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[SmileyMan]

Been playing Empire: Total War recently, and that works by having 20 or so active squads on the field at once (you command them at squad level, not individual soldier).  When a squad is destroyed, or routs from the field, if you have any reinforcements they join the battle from the appropriate edge of the map.

Something similar ought to be quite easy to replicate.

200,000 would be a bloody big single army deployment by any standards, fantasy or otherwise.

[Mephansteras]

Sounds like you've got some good ideas there, Toady. Looking forward to seeing how all this shakes out.

[bjlong]

As usual, thanks for the answers, Toady! I'm looking forward to this release so much it hurts.

[Footkerchief]

The fortress remains the least satisfactory part, but it should fit in all right, in an overtly gamey kind of way.

Maybe the idea of shifting your "focus" from the fortress proper to outlying settlements, roaming armies etc. could be generalized to other aspects of fortress mode, so that very large fortresses could be controlled piecemeal?  To the extent that you could have one large burrow at a time being directly simulated, with other burrows running in semi-abstracted mode, and haulers occasionally moving between burrows with off-map arrivals etc.  I guess it's mostly a question of how well the Caravan Arc stuff (production of items, transfer of resources between sites) scales down.

[bjlong]

^^^ How big did cities usually get in Medieval times? That should be the target, I'd think.

Burrows would work. You could also treat certain rooms (like workshops!) as separate, and abstract them out when looking at the larger fortress. Not the most eloquent solution, and it'd only really be helpful in assembly-line like workshops (smelters and forges in one room, for example) or rooms with a lot of people (like barracks!). It'd also fail if everyone's outside the rooms that are being abstracted.

[catfry]

As to the discussion about personalities and military duty I'd mention that in the current version there are traits that influence dwarves behaviour when fighting, for example, 'is not a risk taker'.
Over a number of forts I have seen this trait manifest itself so a dwarf will train up his shield and armor ability but remain a novice with weapon skill. Also, such a dwarf will rarely charge into the enemy but 'hover' at some distance, and only fight when the enemy comes after him.
This kind of thing is quite fun when you notice it. It doesn't do very much for gameplay but it does help with giving the game that special DF flavour that there are a million little connections and interrelations if you just look for them.

[Mephansteras]

^^^ How big did cities usually get in Medieval times? That should be the target, I'd think.

Well, at it's height Rome had a population of about a Million, and I found a reference on medieval Paris having somewhere between 80,000-200,000 people. So we're talking LOTS of people, even at the low end.

How reasonable that'll be with current processors...I don't know.

[thvaz]

Found a good essay about the subject: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

[Mephansteras]

Found a good essay about the subject: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

That is a good one, although it focuses specifically on Medieval Europe. Thanks for the link!

The Roman Empire certainly gives a good example of an Advanced pre-industrial society, and Toady may also want to research population levels in countries such as China and India during his accepted time period. I know he's allowing technology and knowledge from those areas into Dwarf Fortress, so it makes sense to check out their societies and population levels as well.

[Christes]

Of course, none of those civilizations lived underground.

[Tenebrais]

Well, I suspect that if you were to plan out and construct Rome in DF it would go well over the bounds of a normal fortress. So I'm not sure that's the aim we need to have in mind.

I like the thought of most of your population being in surrounding outposts/towns/whatever. So that Fortress Mode would turn into Empire Mode, gradually. That sounds awesome. Plus, it means that once your fortress is pretty much impenetrable, you don't need to deliberately sabotage it to keep things interesting, especially if you could change focus so you're controlling one of the outlying settlements.

[Mel_Vixen]

Well if you want to create big civilizations and theyr Cities, i say Df would need a fluid ascension of the tools we use. Building, for example, the way we currently do is (for me) to much Micromanagement on the scale of a city that spans multiple middle-map tiles or for a number of citys.

For a real vast city for example why not create a own Build-mode without dwarfs on the screen? Pause the time entirly even, then let the player plan entire buildings, streets, places and zones from premade or selfmade templates/blueprints.

The player could for example select a section of his buildings and turn that into a template (if the player doesnt create the template by hand in the first place) for every other city or even for the automatic use for the "Ai" of a dwarfen cityplaner/architect. The nonplus ultra would be if those templates could then be manipulated itself for example by setting what material(-lists) for different sections can be used or to specify additional zones inside of the template.

After a building is set a player could (if he wants) decide how many dwarfs work on the sheduled project and which importance it has. At this point you calculate how long a building would need to be finished and go back to the normal timeflow.

You can even go further with lists and triggers that say what has to build at which time. For example, let the Ai build the second tenements as soon the setllement reaches 50 inhabitants, the prison as soon the garnison is done, the waterwheels not before the 20th of slate and so on.

(edit: Going down to the lowest detail level should still be possible.)

For the supply of such a city you could set up caravans like patrolroutes with commands like bring/gether amount x of y at this place on the stations.

This could work nicely if you can also set up entire settlements (templated?) on the Main/middlemap. Build a Hamlet for food production in place x, maybe specify the fields and crops and then get a caravan sheduled between the hamlet and the maincity.

Naturally the Ai of a civ should still work if you dont want to order around everything. Maybe you want just to build a "chinese-wall" like construction around your kingdom everything else which is not important for this project is controlled by the civ-ai. Or you just shedule the creation of a bastion near your border and after/while the bastion is build your folks settle around it controled by the Ai.


I dont see that much problems with war and huge armys since even as abstraction it works just fine. Its like standing in a tent and moving little flags over a map.
The option to zome in on a 96x96 part of the map is cool and would work very well with a way to plan ahead (go to point "a" then "b" and then "c" ) , behaviors(hold position, follow attackers) and triggers (if a enemy reaches this point retreat).
Stop the time. Lay your plans out for the next rounds (switch to the next part of the map where you do the same if you want) and then let the time run again untill you think you have to act again.

[Karlito]

Isn't it the job of the military to break down soldier's personalities and turn them into emotionless killing machines?

That is what the game currently does. You will notice Drafted Dwarves slowly becoming hard if you check their personality pages.

Exactly, which is why I don't think dwarfs' personalities should matter that much past the "doesn't really care about anything" point.

[Scarpa]

Isn't it the job of the military to break down soldier's personalities and turn them into emotionless killing machines?

That is what the game currently does. You will notice Drafted Dwarves slowly becoming hard if you check their personality pages.

Exactly, which is why I don't think dwarfs' personalities should matter that much past the "doesn't really care about anything" point.

Well it's one thing to be hardened to death, and another to be a good soldier, IMO. If we're going to have fancy formations and improved squads I think there should be a little bit more taken into account along the lines of what Jerph posted.

[Gculk]

For the idea of making massive cities while still retaining the detail, this could, I think, be done, keeping the autonomy of the single dwarves, by making industries in quarters, rather than by buildings.  For example, a corner of your fortress could be the weaponsmith's quarter, there are a number of workshops there inside one confined space.  You could then select this quarter and make a work order of say, 500 axes, at priority 1.  Then, when your weaponsmiths stop drinking, twenty of them will walk into the weaponsmith's quarters, each take a shop and start hammering.  If you then set another order of 15 shortswords at priority 2 and another 300 spears at priority one, the 15 shortswords will be created, then the 300 spears and axes will be made concurrently (one axe then one spear, for example).  These quarters could act as groups do in RTS games, you select them, put them into a group, and then you can select them together to do a task.  You could also seperate them, say if you wanted a legendary weaponsmith to make axes and the rest of them make hammers.

If it was done like this, it'd strike, I believe, a nice balance between detail and ease of use.  If population cap was an easily changed value, say on a regular menu, then it'd be easy to just say, ok people with gaming rigs, go wild.  You people on dinosaurs, well, go wild, but only with 40 dwarves.