The Sliding Scale of Difficulty:There has been a recurring theme among those talking about the way in which DF is played, which is to say that DF is not
hard, it's simply
complex. It's hard to
learn, but once you have learned it, it's rather easy.
In fact, very few things in DF are hard to accomplish once you understand the mechanics of how to do so, the difficulty largely comes from the fact that the game throws a hundred different things you can do in your face, and lets you drown in the choices you have to make. Many people lose a fortress simply because they forget to set up a farm, not because setting up a farm was something they were incapable of doing. People lose a fortress because they lost track of how their brewing job was canceled because of a supply chain hiccup, rather than because of a poor decision per se.
This is partly because DF has lost some of its "game" features, as discussed in
DF Talk 17. Where once there was a progression in the 2d game where the player moved to different roadblocks from the underground river or chasm or magma river, and new and more powerful enemies appeared at each point along that progression, along with more valuable materials to mine, now realism and simulationism have replaced this with a game where almost everything worth having is available from the start. There are caverns, but they are no roadblock - they are easily bypassed, and the magma sea can be easily reached while avoiding them.
My proposed solution is to make the solution to this problem go hand-in-hand with another
problem people had with dwarven autonomy when I was trying to push for that idea a while back:
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.
Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior? Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability? Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone? While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.
At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons. At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods. Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults. Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system. For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.
On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation. The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time. If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws. That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.
Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build. It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected. The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview. If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed. Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.
So the idea here is to make the game more difficult in stages by making your dwarves more autonomous and demand more of the player in stages, as well.
In the game
Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a great example of how to make a City-Building game a challenging game with progressive levels of difficulty, there were multiple stages of housing, each one packing more people into denser space as the city you were building became more urbanized, and
requiring more services to be available in the city before they could evolve again.
This started with basic water and food, but moved up to having access to a shrine, then having hemp for clothing and oil, then having basic entertainment and medicine, then multiple types of food, then pottery, then advanced entertainment and religion, acupuncture, tea, luxury goods and spices at the top. Each successive service you needed to provide took workers, funds, and space. (Each building took up space, and each building had limited range of effect, so more buildings meant it became progressively harder to plan for having the space to build the next type of building you needed.) More than this, every new stage of development took higher "Desirability" ratings for that property - locations near glamorous buildings like courthouses or the palace or a temple would become more valuable, while industries like kilns dropped values like a rock. In order to get the highest quality housing, you would have to surround it with expensive and spacious parks or statues to boost their property values enough for the truly wealthy to see fit to live there.
Emperor itself had a progressive challenge in the sense that your building sites were smaller and smaller and had less resources to build with (and hence, you had to import more of your goods) as the game got into the difficult challenge scenarios, but the same basic progression model can work for DF: As your fortress wants to move up, you need to provide more services to your dwarves, which provides that natural progression in forts, provided that the actual building of these services is made a challenge in their own right.
That doesn't mean that building a tavern (as an entertainment venue) all by itself should be hard in a tedious sense, but that running it properly should be an involving process that adds some depth to the game and challenges that go beyond simply spending a single stone to construct a new workshop and then making a new finished product out of one unit of raw material.
The ways in which I've talked about
farming are ways in which we can make "provide food to your dwarves" a deeper and more complex experience. Using minecarts and the complex logistics system we just got along with perhaps the
rubble system that had been discussed and a "make mining more dangerous" scheme, including not just cave-ins but also coal dust explosions or exploding natural gas pockets to be avoided.
Maybe we can have a requirement for well-lit areas in housing. You can fuel lamps out of rock nut oil (assume it's just a wick on a sconce carved in the wall), but it's stinky, so dwarves don't like it if they can avoid it. Maybe there's a more difficult to grow, but sweet smelling oil you can trade for that will increase the local residence's property values or satisfaction with their housing or whatever you want to call it. Rich families might want gem lanterns that operate on alchemy, and require multiple fancy component plants to be mixed under certain conditions to be made. Other advanced achievements might include setting up pipes to a natural gas pocket, and tapping it carefully through a plumbing system to allow for a city-wide natural gas-lit streetlight system. Such an achievement could add prestige to a whole city as well as raise the desirability of any such lit residential or commercial district.
Entertainment, likewise, could require building proper venues and getting proper traffic flow, or good accoustics in the venue, as well as potentially managing the talent.
Hospitals might be made more interesting with common comunicable diseases, with a nutrition model that makes keeping dwarves eating right (see the farming thread again for making a balanced diet more difficult) also give them better resistances to diseases, and hence less sick days at work. Hospitals might also be expanded to provide alternate health services, such as apothecaries or potion-makers that provide both magic potions for warriors in battle, but also potentially medicines for more domestic troubles (like dwarf viagra potions) that would be a economic service a healthcare professional could provide.
Religious institutions could be made more interesting by making the priests have to cater to the whims of their gods, which may require festivals in their honor (which are like parties that take away laborers, but also require material sacrifices to the gods) and where the priests gain political power that may rival your own, and will require you to keep them in line.
Economics in general can be made more interesting, although I'm dedicating a whole section to that.
The concept of the "Noble Tree" will be explained more in depth in the Social Classes section, however, for this section, some basic things about this concept should be explained:
The noble tree concept tries to bring back fortress specializations like what the game had back in the 2d era when there were fortress nobles that you gained based upon guilds - a smithing-heavy fortress would get a special smith guild noble.
As part of the notion of a sliding scale of difficulty, the Noble Tree will involve letting the player branch out into gaining different nobles that bring about different in-game rewards to the player for having that type of noble (in the form of new menus that let you exercise that noble's political power for your benefit), but also challenges associated with keeping that noble (not just normal noble demands, but infighting among the nobles).
A player might have a strong religious base, or a strong economic base, or military base, and these would bring about religious nobles (making up a religious hierarchy) as the church becomes larger and more powerful in your fort, while a powerful economic base would see heads of more and more trading houses become functional nobles in the form of trade barons, who try to purchase their influence in the fort with money. Military nobles would give you access to more armies marching across the map after the army arc.
Since gaining more nobles gives you more access to menus or edicts or agents that give you different controls over your fortress or the worldmap, you can choose to go down different "branches" of growth in your noble structure.
In this way, different nobles are like a "tech tree" without having it be based upon technology. You gain access to more advanced control over creating and chartering caravans as you gain merchant nobles to run them, or the ability to do more things with your soldiers on the worldmap as you gain higher-ranking military commanders.
At the outset of a new fortress, every dwarf will be content with just plain survival, and will follow every order as though you are directly controlling everything they can and cannot do, as much as the game allows you to do now.
In fact, to help new players acclimate to the game faster, some features of the game may be "blanked out" at first, in order to help new players focus in on what aspects of the game they should focus upon (such as getting that farm up). This might be optionally disabled through modding or some init option for those who "know what they are doing" and don't want those limitations, but it would be a good step towards making the game a little easier for new players to understand what they must do early on.
I would think most specifically about shutting down most of the non-crucial workshops or constructions that one could build until after one hits a certain stage of the game, such as having a working farm and still and at least one bed.
In real-life, almost all small, early societies were "True Communist" - they all shared and shared alike because that was the only way they could survive, and also because they were communities that were small enough that everyone knew each other, and in established villages, everyone was probably at least a cousin of everyone else.
Throughout most of human history, most humans lived in communities of less than 100 people, almost all of whom were related to each other at least as cousins. Money wasn't strictly necessary in most interactions because they would spend their whole lives with one another, and as such, all debts would eventually be paid back. They, in fact, wouldn't even keep track of debts, the same way we probably don't think much of sharing things with our own family members.
As the fortress progresses, however, (around the time of becoming a "town" with a mayor), dwarves will start having greater demands of their leadership. They will no longer be such happy little communists that share and share alike with everything in the fortress, they will start demanding personal quarters, and the ability to keep at least some personal trinkets.
As survival becomes more assured, there will no longer be the threat of imminent death to keep the workers going at maximum work capacity, and giving workers a share in the stake of the fortress in return for their work (that is to say, pay for services rendered) becomes necessary to keep the dwarves working, especially later-comer dwarves. While the Starting Seven may be assumed to all have a personality skewed towards diligent work, later dwarves may be more opportunistic, and seeking a place in the fort only for their own personal betterment, and will work only for pay.
This, in turn, will open up the need to have an internal economy for dwarves to spend their money within, so that you will need to focus at least a small amount of your industry upon giving them things they can buy (for example, crafts,) as well as starting to need to build entertainment venues or nicer housing for your dwarves. These will be modest at first, but as your fortress advances, they become more complex, and more difficult to satisfy.
Dwarves will also have preferred professions based upon their personalities in the Personality Rewrite. As the fortress becomes more populous, and dwarves can afford to be more specialized, then dwarves will be more likely to want to go into jobs they want to do, rather than the ones you arbitrarily assign them.
Because managing the individual personalities of different dwarves would be a massive micromanagement headache, however, the game will need to enable a "Dwarven Resources" manager, which would be an appointed noble that takes care of assigning dwarves to your different jobs. I'll go into this topic more, later.
As the fortress becomes more wealthy and more secure, the actual nobility may show up.
The noble will still demand a nice room and all, but they'll start demanding more, but also start giving the player more in return.
I think it best to keep the notion that we have some sort of dwarf we can choose from among our fortress to elevate up to nobility - this will give us players a better buy-in to help us feel that it's "our baron", rather than something foisted upon us.
Barons give players access to the barony, which is how we gain access to the world map, and control over sending out hill dwarves to start off-map actions. Barons can also give us access to a "political intrigue" game, where the baron is trying to build up prestige for their title and their fort by engaging in the rivalry between nobles for power. At a basic baron level, they won't have much capacity to affect much, but it will be there.
Barons may still make demands, but rather than simply being something you have to do or else a dwarf is executed, demands could be means of adding to the prestige of your noble. When barons are more fleshed out, rather than just being arbitrary and random, they could be made to have more rhyme and reason. Barons might ban exports of goods to hurt a political rival, for example, or drive of prices of goods by causing a shortage of supply.
If a baron ever dies, we can still get a new one, but they have to start all over again from square one with no prestige. Worse, a different noble may try to take control of your fort, and force you into vassalage, where you would lose control of your fort if you aren't capable of resisting. This would give players a strong incentive not to have Unfortunate Accidents - the baron is not just a reward, it's the player's avatar in a sense, and if they get killed, they lose a lot of their progress forward in the game.
In the political intrigue game, you have a court (a special menu) and the ability to make decisions about your land holdings, and different nobles of the same civ are constantly spying on each other's court to gain advantages over the others. Gaining enough prestige to climb in ranks through nobility means gaining more and more noble tree nobles under your banner, expanding the number of hill dwarves under your command, and gaining economic, military, or religious influence by running trade caravans that bring profits to the kingdom (that are taxed by the king)
For that matter, the king will have their own court, and will be ordering you as a vassal to provide for the kingdom in some way. This means that you may be given directions to generate more wealth (through trade) and paying up some of that wealth in taxes, more soldiers or to fight and gain military victories, or to simply train troops and lend them to the armies of more powerful military dwarf nobles, or to appease the gods or seek their favor for religious forts. Fulfilling these royal demands gives you more prestige and failing them harms your prestige, and may get your noble stripped of his title if they lose it all.
The fortress you are running, then, will have a debt to (or possibly from) the kingdom that must be paid off where there is a continuous burden of debt in the form of taxes being added on proportional to the size and splendor of your fort. It is demanded of the fortress that you pay for your keep, so to speak, within the kingdom. (Loaning troops or brining victory or showing signs of pleasing the gods can count as "payment" of this debt in order to make non-economic fortresses have an equal standing.)
The fortress running into debt to the kingdom will result in penalties to prestige and losing status and the ability to further advance, while paying off more than your fair share leads to increases in prestige.
Your prestige, in turn, can "buy" advancement through the ranks of nobility, and give you a chance to advise the king on what it is the kingdom as a whole should do, or at least, what your part in it should be. With little prestige, you are simply spoken down to. With tremendous prestige, you can convince the king to send the kingdom off on wars of your own choosing for your own noble's more personal gain, or otherwise work to influence laws and edicts to be passed that grant your fortress or noble more power and influence and wealth.
In the fort itself, the economy should come into mostly full swing - many dwarves would still know each other or be family members of the starting 7 or something, and be generally willing to help the community, but dwarves working for a noble will generally expect to be paid from their work, and you will start having an actual treasury.
You don't need coins except for if you are going for high mercantilism, but there will need to be an accounts book, where nobles owe the workers of their land money for the services they render, and the workers can demand goods and housing in exchange for these debits that they have built up. Dwarves pay for their rent and food and clothing and pay for entertainment venues like taverns. Dwarves will get angry if they start to have a net positive debit balance that goes very high, as this means they are owed money by the noble and not being payed. They might just start "buying" property you have available for internal sale, but generally, the more debit they have in their favor, the less they will feel that they have to work, so they will take more and more breaks the "wealthier" they are in terms of being owed money for their services. They will spend these breaks on hobbies or recreation instead of working, so giving dwarves plenty of expensive treats to keep working in order to obtain is a way of ensuring that dwarves are motivated to keep working hard.
The degree to which "motivation" is a big deal in how often they work hard is a factor of how well they know the other dwarves in the community. Someone with a lot of friends or who feels a large amount of investment in the community in general (like the starting seven) is going to be motivated just to help the community in general. Newcomers and loners are going to be more likely to be motivated by their own personal interests (although some loners may be altruistic or naturally diligent workers), and as such, need more personal financial motivations to work hard.
Conversely, dwarves can also fairly easily go into debt. They can continue to buy many things on credit, so that they owe more work back to their noble to pay it off. If they go sharply into debt (typically because of not having enough work, or unfair economic conditions), then they might face repossession of property or demotion of social status down to the likes of slaves or beggars. This, obviously, would make them quite angry, as well.
At this point, you will need to continue satisfying all the demands of citizens from earlier on, including the need for a more robust economy.
Few, if any dwarves will be working for the common good out of just loyalty anymore, as there will be so many dwarves they don't know that motivation should come mainly from the economic incentives.
This means that you'll need to start supplying more and more advanced amenities, which in turn, raise property taxes, which in turn are paid by those dwarves, and inspire them to work harder to be able to afford their comfortable lifestyle.
At around this point, you should also be able to start just plain zoning land for sale. Dwarves would be able to buy their own land out of your hands, and set up their own homes (which they pay property taxes on instead of renting) and set up their own workshops (where they buy raw materials from the fort but own the finished product), and have the ability to sell those products back to the fortress or to any travelers.
The dwarves that do this are those of higher social classes that have obtained enough status and wealth to be free of serfdom, and are mini-capitalists in their own right.
They will start taking jobs according to what guild they are a part of (if any), what jobs they like doing due to their personality, and according to what jobs have plenty of raw materials available
They would obviously need to have some decent AI in order to learn how to take care of themselves, generally.
If dwarves are not capable of reaching the status they deserve (because you are not allowing for zones for them to buy and set up decent shops), they will become less happy with the fort and generally work less, since they don't have a reason to strive. The advantage is that capitalist dwarves are motivated to get as much profit as possible, and as such are going to be harder workers than the still communist dwarves that don't have potential death of the fort motivating them.
All transactions inside the fort could be taxed, and as such, you get a decent cut for simply letting dwarves churn out huge numbers of rock crafts to pawn off on the random travelers.
Alternately, you could simply buy those goods from your dwarves to be put to public works use, which functionally means you are still paying a dwarf for the goods they produce and the fortress can own the goods afterwards, but that the quality and supply/demand mechanics come into play determining how much that dwarf is getting paid for their goods, and it will likely be more expensive to buy from the private sector than it is to simply have the public sector workers make things for you.
If you simply set up an automated "I will buy ___ amount of ____ item for ____ price per ____ period of time" as a system, you will no longer need to schedule individual jobs or workshops. If you are paying enough to make it worth their while, dwarves that own commerce zones will simply set up a shop, buy the raw materials, and sell you the goods you are willing to buy automatically. This can be linked with the Standing Orders concept to make it so that you automatically start setting buy orders as your fortress runs low. You could even start setting different price gradients of what you are willing to pay the more low your supplies get. ("I'll pay you double, just somebody make some booze before there's a riot!")
At this stage, you have the king's court and the noble's court in your control. (Depending on how you get control of the kingdom, your noble may also be the king, or the noble may simply be so powerful that they can influence everything the king does almost automatically.)
This means that you'll gain control of the king's court interface as well as your standard noble court interface options. Lesser nobles will lobby the king, and you will have to keep different nobles (or factions of nobles) from getting too grumpy and possibly trying a coup against you. Their loyalties and respect for your reign will be one of the things you have to control. Letting them do as they wish or doing things that get them rich or more powerful make them more loyal, while forcing them to go against their wishes or having their standing drop causes them to become less loyal and more resentful. If nobles turn traitor, they'll take their lands with them, and become enemies, unless you can manage to capture the noble and accuse them of treason (which other nobles won't like) before they can do so, and put a new noble in their place.
The way you run the fortress itself should be simply the logical extreme of the changes already happening at this point - almost everyone is a dirt-poor beggar or serf, or else a wealthy capitalist or noble with tons of demands.
Your fortress is at its highest peak, and should be dizzyingly complex networks of residences, zones for capitalism, marketplaces, transit systems, farms, industry, religion, military barracks, etc.
Odds are, you aren't going to be able to manage individual dwarves at all anymore, and as such, will be relying upon assigned noble middle-management and dwarven resources to control everything going on. The idea is that by this point, you should be far removed from much besides designating what work needs to be done, and letting the game worry about how it actually gets carried out.
A half-serious proposal, this would be the Kingdom equivalent of hitting the HFS - a sort of grand crescendo for the game at its final stages, where, if your dwarven kingdom looks poised to take over the entire world or region, a coalition of every remaining power (including, perhaps, releasing the HFS or some divine intervention that seek to destroy the dwarves for their hubris or upseting the divine balance) rise up to confront the dwarves.
The main purpose of this would, of course, be to give players a way to either go down in a glorious blaze as everything they created is destroyed, or else to give players the ability to make "beating the game" in the Kingdom Mode by conquering the whole map a more challenging, and hence, more bragging rights-worthy.
By adding back in more clear progressions of challenges based upon how developed the player's fortress has become, we can add back into the game that "game-like" notion of progression and achievement and scaling difficulty, and do so in a way that enables
Further, we can allow players who only seek "constructionist" gameplay a chance to simply opt-out of the whole system if they are only interested in building large monuments, and not playing the game-like features that the "gamist" players are seeking. They need merely not climb the "noble tree".
Simply put, the mechanism by which fortress advancement is dependent upon fortress "created wealth" simply does not work.
I believe that a general population size-based trigger for advancement through different stages of fortresses should still be available, but population based upon created wealth should be scrapped entirely.
In the first "7 sods in a hole" stage, we need to make it clear the objective is simple survival. A hidden "score" for how well you are doing in this regard should exist where you get points for just not dying and for securing food (preferably enough to feed more than just your initial dwarves) as well as preparing beds and a meeting hall for your fort will add to the score, as will killing some dangerous creatures. Deaths will significantly subtract from the score and heavily discourage new migrations.
In this way, instead of having massive migrations the instant you start making rock crafts, you should hopefully have to spend about 2 game years as a pre-town fortress, just getting your basics in order, and letting players prepare for migrants instead of being drowned in them.
Advancement from town to barony should require having more "nice" things, not simply value. Villagers could have a satisfaction rating for the amenities that a town has, and that adds to the town success score that brings in new villagers. They may want access to a hospital, a shrine or place of worship to at least one major deity of your culture, or a tavern with some basic entertainment. Safety would, of course, still be a concern with deaths driving away migrants, but so would loss of basic needs, like not producing enough food or running out of alcohol. Gaining the actual noble would require gaining enough population but also gaining some of the "noble tree" nobles to give your fort enough of a political influence to justify elevating a noble from your ranks.
Advancement from barony on up to duchy would require having your baron gain in status, which would also require satisfying demands for the baron, but also would require you raise the profile of your fortress through beautification projects, through military achievement, through economic dominance, or some other means of showing that you are a powerful and contributing member of your kingdom in general. Basically, gaining county or duchy status is not so much a factor of population anymore (although it does help) as it is a matter of political clout, which is influenced by how much economic, religious, military, or other clout you can throw around.
Advancement up to obtaining the seat of the monarchy, obviously, would mean either a coup of the violent sort, or of the political sort where you can dramatically shift the political winds so as to make your duchy the center of political might in the whole kingdom. It would mean that your political pull (or that of your coalition of supporters) is more powerful than all opposition to your rule.
Advancement to the Zwergedämmerung would be upon some sort of "too greedy" use of expansionistic policies once you were in control of the full kingdom.
Oh boy, when I was starting this, I thought this was going to be a relatively simple thing to explain. 6000 words and a couple days later...
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Topic: Class Warfare: Internal politics, scaling difficulty, and personalities (Read 64996 times)