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.
The Major issue Toady has with having cities actually reach populations in the tens of thousands or more is the need for generation or more simply the need for everyone to has a history.
Its mainly a time and resource issue i think. In a world that is medium-sized you get around 20000 (iirc) inhabitants.100 times more - 2 Million - people would need 100 times more Diskspace which could grow up to a half Gigabyte.
Yeah, it would take countless hours to generate a world, which has millions of creatures.
Yeah, the genesis of this conversation in the previous posts was part of the last interview I did, in which I talked quite a bit about how abstract populations might be used to convey a proper sense of scale for a typical fantasy world while at the same time maintaining much of the historical data and individuality of the people you meet, so it's not so much a processor issue, and these critters don't all get saved or stored individually, though obviously it comes up a little bit since there's stuff to be handled.
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.
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.
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.
(snip)
(edit: Going down to the lowest detail level should still be possible.)
This is all the central problem with fort mode really. It's similar to the difficulty with retiring a fort and expecting it to be going on as you want it to continue on. Jumping back and forth between levels of abstraction is a hard problem when there are things like the state of fluids and so on to consider, and so without a solution present I've been leaning toward having one main active area, at least for any reasonable period of time, with sub-areas available for relatively simple acts like army fights.
There's a bloat somewhere about "deep sites" which relates to the question of fortress sprawl. I think at least having a main section that you are looking at in detail and other sections that you aren't looking at in detail (at worst, ever) is a tractable problem, where you could think of your fortress as the keep in the center of a giant capital, and you could have your dwarves off doing all sorts of projects all over while still maintaining a "realistic" sense of scope, without your dwarves being important enough in the workings of things so as not to become drowned in mediocrity. You'd still have complete access top to bottom in one map column, so bad things could still happen locally, which is good, and it could give you all sorts of reports and various control over non-visible sections, and they could be realized for you in either (a) adventure mode, (b) in a non-controllable fortress mode based on the adventure mode representation. This is easier since fluids don't come into play (since they can be controlled in general when you don't go all nuts with them). I don't mean to harp on fluids though -- there are all sorts of problems.
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.
Regarding China, which I had been reading about for some months intermittently due to my ROTK/Water Margin read, from the Battle of Red Cliffs (~200 AD) to the battle at the end of the Song dynasty (~1300 AD), it looks like the larger armies in the area were always around 200,000 troops (which is why I used this figure in a previous post), but there were lots of battles in the intervening time, so it could have been even higher. That said, I'm not sure a large-sized DF map could be considered China-sized (especially in the sense of arable land, since we'd prefer a huge amount of biome diversity), though we don't actually have a scale, and abstracted populations would change the potential of it.
It will be nice to have some control over the royal guard, but I suspect that it will still just be a black hole to throw cripples into to keep the nobles happy. Have you ever thought about their practical purpose and what they could be guarding against?
Not much. Their current role is to walk around with the tax collector and ransack rooms for things they want to walk off with, so they'll certainly need changes. Being able to use them as a standard squad most of the time will tide that wait over a bit, anyway, until the nobility actually has to worry about life beyond a well-placed lever.
Will the new noble positions and entity definitions allow for nobles to be non-unique? And, is one of the mechanisms for rising to a position going to be a certain amount of a skill?
Yeah, for non-unique nobles, you can set a number, either greater than one or "as needed", which lets you appoint as many as you want (only practical for military squad captains as it stands, but you can do it with any position). I don't have a position with strict skill requirements in vanilla as it stands, but it's as easy a thing as any to add in to the format if people find cause for it. For the current positions, I don't see a reason to restrict them by skill where the player already has an ordered list of the best dwarves and can put in a crappy one at their own risk. It can still produce such an ordered list since each responsibility you assign to a position has an inferred list of skills.
QtT: Will the new squads and patrolroutes/stations get some use in Adv mode for stuff like reasonable stationing of guards or having to patrol them throught the tunnels of a mountainhome.
What about ordering around your teammeates you pickup during the game like tiny squads in style like this maybe: "The 3 elves in the back, the speardwarfs in the front and the human swordmaster goes with me".
At some point it'll come up in adventure mode, yeah, though for now even siegers that attack you in fort mode are up in the air with respect to squads. The squad mechanic is separate from your dwarf fortress though, so I plan to get a lot of use out of it all over the place.
And yeah, with adventurer entities (on dev_next) come the ability to have adventurer squads and adventurer everything else (sites, etc.), and it's one of the things we're hoping to explore in the nearer term (with improved sieges and the top 10 list and a few other things, probably with adv skills placed before adv entities). Not all in one release of course. I've had enough of that... or rather, I'll have had enough of that as soon as I get this one out.
Toady, what will be the treatment of the "draft a civilian dwarf to move it out of a danger zone/ into a drowning camber"?
You can still play the system a bit here, though I have one item up there concerning the break exploit I think. There's still the "I was drafted!" penalty for unskilled dwarves, but yeah, it's a bit like mind-control, which we try to avoid. A dwarf that is drafted, moved and then undrafted could very easily detect that action though, and it might be subject to particular thought-scorn and whatever else is needed. If that isn't enough, some of the more drastic-and-realistic measures (such as requiring a message delivery for activation) could be considered, but the fun of commanding a military against proper threats needs to be considered first and foremost in these matters, so I don't want to hamper that too much. Something like an initial contact from the squad command and subsequent contact every year or major cycle might be called for, and that shouldn't hamper you too much in the case of an emergency unless it is particularly ill-timed. Some kind of "the goblins are coming!" mechanic might be fun, but by the time your guy gets through with that they'd have crossed the short distance to your fort... perhaps when you have more control over the outside area it would work better (since you could have more advance warning).
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3666589 times)