Well, I read your first two posts twice, and skimmed the others- I was more interested in your ideas rather than the specifics of implementation. A quite brilliant post, I really hope Tarn takes the time to absorb the implications. Since you already debated the lack of FPS hits by this, I would like to add my dislike of a research tech tree, as it seems to belong to a different genre of game, and doesn't fit with DF to moi.
What I most fear about this is that Toady will have a difference of game design philosophy, and that I'll never really get to know it through anything other than Toady simply not ever commenting on or implimenting anything like this years down the road.
Toady commented somewhere that he never really plays long-term forts anymore, and I think it can really start showing in the way that the game plays right now. Not only is there basically no late-game content, but the game has a serious amount of entropy which is only being partially addressed. Especially 40d, where the world was basically a static collection of individuals who just sat around waiting to be killed, with nothing you could do but kill them, but even now, reading some of the devlog stuff, it's just, "Oh, well, the lord of this castle was eaten by a crocodile, and nobody's going to replace him, so I'll just move on to the next castle, and hope the queen there doesn't get eaten by a badger."
You can even see it in the Threetoe stories how much entropic decay seems to dominate the theme - characters from outside sources are introduced, then weeded out one by one until maybe a couple characters remain at the end of each story. Every conversation seems to involve snarling, threats of death, or actual death. Anything approaching diplomacy or teaching through methods other than someone dying are uncommon. It's just a set of opposing forces that manage to survive the elimination process to remain the lone standing actors.
It's the way that the games play out - you build a custom world, filled with various peoples from nowhere, and gradually eliminate them until there's nothing but a barren void, and you have to generate a new world to play again, because you're all out of challenges since everyone's dead.
In order to make this a better game, it really needs to learn to be more sustainable, where players can enjoy coming back to "their world" over and over again, and I'm afraid it might not be something Toady considers very important.
To a certain extent, this is my trying to divine the mind of Toady from the piddly tea leaves left behind in the very few responses I've seen, so I can't really know for sure, but it's also hard to rule out the suspiscion. It's also extremely frustrating because there are so few means of trying to get information about what he thinks on these sorts of things, and in places like Future of the Fortress, he'll often just ignore the bulk of my questions entirely. How the Hell am I supposed to make a compelling argument to appeal to a total black box?! How am I supposed to refine my suggestions when I can't tell if he disagrees with something or not, and if so, on what grounds he is uncomfortable with it?
Maybe he'll just think, "Oh, nobody wants to farm. If they want to farm, they should just play Harvest Moon." the way that some of the people from the previous thread responded. Maybe he likes NPK just for the gritty realism of it, but has no intention of making an automated system for handling it, and rather enjoys the forced micromanagement. I have no way of knowing.
.... Yeah, looking into it it is a regional thing. In my own country(the netherlands) it was apparantly forbidden to balm bodies till about two years ago. And only in few countries they make coffins from metal.
My point is, what you speak of is rather modern is it not?(And probly cheaper when it comes to the coffins at the least...) so in a medieval setting they would have their bodies return to the earth.
Well, if this is a regional sensibility, then I don't think Toady is Dutch. Dwarves definitely seem to have the Egyptian thing going on. They demand elaborate tombs if they can, get sealed in stone coffins for all eternity without returning to any sort of soil, and they get buried with all their personal belongings, as well, instead of passing them on to their next of kin. Death basically means everything about them and that they own gets sucked completely out of the cycle of life for all eternity, with no returning to any sort of cycle of life and death, and a potential for an ever-increasing number of ghosts that will glut the land.
Again, it's a sort of sign of a philosophy of gaming entropy, where dead things will continue to take up more and more space as time goes on.