Nope, it's just GRAVITATE_BODY_SIZE (and the related CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC).
Nope, you can't nest templates yet, although Toady's conscious that it'd be useful.
Ah, yeah, Toady talked a lot about this stuff (leaders of smaller entities, how/why groups split off from each other, difficulties of tracking large numbers of people) in
Toady: [...] the main thing that's missing from the game in terms of world generation and everything about making that interesting is the notion of conflict, not like a war but an internal conflict within one person, that drives their decision making. Having multiple cultural backgrounds for a single person is a great way to do that, and that's really the foundation of a lot of literature and so on, having those conflicting backgrounds and so on. It's one of those things that would start to be realised when you have the leaders moving around during play, which is not too far away, just getting more personal decision making in for the leaders, then there would be more of an impetus to draw on that kind of information. At least there's some challenges, because if you've got a hundred thousand people you can't keep track of every little thing about what they think and all that kind of stuff. The important decision makers are the ones that are going to be done first. It has all their background saved, it has all the historical things that led up to their present time and all of their previous entity affiliations and so on, so it can have a pretty good background but what it really needs is a snapshot sitting in their head of what their current ethical belief and value system is.
[...]
Toady: Also there's the issue of ... This comes back to the internal groups within your fortress, like the religions and guilds and so on, because they all have the same cultural and ethical setups as well and each of those can come into play again as far as determining what the overall cultural makeup of your fortress is, and that's another way that cultures can change over time, by introducing new subgroups. Right now I'm not really sure how religions start during dwarf mode; it could be that pilgrims arrive and start preaching about things, or a dwarf could have a revelation, or there could just be your pioneer guys, your seven guys, all come there with their own beliefs to begin with, which is how it works now. They could then, when it comes time that your fortress is large enough for you to set up some kind of temples, or whatever the dwarves end up having for that kind of thing, then you could at that point have the religious subculture spring up around those locations. Then the aesthetics of that group can start coming into play when they interact with different objects in your fortress and other people come, and the outpost liaison again could be accosted by worshipers of a certain religion either in a peaceful way or a non-peaceful way, all that kind of thing. It's all a big mishmash and again the important part is when you have dwarves that overlap in several of those groups. It could be that the outpost liaison himself fits into one of those groups, like had been a miner during the first ten years during world generation, and so is very predisposed to your miner's guild guys and chats a few of them up when they meet in the hallway and then overall has a good disposition during the meeting with your mayor. There's all kinds of things like that just slowly get put in over time.
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Toady: Yeah it reminds me of those games where you have the black, white and grey world and you add colour to it. It's like when you add blue then the dwarves can either like blue or not. If I had chosen a better example, it would have been a better example. So if they bring cheese, cow cheese, and you don't have cows, then maybe you're a connoisseur of cheeses to begin with, you already like dwarven cheese and cat cheese and carp cheese ... made from carp milk from the carp mammary gland. If the dwarf likes all cheeses then they should like that cheese too, but they shouldn't have some kind of preconceived notion about cow's milk if they've never had it before which is how it works now and is kind of strange. So then if they move they could start to develop a regional character and then you get things like the traditionalist thing again where at first those guys might not like the second place, the hill at first and long for the gully ...
Capntastic: And have recipes from the old country.
Toady: Yeah, and then five generations later a lot of dwarves might think that being 'hill' is traditional, but then there's a few people who still remember the gully who think that's traditional so you could actually have two traditionalist camps that disagree with what is traditional. That kind of thing; it gets trickier and trickier to store that sort of information but ...
Rainseeker: You could get two nations that arise out of that, the 'gullies' and the 'hills'.
Capntastic: Yeah, you'd have a schism, then war, then violence, then fun. A progression of culture I think, which would be great because at any given point in time it would indicate that the culture was doing something and they had preferences at that point, and then basically they have an actual history at different points.
Toady: It's always a storage thing, especially when you'd going over time with lots and lots of people. But you can do that with kind of a snapshot ... There's the internal snapshots inside important people where it can track their history but it can't do that for too many people, and then the other people I guess it can take the thousand or so most important bits of information and create a snapshot every ten years for the entity, so that ...
Capntastic: For like what special events happen, like 'this is when we invented carp cheese during the great famine.'
Toady: Yeah, you'd have the important historical events, the tricky part is reconstructing the entities ... If you tracked every change you could go back in time and reverse engineer the changes but that's slow and you couldn't track everything, like certain thoughts about copper, what the dwarves thoughts are about copper in general, so if you have snapshots it might make that a little better. Then you could track trends in copper ... it's almost like the stock market or the monetary mineral markets or whatever the heck they're called, futures, cattle futures ... So you could look at the - there's no reason you'd really want to do this - but just how people thought about various things over time, the most important bits anyway. That's the thing, when you want to meet a dwarf ... The reason to do this is if you meet a dwarf they need to have some kind of picture in their head of their likes and dislikes, but since that dwarf would likely not have that information stored in them if they're just a dwarf off the street, or out of the mine or whatever, when you walk into a new settlement, that dwarf needs to have their information placed into their head once you talk to them about these things. So it would have to do through their entities, the larger groups they're associated with, and so those need to have that information tracked, and if the dwarf has been living there for sixty years it can't just use the information sitting in the entity at that moment because that's the stuff the new kids like, the Twilight stuff and all that. Whereas sixty years ago when people were in to other things ... that dwarf ... if you took a snapshot every ten years, you take those six snapshots for that dwarf and then take their traditionalism and a few other things and cast their line back as far as it needs to go, and that's what that dwarf can believe. It's interesting to try and set that up.
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Toady: [...] We haven't really planned a lot for version 1 especially for massively multiracial forts with like ten goblins hanging out, but really when you get back to some of this entity stuff we were talking about, there should be a notion of them cliquing up a bit and making a sub-entity, at least for certain races. It's quite possible that goblins with all their kidnapping behaviour and so on don't really see the species of the creatures the same way and might not even clique up based on their goblin nature unless they're spurned by the rest of the dwarves or something. It's all going to depend on how that works out, I don't pretend to have the algorithms set up for making sure that stuff is going to work right, but hopefully that would be one of the main considerations when you start forming sub-groups like miners' guild is if there's multiple species in the fort.