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[G-Flex]

If you read the post, that's not an inherent flaw of the thread, but is in fact due to people (primarily yourself, by my perception) throwing in massive amounts of discussion that does not belong here. The remedy to this should be fairly apparent.

A new strategy, hmm?  I don't know, contributing nothing but a few random insults doesn't seem to be doing you too much good, either.

No, he has a point. You're complaining about the fact that it's hard to get things answered here, yet one reason that's hard to begin with is that the thread gets cluttered up with very off-topic discussion, which you do yourself. You've admitted to bringing up off-topic things for the explicit purpose of trying to drum up discussion because of a thread of your own failed to do so.

[Thief^]

Are there any plans to remove the "brook tile" hack and replace it with sloped banks and less than 7/7 water?

[...] Another obstacle is having new moist tiles or tiles with some water without having them having floors on a different Z level.  Brooks are currently handled that way.  I don't like the idea of having 3/7 water a Z level down, although a lot of the streams should probably connect up with the aquifer.  This would make fewer places inhabitable by digging creatures unless the stream were smoothly lowered a bit, but I'm not for turning them into rivers with less water in them since that introduces problems with connecting rivers (would all 3/7 rivers connect to 7/7 rivers in waterfalls?  Otherwise you'd have reverse waterfalls, or you'd have to introduce a 4/7 ground square, which feels like a can of worms) and people walking across a brook should not be in a separate Z level with respect to projectiles/LOS, etc.  People swimming on the surface of a river should probably also be vulnerable to archers, but having an ankle-high brook hide you is worse.

I hadn't thought of joining brooks to rivers, that's a tough one.
This is obviously why you develop DF and not me

[Kogan Loloklam]

There is, pretty simply, no way to have a large hunting-fed permanent settlement.  (No more than a "hunting lodge" of a few dozen.) If you are talking about hunters of wild game, you are talking about Mongolians or Soiux Native Americans who were nomads that chased after the large herds.  If you are talking about livestock that aren't fed by farming, you are talking about herding nomads who send their herds out on year-long treks so that no one area becomes overgrazed, the way that Cowboys did in the old west.  Whatever permanent settlements they might come back to would be ones that could stay there for more than a year because they farmed.

Fishing is a different matter, if and only if they are ocean fishers with boats capable of surviving voyages out into deep water, and/or they have located themselves in a place with an irregularly large fish population (like cod were in the New World before they were overfished), and the fishers are actually careful to avoid overfishing... (which doesn't seem like a very gobliny trait to me...) It's difficult to say how large such places might get, as even most fishing-heavy cultures tended to garden.  I would say the norse colonists of Greenland and their Inuit neighbors are a good example of people who survived entirely off fishing or occasional grazing livestock, mostly because it's just too cold to farm.  (Note: This did not go well for the Norse, whose entire colony starved to death.)  It would depend largely on being able to claim a large enough body of water that they never overfish, and can prevent other nearby villages from popping up to fish the same waters.  (Best estimate, though, would be from English fishing villages or the like where they are carved into a little valley, and you could get a few hundred, MAAAAYBE a thousand people in a "city" based entirely on fishing.)

Stocked fishing, such as specifically breeding oysters for fishing can expand your ability to fish (as less adults need to survive to adulthood to spawn if you protect the eggs from predators for them), but only if you have dedicated fish breeding programs.

I just want to state that this is not entirely true. Populations of hunters could be pushed into the thousands.
It takes the ability to support large amounts of wildlife to support large hunting villages. It would take a larger amount of prime wildlife than a farming culture needs of prime farmland. The land these large hunting villages would occupy would be perfect for farming, since it means rich soil to support lots of wildlife. As such, those that didn't adopt farming were replaced by farming groups who could support more people on smaller plots of land. There aren't great examples in historical record because there aren't great examples of good land being available to a non-farming culture in recorded history. A population of a few hundred is easily believable though. You put animal management into the equation and you have much larger populations, as you can discover by looking into herdsmen cultures. You certainly won't get no Tenochtitlan, but a Machu Picchu sized city is easily possible.

The thing is, NW_Kohaku is 100% correct in the real world applications of being a hunting culture. You don't have the population to spare in wars, and if you do it is because your people are starving. This is exactly why the farmers displaced the hunters in good locations. Goblins couldn't possibly generate the populations required to zerg like they currently do, not from single site locations.

[Jiri Petru]

Goblins couldn't possibly generate the populations required to zerg like they currently do, not from single site locations.

Well, they could... if they require less food than humans. In a fantasy game, different metabolisms may be a way of achieving results that wouldn't be plausible in the reality.
(This is not a nitpick, it's more like a suggestion  )

[Greiger]

Could always have the goblins drop the current zerg approach and go with a more protoss approach instead.  Smaller numbers of highly trained soldiers instead of massive quantities of cannon fodder that barely know which end of the sword to hold.

I would think a culture that spends all it's time hunting would make better warriors than farmer cultures anyway.  Probably every member of the civilization would be passable with some kind of implement of death.  Spears, javelins, and bows in particular.

[Neonivek]

The goblins havn't zerg rushed for a long long time.

In fact I believe they never did.

[Mysteriousbluepuppet]

THey tend to live in caves also, if theres fungal growth and undeground game i could see them thrive with farming

[Greiger]

I'm talking more about the mass numbers of low skill goblins generated from thin air every season, since the plan is for those gobbos to have actually come from somewhere instead of being genned on the spot.  My current world has a population of about 20 goblins total, and they don't even have a site to their name.  Yet they still throw about 70 goblins into the waiting arms of my military 2 or 3 times a year.

[NW_Kohaku]

THey tend to live in caves also, if theres fungal growth and undeground game i could see them thrive with farming

The salient point is that they are carnivores, though. 

That's why I suggested essentially raising chickens or cows or pigs for meat or some such fantasy equivalent by farming muck that only herbivorus or heavily omnivorous creatures can eat.  That way, they're still eating meat, but have a reason for a permanent settlement.

Well, they could... if they require less food than humans. In a fantasy game, different metabolisms may be a way of achieving results that wouldn't be plausible in the reality.
(This is not a nitpick, it's more like a suggestion  )

Toady did say something to that effect... although that doesn't really help the non-goblins raised from the snatched children who so often wind up taking over goblin civs, given enough time.

Could always have the goblins drop the current zerg approach and go with a more protoss approach instead.  Smaller numbers of highly trained soldiers instead of massive quantities of cannon fodder that barely know which end of the sword to hold.

I would think a culture that spends all it's time hunting would make better warriors than farmer cultures anyway.  Probably every member of the civilization would be passable with some kind of implement of death.  Spears, javelins, and bows in particular.

This is, of course, possible, as it should only take a little hardcoded variable changing (or heck, put it in the raws, so we can make "challenge" forts where every gobbo's a hero-level soldier) to give them SOME skill.  Still, I think a certain sub-set of the players rather enjoys the ability to have a lone champion play goblin golf, flinging gobbos 20 tiles into a tree while the champion single-handedly turns back a full invasion where almost the entire screen is covered in goblins.

[tj333]

In a histry class I took the professor mentioned that basic agriculture can support 100 times the population of a hunter/gather society in the same area.

[Makbeth]

They have been around from the beginning, and I never got around to the local variations in the landscape that I'd need to get a better distribution of differently-sized small features.  We might see something on this with underbrush (which is up in the first category on the dev page with the other things I've been working on), since I wanted to mix tree/brush density up within a given world map square, though soil information might have to come first for that to be satisfying.  Another obstacle is having new moist tiles or tiles with some water without having them having floors on a different Z level.  Brooks are currently handled that way.  I don't like the idea of having 3/7 water a Z level down, although a lot of the streams should probably connect up with the aquifer.  This would make fewer places inhabitable by digging creatures unless the stream were smoothly lowered a bit, but I'm not for turning them into rivers with less water in them since that introduces problems with connecting rivers (would all 3/7 rivers connect to 7/7 rivers in waterfalls?  Otherwise you'd have reverse waterfalls, or you'd have to introduce a 4/7 ground square, which feels like a can of worms) and people walking across a brook should not be in a separate Z level with respect to projectiles/LOS, etc.  People swimming on the surface of a river should probably also be vulnerable to archers, but having an ankle-high brook hide you is worse.

Hey Toady, wouldn't it be physically accurate to keep the brook surface tile and make the "body" of the brook a localized aquifer rather than 7/7 water?  Units can still walk on it, it's still a source of water, nothing can swim or live in it, and the best part is that there'd be no flow calculations so brook sites would be great for FPS.

[Neonivek]

I stopped historical figures from bouncing around between cottages each visit

Thank goodness... The constant moving in the history section drove me nuts! it was also highly unrealistic

[Chthonic]

In a histry class I took the professor mentioned that basic agriculture can support 100 times the population of a hunter/gather society in the same area.

I think that's a simplification.  It depends on the methods and the crops and the year--year because if conditions are bad, hunter/gatherers up and move, while agrarians starve to death.

And (I was surprised to learn this) hunter/gatherers tend to have better nutrition than agrarians because of a more varied and ample diet.

[Neonivek]

In a histry class I took the professor mentioned that basic agriculture can support 100 times the population of a hunter/gather society in the same area.

I think that's a simplification.  It depends on the methods and the crops and the year--year because if conditions are bad, hunter/gatherers up and move, while agrarians starve to death.

And (I was surprised to learn this) hunter/gatherers tend to have better nutrition than agrarians because of a more varied and ample diet.

Well your forgetting that in a agricultural society not everyone is a farmer

But in a hunter gatherer society... everyone is a hunter or gatherer (well just about)

[Cardinal]

I think it'll be necessary for large cities that are inhabited by people that need to eat a normal amount or else starve in some weeks.  Goblins might not fall in that category.  A human capital would likely only be supportable with farming, though I'd consider any real world counter-examples from the right period.  What were the biggest fishing/hunting-fed settlements back then (that didn't also get a lot food from crops and livestock -- theirs or otherwise)?  Does the answer change much if livestock is included but not crops?

Fishing can provide a lot, as long as it's done on a large-scale or in a particularly fertile region.  Hunting, on the other hand, crashes available stocks very quickly.  The Anasazi, for instance, completely predated the deer populations around them in twenty years.  There are no settled communities with built structures that relied on hunting to fulfill a real food security need (as opposed to a customary or luxury one).  Only through pastoralism can a large group maintain enough food security without crops, and even then they supplement their food security by harvesting the crops of nearby agricultural communities (through tribute or warfare, either eating the grain themselves or foddering their animals with it).  Also, much of our agricultural ouput, today and in the past, was for feeding livestock, so a strictly carnivorous people could still raise wheat to fatten their cattle (or, if they had some kind of cultural desire to eat "wild" animals, to increase the local population).  Livestock are also a mixed bag when it comes to diet, with ruminants more resilient than single-stomached herbivores like horses.

Granted, a fantasy world can provide more options, and if you had an annual Wyvern Flight when the Wyverns do the equivalent of migrating to Capistrano (or overland zombie whale migrations--with some method to reasonably cure zombie meat, of course) then you could foresee a system where a larger population could survive off of hunting because hunting has become more like fishing (very large stocks with comprehensible patterns that replenish regularly).  Maybe goblins spend more of their time hunting underground, but even if that were the case, the DF underground would have to be thousands of times more teeming with life than the average hardwood forest.