Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hans Lemurson]

I have played and enjoyed the first Tropico very much.  It is reminiscent of Dwarf Fortress in many respects, but with the added challenge of trying to STAY in power.

You choose what industries you want on your island, but have only indirect influence on who does what.  Your money comes from your island's exports (with manufactured goods worth more than raw materials) and is used to build the housing and infrastructure needed to maintain a happy, healthy, and well-educated population that will work in your factories and keep re-electing you.  Technicly only the latter part is necessary.

Your citizens have various needs that need to be satisfied (reminiscent of the Sims), have skills in various fields (reminiscent of DF, but without overt levels), and have their own political beliefs where they support the different factions (religious, communist, capitalist, environmental, militarist, intellectual) to varying degrees and place their votes accordingly, and approve/disapprove of your policies based on this.

Money flows strangely, in that the wages paid to your workers is a "money sink" which has to be filled by the export of resources.

[NW_Kohaku]

Incidentally, I went and played Majesty because of revisitng this thread...

I guess my best way of describing it is "slippery" - everything happens fairly fast, and there are about a dozen different buildings you need to babysit, constantly mashing the "do stuff" buttons on their interface.  I never really have time to pay attention to what the heros are actually doing, I'm just worried about making sure I have my markets, blacksmiths, libraries, towers, and other buildings researching their next thingy.

[Hivemind]

I think all I'd want to see is dwarves who're on break running out to buy items to fill their designated space.

I like managing every part of their lives. They're like drunken, beardy zerglings.

[peregarrett]

As a quick start - first, make labor assignment three-state - On, Off and Up-to-dwarf. Second - add ability to pick random job instead of partying and socializing when idle.
So, when dwarf is on work - he picks jobs from activities that are 'On'. When he's idle, he can either go party or pick a job out of his 'Up-to' list, based on his personal traits. Labors that are marked 'Off' can be never done by this particular dwarf.

Making his hobby-jobs makes dwarf happy, but is less productive than official job.

[TolyK]

As a quick start - first, make labor assignment three-state - On, Off and Up-to-dwarf. Second - add ability to pick random job instead of partying and socializing when idle.
So, when dwarf is on work - he picks jobs from activities that are 'On'. When he's idle, he can either go party or pick a job out of his 'Up-to' list, based on his personal traits. Labors that are marked 'Off' can be never done by this particular dwarf.

Making his hobby-jobs makes dwarf happy, but is less productive than official job.

ME LIKEY!

[peregarrett]

And when dwarf takes hobby job - he makes an item that he likes from material that he likes.  Same mechanism as getting noble's mandates.

And if he's out of material for example, he wants electrum goblet and fortress has no electrum, he can make it himself - take gold bar and another components, too lazy to look to wiki and smelt it in nearby smelter, if his furnace labor isn't forbidden. If he can't make it - he gets unhappy.

[TolyK]

And when dwarf takes hobby job - he makes an item that he likes from material that he likes.  Same mechanism as getting noble's mandates.

And if he's out of material for example, he wants electrum goblet and fortress has no electrum, he can make it himself - take gold bar and another components, too lazy to look to wiki and smelt it in nearby smelter, if his furnace labor isn't forbidden. If he can't make it - he gets unhappy.

agreed, but not too much. just like an, "eh, didn't work" thing

[peregarrett]

I guess it can have accumulated effect. First time it's "eh, didn't work", 10th time it's "Hell, I want crystal glass!" and on 1000th it's RAAAAGEEEE!!!! =)

[NW_Kohaku]

In a sense, peregarrett is getting over towards the sort of thing I'd like to do, although a part of what I want to do is to honestly make the game have a difficulty curve as your fortress becomes larger instead of a difficulty cliff.

Part of having dwarves that are more autonomous does is not only make dwarves more capable of figuring out what jobs need doing, and taking it upon themselves to go do those jobs when the workers whose job it is supposed to be is on break, but also to have to make you care a little more about dwarven living conditions. 

Basically, I see two separate paths that DF can go to cut down on some of the micromangement-

• One with dwarves that follow scripted instructions from the player utterly to the letter.  You can give the little automatons exact instructions on what to do in every conceivable scenario.  This means basically programming them like robots.
• The other with dwarves that are relatively free-willed, occasionally fairly stupid critters, and where it is your job to keep the little suicidal emo drunkards from killing themselves by giving them toys to play with instead of cutting themselves. 

Frankly, I see the merits of both options.

The thing is, however, that in order to achieve my more over-arching goal of trying to get Dwarf Fortress to the point where it is less of a "difficulty cliff" where surviving the first year is the only difficult part of the game, I think that having the game move from one to the other is necessary.

As I said in the Class Warfare suggestion thread, I think that Dwarf Fortress can be made into a game where the aspects involving building a proper city and community can be developed into its own form of play, which would require that the game migrate through different phases -

• One where you are a tiny band of survivalists trying to live to next week, getting food and shelter.
• One where you are a small frontier outpost, filled with rough and ready dwarves concerned with militarily fending off the invasions of your civilization's enemies
• One where you are a bustling community with amenities for a more civil society, with a set of noblility providing some governance, but also some middle classes and a chance to trade and make your community a destination for traders and travellers and people really out to make a new living for themselves
• Finally, a major city, if not a mountainhome.  You have to combat the problems of social unrest and decay with more of your attention than you spend upon silly things like military matters, because of course no goblin could ever breach your blood-soaked defenses.  You turn from looking outward at the world fearfully to looking inward to "your" own dwarves as the greatest threat.  Are one of them plotting some "unfortunate accident" for the king or queen?  Does political intrigue stalk your halls?

This is also why I would say this needs to be based upon some sort of sliding metric where players can stop it from moving past some certain point - I'm sure there are people who don't want to play anything beyond the first two, maybe three.  I certainly don't want to take anything away from those players, but I think we can do something to make the "end-game" more, and part of that means making dwarves more, because once you have 200 of them in your fortress, then sending in enough siegers to really challenge that fort is going to make your processor scream in agony, and it's really a matter of making those 200 dwarves a threat to one another.[/list]

[EnDSchultz]

Okay, first off, I'd like to point out that I love the ideas posted in this thread and would love to see them implemented in DF one day.

But something occurs to me that can be expressed in one word: framerate.

By the time you get to a hundred dwarves or so, your framerate can start dropping substantially simply from them figuring out how to get around the map. What on earth will happen when we try to make them think?

[NW_Kohaku]

Put simply, dwarves do not think very much while they are en route from point A to point B.  It is only when they are at point B that they start thinking about what to do next.

Given that anything in this game is likely going to be dozens of tiles away, and each "step" takes 10 frames for your average (non-speed 0) dwarf, then we're talking about a "thinking process" that occurs once every hundred or thousand frames per dwarf.

Compare this to temperature checks on every item in the map, fluid checks, the whole fact that there are hundreds of creatures on a map pathfinding, pathfinding itself, the population of the list of things to pathfind to...

Simply making the decision tree for a dwarf stopping to think "what do I want to do next" more complex shouldn't have a terribly massive impact on framerate.

[monk12]

It occurs to me that, properly implemented, such a sliding scale of dwarven society would be like Spore, but done right.

I also like the idea of this scale being tied to the size of your settlement; when the liaison offers to promote your settlement to a barony/county/duchy, there would be a little blurb enumerating the exact changes this would make to your fortress. So to use NW Kohaku's chart there, a barony would signify official civilization interference in military matters, meaning that your fortress is involved in larger conflicts and may draw attacks from civs who are not necessarily immediate neighbors. A county would be the point where your fortress is a significant player in civilization economics, and is the point where more advanced economic systems, class systems, and diplomatic systems would kick in. Duchy would be where intra-civ politics become important, with political intrigue, social unrest and internal factions coming to the forefront. And of course, being upgraded to Mountainhome puts you at the helm of the entire civ, with all the internal and external policy decisions that implies.

Each level involves different levels of individual freedoms for the citizens- in an outpost or barony, everyone has to do exactly as the leader mandates in order to ensure the survival of the settlement. By the time you are in a county, however, dwarves do not want to work 18 hour days and want leisure time to pursue their hobbies and social lives, which is now possible due to the many unemployed dwarves who are more than ready to pitch in and take up the slack. This is the point at which your fortress becomes less of, well, a fortress and more of a city. There is more of a "me first" mentality shift as dwarves resent infringements upon their liberties. The extra socializing leads directly to the formation of political parties, factions, and especially a unique culture. You also see the rise of a middle class of legendary artisans, elite warriors and the newly forming service industry.

As the city elevates to a duchy the settlement is a prominent player in the politics of the civ, which attracts a growing court of nobles, guildmasters, foreign dignitaries, and other persons of interest. Not just your resident nobility, but also the barons and counts of neighboring territories will drop in to pay their respects, ask for favors, act in the best interest of their settlement (or not) and generally try to advance their position in the civ. All of these people have their own needs and wants, and their own agendas which may have far-reaching consequences for the civ as a whole. Barons who become discontented with their treatment may rebel, or defect to foreign civs. Slighted diplomats may make trading more difficult, or even close the borders or declare war. Other dukes may try to kill you- depending on the central power of the King they may even fight you to take some of your lands away. And once you are a Mountainhome all of this political wrangling and infighting is happening in your foyer all the time!

Naturally, a player can refuse an elevation in rank if they don't want (or are not yet ready) to deal with all of that. I also foresee an option whereby a ruler can declare martial law in order to force dwarves to work as if they were still in a barony. This would cause an unhappy thought in dwarves accustomed to greater freedom, but it would allow players to handle emergency situations.

If this is the route that Toady takes, it would also be interesting to see how influential counties/duchies/monarchs are within your settlement even while you are still a barony. Will they call upon you for levies in times of war, or demand tribute? Will you be able to call in the other half of the feudal agreement and send your baron or expedition leader off to secure Royal Reinforcements to help stave off enemy incursions? Will there be forms of government other than feudalism- perhaps in the Great Dwarven Republic being a duchy grants you a vote in civ policies? That is still quite a ways off, but its fun to dream.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, pretty much, "Like Spore, but done right" is sort of what I was thinking of.  I just didn't want to say it outright, because it often brings up some sort of argument about why a game like Spore never works.

However, regarding the barony change, I'm actually a little leery of the notion that it would be all tossed onto you at one specific point.  I kind of like the idea that it's a linear progression, based upon a function of population size or other factors like an average dwarven quality of living across the fort, or the amount of and kinds of industry you are performing.  That is, if you are building more luxuries for your dwarves, it progresses more towards the "cultural focus", while a more spartan fortress stays "military focus".

As for "how the King pushes around a small fort" question, I'm actually holding a suggestion thread on that off in the works, but I think that working the "military vs. cultural" idea into a sort of "fortress mission" can also work quite well - as we go into the Army Arc, military forts can be built with the player specifically declaring that they are "holding the pass" at some strategic military location, and the King's requests may come in the form of "send 20 soldiers of at least X rank to my armies".  A cultural fortress would instead work towards building statues for the king's personal statue garden - nothing but masterwork will do!

[EnDSchultz]

It is nice to dream. I'd love to see this all happen, but Toady will be old, gray, and have a 10 foot long beard by the time it comes to pass.

[monk12]

The thing I like about tying it to the level of nobility you have is that it takes an active acceptance of responsibility on the part of the player. It avoids situations where a new player is still figuring out how to farm or set up a military and doesn't realize what they are getting into by advancing to all this other stuff.

In accordance with the whole sandbox mentality of the game, I think that influencing the culture is a thing you can do regardless of fortress level. If you make the best damn statues in the civ, you don't need to be a county to be recognized as being the place to go to get your statues. Similarly, if your couple dozen outpost dwarves are all legendary soldiers who regularly beat off sieges in open battle, then the whole world will recognize your prowess and act accordingly. I seem to recall reading a thread about this type of thing, maybe I'll find it again later.

I also don't think of it being a hardcoded thing, not completely. Its more like advancing up the nobility ladder is a way of accepting larger responsibilities. Dwarves in some random outpost don't mind if they're sleeping in little dirt hovels- it is expected. If they all happen to be sleeping in luxurious apartments, then so much the better! If they're a city, they expect a better standard of living as a matter of course, and will be unhappy if they are still in their little hovels.

Similarly, heading up the ladder is a general way of allowing dwarves more autonomy and free time, which they use to establish hobby industries and socialize, which ultimately leads to the formation of those factions and social circles I mentioned. These kinds of things will still happen in an outpost where everybody only has intermittent break time between jobs- the difference is that while in a small outpost these kinds of social circles will develop slowly and will likely not have time to do that much, whereas dwarves in bigger cities will have more free time to invest in those circles, which leads to political systems and demands for social reform and such. In short, dwarves with more time to think have more time to realize they are living in a crapsack world and more ability to do something about it.

I suppose what I'd like to see is a system where each part of the game is present in all parts of the game, but emphasized differently based on your level. So there will always be internal social pressures, diplomatic and military challenges, and economic forces to handle- they just manifest differently in each stage of the game. A player will be prepared for the challenge of internal politics because they have already hurdled the challenge of general happiness and tantrum spirals early in the game- the former is a logical extension of the latter. Doing enough trading to ensure year to year survival leads naturally into trade for luxuries and exotic resources. Meeting the needs of visiting dignitaries is an extension of meeting the needs of your first baron, just more so. Each stage adds a new wrinkle into the mix, so a player can intimately know an exceedingly complex fortress because they had a hand in creating each new level.

Of course, if it is tied to the nobility then this raises the question of how the elevations in nobility come about. How much of it is based on production and industry, and how much of it is based on your baron's ability to kiss ass and fulfill mandates from higher ups? (Link me to that thread, when you make it)  I could even foresee situations where your fortress population recognizes that they should have the rights and privileges associated with the higher levels of nobility, and gradually apply some internal pressure to move up the ranks. It would be much like Provinces applying for Statehood in American history.

Look at that, another post that was going to be a brief sharing of my thoughts turned into a wall of text    I'm having too much fun with this thread.