dwarfbucks while selling products worth tens of thousands of dwarfbucks, and players have no reason not to purchase raw materials they can use in their own industry over finished goods when buying metal ore or bars lets them train their smiths and is cheaper to boot.

I agree that having trading relations with nearby villages would be a fun addition to the game, but DF has just always been fundamentally built where, for player fortresses, trading is kind of pointless and dumb unless you need something very specific like an anvil.  Even if you need iron, it always comes in amounts too small to matter.  (In fact, the main reason to buy up metal goods is just to melt them for more bars of metal you don't have on-site.)  The main reason why "hill dwarves" exist is that mountainhomes are meant to be unable to produce enough food for themselves, so outlying villages produce food to send back to them, but DF forts are able to produce all the food they'll ever need in an amount of space you need to house 5-6 dwarves.  There is no economy of scale that would push a town to have a large factory that out-competes small local workshops and then trades for other goods.  Even things like forests are easily replaced with underground wood.  The game is just built on every level to obviate the need for trade.

[FantasticDorf]

I agree that having trading relations with nearby villages would be a fun addition to the game, but DF has just always been fundamentally built where, for player fortresses, trading is kind of pointless and dumb unless you need something very specific like an anvil.  Even if you need iron, it always comes in amounts too small to matter.  The game is just built on every level to obviate the need for trade.

Kind of a counterance to your point, trade is currently the only outreach of diplomacy open to players able to correctly gauge and interact with the attitude of other races towards you in binary terms of whether you are at war or not, and if your relationship is blooming or starting to slide due to consequences of providing protection or ethical conflict. A fortress is a big trading protection racket in reality, made to protect the population (not from the player, ha!) and to be "safe port" for mechants with the incentive that the civ improves relations with you in what's deemed a mutually profitable relationship.

So of course your investiture goes entirely into getting high commodity goods no matter how exploity they may seem and they keep you going. I do think that DF has absolutely everything to do, maybe too much emphasis to do with trade, and more petty trade-partners would be especially welcome for non-national scale trading where the consequences and benefits are locally constrained with nominally smaller regional markets without scaling up to some of the urbanized larger market cities.

You can probably anger a tiny site by letting their precious cargo be looted, and provincially they might harbor a ill mood towards your fort, lodge a complaint into the ear of someone important, or human merchant nobility might just take it up personally using their accrued wealth (they can afford additional homes & warehouses after all) on assassins and mercenaries to enact a vendetta.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

Personally i think this might be improved if dwarves had a reason to use the offsite's caravans take back people & items to drop off in your depot, such as the contents of the original missions plunder as warloot, i agree the corner thing is very annoying. Maybe some screen popup of occupied tributaries to see what they've got ready to offer can help before you run a messenger over there and claim it periodically.

At least if they're going to change into plainclothes, it'd be nice if the gear was neatly folded up and transported in a caravan/pack animal with escort provided by site citizen psuedo-merchants.

It could be done in a number of ways - I think any solution would be better than the drop the armor on the edge of the map-way. They could either remain soldiers so they wear it, or a caravan could come and drop it off at the depot. I sort of like the caravan solution.

2. Occupied forts should produce or require products, depending on the site. The general aim for me would be to have a screen where you have a lits of possible products and then tell the site to produce them - steel bars, green glass, balista bolts, whatever the site can make - and you'd get a caravan once a year where they delivered the goods in the depot.

On the other hand, the site should possibly have needs, for instance if they for some reason cannot make booze or food. Then YOU need to send them a caravan.

There should be a chance of mishaps at site, so you get a messenger saying "All our food got destroyed by some goblins, we're starving now and you need to send us X units of food or people start dying." or "We can't make clothes and we have no more trousers, please send us trousers."

.

Its funny you mention this, because this is often the case more post-embark the populations will arm themselves with dwarven customs & material production, but the materials and "labor" doesn't update anytime sooner than this. Kruggsmash had a example of this in one of their successive forts set some time apart from each other, conquered goblins re-emerged post being conquered wearing the vestiges of dwarven idoltry over their heavy armor.

It does matter in the greater scope of political power, but its more for the next playthrough. You can for instance pick a fight with your old fortress's little conquered network as another dwarven civ and duly undo all their work and face the consequences of a large pool of nonhistfigs thrown at you.

It influences the world that you conquer sites sure.

But what I meant is there is no real direct change on your own site here and now. And I think there should be some change.

In my game now I have 3 holdings with total 300 dwarves in them. In most games it would make me more powerfull, they'd pay me taxes, or I could decide if they should focus on mining or logging, and I'd get a caravan with ore og logs each year from them. It's a common game thing, you conquere some cities, they pay you takes, that makes you richer, so you can conquer even more cities etc.

I feel like the game would be more fun if holdings meant you got SOME stuff from them, so it turns into a game of getting holdings and being a rich conqueror. Even if just a small amount of stuff like 50 logs or something, it would feel cool and you'd start thinking about how many sites you should conquer to not having to cut trees down.

It would make possible a play style axed towards military stuff, where you did a lot of soldier stuff and then got ressources from holdings. (To a small degree that is already possible now with raids.)