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[Eugenitor]

We're comparing goblin civilizations to human ones, which is the wrong approach.

Goblins should be able to eat anything- vermin, other races, animals, cave blobs, FBs made of organics... you name it. Everything loose in the caverns is goblin chow. Everything we farm in the caverns, they do (and it's not so much 'farm' for them as 'spread the seeds everywhere in the mud'). Think of them like we think of our own forts, only with much weaker forges, much less mining, and no MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE tag. And if they run out of food they just start eating each other until the problem is solved. And they expand. Constantly.

The only chance other civs have against this tide of meat is either lots of ingenuity or heroes in steel.

Protoss Goblins? I can't believe anyone suggested that.

[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.

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)

Not forgetting--just observing some additional complexity.

[Silverionmox]

Concerning the rivers, the brook tile can be used as a floor tile, without water underneath it. That way you have the brook tile instead of the upper floor of soil. It still brings water, it's just on the same level as the surrounding area, it's enough to drink from but you won't wet much more than the soles of your boots if you walk through it. It should have a stream direction though, so it can generate a trickle of water where it ends (at a z-level difference, creating a tiny waterfall). Then it can continue as a brook, absorbing the trickle of water from the waterfall, or the water can fall into a real stream handled by the fluid mechanics.

Don't worry about the z-level differences for brooks; everywhere except in swamps streams do erode quite a bit, and in most seasons there's not much water in it. Depending on the seasonal rains, there might be more water, almost filling everything the brook eroded.

Consider to let the ramp tile contain only 4/7 or 3/7 water.

[jei]

There is, pretty simply, no way to have a large hunting-fed permanent settlement.  (No more than a "hunting lodge" of a few dozen.)

I don't think Toady should really give too much weight to reality, as DF is after all, a fantasy game. As Stephen King said, "as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut." And as long as the end-result is a playable and fun game, do we really care? I think Toady's policy should be the same.

Maybe goblins have a better metabolism that gets more out of less food and can thus survive well on hunting alone? After all, many carnivorous animals live only on what they catch. Your argument against goblins that wouldn't survive on what they can catch should apply as well to all the lions and wolves out there too, if you apply your human-centric logic and thinking to them equally. And goblins have some levels of technology to aid them too.

Even humans have different kinds of metabolisms, with different efficiencies, depending on the bacteria they carry, etc.

[tfaal]

While realism isn't the main concern of game design, I agree with Toady One in his assessment; sticking to reality is a good rule of thumb, unless there's a very compelling reason not to.

[Flaede]

Maybe goblins have a better metabolism that gets more out of less food and can thus survive well on hunting alone? After all, many carnivorous animals live only on what they catch. Your argument against goblins that wouldn't survive on what they can catch should apply as well to all the lions and wolves out there too, if you apply your human-centric logic and thinking to them equally. And goblins have some levels of technology to aid them too.

The trouble isn't with a goblin being able to feed themself. The trouble is about the area's ability to support thousands of goblins all feeding themselves (ie. provide enough game for all xthousand to catch).

[de5me7]

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.

Being as goblins are found in mountains, however, requiring being near an ocean may make goblins nearly impossible to place. 

i could be completely wrong but i was under the impression that over fishing (certainly of sea and ocean stock) was a modern phenomenon simply because the sea is so productive compared with historical population densities. The north sea is only in plight today because we scoup out tonnes of fish in huge nets.


although generally i agree woith your point. Few civs prospered with out a strong farming basis historically. The crucibles of civilisation were all based around intensive agriculture. THis is partly due to food availability and partly due to time. Does anyone on this forum hunt? (i dont) but im lead to believe that it takes time. Hunters can spend days stalking pray (not in df usually) and it can be physically exherting (burning up precious callories). Hunting and gathering is very time and energy inefficient compared with farming. This ment that hunter gather civs were often academically and technologically behind those based on farming.


if nomadic civs or groups are introduced will Yurts and teppes and all manner of tent be introduced? I hope so, id like a yurt for my adventurer. IT would be a roundish structure comprised of wood and cloth that could be constructed and desembled with the carpenter skill and loaded onto an animal. (or given that adventurers in df currently have pockets that lead to another dimension the adventurers pockets.)


as far as realism go's. If the game creates magic food for civs rahter than simulating huntiung i suppose it doesnt matter. Although i dont see any reason why goblins couldnt raise cattle. Or another option would be to have goblin civs less concentrated than other civs - more small settlements and a central tower rahter than beng concentrated round a fortress or city with some outliying settlements. This would make them more suceptable to attack tho. But having farms may also make you seceptable toa attack. A legitimate strategy could be to burn another civs crops.

[Mephansteras]

Goblins can also spread out through the underground a bit more. Send out hunting groups to range deep into the mountains to harvest various critters.

One interesting approach would be to have a very large underground critter that the goblins rely on. It could even be somewhat toxic to most animals, leaving the goblins as the primary predator of them. Which would give the goblins a nice large food source that was unique to them.

[Sizik]

and it doesn't show anybody's name until you learn it (you know everybody in your starting town).

The same should be done with professions, i.e. NPCs are colored based on their clothing, not their job.

[NW_Kohaku]

i could be completely wrong but i was under the impression that over fishing (certainly of sea and ocean stock) was a modern phenomenon simply because the sea is so productive compared with historical population densities. The north sea is only in plight today because we scoup out tonnes of fish in huge nets.

That's just plain not right.  Overfishing and overhunting have been problems throughout all of history.  Not just human history, but all of for animals, as well - populations rise, overgraze or overhunt, kill off their food supply, and start to starve, until their numbers drop low, and the plants or prey numbers start to recover from having less grazers/predators.

Whalers killed off the vast majority of whales without huge nets. 

The people of Easter Island are believed to have dissapeared in part because they overtaxed the land, which led to them having to rely on fishing exclusively for their food, and eventually exhausted the fish populations, inflicting famine upon the island, whose remaining population afterwards was not enough to sustain human life on the island.

As long as you are killing more fish than can respawn, you're going to overfish... and if the only limit on population is food, then if you can feed your population now, it will rise, and when it rises, you have to get more food. 

[Cardinal]

We need to be careful conflating pastoral peoples with hunter-gatherers.  Hunter-gatherers didn't rely solely on animal products as much as certain pastoralist communities.  If the goblins were imagined as pastoralists, they'd need to have some element of their civilization that was always on the move (getting the bone dogs and reachers to new areas to feed) as well as some manner in which these mobile elements supported the construction of dark towers.  I think that the idea of a constantly moving horde of goblins sounds pretty gobliny to me, and it requires the only fantastic element to be an arbitrary desire to funnel their resources into a few static locations, which isn't as much of a stretch as envisioning a race of beings that goes against all known biological norms yet operates as a typical society in most respects.

[tfaal]

The dark towers are easy; demon leaders demand a secure fortress to rule from, and the goblins are happy to work themselves to the bone to build it, because they're completely brainwashed/subjugated/dependent on them. They main question is how dark towers are actually constructed, which is a matter more troublesome. It might be better if they were magically summoned by the demons themselves.

[NW_Kohaku]

Not all goblins are led by demon leaders, though...  (At least, not all the ones I've seen.)

I do think it's entirely possible to have dark towers with muck farms for feeding livestock and the livestock themselves for slaughter in the basement of a dark tower as a permanent food source, while there are goblin "cowboys" and "drovers" who herd large numbers of animals around the high mountains as the larger food source.

I remember the chapter in "Outliers" on the differences about social norms between cultures of herders and cultures of farmers, as well... Herders are socially more agressive and ready to pick up a fight at slights of honor because they have to protect their herd from ranglers who pick off their cattle.  The slightest sign of weakness invites ranglers looking for an easy mark, so all slights must be answered.  (We of the American South are largely descended from such peoples, such as the Scottish sheepherders or even the outright cowboys of Texas.  This is where you see the psychological experiments on Northerners and Southerners where Southerners are usually more polite, but hyperagressive once slighted compared to Northerners.) Sounds quite fitting to goblins...

[Interus]

I think with a drastically lower metabolism, goblins could support a larger population on hunting and maybe herding.  The way I think of it, it wouldn't just be one site producing all the children who are needed to mount large raids.  Each dark tower could support a stationary population that raises their own herds and farms to feed their animals, while many small raids go out to hunt or steal food, and occasionally snatch children too.  Maybe the other races they bring in would be more inclined to handle farms.  Mostly, I just see a network where the goblin society hunts throughout their territory to support all of the towers instead of each tower trying to support a huge population.  No idea if that's more effective or not.

Sorry, I wanted to participate but I'm not sure that added much.

[Yaddy1]

Well time to disregard the current conversion and blurt out a random question.


Will there be any interactions between wanderers and your fort? The ability to set up an inn for them to stay in would be cool. Maybe expand thieves to pretend to be travelers at first?