There's a joke that goes around the DF forums that goes something like this: "Dwarven psychology is a funny thing. Something negative, like, say, "my family was just murdered by a rampaging elephant" can be completely canceled out by something positive, like, say, "I ate at a REALLY NICE dining room recently!""
I have said before that there are really two major aspects to Dwarf Fortress, the construction and engineering aspect, and the military aspect. This is due largely to the way that the game is presented: You can't really see much beyond walls and individual units running around. You can also largely divide DF players along which one of those two aspects they tend to prefer. These two things are not, however, the only play styles DF has to restrain itself to catering towards. Rather than focusing on the macro, the game can focus inward on its own the micro where so much of the detail is currently ignored.
I've made some suggestions, and commented on suggestions based around trying to make dwarven life a little less about having the bare necessities for survival, and make it start to involve some
higher quality furniture, hobbies, games, and leisure activities, decorative objects,
varying quality levels of food or
booze, but the same problem comes up: It's impossible to make people care about improving the quality of life for the dwarves of your fortress until you first
fix the happiness system and institute a social class system.
As such, this is (yet another) suggestion that is very broad and sweeping, attempting to make large structural changes that would enable a great deal more customizability, fun, and Fun in Dwarf Fortress, rather than anything that makes incrimental changes.
Class Warfare:
Whenever someone is trying make any suggestion for something new to add into the game, it will, almost by definition, create additional complexity, simply by the nature of having more information, objects, and options, which will always stir up the cries that it is "unfair on newbies" or that "it is hard enough to set up a farm and get your dwarves fed, we don't need something else to worry about". This stems from the largely front-loaded nature of Dwarf Fortress's difficulty - the vast majority of threats to a fortress exist before a fortress is properly set up, in its first two years of existence. Any fort that survives five years is almost guaranteed to continue existing unless brought down by HFS, tantrum spiral, extreme player stupidity, like magma-flooding his whole fortress, or abandoning caused by FPS drops or sheer boredom.
What this game really needs is a (better) system that gives players a reason to start simple, but build towards more complex systems to feed more complex demands. Nobles are largely the only thing that exist as an incriment in difficulty as your fortress becomes more densely populated. Higher-ranking and more numerous nobles with greater demands arrive as your fortress becomes a more populous community, but nobles are rarely a serious concern for the players who get them - after all, any noble that
really causes a fuss is just one Unfortunate Accident away from no longer making any more mandates.
Aside from nobles, the only dwarves that stand apart are legendaries, which are just normal dwarves that are exempt from the economy. All other dwarves are essentially just normal dwarves who will be perfectly content with uncooked plump helmets and a bed in a rough-cut communal sleeping area (although appointed positions do get to demand minor things like a desk to do their work upon) whether they are the starting seven roughing it, and glad to have a bed at all to sleep in, or the third generation denizen of a 25-year fortress whose hallways are litterally paved in gold.
What needs to change is that dwarves need to start being able to look around themselves, and realizing just what kind of slice of the pie they actually deserve, and start demanding their fair share.
As fortress wealth, age, and/or population increase, dwarves need to start rising up out of a mere expectation of bare-knuckle drudgery just to make do on subsistance to having expectations that their great Mountainhome is surely the greatest city in the world, and that as its citizens, they are privalidged to expect a certain baseline quality of life, including fine food, fine booze, fine housing, and fine entertainment.
Of course, no society has perfect equality, and so what this leads to is the need to build a mechanism for socially stratifying your dwarves. The mechanic for doing this may be a bit difficult to nail down to a specific ideal set of mechanics, but there are a few guidelines to follow:
- First, there should be a social standing ceiling based upon the overall size and wealth and security of a fortress. Early fortresses should be restricted from having social mobility until they can settle in, generate some fortress wealth, and get some migrants so that the initial seven can lord their veteran status over them. With incrimental gains in your fortress size, new social classes will start to be unlocked. This would probably be best handled in a similar manner to the way that fortresses upgrade from simple outposts to baronies to mountainhomes, with each level introducing new maximum social classes.
- Dwarves need to have some sort of social mobility. Unlike nobles, who are basically born and will die nobles, dwarves need to move between these statuses. One obvious criteria would be to track the wealth that a dwarf has accumulated. In times when the economy is turned off, using a counter for the number of jobs he/she has done in the past year or so, or a running total averaged over the time that he/she has been in the fortress could be used. Perhaps a simpler method would be to simply multiply the ranks someone has in their skills by a value that is placed on each skill to dwarven society (preferably modifiable by the player), so that legendaries are the dwarves that rise to the top. Multiple criteria can be used, however, and I think that aside from wealth and job status, a good criteria would be a dwarf's connections with the rest of the fortress - the more the social standing of a dwarf rises, and the more friends he has, and the better positioned his family/clan is, the more of a bonus to his social class he has. Finally, there might be a convenience bonus on social class - since dwarves of higher social classes will expect better goods, if a dwarf already has access to better goods and amenities, he will recieve a boost to move to a higher social class.
- Just as an example list, I would say that classes could go like this:
- Subsistance (only concerned with immediate survival - food, danger, shelter)
- Lower Class (wants relatively comfortable beds, likes nicely decorated public spaces, likes socializing and some gambling or other lower-class specific entertainments)
- Lower-Middle Class (expects private rooms excepting immediate family members, wants decent clothing, rooms that are nice, possibly containers, enjoys zoos, socializing, statues and engravings, gains happiness for better-quality prepared foods, may take up hobbies with small amounts of free time)
- Upper-Middle Class (will buy personal luxury items and decorations, feels great bonuses for having decent housing to prove their status, will be unhappy to eat low-quality food but delighted with high-quality prepared meals, higher-quality (more comfortable?) clothing, will take up hobbies that may take up more of their time, and take time off rarely to enjoy entertainment avenues or parks and zoos for their own enjoyment, and expect medical treatment for their injuries or illnesses, and are more upset when they are put in direct physical harm)
- Upper Class (Expects plenty of luxury goods to be available for purchase, to be kept completely safe, want to have extravagant goods to assure them of their status, have access to high-class leisure pursuits, such as watching plays, will want beautiful surroundings, both in their private areas, and in the fortress in general, such as admiring all the doors or statues in the hallways.)
- Plutocrats (Basically, the nobles.)
- Dwarves of different social classes have different expectations for how they can live their lives. This isn't the same as a noble's room demands per se, but rather a baseline level of quality they expect in their living arrangements (not having to sleep in the same room with strangers, having a better-quality bed, whether that is a simply better-carved bed, or one with fur blankets and bird down mattresses, and more valuable homes overall), and whether these expectations are met or exceeded are the basis for the power of the thoughts that dwarves have. Dwarves can also have new expectations open up the chance to get thoughts on certain subjects at all - subsistance-level dwarves might not care how nice their dining hall is, they just want not to be eaten by wild animals and have any kind of food at all.
- Dwarves can have some limited recognition of the differences in social class as part of their behavior - dwarves can be motivated by the temptation of rising in social class, and enjoying the benefits of having better quality of life, and if they feel that this is possible, will become more motivated, happier workers. If they think this is impossible, or realize that there aren't the goods to improve their lives, even if they raise in class, they lose their motivation, (this is a specific break from the "Perfect Communism" that the game currently runs on) and become lazier workers, and are dissafected with their jobs. If nobles have access to wonderful goods and lifestyles, but common dwarves can never hope for more than living in a communal flophouse and raw plump helmets for dinner, Class Warfare can start to happen, creating the potential for riots or brutal crackdowns from fearful nobles, sicking the Hammerer on whoever they feel is a "threat to the state".
The Pursuit of Happiness (the system):
Cribbing some bits shamelessly from the
Dwarven Psychology Thread (I should also point out
this thread also showed up while I was still hammering this post out), I am re-proposing that happiness be broken up into individual mood and perspective elements. It also breaks up the effects of having low values in specific desires to have different negative consequences, so that not all happiness is measured in terms of "X units away from going nuts and killing people".
I'll just copy some bits about those other two threads I linked to above: There should be a set of Sims-like needs and wants that dwarves can have. I like the notions of having a "Security" desire that takes hits as dwarves are terrified by things like amphibious zombie elephants popping up out of the cistern while the dwarf was bathing. Most of those suggestions are good, and I'd just say I want to copy them as ideas, including having specialized negative effects for "zeroing" on specific desires, rather than making everything result in potential tantrum spirals.
Another good idea is a "Job Satisfaction" desire. Dwarves already feel satisfied with doing their job, but this could become a much more fleshed out mechanic. In a sense, a person's job is one of the most important definitions of who a person is (especially for males, psychologically speaking, whereas females tend to define themselves more by relationships with others), especially in a game where, after all, job title is the biggest, most commonly seen thing about a dwarf besides name, and which is the only thing visible about the dwarf when you aren't looking in a menu (as it determines token color). Job Satisfaction is about more than just liking what you do, though. It's also one of the key measures of how much control one thinks they have over their life. Someone will be happy with horrible pay or conditions if they think that they are the masters of their own destiny, and so will stick with being a "small business owner" (or just an outright freelancer) and be happier than having an easy, good-paying desk job that makes them feel insignificant.
The difficult part here is translating this into game terms. I think that what we already have might work in some degree - that giving dwarves the ability to work in jobs with a material they like is a good idea, but that it needs to be expanded with a general personality type matching between how a job is done, and whether it suits them. I.E. creative types like engraving, and uncreative types hate it. Strong, agressive, or impatient dwarves prefer things like woodcutting and would be bored with delicate gemsetting.
Another dimension I would put as a "Standard of Living" desire, which is largely related to the expectations of their class. This is the desire to live in a nice home, in a relatively mud-free, decent-looking neighborhood. They would want to eat well and drink well in a nice environment (it would be nice if they didn't have to drink in the booze stockpiles, but in some kind of salon or lounge area), and have beautified hallways, free of naked, vomit-and-blood-soaked hobos. They would want the ability to bathe if/when they get dirty. They generally want to know that where they live, in their dwarven way of life, is a superior way of life to those filthy humans and elves, and even other dwarven cities.
To turn Dwarf Psychology's Frustration and Stress around, "Leisure" should be a desire for dwarves. As dwarves get stressed out by finding their paths frequently blocked by heavy traffic, having to path great distances to get logs from outside instead of at the nearby stockpile because there aren't enough haulers, or get tired of eating plump helmets every day, or being threatened by a wild beast, or generally just the monotony of doing the same effin' job in the same tiny burrow day in day out with no hope of advancement, they will turn to your fortress's leisure halls for relief. Leisure is all those wonderful things like music or art or gambling or zoos and parks or tame animal races that distract dwarves when they are stressed and frustrated, and make them feel more at home in their fort.
Dwarf Psychology's Greed, I will rebrand as the desire for "Ego Appeasement". Dwarves want other dwarves to recognize just where the belong in life (which is, quite obviously, a higher status than they are in, as they have earned everything they have, and everyone else is just a freeloader), so they would prefer to put out their own works on display. SEE the magnificence of Urist McEngraver's masterpiece work of himself carving out another masterpiece of himself carving something else! If high-quality work of theirs is on display (even better, if SOMEONE STOPS AND APPRECIATES THEIR FINE DOOR!) they get bonuses to their pride. Alternately, if they OWN the fine door, they get bonuses to their pride. If the artwork (like a statue or engraving) is OF a dwarf (like the mayor), then they get pride if people admire their likeness in statue form. This desire, however, takes hits as dwarves with senses of entitlement find out that someone of lesser rank than them DARES have a nicer facade for their home (what? TWO windows facing the pitch-black wall? How DARE they flaunt their ability to get pointless windows installed!) then this desire takes a massive turn for the ugly.
More specifically to relate to the Class Warfare section, however, I would like to see a sort of "Patriotism" measurement. This reflects general satisfaction with the government, with low patriotism meaning they are harboring thoughts of treason or rebellion against the ruling class. When a fortress is wealthy enough to enable certain social classes, but few dwarves can rise up to that class (or have the expectations of that class met), then dwarves start to wonder why they are working so hard when they never wind up getting to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Likewise, when there is a disproportionate number of lower-class dwarves, no middle class, and a small number of super-elites like nobles or very wealthy and pampered upper-class champions or legendaries, there becomes resentment at the social divisions, and patriotism suffers. Propoganda (statues and engravings, or the like) can alleviate this to a degree, if it is specific to raising pride about the fortress, as can major victories in the likes of seiges or even better, turning back the HFS with minimal casualties.
When patriotism drops unacceptably low, dwarves who have like complaints will band together, and start riots if they are of lower classes, fighting against the noblility or upper classes, or else possibly just looting the goods they believe are rightfully theirs. Upper classes that are unpatriotic will instead become more callous towards their "lessers", spending more time gathering goods for themselves personally, and having lower classes hammered for their own amusement. (Which would probably make patriotism of the lower classes drop like a rock.)
Also related to this thread would be a "Socialization" desire, as I had said in the "Harder Happiness" thread. Dwarves will want to have some connection to other dwarves simply as a means of preserving their sanity (with dwarves that have specifically reclusive personalities being possible exceptions, for the purposes of keeping "Hermit Fortresses" still possible). This would mean that, as opposed to the current system, where socializing is seen only as a liability, it would actually be more damaging to avoid socialization.
As a dampener on the possible damage, dwarves who are more friendly and popular may be less potentially depressed by the loss of a fellow dwarf, as they can be consoled by having more friends willing to dampen the blow with them. An isolated dwarf who loses his only friend, who might also be a family member (such as a dwarf who came with a child, had made no friends yet, and saw their child die), might be utterly unconsolable and immediately launch into depression, but dwarves with many friends may have a bigger safety net to fall back on.
Clans:
First, while it may overlap somewhat with the upcoming Guilds portion of the devpage, I would like to suggest that dwarves start becoming a little more... Clannish. Dwarves come from extended family lines, rather than having simple immediate family, and new migrants have a growing random chance of actually being a relative in the same clan as existing dwarves.
These clans bind dwarves into distinct social cliques.
Dwarves in a clan can vie for rank within their clan, with the same general measures of what raises them in social standing as what I detailed in the earlier parts of this thread.
Dwarves can be more or less "Clannish", diving into their clans (or their guilds) internal politics, and not wanting to socialize with others, unless those others specifically become "friends of the clan", where there are friendship (and enemy) measurements for every other dwarf in the fortress. Socializing with high-ranking members of a clan, or being politically convenient to a clan, can help raise someone's rating overall with the entire clan.
Clans can also have inter-clan politics. Clans will want to elect their own mayor, or at least ally themselves with the mayor's clan. Guilds might also become heavily influenced or even taken over by certain clans, and leverage those guilds to their clan's ends. (Or, if mechanics make it willing, even make clans specifically better suited to certain job types, or start with better skills in that particular job type, making those clans more likely to join those guilds, although figuring how to get dwarves to want specific jobs without forcing the player's hand would be tricky.)
Clannish dwarves will, however, take care of their own, showing charity to their clanmates who fall on hard times, and helping clan members avoid becoming dissaffected with lower social standing by giving a sort of clan pride bonus if their clan gains influence or prominance. The more clannish they are, however, the less happy they become about having to help others outside their clan (or at least, their guild).
The Pursuit of Happiness (as a replacement for "Property" from Locke):
Dwarves can decorate their rooms themselves. This means that, instead of renting rooms based on the value of the furniture built there, and the decorations of the walls, dwarves rent just the rooms, and will buy (or lease) the beds, cabinets, luxury goods, decorations, etc. for their own rooms. They will sell old beds or luxury goods back, and buy better ones, and build them in their rooms on their own.
In conjunction with clans, this can become even more elaborate, however. Dwarves can be designated with not just rooms, but essentially clan holdings in the fortress. Essentially, a sort of burrow that designates that the area is the residential area of that one particular clan, and where dwarves of that clan automatically pick rooms to be their own private rooms, to be decorated as they like, but also to have clan-public rooms. These would be social gathering points for just the clan in particular, and having a specific clan legendary dining hall would provide far more pride than merely eating in a public legendary dining hall to a dwarf.
This means that, instead of having to house dwarves yourself every time new migrants come, they will instead flock to their own clan's halls, try to find new housing for themselves inside said hall, and purchase beds and furniture for themselves, decorating it as they want. No player micromanagement required. (Although the more OCD players might want some sort of manual override in decoration choices.) The major concern for players will simply be carving out enough rooms off of a clan's hall to house all their citizens, and occasionally needing to perhaps knock down a wall to join rooms so that you can create single large rooms for particularly wealthy dwarves. If it becomes possible, dwarves might even be able to call in for smoothing or even engraving of the walls all on their own.
In addition to all the things I said in this post, I'd like to also link to the previous thread I had on this topic again here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=50284.0That thread contains much on ways that dwarves can create new crafts that are essentially just luxury goods, as well as entertainment venues, such as art galleries, music halls, auditoriums for plays, libraries, etc.
Children Are Our Future - The Orwellian Mind Control Scheme
Dwarven child-care centers! (Wait, wait, this one's diffirent from the others!) (OK, maybe
nenjin was close to this one...) Anyway, rather than having a system where we can force the early assimilation of dwarven children into our workforce as willing two-year-old drones, we can instead use dwarven childcare as our way of impressing certain values upon our dwarves' children, altering their preferences, their traits, possibly even getting a chance to alter their (currently set at birth) baseline attributes, so that they have higher maximum attribute caps (which are double your baseline attribute).
We could be able to expose children to different environments to get children used to those environments and living conditions, so, for example, children near plenty of flies (who put the school next to the refuse stockpile?!) will likely not develop aversions to flies. They can be stratified by the class of their parents (and their parents may demand their children recieve education appropriate for their class), to help children develop class-appropriate affinities for different objects, materials, leisure activities, and other likes.
We can also use teachers/caretakers who are given certain stories or games to push onto the children in their care to enforce certain personality traits, and can heavily douse children in the form of propoganda you feel best for controlling your happy little populace, ensuring more loyalist patriotic adults later on.
We could also potentially give children religion, or make them more secular/humanistic, as long as the parents aren't looking too closesly (or you don't mind the hit to their happiness for your evangelizing upon their helpless children) as that is now supposed to have actual impact in-game.
Interface Improvements:
As I'm talking about having dwarves become more involved in their socialization, I think it becomes more important that you can... well, SEE that's what's happening.
Currently, the interface is extremely limited as to figuring out what a dwarf is doing. Basically, you can try to infer from what direction a dwarf is moving, or you can guess when they are sitting at a workshop that they are working there, but it is essentially impossible, without (k)-looking at them (which requires stopping the game, and pointing at them, and specifically them to find out) to see what they are doing.
I know it's too much to ask for the "Complete Interface Overhaul", at least any time soon, but I think that with the graphics improvements we have had recently, it should be at least possible to do a few new things with symbolically representing actions and dwarven states on the map.
For one thing, rather than having icons that are simply a dynamically bitmap icon and a background color for the "transparent" part, we can start using transparency layers on top of icons. Rather than only seeing flashing icons when dwarves are either really hungry or really upset by having it alternate between their normal dwarf icon and the "down arrow" icon, we could have a semi-transparent patch of color overlayed on top of the dwarves. This could be used in conjunction with a special viewing mode that could be toggled, so that you could instantly see dwarves color-coded according to their happiness levels by punching the button to enter the overlay mode.
Additionally, rather than completely occluding view in miasma clouds, using transparency with the miasma clouds would let you be able to find the #@*$ dead rat causing the miasma more easily, rather than having to hunt through each covered tile for what is causing the miasma, and if it is even still there.
Even better than this, however, would be a system where you could tell what dwarves are doing in the world without using the (k)-look to specifically target each dwarf by instead using mini-icons. This could be drawn from what essentially amounts to another graphics/icon sheet that would be smaller than the main graphic/icon sheet of 255 characters. These miniature icons can then be placed at the corners/along the borders of tiles, (that is, require icons to not always take up exactly one tile on the grid) to show when dwarves are interacting along those tiles. Naturally, the sheer tiny nature of the icons we already have would dictate that these mini-icons be fairly small, possibly even only 4 pixels wide, but could at least be full-color (that is, not all painted one color, the way that standard icons, excluding expanded graphics sheets, currently are) and basically make something like a "dust cloud" or a "hammer" to represent that a dwarf is working, a "speech bubble" to represent conversing with a creature along the border between the two creatures talking. Likewise, a "sword" icons or the like might indicate fighting between two creatures (although this is typically more apparent).
Author
Topic: Class Warfare: Internal politics, scaling difficulty, and personalities (Read 64977 times)