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[alcohol_dependent]

Oops, you're right. I did throw that term out there, LOL. I have been talking a bit out my butt to be honest though I didn't expect to have to defend myself. What I should have really said was that it shouldn't be so simple.

Actually if a king got killed by an alligator, all signs point to civil war.

And who is good at war? Generals. They are the "guy with the guns".
[/quote]

In a given DF kingdom there may be many dukes. These are the figureheads of a given civil war for the position of monarch. I assume this would probably work based on some accounting of each of their ambition scores.

Julius Caesar as general wouldn't have had the opportunity to become emperor were Rome not a (very dysfunctional) Republic at the time. He also held many different offices, he wasn't just a general. That's not to say that there aren't definitely instances of the people appointing generals to be kings.

Somehow it just seems like it wouldn't be so smooth what with a given amount of dukes composing a given civilization unless there were a good reason. If Tholtig were a general during the war of the elves, I'd have appointed her queen with no hesitation.

Ultimately I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that dying figureheads should always make for some compelling in-game political climates.

[Angel Of Death]

Elves have Queens.

Queens are not the leaders of the elves.

Queens are every male elf. 

[Jeoshua]

Look honey, one thread already got killed cause o' this so you BEST not bring it up here *snap* 

[Reelyanoob]

In a given DF kingdom there may be many dukes. These are the figureheads of a given civil war for the position of monarch. I assume this would probably work based on some accounting of each of their ambition scores.

Their power lies in the fact that Dukes were the generals in feudal society - they controlled armies. The idea of a general who is not a nobleman with land, vassals and a title only makes sense in a non-feudal society like the Roman Empire or a modern state.

Still, civil war is nowhere near certain. The players have a lot to lose to, and they rely on the allegiance of lords and men under their command. You have to convince the lords under your command that it's worth killing their countrymen to make you king. Consider also that the King has many soldiers, vassals, lords, in his own fiefdom - more than the individual dukes. Presumably this army is strong enough to fight off any single duke (or he would have been the king), so the dukes would have to team up to take them out, defeating the whole point. Certainly someone would rise to lead this faction. Civil war would require more exceptional circumstances. Since there's a large number of dukes, there would have to be factions promoting particular candidates, existing rules for such situations failing to settle the matter, and either a weak central army, or oppressive taxation of some sort. Also, outside threats would encourage peaceful transition.

If you're in a non-feudal society with a concept of "general" as such, then generals will be the powerbrokers instead.

Consider Ptolemy, Alexander's general who made himself Pharaoh of Egypt, and gave rise to the dynasty ending with Cleopatra.

And rising through the ranks, becoming a general, and scoring a great victory could make you a duke in the British Empire:

John Churchill was made duke of Marlborough after he defeated the armies of Louis XIV

Arthur Wellesley was made Duke of Wellington after defeating Napoleon's armies.

-----------------------------------------------------

Excerpt from the Ptolemy history (showing a general fighting to gain the royal crown after the king's death):-

"When Alexander died in 323 BC Ptolemy [...] was appointed satrap of Egypt, under the nominal kings Philip Arrhidaeus and the infant Alexander IV [...] Perdiccas appears to have suspected Ptolemy of aiming for the throne himself, and may have decided that Ptolemy was his most dangerous rival. Ptolemy executed Cleomenes for spying on behalf of Perdiccas — this removed the chief check on his authority, and allowed Ptolemy to obtain the huge sum that Cleomenes had accumulated."

[Jeoshua]

This thread has inspired me.

I have been modding in multiple [CREATURE:HUMAN] entities for a while now.  I now realize that I must give them all true Position tokens, and their power must be able to be usurped by conquering civs.  No longer will they all just be warlords and kings, appointed and never questioned.  No.  I am going to make their power structures complete.  And all the way to the highest corridors of power, there must be positions with the [CONQUERED_SITE] token.  This will allow civilizations to be conquered, instead of merely raided until the end of time.

So far I have a few entities:

Roman - Based on the Keepers from Genesis and using the Latin language file.
Nordic - Based on the Nords, and thereby the conquering Gothic tribes.  Using Finnish as their language (because nobody has come forward with a German language file)
Arabian - Taken wholesale, so far, from the Ezrakim.
Asian - From Genesis's Orcs, only human.  Still waiting for the language file.

So far they coexist, and occasionally a city will become overrun by members of a different race, since they all [LIKES_SITE:CITY].  This only changes their culture and language.  With the addition of positions of power that can by usurped, once these cultures go to war with each other, the actual ownership of the cities will begin to switch.

The outcome of this, I predict, will be quite a lot of wars between the humans.  Placed in a normal game, this will mean there will be 4 times the amount of humans.  It also means 4 times the amount of dead humans.  This should balance them out a bit, and prevent them from overtaking the entire world, since they will be fighting for dominance amongst themselves.

This is actually very close to what happens in most fantasy worlds.  The Elves and Dwarves stand idly by while the short lived races fight for dominance.  These elder races will be made more powerful, but much less aggressive and warlike, as a result.  I forsee that it will be entirely possible that humans may kill each other off in such numbers that in an old-world gen, the elves and dwarves (bitter enemies of course) will be left as inheritors of the entire world.

If all goes well, and I get permission to release the raws from Deon (they will be heavilly modded, of course), I may even release this as a mod.  Installing it into Genesis will require removal of some of the races Deon has added... but adding it into the vanilla game will be as easy as deleting [ENTITY:PLAINS] and dropping in entity_humans.txt.

Wish me luck, and much !!FUN!!

[Reelyanoob]

I could help with the language files. So you want German first, i guess. What about for the other races?

Ok I'm starting working on an auto language file generator, which uses VBS, wget.exe, and google translate.

This should allow all real world language files to be created - more or less instantly and/or on demand

I estimate this will take me 3-4 hours tops.

[Jeoshua]

I have Latin, English, Finnish, and soon Japanese(ish).

The languages are really the least of it, tho.  Sure they're fiddly and long, but balancing the ethics so they dislike each other but don't HATE each other to the point of killing each other off, and making the position tokens be unique but still run the gammut of what is needed for a "real" society... that'll be the hard part.

[Reelyanoob]

Ok, noted, but I'll keep working on this script for now, because it'll add value for all mods, not just this one

You could have pretty much symmetrical positions but use the language specific names, e.g. the Germanics could have titles from the Holy Roman Empire. That would fit the time period of DF.

[Jeoshua]

I'm thinking of using basically the highest level of development from year 0 to 1400 AD of all the cultures involved.  Meaning that the Arabic race will be pretty developed, maybe with Alchemy if I can manage to "borrow" it from other mods.  The Romans will need some heavy artillery, and the Germanics... well I suppose they can steal what they need from the other races and overcome in large numbers.

Ultimately there WILL be a lot of lateral mobility of the humans between the various civs.  So conquest will be able to happen in two ways: Conquest, or Cultural immersion.  I've already noticed this mobility with the way I have the races already.  Sometimes a city will switch language files (Arabics starting to name their children "Officius", for example).  The game seems to keep track of who the children were born to.  However, after a single generation this behavior disappears (Officius's children will be named Araakin or somesuch).  Either way, it does not appear there is a limit of imigrants in their UPWARD mobility, since I've seen Arabic civs with leaders that have Roman or English names.

It's all quite opaque, how the game handles all of this.  But it certainly does add a bit of flavor to the otherwise quite dull humans, I think.

Disclaimer: No promises on anything except Roman steel.  Alchemy is still quite tricky and I might not get the "right" to release it since I didn't create any of it.  I'm a syncretic modder, not so much a creative modder.

[Reelyanoob]

I'm thinking of using basically the highest level of development from year 0 to 1400 AD of all the cultures involved.  Meaning that the Arabic race will be pretty developed, maybe with Alchemy if I can manage to "borrow" it from other mods.  The Romans will need some heavy artillery, and the Germanics... well I suppose they can steal what they need from the other races and overcome in large numbers.

Germans in 1400 had the empire remember, they were pretty advanced, should have steel, unless you make them more like roman-era germanics, in which case Iron would have the right flavour.

BTW: I have completed the GERMAN language file! Am ready to make more, name your language.

It's a 53k file, can I email you the RAR?

[Desdichado]

If the king dies, someone takes over. That's real life.

Actually if a king got killed by an alligator, all signs point to civil war.

If a king is killed by an alligator, then obviously, the alligator should become king. Might makes right.

[alcohol_dependent]

Good post with links

Good post.

This made me think of this thread:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuccessionCrisis

[Jeoshua]

Don't click it! It's a trap!

[Interus]

I don't think I have it any more, or I don't know where it was, but I wrote down some succession information from legends mode once.  The main line went down to like, the original king's great-granddaughter or something.  But since it always goes with the youngest child(since the oldest might only be 13 years younger than one of their parents) she died at something like 12 years old, with no children.  Then somebody else became king, and I can't remember exactly what their lineage was like.  I'm pretty sure they were actually a descendant of the first general though, and not some cousin or something.  His family line lasted until worldgen, which isn't impressive, but his youngest son was king with like 3 daughters and 1 son that hadn't been killed or kidnapped.

I wish I'd paid more attention to his lineage now, but instead I focused on the epic stories of his family.  It was cool, but less helpful in this case than it could have been, even if it only provides information on how succession worked in worldgen.

[Vercingetorix]

Actually, if you kept playing successive games of Fortress Mode long enough for dwarves to have children and grow up wouldn't they eventually take over the world through sheer numbers?