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[nbonaparte]

Manually editing dwarves' personalities.

[NW_Kohaku]

There's a difference between manually rewritting the values in a dwarf's profile through a memory hack, and modelling in social pressures that reinforce personality traits in one way...

That's like comparing memory hacking to give yourself extra skill ranks to specifically training dwarves to have better skills by focusing that dwarf on using that skill until it levels up - they might accomplish the same end goal, but one is a hack, and the other is using the game as intended.

[Ghoulz]

Under your system, would it be possible to embrace the teachings of Urist McLenin and simply abolish the class system (or more realistically, the upper classes) through means that are more complex than simply throwing them all into a pit of magma? Perhaps enabling a revolution to happen, which could lead to both positive (no more annoying nobles) and negative (failing infrastructure) effects.

[NW_Kohaku]

Under your system, would it be possible to embrace the teachings of Urist McLenin and simply abolish the class system (or more realistically, the upper classes) through means that are more complex than simply throwing them all into a pit of magma? Perhaps enabling a revolution to happen, which could lead to both positive (no more annoying nobles) and negative (failing infrastructure) effects.

I would have to say that this goes beyond the scope of what I have really been talking about, but my having read Animal Farm and generally enjoying history and news tells me that Urist McLenin really DID get rid of the upper classes by effectively tossing them in magma (well, firing squads, anyway) and that they then didn't so much abolish the upper classes as declared themselves to be the new nobles, instead.

In fact, that's probably the best way to model a successful "Communist Revolution" or revolution from the lower classes in general - once the upper classes get butchered, the people who were major leaders in the revolution then turn against one another to become the new nobility, using politics or violence to drive the others off.  Then their friends get to become the rest of the nobles or get enough wealth to become the upper class.  After that, the new nobility has to open up some sort of public resource for free or heavily subsidized consumption by the public as a means of mollifying the rest of the lower classes, which are exceedingly difficult to take back once given out freely (as it is the basis of their support from the masses), but can ultimately cripple their long-term economic viability if allowed to stay in place.

[NW_Kohaku]

Some relevant comments from Toady One:

The introduction of sprawl around the fort could change the rental situation drastically, but the overall price setting would apply there, assuming rooms in your fortress aren't so rare and the outside population so vast that they aren't all the exceptions you mentioned.  It's hard to say how it'll turn out.

Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

The first actually has the longest-range implications for this suggestion: If dwarves will emmigrate away from your fortress if conditions become poor, this actually starts to make an even bigger impact upon concepts like social classes, as we have to attract higher-class (higher skill-rank), more productive citizens, and use rewards to retain our increasingly valuable skilled dwarves, or they will leave for jobs in part of the sprawl where they can get the sort of lifestyle that they demand in return for their skills.

It would also mean that your fortress could wind up the dustbin of refugees, all hoping to get a job even though they have no experience in any useful field.  (Well, OK, it's pretty much that now, but this time it would be on purpose, and a reference to places like "The Big Apple" or "The Big Easy", where people flocked to major cities for jobs when they lost everything in their rural life.)  Tragedies like having villages wiped out could send sudden influxes of refugees to your fortress (and we could correspondingly shut off the flood of migrants that come in normally), or we could simply start opening up "job openings" that would tempt more workers to come in.

Especially if turning the economy on can have a real governmental budget - we would actually be able to influence immigration and emmigration simply by adjusting wages above or below the "national average".  We would want higher-class dwarves (even "useless" ones) because those higher-class dwarves have more money, which means more tax revenue, which becomes more important as more of the economy gets switched on, and we have to handle our fortresses more like a government, and less like a dictator with mind-control powers.

[nuker w]

I find this STILL very cool. The things Toady has said about such things is even better. Yay for this.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm trying to push a new kingdom mode suggestion

For additional fun, if we are going the route of "being" the nobility, we have even more reason to want to mess with social classes.  I rather like the idea of mixing this in with some RoTK themes.  That way, some of the higher-ranking dwarves we cultivate may eventually become the agents we send out to see our will done on the world map...

[Dagoth Urist]

Would it be feasible to maintain a successful community not on the verge of revolution without propagating patriotism, according to your system? It isn't universally seen as something positive to everyone in this world, after all. If the patriotism in your fort reaches the maximum limit, you'd get a bunch of jingoistic nationalists, wouldn't you? It would be a somewhat dwarven opinion, I guess. But I don't like the idea of the game's mechanics forcing you to take that path in order to not get uprisings in your fortress.

Oh, and before I forget: You make excellent suggestions. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Ah, you made me go back and re-read to figure out what the heck I was talking about in the first place, again.  It's been a few weeks since I've seriously gone at this thread, I'd pretty much abandoned this one to focus on Farming.

Anyway, I threw in the weasel words about it being a "sort of "Patriotism"" metric in the first place, because I knew that I was walking into a loaded term, but had difficulty coming up with a better one-word label for what I meant in the positive sense (so that high numbers intuitively correlate to good).

What I'm really talking about is what amounts to how dissafected someone is with their society - it's, in some ways, the class-based strife metric.  The way to truly solve the problem caused by that stat is to ensure that there is social justice in your fortress - that workers are rewarded fairly and that harder or better work correlates to better rewards for their work, that at least some degree of social mobility exists, and that social safety nets exist for those who need it (which, in DF, would almost entirely consist of making sure that you don't go long periods of time without letting your lumberjacks do nothing and not having any fallback jobs for them to gain money from, as well as having a hospital that can provide healthcare).

Patriotism and jingoism are basically the "opiates of the masses" to patch up the holes when systemic problems exist, but that's not to say we couldn't model in some negative side-effects to such measures, especially when they become extreme.  (Heckling the caravans, even dwarven ones, to try to get rid of the "foreigners", pressing for wars, possible "racial" tension against dwarves of different hair/eye/skin colors when certain types have a majority, that sort of thing.)

edit: and thanks for the encouragement.

[Andeerz]

I've been thinking a bit after reading this thread about implementing a class system of sorts.  I like the general idea of the OP and like some of the ideas that have been posited.  I wanted to present some ideas to ponder which I think would help guide this idea towards a more "procedurally generated" approach than it is now, though the idea already has some of it in there.  The ideas I present are as follows.

Social mobility is something that I think technically exists in all cultures, it's just that in some cultures and governments social mobility was much harder than in others (i.e. in a caste culture, social mobility outside of a caste would likely be nigh impossible vs. something like the meritocracy of Venice throughout the High Middle Ages and Renaissance ).  What were the factors that underlay this phenomenon?

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/pdf_files/Princes.pdf  <---I encourage people to read this.  It's a scholarly article on economic prosperity and its relationship to government and has a lot of bearing on the topic at hand.  It gives some ideas about some of the underlying factors.

Some other factors to consider are things like the Black Plague in the mid 14th century, where so many people died that the cost of labor of many things went up and, in many respects, the social mobility and living conditions of peasants improved because of that (and vice versa perhaps.  I'm not entirely well educated on the matter, but check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death

If we can understand and model factors like these among the likely many others I haven't covered, we can make more credible models of things like social mobility, class warfare, population contentment and prosperity that reflect the progression of things IRL in a way that's procedurally generated, without having to resort to game mechanics (not saying they're necessarily bad!!!) like having sort-of arbitrary events like a king coming to your fort to determine how wealthy people in a fort or city can be.

Basically, the presence of this, that, or the other class in whatever proportions and what defines this, that, or the other class should have proximate, observable causes that are believable and compelling.  And I think the best way to do this is modeling real-life sorts of causes as well as possible.  I think these causes would largely fall under stuff that can be controlled and observed by the player, though perhaps not all would be at a timescale observable in most forts as the game is now , and some major things might be outside of a player's control.  Some of these factors (or what I think with my current knowledge are factors) have already been suggested, like patriotism and stuff, and the causes of these might be model-able, too. 

[TolyK]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

amazing. if this forum had karma I'd give you some damn carma.
i currently have nothing to add as I have lost 4 hours of sleep reading this net of strings. threads. I am really tired...

[ScriptWolf]

Bump, I have to say that they have this right on spot and I really would like to see different clans and dwarf classes when the economy kicks in and before ofcourse

[Neonivek]

Personally I don't think we should have hardcoded classes as such.

But then again the classes while always economically influenced weren't always economically based.

Many "classes" and "Castes" of people had to do with people's races, origins, or even jobs.

Anyhow I do think that the game should extrapolate seperations of society in each city so as to have revolutions become possible or class warfare.

Would it be feasible to maintain a successful community not on the verge of revolution without propagating patriotism

Isn't Patriotism something that is rather recent and completely out of place in a medieval game?

Though... Completely IN place in a Fantasy game.

Fantasy games seem to support modern ideals quite often...

[Andeerz]

Hmmm... patriotism's meaning can vary on context.  I will assume that what you mean by patriotism is patriotism in the sense of loyalty and pride for one's own country.  I will have to look into this some more another time, but I'd be willing to bet that patriotism is something that existed well before the modern era.  In order to have patriotism as defined here, you have to have a country, as opposed to a loose confederation of city states, feifdoms and the like which were prevalent throughout the medieval era.  A nation in the modern sense in Europe didn't come around until the Renaissance with the rise of nationalism and stuff. However, I wouldn't be surprised (and this is purely speculation) that there existed patriotism in solid, unified empires like the Roman Empire, and the Persian Empire which I would argue fit, at least in many respects, the modern definition of a nation. 

Patriotism is dependent on a sense of unification across a large geographic area, something that I think couldn't happen without a strong, unifying government able to effectively make its presence felt across a large area; you couldn't really have a nation in the modern sense nor patriotism in the way defined here.  Persia and Rome did have such governments, and I'd be willing to bet that this was due to a thriving economy, solid infrastructure, and a strong professional volunteer military to keep destabilizing agents out of the areas. 

I bring this up, because I think this could give an idea of how to deal with the idea of "nations" in DF.

[Neonivek]

So in otherwords...

A "Nation" doesn't exist in feudalism so to speak.

Persia and Rome did have such governments

Not so much Rome. In fact that was one of the contributors to their eventual downfall.