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[NW_Kohaku]

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?

That sounds slightly amusing... but what will wanderers do at your inns?  Do they purchase food and drink?  If they "purchase" it, how do they pay, because players may not want coins...

If players decide to just bump off the travellers (and trust me, that's exactly what a great many players are going to do just by default, especially if they don't do anything seriously positive, and may contain thieves) will there be any negative consequence for doing so?

This could be useful if fleshed out, but... it needs said fleshing.

[Eduren]

Travelers could be a source of happiness for your dwarves. "Was entertained by a foreign story recently"; "Received news about the Mountainhome recently"

Also, once a more complicated culture model is introduced, it could be the best way to stay connected to the outside world.

[Greiger]

Travelers could always have an ability to sell some of their used gear to either you (High quality steel weapons for example) or sell some crafts into the internal fortress economy selling directly to shopkeepers. makes the fortress appear a little more alive and allows shops to stock some more unusual crafts and things instead of nothing but the same rope reed amulets the fortress has been cranking out for years.  Then the traveler buys some food and such using the fortress coin (or far more likely the fortress credit) he got from the shopkeeper.

If the adventurer enjoyed his stay and was well taken care of, when off site expeditions get implemented, the traveler could tell you of some ore he came across in his travels.  At which point you could send a miner or two off map with a wagon for a season or two and he'll come back with a wagonful of ore.  Allowing more workable amounts of offsite ore or large amounts of sand or rare gems to be obtained.  Which can help with impossible mandates.

It could even be expanded further, for example allowing you to pay high skill mercenaries and adventurers to help defend your fortress or train soldiers for a year or two, in trade for some excess gear and board for the duration.  An adventurer would probably kill for even your spare crappy low quality adamantine gear.  Let them hasten your soldier training or shore up your defenses for it.  It's just taking up space in the stockpile anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

Heh, suddenly, I'm reminded of that talk about contracting out work and "Majesty"...  Travellers are now miniature-caravans and also mercenaries you can hire to loot dungeons or slay dragons, if you post a high enough reward for the behavior?

But how do you trade with a traveller?  Do you set up a store and post what you'll accept as payment?  Or do you have to go into an individual caravan trade screen for each and every random hobo who walks into your tavern?

Of course, this is going the route of just being an entirely new suggestion...  Someone else want to make the thread, or should I?

EDIT: Ok, just starting it: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64267.0

[Yaddy1]

It would also be interesting if they decided to stay at your fort for a while. You'd have people not under your control running around. Yes I think the benefits should be high and the downsides high as well. Yes they should have an impact on your economy and yes they should have an impact on your dwarves happiness. But they could also raise crime. (bar fights, theft, ect...) This would make the guard far more interesting. However to prevent them from being annoying players could simply opt out of them by not building an inn. Then very few travelers would pass by. Maybe a few family and friends from the mountainhomes would come to visit but human vagabonds wouldn't bother. It would just be nice for your fort to feel less isolated.

Heh, suddenly, I'm reminded of that talk about contracting out work and "Majesty"...  Travellers are now miniature-caravans and also mercenaries you can hire to loot dungeons or slay dragons, if you post a high enough reward for the behavior?

I was actually thinking of majesty...and no. Trading with randoms could be done by the fort but it would be nice if dwarves would take initiative and trade themselves.

[Flaede]

But how do you trade with a traveller?  Do you set up a store and post what you'll accept as payment?  Or do you have to go into an individual caravan trade screen for each and every random hobo who walks into your tavern?

Of course, this is going the route of just being an entirely new suggestion...  Someone else want to make the thread, or should I?

I'd say you have more Whuffie, you you start it. I'm interested to see where that idea goes.

[Hammurabi]

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?

That sounds slightly amusing... but what will wanderers do at your inns?  Do they purchase food and drink?  If they "purchase" it, how do they pay, because players may not want coins...

Isn't the purpose of an inn to sell food and drink and a place to sleep, all for coins?

[Threlicus]

So obviously we want the player to want coins. Why would the player want currency, assuming that he has enough in circulation to keep his (future version of) dwarven economy humming along? The only reasons I can think of are
1) To buy stuff off of caravans. That's good, but it implies that the player actually need something that he can't produce (or can't produce cheaply) locally. That ties us back to resource scarcity issues.
2) To pay taxes/tribute to more powerful entities. So the player needs to be able to pay the Mountainhome, or tribute to a powerful goblin army that he's actually scared of.

There may be more, but for currency to be useful to the player it requires the fort not be self-sufficient, because currency is a way to interact with outside economies more efficiently than barter. (Buy from caravan A, sell to caravan B) and a self-sufficient fort has no incentive to interact.

[Chthonic]

Currency could be used in the future to deal with all sorts of non-material needs . . .

- pay off bandits to leave your trade routes alone
- pay tribute to foreign lands
- hire a quick mercenary army
- purchase goods that can't be made domestically (books, whenever libraries get in)
- pay a bounty to hunters for the ears of some pesty animal
- offer a bonus for immigrants of a certain type
- bribe the human kingdom to cut down the elven forest
- pay for information from travelers

. . . especially once a supply/demand economy is in working order, and not everyone considers gabbro mugs legal tender.

[de5me7]

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.

I thought the people on easter island dissapeared because the deforested their entire island and destroyed its ecosystems. Im not implying that over hunting isnt possible, just over fishing in open ocean withoout modern intensive technology. Whales are not fish. I dont view predator prey relationships as being the  same as over exploitation of a reource. I can see land beased animals being more easily over hunted (partly because i know of examples) and partly because land based ecosystems arent as productive as ocean based.

i recon that other factors would limit the population of a fishing based civ prior to fish stock decline. Unless of course that fishing was limited to rivers or coastal reaches. Overfishing local populations wouldnt be too difficult.

[NW_Kohaku]

I thought the people on easter island dissapeared because the deforested their entire island and destroyed its ecosystems.

Yes, and when they deforested the island, the soil eroded, and crops failed, so they were forced to rely upon the sea to get all their food - but the ocean did not have the sealife populations to support that, so they overfished the area quickly, and eventually destroyed the marine ecosystem the same as they destroyed the land ecosystem.  That's the entire point - It's entirely possible to overfish, it only takes you being able to catch fish at rates greater than their replacement rate.  (Plus that ignores the Greenland example.)

This is especially possible with shellfish or fish hunted at their spawning points (such as salmon) or schooling fish such as cod, even without "modern" nets.   

Maybe it's more difficult to completely wipe out a population with just old-fashioned nets, but overfishing is easy with even stoneage technology.  After all, if your nets come up more and more empty, and your life depends on catching enough nets, that just means you have to go out longer, in deeper water, and keep your nets trawling a larger area until you catch the last few stragglers.  It's not like shrugging your shoulders and going home with no food is much of an option.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.

Random revisiting, perhaps, but upon reflection, I really like this solution.

Digging into a "local aquifer" would produce a tile that constantly fills up with water (that can be diverted and fed into cisterns), but perhaps not at a terrifically fast rate.  Digging through a brook tile that is "only enough tile to get your boot wet" should still create a pit that EVENTUALLY will fill up with water.

It might need some tweaking of the aquifer code, however, so that there is only so much water that the entire "aquifer" can produce per unit time even if you dig into it, and that it still has an "upriver" section that has priority for filling with water before the "downriver" sections fill up with water.

Silverionmox's comment about ramps only allowing 4/7 or 3/7 water also makes perfect sense, of course.

Perhaps having coding with brooks (and rivers) that make areas have Spring and Summer floods when brooks are based off of mountains, when the snowpack melts annually would also make for some lovely verisimilartude.

[Funk]

Goblin towers work as:

1 civ capitol with most of the leaders

2 main fort and army center

3 crafting metal goods.

4 temples?

[nil]

I thought the people on easter island dissapeared because the deforested their entire island and destroyed its ecosystems.

Yes, and when they deforested the island, the soil eroded, and crops failed, so they were forced to rely upon the sea to get all their food - but the ocean did not have the sealife populations to support that, so they overfished the area quickly, and eventually destroyed the marine ecosystem the same as they destroyed the land ecosystem.  That's the entire point - It's entirely possible to overfish, it only takes you being able to catch fish at rates greater than their replacement rate.  (Plus that ignores the Greenland example.)

Never heard of this part before; Diamond and a few other sources I've read emphasize the ways the on-land ecosystem's collapse made it difficult to fish--no more big trees for their dugout canoes nor plant fiber for their nets.  It's sort of a moot point, though, I don't think anyone wants to see goblins have to rely entirely on deep sea fishing to be a threat.

The only food sources I personally like for goblins is either forcing tribute/slaves from other cultures (starting with underground animal men, then expanding to above ground civilizations), or farming some sort of ugly omnivore (as Kohaku said).  In either case they should be their main food source with hunting, raiding, and possibly some sort of racial-metabolic effect (minor or otherwise).  Maybe goblins can go into a sort of stasis--what exactly happens when an immortal creature doesn't get enough food, anyway?

[BigFatDwarf]

Currency could be used in the future to deal with all sorts of non-material needs . . .
. . .
. . . especially once a supply/demand economy is in working order, and not everyone considers gabbro mugs legal tender.

Except that each civilization has its own currency. So either you could trade within your own civ only, if you could exchange it somehow, or if you could force them to convert to your currency.

This might be useful though.