Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[thebear]

I endorse this big time. I especially would like to get some immigrants with already developed skills (with the downside getting more immigrants who are skill less).

[JT]

quote:Originally posted by Black Hound:
<STRONG>Of course, you shouldn't be able to mash anything under a drawbridge anyway. But why should it have 'consequences?'</STRONG>

Mashing things under drawbridges makes perfect sense to me (drawbridges aren't light), though obviously dropping a drawbridge on something should damage the drawbridge a little bit proportional to the heft of the object it's crushing... so dropping a drawbridge on a greater demon of some kind would result in a smashed drawbridge and a slightly dazed demon, and in any case dropping a drawbridge on a body should result in a much bigger mess....

It should have consequences just like any other form of wanton act of mass murder should have consequences.

Thought consequences like:
"Oh my god, we just crushed/drowned/incinerated twenty of our brethren, we're horrible!  Oh Armok, there's blood everywhere... oh gods.  I can't take it!  It's too much!  The whole world... crushing down on me... crushing down on them..."
(and a prompt suicide)

Legal consequences like:
"Whoever pulled that lever is gonna get hurt real bad, and I think I'm gonna beat up the person who installed the lever, because surely he was involved in the conspiracy!  Or at least criminally negligent for not securing the lever in a protected area!  And you made the mechanisms, so you're responsible, and you installed the mechanisms, and you hauled those mechanisms to the stockpile, and you built the drawbridge, and you linked those mechanisms to the drawbridge..."

And political consequences like:
"We heard you crushed people from our civilisation!  And after we gave you 700 points of equipment and training, too!  You're despicable!  We're gonna ass-rape you all with +1 maces!"

It's one thing when it's something clearly no fault of any dwarf, like when a gremlin pulls a random lever (but even then, negligence on the behalf of the lever's installer could come into play), but another entirely if there is a direct chain of events leading from a dwarf-triggered event to a murder of dwarven citizens.

[Black Hound]

quote:It should have consequences just like any other form of wanton act of mass murder should have consequences.

For the record, I don't see the point in trying to enforce some kind of moral code - if you don't want to hurt your dwarves, then don't, but don't go around trying to push your style onto other players. Your dwarves are moral, peaceful people - fine. Maybe someone else wants to play a merciless and cruel totalitarian dwarven state where the lives of peasants are gristle for the mills of industrial progress. As it is, you have freedom of choice between the two, and an open-ended game like DF would only be hurt if you started setting down arbitrary limits on what the player can and can't do.

But the moral question aside, you shouldn't have to make a choice between killing unwanted immigrants or not having any immigrants at all.

[schnobs]

quote:Originally posted by Black Hound:
<STRONG>For the record, I don't see the point in trying to enforce some kind of moral code</STRONG>

I heartily agree.

But I definetly want a way to control immigration, at least to some degree.

I killed immigrants once, and don't ever want to do it again -- those blinking ?'s struggling over each other when water gushed into the room got at me far more than any amount of gore in graphically more detailed games.

But large immigration waves are a threat as real as elephants, and I want a way to deal with it other than summary execution.

[JT]

I think the idea behind Dwarf Fortress isn't to make a game where players can do anything they want, but to make a game which the player is a simulated part of, where every one of the player's decisions have a feasible impact on the game.  Mass murder of dwarves is an exploit, and there's no other way of describing it: it's not my perverted version of morality, but rather the fact that the world is oblivious to it.  All actions in the game have consequences -- you can assign a dwarf to the military and he'll get unhappy, you can send a dwarf to waltz into a pile of stink and he'll get unhappy, you can send a dwarf to kill a berserk dwarf and he'll get unhappy, you get a dwarf who watches another dwarf die and he gets unhappy, but you can't find a single dwarf that is uncomfortable with pulling a lever and crushing innocent dwarves?  That screams "exploit" from every orifice.

Toady has said "you don't play the fortress, you play the world" so many times now that I feel irritated at having to repeat it.  Fortress Mode is actually just a game within a game, so to speak, and based on everything I can tell DF is eventually going to focus on its Adventure mode.  If moral actions matter there, they'll absolutely have to matter in Fortress mode too.

Aside from the moral issue, there's the whole issue of game balance which seems to be getting ignored here.  If you can exile anyone for any reason at no penalty instantaneously, it makes the game too easy, for one, and you miss a whole lot of potential noteworthy circumstances.  Where do you get the strategy of maintaining an army?  Where do you get the pleasure of watching a dwarf walk up to an immigrant and talk to them, seeing the immigrant walk off with "Unhappy" status?  Where do you get the occasional husband going berserk when his wife is deported, with military dwarves swarming onto the wailing dwarf as he smashes up the place?  Why would the player be able to arbitrarily turn away anyone he doesn't want without using military force?  (Mexican illegal aliens want to come to the United States every day, the United States has to spend considerable resources to ensure that only legal immigrants arrive.)  Why would the player be able to hand out such life-shattering edicts like sentencing a dwarf to exile -- far more noticeable than just evicting them from an apartment -- when a player can't even tell a dwarf to move to a specific location without drafting him into the military and ordering him to go somewhere as a soldier?

I like the idea of registered immigration and calls for specialised immigrants, don't get me wrong... but I think that having all immigration "registered" would detract from an already interesting feature.  The unplanned immigrations shouldn't be removed entirely, and should require actual shows of force to ensure that you get the process you want.

The best part about my suggested feature is that it doesn't require any changes in gameplay style as-is.  If you want immigrants, you do absolutely nothing, and nothing changes from the way the game exists.

If you don't want immigrants, you have to take measures to get rid of them, and at the same time we balance out things that make no sense in a functioning game world.

If you think small scale, yeah, the fortress is yours, and mass murder might be locally acceptable, but again, you're playing the world, and dwarves on the whole have certain principles which is made pretty clear with ThreeToe's stories.  If Toady can make it so dwarves can have different cultural beliefs on the morality of mass murder, I'd be all for it!  You wouldn't see a goblin feeling bad squashing dozens of his brethren.  He'd probably even laugh about it.  An occasional dwarven civilisation here or there would also see nothing wrong with it, sure.  That makes sense too.  But the idea that a player can play the fortress and not the world grates on me, because the dwarves are autonomous and the player shouldn't have such a direct effect on the world's moral beliefs.

[Black Hound]

Life-shattering? Exile? These immigrants have just turned up at your fortress. Turn them away and they'll just find someplace else to live, the same way they wandered into your town.

quote:Aside from the moral issue, there's the whole issue of game balance which seems to be getting ignored here.

Dwarf Fortress is not supposed to be a balanced game, as far as I can tell. It's more like The Sims than Command & Conquer or whatever - if you give the player enough control over the gameworld, game balance stops being an issue because, given enough control, the player will always easily trump whatever obstacles you can throw at them. The game isn't supposed to be difficult.

As for the game somehow keeping track of which dwarf threw a lever which sent other dwarves to their deaths, that seems awfully difficult to code, and it would be impossible to make it completely airtight - what if instead of melting them in lava, you just trapped them on a little pocket of land where they starved to death? How is the program supposed to figure that one out and assign blame at all realistically? Anyway, there's no way for the game to tell whether you actually meant to harm any of your dwarves or not - I've sent a couple dwarves spilling into the chasm purely by accident from time to time.

quote:Where do you get the pleasure of watching a dwarf walk up to an immigrant and talk to them, seeing the immigrant walk off with "Unhappy" status? Where do you get the occasional husband going berserk when his wife is deported, with military dwarves swarming onto the wailing dwarf as he smashes up the place?

How is any of that going to be at all satisfying? The whole point of turning away immigrants is to avoid the trouble they cause a fortress, not make things even worse. If it's going to be that much of a hassle, just make a lava moat and flood it whenever they try to enter - let them feed the elephants out in the wilds, if they want to hang around so bad. I don't see how you could make such a system both not too much of a hassle for people willing to deal with it, and too hard to get around for people who simply don't care about their little bearded peons' feelings.

I still say that having something like the existing diplomacy and trade screens for controlling immigration, perhaps something one of the useless nobles handles, would be better. Once Toady gets the County Arc underway, of course, you'll have a little town perfect for all those immigrants who are useless for the actual fortress, and this discussion will be rendered moot.

quote:But the idea that a player can play the fortress and not the world grates on me, because the dwarves are autonomous and the player shouldn't have such a direct effect on the world's moral beliefs.

The player is the world - we can already make up our own races and such, and from the sounds of it, Toady will be giving us more control over what kind of world we want to play in, not less.

On an unrelated note, since you mentioned berserk husbands, it's my experience that all the most dangerous people in DF are female. My engraver went berserk after failing to create an artifact once - her husband was a craftsdwarf but was too lazy and useless to help make the raw glass she needed, so I locked him in the workshop with her out of annoyance. She promptly bashed his head in with her bare hands, killing him instantly, and proceeded to smack a couple of my Marksdwarves silly before she was brought down in a hail of iron bolts. The same engraver, earlier, flipped out when I destroyed some of her masterworks and went all the way across the fortress to start a fistfight with a horse, of all things, for which the sheriff threw her in jail. Non sequitur, but it was a very, very amusing sequence of events.

[RPB]

As far as I can tell it IS supposed to be a balanced game but it IS NOT anywhere near complete. It's still in early alpha, so of course it's not balanced very well.

There's actually a lot of things you have little to no control over in the gameworld, but you do have a few very powerful tools (mostly derived from mechanics) such as easy to make reusable risk-free traps, floodgates which pump out an endless supply of deadly water and/or magma for no more effort than it takes to pull a lever, drawbridges which instantly destroy anything and never take damage themselves, and so on. Monsters never think to swim or bridge your moats and they can't dig through walls.

Things like this stuff does end up giving you a lot of control over the gameworld. But the vast majority of this stuff is the way that it is because it is a very early, very simple version, and most of it is probably going to change. Yes there are always going to be exploits to get around obstacles like invasions (or "immigrants", although I still don't see how immigration is ever supposed to be much of an obstacle) but they're not always going to be as easy and powerful as they are now.

[ March 30, 2007: Message edited by: RPB ]

[Keiseth]

I'm liking these concepts. My own solution for unwanted immigrants is sub-par. I had made a room for the one noble I didn't want in question, and set up two floodgates. When he was sleeping, they opened...

...But he swam into the river, screaming. Oh, he drowned, yes, but not before scaring the living daylights out of all the passerby.

Well, as I said, I like the ideas, but it's also kind of fun to think of interesting ways to get rid of them... with fire or water. I say, open the floodgates and let the river sort them out!

[4bh0r53n]

if u worry about immigrants taking all your food, set up a bowyer's workshop and a craftsdwarf's workshop and make hundreds of creossbows and bolts and every immigrant that turns up over the horizon is instantly made a hunter, set tham to hunt elephants and not only will u decrease the population of your fortress, but also u will get extra food and workable items.

[Brisbane Dave]

I like the idea of being able to affect migration. Out of the ideas I've read here, I best like requiring a noble and requiring a military. I don't know which noble should be responsible, but many of them could use fleshing out. I think it's a good idea to tie it to having military dwarves because it makes sense and encourages having a military. Seems a lot of players get by without one.

I'd prefer it was macro-managed, though. Picking out individual dwarves seems contrary to the spirit of the game.

I think something similar to the settings in Tropico would work. IIRC, they were open door, closed door, and skilled workers welcome. The first two are self-explanatory, the last was you got fewer migrants but they were more likely to be educated. Of course, in dwarf fortress, skills aren't always what you want, so maybe a setting to encourage peasants to migrate, maybe call it "huddled masses".

Also, it would be nice if you could request particular skills from the dwarven city representative-- for a price. As it is all you can ask for is an anvil, seeds, and I forget the other one. A bit skimpy.

[Tamren]

There should always be a random effect when it comes to immigration.

But you should also be able to limit it as you see fit, to make solo forts and stuff like that.

I my thread on nobles, each class of worker like bone carvers and armoursmiths belong to a different guild or "house" of craftsmen.

The representative of each house gives you greater control over the workforce. Specifically the ability to deny or request the immigration of different workers.

Say i decided i didnt want any farmers one year, i tell the appropriate representative and he sends out a missive by caravan or messenger.

Next spring rolls around, the random group of migrants are calculated as normal only any spots determined to be farmers show up as empty.

This makes more sense than turning away migrants RIGHT as they arrive to your fortress, after which they would have to travel home alone and probably die in the wild. If you do not want miners but still allow carpenters. What if a carpenter shows up and brings his wife who happens to be a miner?

Later on, if you wanted even finer control over the coming and going of your population you could add a noble to handle the task. Not sure what we would call the noble. Minister of colonization? kind of a long name.

[slMagnvox]

quote:Originally posted by Black Hound:
<STRONG>Dwarf Fortress is not supposed to be a balanced game, as far as I can tell. It's more like The Sims than Command & Conquer or whatever - </STRONG>

Nah, JT is absolutely right on this one.  Balance is a loaded term, what DF is "supposed to be" is at least a complete simulation.  One in which a Dwarf witnessing a butcher put down a mule is upset by the sight.  That players can rig mechanisms for the wholesale slaughter of peaceful, friendly Dwarves is an important part of the game.  Just as important is the reaction to, and repercussions of such an event.  Just like nearly all other event generates a reaction among your dwarves.  It breaks the simulation, the reality, of the world if no one notices the death of a dozen dwarves when mechansism are the instruments.  When a single dwarf in a fort of mine died to a gremlin every other engraving depicted the event.  Ah hah, case in point.  If engravers can't record the event, it must be broken.

While I don't know all the changes we can expect in the newer versions, I am sure we'll see both some immigration reforms (with all the new work on the migrant groups), and perhaps later on something done to address the total disregard of any and all murder by mechanism.

[Tamren]

well what DF is "supposed to be" is something that is fun for the player. Which may still be the whole disaster + lemmings thing.

That is pretty much the fundamental point of any game. If it is not fun then it becomes work, and thats no fun!

[slMagnvox]

Hah, I have every confidence there will always be plenty of disaster.

And if I could add another of my unsolicited opinions to this thread: (sorry Black Hound, heh)

quote:I still like my idea better. It still allows you to control immigration without callously murdering any of those little bearded fellas. Besides, soldiers waste enough time on their own without having to use them to get rid of useless immigrants.

Hah, forbid we give the Fortress Guard a job to do besides Chain Criminal!  Soldier class, particularily guards, do sorely little work.  Once you have the mayor, giving the theoretical Deny Immigrant job to fort guards would not cause any work (which Fort Guards don't do) to be shirked (which is what they'll be doing the other 11 months of the year).  Pre Mayor, if you want to turn away immigrants you'll need some soldiers.  Off duty soldiers, anyone on duty is someplace else for a reason.  Maybe it would take a week or two out of regularily scheduled sparring, but before the Fort Guards hit the scene there isn't much sparring taking place anyway.

On the other hand, a screen to simply review and allow/disallow any and all immigrants feels a little cheesy to me.  If its just a handful of farmers and craftsdwarves populating your fort, who is keeping them from staying on?

Why not ask us every season if we want the cave river to flood or not?

Whatever form it takes, migrants are a force of nature and if there is ever a dialogue screen to influence their arrival (or departure) it should only be accessible via some appropriate noble.  Otherwise it'll take a show of force to send them back out over the wilderness.  Or an adequately large drawbridge to send them someplace more... tranquil.

[JT]

quote:Originally posted by Brisbane Dave:
<STRONG>I like the idea of being able to affect migration. Out of the ideas I've read here, I best like requiring a noble and requiring a military. I don't know which noble should be responsible, but many of them could use fleshing out. I think it's a good idea to tie it to having military dwarves because it makes sense and encourages having a military. Seems a lot of players get by without one.</STRONG>

As I stated before, the idea of tying it to a noble would result in only allowing immigration to be denied when you already have an established fortress (where a wave of unwanted immigrants no longer really matters).  In the case of a small, managed community, you wouldn't have a big enough population to have a noble, so immigrants could come in by the bowlful and starve you out when you least want them -- when you have a big fortress and have nobles, you're pretty much ready for any unwanted immigrants that might come along.

The idea of denying immigrants was primarily for small fortresses where people don't want more immigrants because they aren't yet ready to accommodate them.  As long as they maintain a body of militia, they can get their wish, although some people might be able to slip through the cracks anyway.  In a large fortress, chances are you'll have a large enough army that you can fully control them and thus a noble would be relatively moot.