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[darkflagrance]

It might be better to think about dwarf-cave civilization relationships in terms of the ramifications of the army arc.

Eventually we'll be able to conduct diplomacy with civilizations, send armies out there, and interact with populations that are entirely abstracted and that we never even see until the actual siege or battle.

Instead of interacting with the static animalman civ confined to the map, migration of animalman civilizations into and off the map should be more complex, drawing from larger off-map civilizations and populations.

From here, things like diplomacy, equal rights, and technology become more significant. The dwarven enslavement of local serpentmen will cause hostility among off-map serpentmen. A cave swallowman who escapes with a steel axe will result in the possibility of cave swallowman invaders with axes. Good relations with cave civilizations might result in lizardman migrants who wish to work in your fort, or the establishment of trade routes, where the olmman trade caravan comes once a month from their far-off civ through the caverns.

Then, arming animalfolk civs would lead to their taking the battle to the goblins through the tunnels that link the basements of dark towers, or to swarming the elves from rivers that go underground because not only do local civs have better weapons, but all those in network with them also do.

The player might even help to create a better organization of cave dwellers, either by warring with them and forcing them to band together for survival, as nomadic tribes were against a unified China in 200 bc, or by actively encouraging alliances against other animalman civs or forgotten beasts.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, the more I think about this, the more I want to roll it in with either the diplomacy or the intra-fortress class relations suggestions I have made.  We really need a class system and economics and diplomacy framework in place to have the serious ramifications of something like enslaving one's enemies in place.

[Lex Talionias]

mmhmmm, but i want to re-illiterate one big point.

lesser civs are lesser. they should have all round penalties applied when doing anything that they don't do normally. so fishing and hunting would be typical of all lesser civs. where as nearly any kind of stone or metal working has a speed and quality penalty with no prospect of becoming legendary. where 2 masons would provide blocks for a mega project 10 lesser civ workers. further more having quality penalties would keep players from using them as gem cutters or blacksmiths. perhaps even the possibility of making negative quality items such as 'a poorly crafted bed'.

though as an incentive lesser civs should have strong points. antmen should be good haulers, fishmen should be good swimmers with even the possibility of using them as 'lifeguards' to save drowning dorfs, birdmen could perhaps fly short distances? kobals obviously can sneek from the word go.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, there's a bit of a differentiation between civ and race, there, though...

The antman civ, if you were to encounter it, and trade with it, without changes to the way the civs are handled, would never be able to build anything they couldn't build beforehand.  If you are trading with that civilization, you could sell them steel weapons, build your forges right next to their villages, let them watch you make the steel, and they would never learn to make steel for themselves.

An antman itself (I believe that most antmen technically have no gender to prevent them from breeding), if it joins your civilization, however, is basically just a dwarf with somewhat different attributes.  (Toady really only went into serious detail on the attributes and characteristics of the big five races, so all the foo-men have basically human default stats, so would basically just be slightly smaller humans with funny abilities like flight and swimming.)  If they "grow up dwarf", then they aren't much different from a dwarf, as far as things currently stand.

There isn't really anything in the game right now to make ability in most jobs really give any particular races an advantage, with the exception of any race that has a bonus to agility or speed, since that just plain makes you do everything faster.  This means that any differences in being a "lesser civ" have to be modeled on the civ side of things.  Basically, it would require some sort of trafficking of ideas, and ability for civs to adopt jobs (and clothing styles and other odd things) from other cultures they encouter if they were to show any sort of impact from meeting another civ at all.

[Max White]

mmhmmm, but i want to re-illiterate one big point.

lesser civs are lesser. they should have all round penalties applied when doing anything that they don't do normally. so fishing and hunting would be typical of all lesser civs. where as nearly any kind of stone or metal working has a speed and quality penalty with no prospect of becoming legendary. where 2 masons would provide blocks for a mega project 10 lesser civ workers. further more having quality penalties would keep players from using them as gem cutters or blacksmiths. perhaps even the possibility of making negative quality items such as 'a poorly crafted bed'.

though as an incentive lesser civs should have strong points. antmen should be good haulers, fishmen should be good swimmers with even the possibility of using them as 'lifeguards' to save drowning dorfs, birdmen could perhaps fly short distances? kobals obviously can sneek from the word go.

This is already in place. Toady was kind enough to grace us with tags to controll not only physical and mental atributes, but also base skill levels and learn rates. With these tags alone, I can make a frogman a prime canidate for selecting a new fisherman, but a poor choice for a mason.

[Solace]

That's a good point, though. Treating humans differently is wrong because all humans are more-or-less capable of the same things, but is that true across actual species? If I remember, the explanation for your dwarves doing some things exceptionally well are their "innate dwarf magic" that just makes it easier for them. If you give a cave-fish-person a pickaxe, should he be anywhere near as good a miner as a dwarf? Can non-dwarves use dwarven smelting techniques, or survive operating a magma forge?

And yes, you could mod the cavefishpeople to breathe magma if you wanted. I'm asking what should be.

[Max White]

Well I think a fish person should be able to pick up a pick and start digging away at the wall, just at a lower rate then a dwarf. We say 'dorf magiks' as a black box story telling tenique for 'We are not sure how a dwarf chisels away at a wall without a chisel, so magic!', but it dosn't realy imply anywhere ingame that it is magic, or the dwarf is using he's beard as a fishing line, so as this is a blank, I don't see how 'blank' stops races from doing things.

[AngleWyrm]

Skill penalties by race is something that could be handled in the raws. Maybe a fishman has an innate -10 to blacksmith. Then even if they gained a bunch of skill points at it, they would still suck, representing their non-ability with metalworking. But they could also have an innate +2 swimming, and +0 hunting, meaning they could become excellent hunters if trained.

When generated, the animalmen might get a few skill points distributed randomly. The result would be that a given fishman might have -8 blacksmith and +3 swimming and +1 hunting.

[NW_Kohaku]

-10 what? 

Do you mean -10 skill ranks, as in, they are still only rank 5 when they hit legendary?  That's pretty harsh...

All you can do, as far as I can tell, is modify the rate of learning.

Still, I don't think that race really determines how easily you learn to work metal.  I can kind of see how some fishman race might learn how to be better fishermen just by natural adaptations that let them track the movements of game fish, but things like learning how to smith metal in particular as compared to the rate at which you learn how to carve wood seems a little bizzare unless you were talking about magical adaptations dwarves themselves had to it (in which case, the difference should be on the dwarves, not the fishmen)

[AngleWyrm]

Do you mean -10 skill ranks, as in, they are still only rank 5 when they hit legendary?  That's pretty harsh...

Monkeys have been taught to "speak" using a board with pictograms on it. They point at pictures in turn to compose sentences. The reporting journalist asked if the monkey wanted to play ball, the monkey said yes. She left to go get the ball, and took a while to get it. Then when she returned, she asked the monkey if he was ready to play, and the monkey responded "past ready".

But the monkey will never write a best selling novel.

[NW_Kohaku]

Technically, that was an ape, not a monkey.

Anyway, I think the depth of cognition there is a demonstration of just how little credit we give animals, not a demonstration of us giving them too much.  The ape will never be able to speak because of the lack of vocal chords, but the ability of the ape to manage to describe a pizza the first time it was presented to her as "tomato cheese bread" and generate words on her own to describe things gives a pretty clear indication of the ability to think on a level at least near that of a human, even if they will always have trouble communicating that ability to think.

I'm also not seeing how you can actually "mod this into the game", since the penalty to learning rate is in the game, but this skill roll penalty thing you are talking about isn't, as far as I've seen.

[AngleWyrm]

They don't lack vocal chords; vocal chords are present in all mammals and some reptiles. They can grunt just fine. The problem is that their vocal chords are located higher in the neck, so they don't have the necessary air volume above the vocal chords to form vowels and other sounds.

But they'll never fold steel into a fine edged sword, or sew a waterskin, or plant seeds--something the common squirrel does with regularity. So they are not eligible for the highest marks of dwarven skill in those trades. That's why monkeys and apes are not used commercially as labor -- people are much better at it.

A way to create such a method would be add tags to the raws that would specify racial limits for each skill, as a plus or minus to the base generated skill level. Then roll additional randomly distributed skill points for each instance of a creature encountered on the playing field.

[Max White]

Is there a way to cap a skill currently? I don't recall there being one, but based on the fact that there is a tag for minimum skill level, I don't see why there isn't a maximum.

[Durin Stronginthearm]

Do you mean -10 skill ranks, as in, they are still only rank 5 when they hit legendary?  That's pretty harsh...

Monkeys have been taught to "speak" using a board with pictograms on it. They point at pictures in turn to compose sentences. The reporting journalist asked if the monkey wanted to play ball, the monkey said yes. She left to go get the ball, and took a while to get it. Then when she returned, she asked the monkey if he was ready to play, and the monkey responded "past ready".

But the monkey will never write a best selling novel.

There's a big difference between a human and an ape though - much bigger than that between dwarves and other sentient species. If you define a given species as sentient it doesn't make much sense to me to say certain species would be incapable of learning certain things. Sure, a frogman might not be able to withstand the heat from a magma forge, but that's a physical difference, not an intellectual one. And rather than, say, frogmen lacking a [CAN_USE_MAGMA_FORGE] tag or whatever, it would be better to have frogmen defined as only being able to withstand a maximum heat.

[AngleWyrm]

I would say that's true of Dwarves, Elves, Humans, Goblins and Kobolds. About animalmen, I'm not sure of the amount of intellect that is supposed to be present. And maybe it varies from species to species. For instance, a centaur is a horseman, and is generally considered competent with other intelligent races, although I have not seen any horsemen in the game. Antmen might be somewhat less intelligent, going about a borg-like existence of programmed responsibilities, where learning isn't a big part of their existance. And fishmen might be similar to merfolk, only somewhat less...human.