Eternal Suggestion Voting candidate (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php#vote51)
To start with, I should get the usual acknowledgements out of the way: Most importantly, much of what I am going to be talking about is already slated in numerous arcs already on the old devpage. The Caravan Arc, Army Arc 2, Kingdom Arc, Diplomacy Arc, Villain Arc, and a couple of the other arcs are involved in this suggestion. I also want to say that this was significantly inspired by talks on the FotF thread, and ZebioLizard2's Dwarven Imperialism thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64249.0). In fact, I would have just continued that thread, had I not really, really wanted to use this thread's title.
The point of this thread is not to suggest any of the things that are in those arcs, or any of the several threads that have similar ideas again, but rather suggest ways to integrate the "Kingdom Mode" and "Dwarf Mode" with these various ideas in a way that adds as much depth to the game as possible. It serves as a sort of counterpoint against the Class Warfare and Improved Farming threads, which focus upon making the game have more of a difficulty curve and depth in later gameplay, by making the game more about looking outward beyond your walls, and making the outside world have more depth.
To illustrate some of the things I want to deal with, some Toady quotes:
Are there plans to be able to have multiple embarks at once, and to be able to zoom from fort view to world view and back on any of these embarks? An example of this would be in the old Accolade game Deadlock, though that was provinces instead of embarks, but a similar idea.
It's difficult to do this while time is passing and have what you come back to make sense, especially if you've got a lot of fluids or machines working particular ways, and you've got your stockpiles all set up in certain ways etc. The first thing we were thinking of was sort of freeze-time army battles where your fort comes back exactly how you left it. After that, it is harder.
Will it ever be possible for nobles to give your adventurer quests that involve raiding/sieging goblins/warring entities? Would that ever affect the world (ie they appear in Legends as sieges, winning results in the target location to be owned by your parent civilization, etc)? If so, how long do you think this would take to implement.
Yeah, all of that will come up in the first army release. Probably on the time scale of the 0.31.17 release to get a lot of interesting stuff going on, but we know how good I am with release date estimation. Whether it ends up satisfying is another matter, since strategy game AI has high standards among discerning players, but I can guarantee adventurer involvement and world changes, if not good decision making, he he he. Fort mode involvement is going to rely on the surrounding populations getting you up to usable numbers as well as some pains with shifting focus from the fort to the battlefield and back, so that might be a further release down the line or in the first release with a bit more of a release delay, depending on how everything is going then. We're really looking forward to get everything out there and moving around, first with the caravans and then with the armies, beasts and bandits.
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.
Here's the thing about the Modes - Kingdom Mode is supposedly the grand strategic view of your entire nation, while Fortress mode is focused upon a single site, while Adventurer mode is about just one character, and the things he/she impacts. The trick is making the wildly different scales in time and geography make sense with one another.
My inspiration in this is the "Council Meetings" in some of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, and the ability in those games to be everything from the emperor of a kingdom, leading armies to war and setting domestic policy to an administrator seeing those policies out to a general bringing victory in war to a single lone vagabond, adventuring alone in the countryside.
In this idea, there would still be those three different modes of play, granting freedom of playstyle, but they would have some overlap if the player so desired to dabble in one or the other.
While it seems odd to start from the middle resolution instead of at the top or bottom and working in another direction, this is really where I think I can draw the biggest distinction from the other ideas that litter the suggestion forums about "Kingdom Mode" play.
Fortress mode would generally behave as normal until you have your baron. In fact, you might start out with a baron, or perhaps a lower "lord" that has to earn his barony, in some circumstances, based upon the type of fortress that you choose to start. Fortresses, however, would now have to create a role for themselves in the Kingdom as a whole. The role you take is based in part upon where you actually settle, but it should in large part be determined by what sort of player you are at heart - military forts for those players who couldn't care less about domestic affairs, and cultural forts for those who enjoy the building of their fortress and community. Fortresses can be built for the ability to clear-cut dense forests and mine sedimentary layers for plenty of fuel to ship back to the Mountainhome, for their ability to create great works of art or fine craftsmanship, or they can serve as a garrison and training camp for the king's soldiers, and protect important strategic passes with their forts.
What really makes this special, however, is that when you get nobles, you will have choices to make regarding fortress politics with regards to the rest of the world, as already suggested in the upcoming Army Arc. Players will have the power to send out armies, yes, but there is potential for much more in this if we work from the mentality of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Nobles in your fortress could start recruiting dwarves to become his or her personal "agents", which have different abilities for controling the world around them. Some agents might just be sent out as expeditions to create new towns that harvest some resources. Some agents could be generals who lead your armies out into the world map. These are the "agents" already proposed, but there could be more. We could have scouts, spies, and even assassins. Scouts could survey the land for potential sites of new expeditions, and bring back word of where enemy armies lie in wait. Spies could give us detailed informaiton of our enemies, and when and how they are most likely to attack. Assassins could stealthily eliminate the leaders of your enemy's armies in their sleep, or kill dangerous nearby semimegabeasts in their lairs.
Beyond that, there are even more subtle methods of intrigue - diplomats or courtiers or even servants could be placed in the halls of those in power, and whisper rumors to influence the minds of the decision makers of both your kingdom and those of your enemies. Trick the elves into launching a war against the goblins to soften both up for easier conquest. If another count enjoys more favor with the king than your own, then poison the well against him. If nothing else, you must make sure that no jealous rival spreads such rumors about you! Ensure that your fortress's noble is protected from the assassin's blade, as well! Silver-tongued agents may make friends with those in your enemy's armies - wear down their loyalty with your lies about their sovereign, and charm them with the best your civilization has to offer, and you might see defectors betray your foes at crucial moments to join your forces, but beware disloyal subjects who may do the same to you.
Adventurers are essentially just a type of agent. They can be dispatched to perform whatever random tasks that you, as a noble, would want to see done. Adventurers who were retired former player adventurers could become a sort of transient drifter who could be hired by the player as a noble to perform tasks while that adventurer is still in retirement, and sent to do all manner of tasks the player desires.
In that vein, your own relationship to the Mountainhome need not be one entirely consisting of recieving mandates from on high to perform random tasks for the amusement of your king. You could gain Influence in his court, and Respect from the man himself.
Every year, there could be the "Council of Nobles" or some such held at the Mountainhome. Unless your noble chose not to attend, or you do not yet have a noble (or do not want one), you would send your noble or some agent in the noble's place out to the Council, where you would have your chance to influence the decisions the Kingdom as a whole would make for the coming year. (Note, if you are a long way from the Mountainhome, this could take so long that you spend a prohibitively long period of time away from your fortress. The king might be miffed you sent only a functionary for a 2-day trip, but more understanding of a noble over a year's travel away sending mostly liasons in succession.) In this meeting, the missions handed out as the goal of every fortress for the coming year are determined. Based upon how well you have performed in your duties in the past, and how well you have buttered up the king with your agents, you could gain significant Influence in this council meeting, and make suggestions as to how the Kingdom should be run that the king would be willing to hear. You can volunteer for certain missions that the kingdom might need, and which you would most prefer to take on, so as to insure that you can easily complete the tasks you take on. Volunteering for ambitious projects should get you more Influence for coming years should you complete them as you prove yourself a capable leader. However, should you drop low enough in Influence and favor, then you might become pariah enough that rival nobles, seeking power for themselves, might see a chance to bump you off, claim your lands as their own, and see no punishment for their elimination of a lord of questionable loyalties or capabilities.
After the noble or liason returns from this annual Council of Nobles, a "Barony Council" or the like could take place, allowing the noble to issue his orders to his agents for the year. This council would involve the preparations for and dispatching of troops onto the battlefield, and the time when you select expeditions to be formed and dispatched, among all the other functions of the noble during that time.
During this council, different positions of power in the fortress (appointed nobles, mayor, captain of the guard, guild masters) could also raise issues for the noble to address. This could actually be a way of informing the player of some of the problems that might be lurking below the surface in their fortress if done well - the Captain of the Guard might tell of rumblings among the ranks that portend possible tantrum spirals later, and give the player advice on how to make his subjects happier.
If a player actually does send out a military force, and takes control of that (see the Battle Mode, below), then rather than pausing the game and demanding instantanious resolution of the conflict, the game can simply continue, while creating a new "sub-save" for the game as a whole. Likewise, creating a new embark to produce resources for the home fortress can take place in a new "sub-save". When you start playing the game, you can choose which sub-save you want to play. Sub-saves are just the saves for the aspects of the game that the player him/herself controls, like the fortresses the player controls or battles that need to be resolved. This means that a sub-save isn't a whole new save folder, just a set of files for one particular site that shares the same world files.
The way that sub-saves can play nicely with one another is to rely upon all these actions to take place in one-year-long "turns". Fortresses can only communicate with one another in yearly turns, so the exact order in which these turns take place from the player's perspective doesn't matter - in the game's timeline, they are resolved simultaniously. When you send out military forces, for example, a little time must pass before the game will figure that the forces have marched out to where the battle takes place, and the sub-save for that battle will open up, but the player need to address that battle immediately. Instead, they can open that save up at any time after the battle is slated to take place to resolve that battle.
The game would also need to ensure that the events in these battles were actually resolved before the soldiers would actually be coming back from the battlefield, however, and if you are operating multiple sites/fortresses at once, then they would need to stay at least roughly synched together. To this end, the game would stop you from playing beyond the end of a year without resolving any lingering other sites or battles before allowing you to proceed with the next year's events. This would best coincide with the year's end/new year updates to the map, and essentially make everything on a Kingdom level of play have their simulated "turn" all at the same time.
Because of this, you would have a capacity to play multiple forts - sending out expeditions that could just be computer-controlled trading posts that generate resources to trade back to you, or letting you control a new sub-fort that has its own sub-save, just so long as you play each fortress's sub-save in turns every year to keep them all chronologically synched.
You could control multiple linked fortresses in one world simultaniously without needing to kill your framerate, because each site is its own sub-save whose calculations are run at separate times, with the exception of the certainly fairly long year-end calculation, which may become "just go make yourself a snack or watch some TV" in length.
... Yes, I went ahead and rolled it up with the idea of Multiplayer, which we already have too much of, as well.
However, this is different because it relies upon what we already have for "multiplayer" in DF - community forts where players exchange command of a fortress every game year - to be its most basic component.
Multiplayer Kingdom mode would be very similar to regular fortress mode for most players, except for the fact that it relies upon the previously mentioned one-year turn system to keep everyone working at a pace with one another. It's actually not much different from Fortress Mode as described above, except that there are multiple fortresses running "at the same time" because each fortress is in its segregated save file. Each player completes their "turn" of one year, and then sends in their individual turns with their individual forts, and they can collectively be playing multiple forts taking turns "playing by e-mail".
To make this work, one "core" fortress (probably the Mountainhome, unless the players agree not to be a mountainhome) could serve as a hub of the game, the one which does the "end of turn" calculations for what happened in all the locations that were not being played out by the various players. Basically, play goes on for one game year in each fortress, then is ended, and a turn-end save is created. The player then sends back in their save of their particular fortress, and waits for the year-end calculations to be run when the core player has all the disparate saves together.
These saves would not necessarily need to have some sort of password protection or anything to ensure it is always the same player - if a player drops out, another player might take the drop-out's place, and each player should have a main save to use, so the "core player" needn't remain the core player. The game would not particularly care who played the fortress, just that all the turns are synched up in the end. Management of who is responsible for playing what forts would be up to the players on the forums.
From existing fortresses like the core fortress (which may need to be established for a few game years if it was started from scratch), new expeditions could be sent out to Strike the Earth, and generate new slots for players. Alternately, it could hypothetically be possible for different players to take over other civilizations. These dwarves could then compete or wage war with the kingdoms of the other players. In fact, they may not need to take over other civilizations - dwarves could simply choose to rebel or usurp the throne of their king!
This gets to the potential fun parts - we could have some forum-based role-playing and intrigue if we were to have the ability to play as specific nobles in charge of specific fortresses, capable of sending out spies to not just their foreign foes, but also to keep an eye on domestic ones. Individual players could post to the core fortress player on the forums what their actions in the council would be, and role-play out their characters, while the core fortress player punched those actions in for all the different nobles in turn.
Here's what makes this really fun and seductive as a game type - it's basically just the Fortress Mode I described above (plus some Kingdom Mode) with multiple people playing multiple sub-saves updating each other via forums or email or the like. All we really need is some kind of function that lets us update the files of one sub-save without overwriting the world data or sub-saves of another player's fortress. Then every player could play simultanious fortresses, and then contribute them all into a single major save folder that holds all the disparate forts as disparate saves, and allows the main player to iterate the year, make adjustments to the world, hold the council, and let the players go back to their individual forts. Massively Multiplayer Dwarfiness.
Not that I think I really need to spend TOO much time explaining this one, since it seems well-described, already, however, some things I wanted to note:
Kingdom Mode in its "pure" form should allow the player to direct his/her kingdom on the yearly turn level as the sovereign, only operating from the council of nobles level.
Kingdom Mode would allow a player to send out an embark that would be a "player embark" like in fortress mode if you so chose, and Kingdom Mode would then simply be the player also playing as the King once a game year. This would allow for the core player in Multiplayer Kingdom to have control over the king, or allow players who just want to be king in single-player fortress mode, as well, to also be the king. Kings could send out low-ranking nobles or adventurers on their expeditions instead of just a purely random 7 dwarves to start a fortress, as normal Fortress Mode allows.
This section is on making a few suggestions on the battles that occur in the Army Arc, in what I guess could be called "Battles Mode", because I have a few things I want to talk about regarding this.
Remember all those times you were told about how soldiers in the 16th to 18th centuries would always wear those bright colored uniforms, line up in rows, stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and fire their muskets in massed volleys, even as bullets were coming at them, and thought that it was incredibly stupid that they wouldn't seek cover? Even more so when some people, like the natives of many of the nations the Europeans colonized, or even the American revolutionaries wouldn't line up, and would be called "cowards" for not standing in front of a line of men shooting at them, but instead shoot from behind a tree while wearing dull clothing? You might have thought that military tradition like lining up in rows might have made sense when the Romans did it, but not when people have guns, but here's the thing - bows and crossbows worked perfectly well at killing people from a distance back then, too.
In Empire: Total War, they even bring this same topic to light, and say that units like Minutemen wouldn't fight in lines, but then, when they are being used by you in the game, they fight in lines just like the redcoats they are supposed to be so different from. Why would they make your units stick together in a line instead of taking advantage of cover and responding dynamically, the way that a guerrila unit really should?
For the same reason ancient generals ordered their men to line up, wear bright colors or wave giant banners signifying who they were, and only to march in formation - before the advent of radio communications and spy planes in the 20th century, it was almost impossible for a general to manage more than a dozen or so captains or colonels with distinct units on the field, and even then, they needed couriers to carry messages back and forth, and they needed everyone to line up nice and pretty and carry big, easily distinguishable identifying markings like banners so that they could tell who the heck was on their side, and who was the enemy. The trade-off was one of giving up individual soldier's combat efficacy and initiative in exchange for letting the commanders of the battlefield have any kind of ability to command. This is the same reason why you can only move units in Total War as lumps of soldiers with facings - there's little way for you to control the units, otherwise.
This sort of mentality should be used when designing Battles Mode, as well. If we are to have serious "strategy gamer" types of battles taking place, we need to have an ability to control units via methods that would let us command our soldiers in large enough groups that we aren't in micromanagement hell (more than 10 people in a "squad" if we have a 200-soldier force), and we need an ability to prevent dwarves and goblins from just charging one another in a giant mosh of individual duels if the system is to have any form of meaning.
Total War, in fact, could be a decent model for this - you can pause the game, give your commands to form the lines starting at one point, and then tapping a numpad key to say what direction the rest of the line should flow out along, or have a "make a line from here to here" command.
Eventually, you might want to give a "mosh the enemy" command, but you should also have a "disengage, and reform your ranks" command, so that it isn't like Fortress mode now, where once they see the enemy, you've ceded all control over battle, and have no choices in the matter besides whether you read the combat message spam or not.
Also in the vein of Total War, somehow outmaneuvering the enemy, such as through flanking, should give some sort of bonus, whether to causing the enemy to rout, or just giving you an ability to turn it from one-on-one duels of the guys in the line to becoming a two-on-one duel if you sandwich the enemy forces. Playing games of who is outmaneuvering who can be one of the big strategic challenges of these sorts of tactical combat games.
As a part of Battles Mode, be aware of Lanchester's Laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester's_laws) as a means of swiftly comparing or modeling combat.
One additional Mode (stupid forgetting an entire section since it's been so long since I started writing):
This would be similar to Kingdom Mode, however, let you play as a guiding force/zeitgeist of your civilization over the ages rather than a single monarch. The purpose of this is to let you "live" your civilization's history as it unfolds, rather than having it just handed to you when you've finished Worldgen.
Turns in this mode might be one or two decades long, to help speed up the progress, and would let you stop and shift down to Kingdom Mode at the time you thought would be most dramatic and interesting for play in any of the other modes.
Depending on if we ever get some of the technological advances over the course of dwarven history (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=62629.30) implimented, and some control over religion and worship, we could also have some hand in shaping the cultural and technological development of our civilization on the way to when we start playing "the real game".
The purpose of this is to make history more interesting and accessable to the player than Legends Mode makes it already. Currently, it's just too boring to really sift through all the incredible amounts of data vomitted out by Legends Mode. At best, you can find some of the things relevant to your fortress, and then look those up because they are important for being related to your fortress. Then, you can look up the things that were important to them, and start to really care about the world you inhabit. But you have to grow attached and interested to your fortress before you can care about the world around it, as it is now. By having some subtle guidance over where your civilization settles, whether to pursue war or peace, and some other minor things, without giving much control to the player, they can "live" the history of their world as it is created.
A talk on the FotF thread led to the The Stranger thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=64267.msg1498648#msg1498648). Using taverns and occasional travelers, merchants, and adventurers stopping by at random times of the year (in conjunction with a more automated trading system) would give you a reason to not really bat an eye at unusual characters stopping by.
To an extent, these strangers may replace migrants, since you could get an option to hire some dwarves that visit, or invite them to join your fortress, and, just as importantly, give you a chance to deny a migrant the ability to stay, forcing them to just be a "visitor".
Incoming agents under the control of rival barons or even enemy civilizations could appear to be travellers staying at your inn, or even as migrant workers. They may "lie" about their skills, traits, and the like, and possibly even "conceal" a small weapon like a dagger for the purpose of their nefarious deeds. At some point, possibly after spending months as a sleeper agent, they may spring their attack, forcing town guards to defend their important personages. Not just nobles may be targetted, at that, as heros that have led armies successfully make tempting, if difficult, targets for assasination. So, too, do legendary dwarves who have been making extremely valuable objects. They could become targets of kidnappings, similar to goblin snatcher attacks, except that they could walk straight past inattentive guards without being caught. Perhaps they are going for a more direct route - sabotage by setting fire to the booze stockpile!
Alternately, perhaps the visiting dwarf works for nobody but him/herself, and is merely a thief or brigand, out to swipe something fast and easy.
Against this, a skill (possibly like Observer) could be used to detect unusual aspects of the visitors or migrants, and possibly make investigations and inquisitions against suspiscious strangers. Observer would need to have some sort of means of drilling your guards to train it for this to be really useful, however.
Strangers at your taverns and inns could also become useful agents without necessarily becoming a true member of your fortress. A passing adventurer could become your scout or spy if you can send someone with the social skills (a "Recruiter"?) to him or her and convince them to work with you against your rivals. In this way, you could get elves or humans working for you, to send against foreigners without necessarily leaving your fingerprints on the whole affair.
EDIT AGAIN:
In Empire: Total War, there is a special campaign called the "American Road To Independence", where you play a couple key historical conflicts in a dumbed-down virtual tutorial mode before you are thrown into the American Revolutionary War. In this, the game apparently models the American Revolution as being waged by the Bostonians, conquering the nearby peaceful, happy British colonies like Pennsylvania or New York or Virgninia who were utterly loyal to England. In fact, the game considers the American forces taking Philidalphia to be "foreign occupiers" for a dozen or so game turns after they have been "conquered". After which, there are no British Loyalists left over, (and never were any in Massachusetts,) and they become fully happy Americans after 6 game years, and would consider a British "conquest" of the state to be another "foreign occupation", but before that magic deadline, it would be a "liberation" if the British retook that state. There is also no difference between Americans taking Georgia, Florida, or the entire nation of Mexico in this calculation of who is a "foriegn occupier".
The problem I am getting at with some of these absurdities is what I tend to call "The Risk Mentality". In the game of Risk, any territory that you have a token on is Your Territory. If someone else knocks your token off, it is now Their Territory. The territory has no loyalty, desires, or biases to contend with, it just gives resources out to whoever has tokens on top of a whole continent without really caring about what differences there are in the governances of orange tokens versus white tokens versus green tokens, if there even are any.
DF is currently a game about nations and cultures at war, and while these cultures pretty clearly arise along racial lines, the worldgen thus far shows no racist exclusionary principles in these cultures, and fortress mode racism is mostly a matter of incomplete implimentation preventing different races from talking to one another or making friends with other races. At its base, though, you aren't so much "The Dwarves" as you are "The Mountain Culture", which happens to be overwhelming constituted by dwarves.
Cultural identity right now is just a token placed on a unit, telling them that they're red team or blue team without them having any particular ability to question why.
I'd see a need for at least three different forms of "loyalty checks", so that characters could question who they should really be loyal to. The first would be a basic loyalty to the principles and ethics that the culture they are part of claims to espouse. If an elf starts to question why they must live their lives around a Forest Spirit, for example, it would be natural for him to start questioning why he is loyal to the elven culture that is based around the Forest Spirit. The second would be a national loyalty, judging whether or not their nation actually lives up to their principles, and if they are disillusioned with the nation as a whole (but not necessarily the ideals they claim to stand for). The third would be a personal loyalty to the rulers or government of their nation (someone may be loyal to their country, but disagree with their leaders).
Having these three things would be the very basics of being able to really judge when and how you could measure the loyalties of individual characters in the game, and your ability to instigate intrigue with them. An elf might become disgusted with the "decadance" of the current elven court and people, but still have loyalty to the principles on which elven culture is founded, and sees those who are "decadant" in his eyes to be the ones who are truly disloyal. (See the Threetoe story Root...)
Such a person may defect their nation in disgust, but they wouldn't abandon all the principles of elven culture and just go live with the dwarves, instead. At most, they'd just go find some other elves to live with. You'd need to appeal to that person's morality and change their idea of what ethics are truly worth being loyal to in order to do something like that. You can see this in the sort of "myth" that grew around Cacame, where Cacame was disgusted with elven culture and its cannibalism and hypocrisy, and as such, adopted Dwarven Ethics and joined the dwarven culture.
Having compelling warfare and conquest across a worldmap where different cultures compete and dominate one another, eventually driving one or the other to extinction as a culture, if not as a people, requires that the game measure groups of people or territories through cultural terms, and not just military terms. Dwarves shouldn't just become goblins with beards if a goblin army conquers a dwarven settlement, but that's pretty much how things play out right now. (As I recall someone saying previously, "genocide is more realistic than that.") We need to have a dimension of the game where actual culture competes, and not just the armies under the culture's nation's banner.
This means playing "Kingdom Mode" on a level besides merely military, expansion, and architecture/engineering. It means you need to fight "wars" with philosophers, entertainers, luxury goods, and the general idea that your culture is both more ethical and more comfortable to be a part of than any other culture.
The Cold War was, in part, won because of the simple fact that the Soviet people really liked the stuff that the West could produce under Capitalism. They liked blue jeans and fast cars and McDonalds. The battle of whether Communism or Capitalism was actually more ethical may not necessarily have been clear-cut in the minds of the Russian people, but the idea of which lifestyle gave them a better, more comfortable life certainly was. The propagandists of the Communist side certainly tried to say that liking the stuff that Capitalism could provide was shallow and materialistic, but that was largely just because they couldn't compete on the grounds of comfort.
Just look at the so-called "Kitchen Debate" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate) Richard Nixon had with Nikita Kruschev - Kruschev tried to talk about Russia's military might and ICBM technology. Nixon countered by talking about all the neat appliances and recreational goods and color televisions in every household. America functionally won that debate. TVs trumped nukes.
Likewise, DF would be improved if the solution to every problem in the game wasn't "kill it with magma". Maybe let TV trump nukes every now and again.