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[atomfullerene]

Was pondering how df places biomes, and I got to thinking...  In a rough way, the placement of biomes is supposed to reflect the processes in the real world that place said biomes.   So, air and ocean currents cause some areas to be warm, some cold, some wet, some dry.  Plate tectonics shapes continents, and erosion guides the course of rivers.

So when areas of terrain dominated by spheres are implemented, what forces might shape they way they are distributed across the landscape, and how might those be simulated in the game?

For instance, if spheres are produced by deities who maintain there territory of influence through competition and contest, then similar spheres might group together, as like minded deities provide for common defense and exclude different minded ones.  Or perhaps spheres result from gatherings in various concepts, like stars from gas.  So the concept of, eg, war, becomes lumped in one area, forming a war centered sphere.  In this case you would be unlikely to get several war spheres nearby.

So what do you think?  My goal is not to say one approach is better than another, but to come up with lots of interesting approaches and ways to simulate them

[NW_Kohaku]

One of the problems I have with this sphere landscape stuff is that so much of it just doesn't really translate into something you would consider relevant.

I mean, I have gods of scholarship, or gods of marriage, or gods of poetry, or gods of charity...

How does a sphere of scholarly learning affect a landscape's natural creatures?  Do the birds all suddenly give a hoot and learn to read? 

Do groundhogs give up on breeding constantly, and force only post-marital spore transmission?

Do bears have poetry slams, which, I would presume, would likely involve actual body slams?

Do charity spheres make animals kindly rip off body parts to feed hungry predators or dwarves?

[atomfullerene]

Certain spheres do make more sense...I mean, blasted landscapes for sphere's of death, or the like.  In other cases I do agree with you.  But then maybe that's something that should be considered.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, even spheres that would, presumably, relate to geography would seemingly have problems...

How would "mountain" spheres really work?  Would it simply be a sphere of any biome that is a mountain?  If it simply got attached to any mountain biome, which, presumably, would still be common, and produced simply from any piece of terrain that is high enough in elevation, then what effect would mountain spheres have?

Likewise, do forests get forestier when it has a tree sphere present?  Forests, as the game stands now, are just places where there is quite a bit of rain, and enough drainage that it doesn't turn the land into a swamp.

What about earth... I mean, where could you send a walking creature that didn't have "earth" somewhere?

[Vattic]

Then again should spheres always have a noticeable impact? Some spheres would only interact when there is something suitable to interact with, like if some pesky humans settle in an area of poetry for example.

[Silverionmox]

It would be interesting to distinguish between causal spheres and spheres of effect. The first would cause the area to become more like them (eg. a sphere of joy makes people happy), the second would appear when appropriate actions and elements were present (eg. a sphere of death may be called into existence on a battlefield). Or a combination of both, where a sphere becomes a self-sustaining, causal sphere as soon as it has absorbed enough relevant 'ambience' in the area.

[Grek]

Scholarship: No real effect on things without [CAN_LEARN] or [CAN_SPEAK]. Local animalmen and sphere-beings would be more scholarly. Skills would be easier to learn while in a scholarship sphered land.

Marriage: Attracts animals which natually form pairs and mate exclusively for a long time/life. In a marriage shpere land, you would not have groundhogs. Instead, you get swallows or elephants or something.

Poetry: The wind whispers poetry. Dangerous animals will pause to listen to poets instead of attacking. People born here are naturally artisitic.

Charity: Squirrels will drop chestnuts at your feet if you are hungry and the trees are always in just the right spot for shade. Less predators than normal. People born here are naturally generous.

Mountain: This is not a sphere. You are thinking of "Mountains", which would make any high elevations be exaggerated. You would get cartoony mountains which are 99% sheer cliffs and sharp pointy peaks.

[The_Kakaze]

Maybe you should have primary spheres, like good, evil, order, chaos.  These are seeded down into a basic 'belief map' that somewhat mirrors the landscape on the real world.  In this type, basic 'landmasses' of good, evil, etc have second tier 'biomes' of Marriage, Death, etc type morality spheres growing on them.  Their interactions would create third tier entities that could be called Gods, who would be named by the Civs that grow in that area on the 'real' map.  The personality of the Gods would be initially determined by their basic sphere levels, as well as the biome where they formed.  If different civs were in that area of the 'real' map, they might give that God different names (or not) and battle over their subtle differences (or ally because of similar beliefs).

This would entail a separate stage of world generation, after the animals and plants are placed.  The Belief map could then be generated on top of it.  Areas with strong tendencies toward primary spheres would seep down onto the real world, producing good and evil biomes, as well as savage and benign areas.

Then the history stage would start, with the civs having gods from the belief map.  They then spread their gods with them, and perhaps gain new gods as they enter new areas.

[Kilo24]

Maybe you should have primary spheres, like good, evil, order, chaos.

I don't think good/evil will be spheres, merely based on the lack of deterministic morality that Toady seems to want (and that they are currently placeholders.)  I'm also rather leery of making spheres primary/secondary, *but* that could solve some of the problems with scholarship/poetry/writing spheres that should require intelligence by folding them into a civilization primary sphere.

I'm not quite sure about the conception of gods, but I do know that he does have things like forest spirits and evil swamps planned that don't require a god's direct supervision.  As long as you think of gods as active agents with individual personalities, and the spirits as more tied to the land, impotent outside of their environment and direct creations of rather than lords of the spheres, I think that's more accurate to what he has in mind. 

[Ascii Kid]

Would there even be spheres of influence in places were no sentience existed to express it?  What role will faith have in Dwarf Fortress worlds, direct or passive? 
For example: Would a war diety just manifest over some swamp and cause battles there, or would it's influence be affected by the fact that a giant battle took place?
Do poetry dieties send or receive poetry?

[NW_Kohaku]

You know, any time they come up, I find myself hating the entire notion of spheres more and more.  I'd like to suggest Toady just scrap the whole thing.

It's one thing for stupid, random bits to be attached to engravings or the like, but making actual game mechanics based on this is absurd.

[The_Kakaze]

Okay, so how about this.

The Divine Map comes from the biomes on the real world.  These biomes each have weights toward certain spheres, ie mountains, being the source of metals might lend points to greed and industry while plains would lean towards farming.  The size of these biomes is compared to the size of the world, if it is large it might produce god entities and if it is small it might produce spirit type entities.  Civs that live in those areas would have a chance of worshiping the gods and spirits that are located in their area.  Gods get temples, spirits get shrines and cults.  These divine entites are then caught up in the fates of the civs that are in their area, and during history creation they would fight battles with the gods of enemy civs.  Chance of winning might be affected by number of worshipers and distance from their nearest temple.  Gods wouldn't kill each other (at least not often), but maybe the winner would help their side out.  Perhaps their battles would manifest in the real world with artifact creation or battle turning random magics.  Gods not associated with war could give other benefits, like increasing the harvest or birth rates.

Gods with no civs might join up with civs that they share spheres with.  They would make up the lesser pantheon of a civ, perhaps lending weight to the heavenly battles, while their primary god would be the one from their home biome.  Spirits would stay in place unless cities were founded near them, then they would try to take over the religion of the local citizens.  If the spheres of the spirit were radically different from the home deity, the city might try to rebel, while a closely aligned spirit would join the overall pantheon.

So, a human civ would have one primary god that they favored.  Their pantheon would be complimented any gods without civs founded in their area, who's spheres were close to human ideals.  Another human civ would share many of those gods, but would have their own primary god.  If those primary's were closely related, it might increase the chance the civs would ally.  Battles they fought against each other might only be affect by their primary gods, while battles against goblins (who would have hugely different pantheon, again with their own primary god) would have the whole weight of their pantheon behind them.

If, say, the dwarves and the humans had similar spheres, gods would be shared between them.  The race of the god would be determined by which race was more closely aligned with the god.  Races would be more inclined to worship god of their own race.

Creatures with the POWER tag could gain divine powers from being worshiped.  After death they could become another god in the civ's pantheon.

[Kilo24]

You know, any time they come up, I find myself hating the entire notion of spheres more and more.  I'd like to suggest Toady just scrap the whole thing.

It's one thing for stupid, random bits to be attached to engravings or the like, but making actual game mechanics based on this is absurd.

Really?  Huh.
I guess I'd be curious to hear that sentiment elaborated on more; I wasn't sure that there was enough of a concrete description of what spheres do and how they do it to warrant that claim (and the conception I have of it doesn't really evoke that response in my head.)

I mean, it will be procedurally generated, but there should be enough historical and deific factors that it's (eventually) not just a complete crapshoot.  I seem to recall him saying something about strings of murders upping the death sphere or somesuch.  It'll let traits of lands and deities mesh well together, and provide a number of easy-to-implement cosmetic modifiers and some non-cosmetic ones.

You're worried about the gameplay being screwed with to the point that people spend a long time looking for the perfect sphere setup as well as the terrain features, and that people are rewarded/punished just based on what their spheres happen to be at that location?

[NW_Kohaku]

You know, any time they come up, I find myself hating the entire notion of spheres more and more.  I'd like to suggest Toady just scrap the whole thing.

It's one thing for stupid, random bits to be attached to engravings or the like, but making actual game mechanics based on this is absurd.

Really?  Huh.
I guess I'd be curious to hear that sentiment elaborated on more; I wasn't sure that there was enough of a concrete description of what spheres do and how they do it to warrant that claim (and the conception I have of it doesn't really evoke that response in my head.)

I mean, it will be procedurally generated, but there should be enough historical and deific factors that it's (eventually) not just a complete crapshoot.  I seem to recall him saying something about strings of murders upping the death sphere or somesuch.  It'll let traits of lands and deities mesh well together, and provide a number of easy-to-implement cosmetic modifiers and some non-cosmetic ones.

You're worried about the gameplay being screwed with to the point that people spend a long time looking for the perfect sphere setup as well as the terrain features, and that people are rewarded/punished just based on what their spheres happen to be at that location?

No, my problem comes up any time there is a discussion of how the spheres should interact with the game.  Now, maybe I'm wrong, and maybe Toady has a very precise and detailed idea of how spheres are going to work (in which case this entire thread is probably moot, anyway,) but from the ways that spheres are always discussed, they are like an arbitrary pile of bones that are dumped on the floor, with everyone trying to argue over how a skeleton can be made from them.

Take a look at my posts above, then Grek's.  I made a satirical comment on how bizzare it would be for marriage spheres or other such spheres to actually have direct impact upon the world.  Grek then turns around and says exactly what I just ripped apart as a serious suggestion.

Take a look over in the "Kohaku's yet another magic rant", and see where I suggested, simply as a way of formatting magic easily, just lumping magic into spheres, since I have little taste for making everything elemental (as with "Mountains" or fire spheres or whatever), and then had people complaining that magic must include the arbitrarily selected sphere system, in spite of having no real idea of how it will be implimented. 

When I say how absurd it is to, again, have "Marriage" or "Preganancy" sphere magic, it was rebutted that, like The_Kakaze said here, that all those nonsensical, impractical, arbitrary spheres should be lumped into groups, like "healing magic"... which is exactly the same thing as having a magic school system.

This is the problem of these arbitrarily selected spheres: trying to make them fit into DF is like putting a square peg into a round hole - either you have to carve a new hole, or you have to shave off parts of the peg until one thing makes an ugly, but potentially servicable fit.  Rather than trying to find some way to ram this arbitrary set of spheres into a purpose, we should be determining what the purpose of spheres will be, then making spheres that will serve that purpose.  That is to say, find the peg that fits the hole, instead of forcing the hole to accept whatever peg you had lying around.

[The_Kakaze]

I kinda think the weird spheres like marriage should be allowed to be defined by the complex interactions of the generating map.  If you take broader, more easily defined spheres as the basis, and then arbitrarily assign meaning to them and allow them to mutate based off of interactions with other arbitrarily assigned spheres, gods get much more interesting and complex.
I mean Hera was the goddess of marriage (a 'good' trait?), but jealous and vengeful (evil traits?).  It might give you some weird groupings (lust and order--wait that's Zeus), but the idea is to give them organic, human personalities and spheres reflect what they care most about.