Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: addictgamer on July 27, 2010, 09:41:38 pm
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1. Technology.
This is a fantasy game, but I'd like to see technology in it.
Only, do it like this:
The whole world starts out with with primitive technology.
If the player does NOT research a new technology, then no one will be able to use that technology.
Also, if the player researches a technology, no one magically also knows it; they must somehow get the tech from the player.
Perhaps you could also add an option in the init to enable other civs discovering stuff. In fact, you should, so that the players who want a tech race can get one.
Either by trading, stealing, or salvaging from stuff the player had that got destroyed in war or something.
This will allow players who do not want to play a game with more advanced technology to be able to play without it.
It would also be very nice if you made raws for technology. I do not know how it would work, but, it will be well worth it ;)
2. More on Technology
Building on the previous thought, how will it work? With much discussion, I'm sure you'll find a method everyone can agree on.
If it comes down to it, you can even add init options/raw stuff that control it.
Now...How it will work...
Let's say this was implemented right now.
So, you have your huge fort, and a dwarf or two who like physics. You have not yet researched any advanced tech
You can build a, for example, small physics labratory.
It is outfitted with whatever tools the dwarf requires to study.
Now, dependong on, let's say, a raw/init option, you get to tell your dwarf to research "The wheel" and/or you can do "blind research", as is in Sid Meire's Alpha Centuari.
Once you tell him to do something, he goes, grabs the tools he needs, and begins working on it.
Depending on his intelectual skills, he may research "The wheel" in a day or in a year.
Another idea: Enable "Random Discoveries", and a carpenter, while working, might just accidentally craft a wheel. If he/she is smart enough to recognize its potential, you know have "the wheel".
As I said, this needs a lot of discussion.
I'd prefer whatever path is chosen, hower, to allow: a few changes to the RAW/init will satisfy all (or atleast almost all) players.
Since you, Toady, do not want post 1400 AD Tech (Unless that has changed), please make it possible for modders to add it in.
So, items/constructions/actions might require a certain tech to be researched, for example.
I am aware that other similair discussion have occured, but, might as post them here.
Discussion from the thread this originated in:
Not sure on the technology part, since it feels that a tech tree does not fit too well inside DF universe, the difficulty is how to organically add that into the game that make simulation realistic (instead of a simple, to build X,Y,Z, you need tech W).
Quite a few modern invention was already invented long before their time (a basic steam engine was invented in the Renaissance), however, in many cases, such inventions were ignored/forgotten for several reasons, a few I can remember are...
1. No need for it. The invention solves a problem that doesn't exist yet (steam engine did not take on because slaves were an abundant power source).
2. No supporting technology. The first difference engine (a mechanical calculator) was designed, but hampered by the fact that early machining technology cannot reach the precision required.
The problem with all these "technology upgrade" ideas is that, for the most part, there WAS no technology upgrades in the Middle Ages. It was, in fact, well-known for being a time where techonolgy was completely stagnant, where free thinkers and inventers would have to join the church to avoid religious persecution for their thoughts, and even then, most of their discoveries were largely ignored by the general peasantry because they were so stubbornly conservative and traditional.
(For instance, the discovery of potatos did not immediately translate into their use, even when it could be proven that potatos were superior crops in cold weather, as their underground growth protected them from frost. The French, in particular, utterly refused to eat them and refused orders and incentives from the nobility to plant them, which helped lead to the famine that sparked the French Revolution. Potatos only caught on in Germany because so many wars in that nation had burned so many fields that people were willing to plant crops that would grow inside the dirt, where they at least wouldn't burn away entirely...)
The best way to involve a "tech tree" in DF is to instead have a "dependency tree". Alchemist's Workshops from 40d, for example, requried 3 clear glass vials. That required a glass making industry (and sand), as well as an ashery (and wood) to make the clear glass. If we had more hardware requirements for making many of the workshops that we build, it would potentially be possible to have the sort of progressive set of requirements for more complex buildings or industries that require more precision hardware that would require advanced workshops to build.
Yes, that is difficult, but there's a whole community available to think about it.
When I say technology, I don't necessarily mean modern techs/inventions.
I mean any and all technology should somehow fit into a tech tree.
Actually, I don't like tech trees too much, they're mostly linear.
So, how about it is realistic.
For example:
You can discover steam long before you discover mechanics, but you have no use for steam until you research mechanics.
When you have both steam and mechanics made known, you can build that artificial waterfall with basic steam engines, even if they're as simple as dropping water on magma so that the steam moves turbines that spin gears.
If you discover a technology, it may unlock uses for other technologies you have discovered and/or provide you with inventions that you can build.
It's a little more complex than the simple, "to build X,Y,Z, you need tech W".
So, there's one possibility.
Remember, if Toady puts the existing technology into a tech tree/whatever you want to call it, players can add their own techs in.
NW_Kohaku, you have a point there, but a dependency tree is not as satisfying. It will work if Toady refuses to add in any sort of tech tree/whatever you want to call it, but...
Actually, ancient humans DID use steam power. Mostly for whistles and spinning things. They didn't use it to generate ELECTRICAL POWER which was then used to do other work, like light a room, or drive a motor to run a bucket chain. But steam engines were well documented and used.
It would be completely in keeping for dwarves to have steam generators to do things like make whistles that can be heard by all dwarves in an embark area, or to boil water and let the steam shoot out of a pipe to the surface to remove the water that is coming into their mines. Going further steam punk would be up to Toady, since it is his game and he's a primary visionary of it's world (along with his brother).
Slave power was cheaper then mechanical power. So there was no reason to go past that point until economics turns it around--- that is, if you don't have access to cheap slaves, and you still need the work done, then other means to do it economically becomes feasible.
One way to unlock technologies could be a little more random then "you go find out what a wheel is" and have it as a sort of artifact mood which ends in the entire fort being able to make something new, aka "urist claims a carpentry workshop, takes one log and begins working" The artifact wheel spinning things has been created, and from then on you can make wheels, yet hav little use for them until someone else claims a masonry workshop or carpentry workshop and makes th first mechanism/cart. This is turn could solve Toady's long dellimma of "How do I make artifacts more useful"
I think that the best way to handle technology in DF would be to give everything a "level."
Each type of armor/weapon/craft would have a difficulty level to make, and each material would also have a level, defined in their raws.
Each civ would have a range, in their entity entry, for their capabilities During worldgen, each civ would be assigned a value in that range. For example:
Kolbolds might have LEATHER 5:10, METAL 1:3, WEAPONSMITHING 1:4, and ARMORMAKING 1:2.
A dagger or blowgun would have a level of 1. That means that every kobold civ would be able to make these weapons, from whatever materials they can work. Copper and Tin would have a value of 1 as well, so all kobold civs could make copper daggers. Bronze would have a value of 3 as it is a complex alloy, so a few kobold civs might be able to make it. Iron would have a value of 4, and be completely inaccessable, even if they stole some iron bars from the dwarves. Leather armor has a value of 2, so only more advanced civs would have it, but they would always be able to make leather shields and helmets (much easire to make a boiled leather helmet than a boiled leather breastplate. Spears would have a value of 2, axes 3, and swords 4, so many kobold civs would have spears, some would have axes, and a few swords.
This could even be tied to perceived value and rarity of items. The more you exceed the level by, the more likely the item in question would be to appear, and the less a trader would be willing to pay to get the item. (Dwarf Civ (Metal 20, weaponmaking 17) "A copper sword? I'll give you two pebbles for it." Elf Civ (Metal 0, Weaponmaking 15) "A copper sword? I will gladly trade some of my animals for such a fine example of your craft.")
that sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to handle it, and since those ideas are easily modifiable it gives modders more lee-way.
I don't know about us having to actually discover new technologies, since after all we are just a small party branching off from the dwarven kingdom, right? But along those lines, what if the available technologies was dependent on the age of the world?
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Random, not ramdom. And procedural is better than random. And tech trees aren't fun.
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And tech trees don't make sense if there's already a civilization behind it.
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Do tech trees really fit into DF at all?
Fort mode typically spans a decade. That's only so much time for serious change.
Adventure mode spans days, maybe months, right? Not enough time.
You could make an argument for changing tech throughout worldgen, but it'd be likely
abstracted. Even then, who's to say in one world all tech wasn't taught immediately at the dawn of creation by the gods?
It sounds like Tarn wants to make DF customizable enough that people who want to play in the stone age or in a steampunk world can mod the game accordingly. But tech trees/progress doesn't seem to fit the spirit of vanilla flexible/procedural DF, does it?
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Do tech trees really fit into DF at all?
Fort mode typically spans a decade. That's only so much time for serious change.
Adventure mode spans days, maybe months, right? Not enough time.
You could make an argument for changing tech throughout worldgen, but it'd be likely
abstracted. Even then, who's to say in one world all tech wasn't taught immediately at the dawn of creation by the gods?
It sounds like Tarn wants to make DF customizable enough that people who want to play in the stone age or in a steampunk world can mod the game accordingly. But tech trees/progress doesn't seem to fit the spirit of vanilla flexible/procedural DF, does it?
1. They do, but it's a hard fit.
2. True, but carry on the legacy in your next fort.
3. Currently, yes. But that should change soon, or it stops being fun fast. I guess tech could be focused on by your adventure mode scientist.
4. Good points. But it can still be worked around.
5. I wish Toady luck with that :)
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People want a Civilization sort of 'cultural progress' feel when DF isn't really about that sort of stuff. Conan the Barbarian doesn't worry if the abacus is invented, he just smashed that bead thing on a dude's head.
Of course, cultures and distinctions between them, and blending is all planned and good stuff, I just don't think we need to see a Roman-styled civ invent flamethrowers or cars or tac nukes.
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People want a Civilization sort of 'cultural progress' feel when DF isn't really about that sort of stuff. Conan the Barbarian doesn't worry if the abacus is invented, he just smashed that bead thing on a dude's head.
Of course, cultures and distinctions between them, and blending is all planned and good stuff, I just don't think we need to see a Roman-styled civ invent flamethrowers or cars or tac nukes.
Who says it needs to go that far? Toady could stop the tech advance at the middle ages.
So, if you don't research, you use stone age stuff, if you research, you have the Roman Empire stuff and some more, for example.
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Yeah, but as has been brought up, technology development takes decades. I have not seen a fort that lasted decades yet.
At any rate, I'd much prefer to see this in an "ages" format, where technology develops over the hundreds of years of worldgen. You can stop it in the stone age if you want cave men, or you can go all the way up to the high middle ages, for example.
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It was an exaggeration. The point remains is that if you're playing a civ that hasn't invented the pump, you're going to hate trying to drain a thing. If you haven't invented the forge, you're going to hate trying to make things. Having a soft level of cultural technology is more forgiving than a "you can't make clothes, you're a caveman" tech-tree sort of thing.
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Of course, cultures and distinctions between them, and blending is all planned and good stuff, I just don't think we need to see a Roman-styled civ invent flamethrowers
Why can't we have flamethrowers in DF? Not only are flame traps part of many fantasy games, it actually has a basis in reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire). And we already have "liquid fire"—we don't know what the hell it is, exactly, but it sounds like it'd be pretty kick-ass. It's definitely something I could see dwarves developing and using.
cars or tac nukes.
I don't think anyone wants in this thread to go beyond primitive steam-powered machinery.
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Wouldn't mind if toady was able to make modders able to implement it and have modders be able to use it instead of being in the vanilla game though. That way one could get some wicked civilization type mods in.
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Of course, cultures and distinctions between them, and blending is all planned and good stuff, I just don't think we need to see a Roman-styled civ invent flamethrowers
Why can't we have flamethrowers in DF? Not only are flame traps part of many fantasy games, it actually has a basis in reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire). And we already have "liquid fire"—we don't know what the hell it is, exactly, but it sounds like it'd be pretty kick-ass. It's definitely something I could see dwarves developing and using.
You mean the fire-imp extract?
Toady already stated that lighting and magic is one arc he will get to. I would guess fire behavior is part of the "magic" arc.
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I said it in the last thread, but...
The problem with all these "technology upgrade" ideas is that, for the most part, there WAS no technology upgrades in the Middle Ages. It was, in fact, well-known for being a time where techonolgy was completely stagnant, where free thinkers and inventers would have to join the church to avoid religious persecution for their thoughts, and even then, most of their discoveries were largely ignored by the general peasantry because they were so stubbornly conservative and traditional.
(For instance, the discovery of potatos did not immediately translate into their use, even when it could be proven that potatos were superior crops in cold weather, as their underground growth protected them from frost. The French, in particular, utterly refused to eat them and refused orders and incentives from the nobility to plant them, which helped lead to the famine that sparked the French Revolution. Potatos only caught on in Germany because so many wars in that nation had burned so many fields that people were willing to plant crops that would grow inside the dirt, where they at least wouldn't burn away entirely...)
The best way to involve a "tech tree" in DF is to instead have a "dependency tree". Alchemist's Workshops from 40d, for example, requried 3 clear glass vials. That required a glass making industry (and sand), as well as an ashery (and wood) to make the clear glass. If we had more hardware requirements for making many of the workshops that we build, it would potentially be possible to have the sort of progressive set of requirements for more complex buildings or industries that require more precision hardware that would require advanced workshops to build.
It's much more realistic to make dwarves incapable of making, say, plate armor, until they develop special tools specific to making fine plate armor. You could need more precise tools to perform some of the more precise tasks, which requires building those precise tools with less-precise tools.
It is, after all, kind of silly that the only thing you need to make every workshop besides forges is simply some kind of stone block.
If certain functions of workshops are blocked off unless you have tools capable of performing those functions, then you can have "requirement trees", where those survivalists starting with just an axe and a pick can work from having crappy jury-rigged tools up to having precision tools specific to certain jobs...
If this gets wrapped up in the quality mechanic, where ad-hock tools like pointy rocks get replaced with masterpiece quality steel tools, and make masterpieces almost impossible to make with low-quality tools, you can create a system where you are building industries specifically to supply your other industries with better tools.
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Kohaku's suggestion for simple "build this, then you can build this" trees is much less frustrating than "you can't use carts until you invent the wheel, which will be a semi-random event depending on how long you research for."
Research and progressing along tech trees just aren't fun.
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I'm finally abandoning speaking solely in Haiku. There are so many things you can't properly express when you've only got 17 syllables to say it in.
I like the idea of essentially researching things by creating better devices for an intended task, rather than the other proposed ideas. One reason for this is that people seem to forget that most development is done through incremental changes to a pre-existing method or tool, culminating in the creation of an entirely new, specific method or tool, rather than rely on the jury-rigged methods and tools you were using beforehand. Rinse, repeat.
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I think that the best way to handle technology in DF would be to give everything a "level."
Each type of armor/weapon/craft would have a difficulty level to make, and each material would also have a level, defined in their raws.
Each civ would have a range, in their entity entry, for their capabilities During worldgen, each civ would be assigned a value in that range. For example:
Kolbolds might have LEATHER 5:10, METAL 1:3, WEAPONSMITHING 1:4, and ARMORMAKING 1:2.
A dagger or blowgun would have a level of 1. That means that every kobold civ would be able to make these weapons, from whatever materials they can work. Copper and Tin would have a value of 1 as well, so all kobold civs could make copper daggers. Bronze would have a value of 3 as it is a complex alloy, so a few kobold civs might be able to make it. Iron would have a value of 4, and be completely inaccessable, even if they stole some iron bars from the dwarves. Leather armor has a value of 2, so only more advanced civs would have it, but they would always be able to make leather shields and helmets (much easire to make a boiled leather helmet than a boiled leather breastplate. Spears would have a value of 2, axes 3, and swords 4, so many kobold civs would have spears, some would have axes, and a few swords.
This could even be tied to perceived value and rarity of items. The more you exceed the level by, the more likely the item in question would be to appear, and the less a trader would be willing to pay to get the item. (Dwarf Civ (Metal 20, weaponmaking 17) "A copper sword? I'll give you two pebbles for it." Elf Civ (Metal 0, Weaponmaking 15) "A copper sword? I will gladly trade some of my animals for such a fine example of your craft.")
Any feedback on this method?
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Another problem is that unlike the modern age a lot of technological advancement didn't come from specific research and development.
While there was indeed funded research it wasn't anywhere close to what almost any game tried to depict.
Also while indeed some objects seemed to appear during the advent of others there were a lot of exceptions.
Even then EVEN if you invented something that could be useful... as someone already mentioned. You need to have people accept it as well. People had the documents for great strides in technology pretty much forever but never used them until much later.
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Actually, coincidentally enough, the guest on the Daily Show just this Monday was selling his book, "The Most Powerful Idea In The World (http://www.amazon.com/Most-Powerful-Idea-World-Invention/dp/1400067057)", which was essentially about how the entire notion of "inventing things" was created in the 19th century. Before that, there was no notion of owning your ideas or a design for something. You only owned the one version of something that you, yourself made.
When people could actually become rich by inventing things, and own the rights to their ideas, it actually created such a new space for created wealth through invention that something like 30 of the wealthiest 75 people (adjusted for inflation) in the entire history of the world made their fortunes within a decade of one another, almost entirely located within the US. That's basically why there was an "Industrial Revolution" in the first place.
It was the difference between having someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, who was a once-in-a-century type of inventor, whose inventions were curiosities, and a Thomas Edison, who builds a massive corporation (what became General Electric), and essentially creates the modern corporate engineer.
So, basically, the problem with an "inventor dwarf" is that invention in the age that we are talking about was a process that took decades if not centuries for something to change. That's just plain beyond the timescale of what we are doing in DF.
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Well even if you bring up Leonardo, out of all his inventions and the few that would have been actually useful; Almost none were used (Good thing too because they were either impractical or flawed).
I wouldn't mind technological advance but I'd like it to be a product of culture rather then a product of a player's tampering unless they themselves are playing an inventor of some sort... and even then it shouldn't be vast collections of inventions that are instantly welcomed into society.
To me though a society should have an unused technology pool which a society can adopt if they so wish. They could have improvements already in place that no one uses. This is especially vital when we speak of a society taking technology from another.
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It might be interesting and sort of thematic if a given fortress could invent just one or possibly two things over the course of its existence, from some sort of predetermined list. It would be generated by a particularly uncommon strange mood - "Urist is struck by genius!" - and could be spread by trading the inventions to other civilizations. To get the whole list of advanced techs, you'd have to run a lot of forts.
Perhaps it could happen if the strange mood strikes the philosopher. Dwarf Archimedes!
The invention might vary depending on the terrain and materials naturally available to the fort.
But dwarf fortress are not really long-lived enough to have a tech tree.
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It might be interesting and sort of thematic if a given fortress could invent just one or possibly two things over the course of its existence, from some sort of predetermined list. It would be generated by a particularly uncommon strange mood - "Urist is struck by genius!" - and could be spread by trading the inventions to other civilizations. To get the whole list of advanced techs, you'd have to run a lot of forts.
Perhaps it could happen if the strange mood strikes the philosopher. Dwarf Archimedes!
(edit: if the philosopher is possessed instead of struck by genius, he builds a device, but nobody can replicate it!)
The invention might vary depending on the terrain and materials naturally available to the fort.
But dwarf fortress are not really long-lived enough to have a tech tree.
Uh, I meant to edit my post above, obviously...
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Even if you did have a whole string of forts there is no guarentee that the technological advancements have extended to the other cities within your civilisation
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Even if you did have a whole string of forts there is no guarentee that the technological advancements have extended to the other cities within your civilisation
It could be an interesting way for the game to play out.
You start at first with simple tools/workshops available, and build a decent fortress. Along the way, you make some tech discoveries, and eventually, your fortress dies.
Next fortress, you start with the technology you discovered last fortress available to use. Eventually, you make some more discoveries, your fort dies, and the cycle continues.
Seems like an easy way to gradually introduce a newbie to the game's features. There would be an init/worldgen option to let you start with all technology available.
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So you want it to go from being 'randomized new inventions' to an artificial limit to gameplay to help new players come to grips with the game? I'm not sure which is worse.
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Enh, playing through a fort in DF takes a long time, I'm not in favor of building a tech tree fort by fort to introduce players to the game, they'll know it by the time they get to year 5 pretty much.
Even if you did have a whole string of forts there is no guarentee that the technological advancements have extended to the other cities within your civilisation
That is why you would have to trade a bunch of the - I don't know, primitive clocks or compasses or exotic mounts, I have no opinions on the nature of these inventions, many can just function as valuable trade goods for all I care – but you'd have to trade a bunch of the things around for the invention to take root in your parent civilization (or the humans).
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Actually, coincidentally enough, the guest on the Daily Show just this Monday was selling his book, "The Most Powerful Idea In The World (http://www.amazon.com/Most-Powerful-Idea-World-Invention/dp/1400067057)", which was essentially about how the entire notion of "inventing things" was created in the 19th century. Before that, there was no notion of owning your ideas or a design for something. You only owned the one version of something that you, yourself made.
I'm rather reluctant to buy into the statement that before the 19th century, there was no notion of owning your ideas or a design for something. The ideas of trade secrets and proprietary knowledge have existed for a loooooong time. Take, for example, armouring guilds of the 14th and later centuries; they went through great lengths to protect their knowledge of armouring techniques and production of high-quality steels. There are undoubtedly other similar examples throughout history as well. Now, what may have not existed until relatively late in human history is the ability to enforce ownership of ideas and the like (patent law and stuff). Also, check out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#History Patents supposedly have existed since at least the 15th century. It is possible that such things existed before hand but records were lost. Also also, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors Plenty of inventors have existed throughout human civilization and were given credit for inventing stuff.
As for inventions and technology and stuff, perhaps you may find my ideas and those of others here interesting (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=46550.15 and http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=41486.msg941692#msg941692).
These suggestions stem from Bloat27, ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM, (Future): Implement a more abstract "knowledge" system. Right now it tracks what items a civilization uses and what creatures it has seen, but there could be general things like how good their crossbow making knowledge is or even points of philosophy and law, etc. Knowledge could be transferred, lost and rediscovered.
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The problem is, Andeerz, that your argument says that there were patents before the 1900s, but it completely ignores the unprecedented change in scale in the rate at which technology advanced once the Industrial Revolution took off.
When we are talking about the things that Dwarves in this game can build, it is difficult to come up with anything that dwarves can do that wasn't being done by the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians or Chinese straight back to the dawn of civilization. There may be improvements in the types of plows they used or the metalurgy (steel manufacture is something of a technological advancement, but then, they're dwarves, and are supposed to be advanced metalurgists).
Farming by hand? Yup, dawn of civilization. Making alcohol? Yup, dawn of civilization. Ranching livestock and then butchering them and using their body parts for raw materials and food? Woodcutting and making wooden items? Mining and quarrying stone and making stone objects? Mining for gems and setting gems? Making soap or other cleaning products? Weaving clothes from plant fibers? Yup, all done back as far as the dawn of civilization.
Heck, glass-blowing must be a relatively new thing, right? Whoops, early, primitive glassblowing goes back as far as 3500 BC (http://www.glassonline.com/infoserv/history.html).
What about mechanics? Well, the lever is just too abstract an object to be based on a "technological level", floodgates and damming rivers were the very basis of Chinese farming, the Archimedes Screw has been used in any naval vesel as far back as the ancient Greeks. A drawbridge is just a bridge with a rope and a winch.
This is the major problem with "technology trees" - there is no technology in DF that wasn't existant for thousands of years before the time period we are supposed to be simulating. What happened over those thousands of years was that people developed slightly different techniques for making slightly better or slightly worse versions of the exact same crap that had come for thousands of years before.
The notion that you could discover a new thing, or a new way of doing things is not a new idea, but the notion that technology can instantly change the way the world works, or that one innovation paves the way for more, newer innovations certainly is. Like I said before, the Middle Ages were simply not known for their brilliant technological innovations. They were, rather, known specifically for their general LACK of technological progress, just as the Dark Ages that preceeded them were known for the backslide society took from the Roman Empire.
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The most difficult thing about simulating technological development while keeping medieval Europe as the inspiration is that when you try, you soon realize the time period was in those terms about 1200 years of humanity just dicking around. I mean sure, there were advancements, but it is a frigging long time to figure out glasses and print.
What I'm saying is that the era is almost impossible to demonstrate in a game where the player strives for advancement, since Middle Ages would not have really existed as we know it if there had been something driving humanity to advance. Most of the technology needed to do so existed, people just didn't really bother.
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The most difficult thing about simulating technological development while keeping medieval Europe as the inspiration is that when you try, you soon realize the time period was in those terms about 1200 years of humanity just dicking around. I mean sure, there were advancements, but it is a frigging long time to figure out glasses and print.
What I'm saying is that the era is almost impossible to demonstrate in a game where the player strives for advancement, since Middle Ages would not have really existed as we know it if it there had been something driving humanity to advance. Most of the technology needed to do so existed, people just didn't really bother.
On this note, I would actually back this up by saying the following:
Humanity, up until the Black Death woke Europe from its slumber, was actually just waiting for the end of the world at that time. In Europe, Christianity had largely believed that the end times were coming aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany minute now for the past millineum. Heck, Revelations is commonly believed to be about how the world would come to an end during the reign of Nero, much less after the fall of the Roman Empire.
In my college art history course, one of the things they taught was that people wouldn't even try to take credit for the art they produced. They produced it for God. God would know who had done the work. No need to tell other people. Hence, virtually all works were religious in nature.
The people were put to work on subsistance agriculture on semi-arable land so that they could just barely eek out a living if they worked with every ounce of strength they had towards just getting enough food to stay alive. That was how the powers that were liked it (Government and Church alike), they didn't have the time or ability to do anything threatening to the current, stable power structure, like think for themselves in treasonous and/or heretical ways.
It wasn't until the Black Death that people found they had a labor shortage, and needed to find a way to do the same thing with less people and less effort, so they created things like the Printing Press instead of relying upon scribes. (Which then paved the way for the democritization of ideas.)
People had invented the steam engine, but they feared using it before the Black Death because if they used steam power to do the grunt labor, what would they do with all those slaves? If the slaves weren't being put to work, they might have time to plot and revolt!!! Surely, the steam engine is a fearful thing! Destroy it!
The people who were the "great inventors" were generally either independently wealthy Bruce Wayne types who had the luxury of spending their fortunes on dicking around with novelty contraptions, or they were patronized by wealthy sorts who could afford to pay someone to make a solid silver birds that appeared to chirp because of pnuematics and water pressure on top of their garden's private fountains. Their works were never used to actually try and change the world, because the people who could change the world were so busy trying to make sure the world WASN'T changing.
Incidentally, when did the black death happen? Right at the very end of the time period that Toady arbitrarily set. Because it's just after the Black Death that the Rennaisance occurs, and humanity actually gets forced, quite unwillingly, out of its Medieval Stasis.
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I'm sorry Kohaku, I think that what you are saying is not a very robust view of things.
I'm not saying I know much better, but I do know this: The Dark Ages was dark for Western Europe, sure, but it didn't hit everyone. For example, the Muslims of the East experienced a Golden Age when Europe was at its darkest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age). These people saw huge leaps in technological advancement, and many inventions and discoveries were developed that were credited to individuals (see the before-mentioned wikipedia article; there are plenty!!!) and known throughout the medieval world, even by the learned in Dark Ages Europe! Also, look at Aristotle, or any of the many famous Roman engineers, or Greek or Arab or Chinese mathematicians credited with developing this that or the other! Many have been known about for centuries, not just rediscovered in modern times, and the fruits of their labor were implemented by others who were quite aware of their original developers!!! Also, there were famous artists during the Dark Ages of Europe, perhaps not as many because of political and economic turmoil. And there were probably many artists who were credited with work at the time but due to loss of records (books can decay, libraries can be burned, and art damaged or destroyed!) they have been forgotten. Also, people would try to take credit for the art they produced in the middle ages and dark ages, even for religious works: medieval atchitects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_architects#Medieval_architects), and religious manuscript illuminators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Manuscript_illuminators).
Also, Cotes, one could say that that 1200 years of dicking around was dicking around trying to re-establish some semblance of a stable economy and social structure that would provide the conditions for faster technological advancement (which is indeed what finally happened to Western Europe starting around the 14th century), conditions that other civs at the time of those 1200 years had and enjoyed (like the afore-mentioned Arabs).
This can be simulated if the factors underlying civilizational progress are simulated (agriculture, record-keeping, knowledge transfer, economic activites, etc.). Think about it this way using the Arabs and Western Europe as an example: The Arabs are the equivalent of a civ in DF that has its shit together, and the European civilizations are the equivalent of civs in DF that have for one reason or another (disease, poor farm management, political unrest, tantrum spirals, etc.) allowed their civs to fall into chaos (or a Dark Age). After the Dark Ages civs stablized, they could catch up with the other civ technologically through spread of knowledge and would have the resources and conditions to implement technologies they couldn't before.
And for the record, I am vehemently against "technology trees" in DF in the sense of how it's done in other games (i.e. contrived magical "research points" being invested by the player into a technology. When the little meter reaches 100%, yay! You can build a third tier dreadnought carrier destructo-matic!)
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If you don't mean a "tech tree like in other games", then please explain what model you would use.
The problem with all that is that, again, much technology in the pre-industrial world was often either something that was intangible, such as mathematics (which doesn't get translated into DF, which is extremely physical), or into something that is better described as "doing something similar to what was done before, only better".
The problem with a "technology tree", as is being described in the OP, is that it implies that there is some product or industry that dwarves are going to be incapable of doing in any way until they have their "tech upgrade". This is a problem because essentially everything dwarves are currently able to make is something that was producable, in at least some rudimentary way, back into prehistoric times. There is simlpy nothing on the "tech tree" that you can scratch out.
This is why I talk about having improvements in the tools and workshops, rather than outright inventions - there is no sense of making a better workshop, or having an improved method of doing the same action in this game. Even in that article on the Islamic Golden Age you link, one of the most important innovations during that era was the "Arab Agricultural Revolution", which involved their research into how to grow the most crops possible given their soil conditions, advances in techniques for irrigation, and trading for a wider array of plantable seeds, which they better understood, and could grow more efficiently... How do you translate that into a "tech upgrade" for DF, even with Improved Farming coming in, that doesn't really come down to "The player understands how to run his farm better than he did before", it's not like you can make a "tech upgrade" to figure out that you can suddenly start planting the seeds that elves have been trying to trade to you for years. It's entirely bizzare to make irrigation suddenly much more effective even when they are using the same tools and same designs just because you suddenly unlocked a "+20% irrigation bonus" tech upgrade. So the question remains: How do you translate something like this into the game? The best thing you can do is to simply make upgradable tools, (which, in turn, requires actually having tools for most jobs).
There are also plenty of things I see on that page that are similarly difficult to put into DF - they created advanced sawmills... when DF turns trees into lumber the instant they are chopped down, and lumber is a fungible product where the same unit of wood can make an earring or a solid wood door or a table or a bow. How do you put this sort of tech upgrade into DF when they can already turn any piece of wood they find directly into any sort of finished product they want simply by very briefly visiting a workshop, which is, itself, made out of one single unit of a building material (potentially even one log, itself), and that is all?
There were, indeed, many Arabic and Chinese scientists, who were capable of isolating new chemical compounds or distilling elements... which only matter in game terms if these go into full-scale production for some in-game purpose.
(The only useful one that comes to mind is distilling saltpeter out of human waste, wood ashes, and straw, which in turn is one of the components of gunpowder... And keep in mind that this was, obviously, not actually used for gunpowder by the people who actually invented this stuff, and black powder had been invented in China long before even this, and wasn't used to make cannons for centuries.)
Even when we are talking about China and the Arab world, though, with all their wealth, they still weren't able to seriously advance their culture beyond the point they were in around 500 AD. The entire reason the Europeans were able to not just catch up after being thrust back to virtually caveman levels of civilization in the Dark Ages, but totally eclipse all the other cultures of the world around the 1600s in spite of them having every possible advantage to allow them to do so was because nobody had seriously created any technological advancements that actually altered the way that the average peasant lived their lives in thousands of years.
All those inventions the Arabs or the Chinese made meant nothing if they didn't actually put them into production, and the things that were put into production are "better ways to do things" that are meaningless in a game where any dwarf can make any finished product virtually instantly with no training and no tools besides a few bare-bones raw materials.
This game quite simply does not have the foundation upon which a "tech tree" can be built.
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I will most certainly explain what model I would use. And in essence it involves a tech tree, but not some arbitrary point system. :3 But first...
What is advancement in technology if not "doing something similar to what was done before, only better"? I can think of a few inventions that were sort of without precedent, like the nuclear reactor, the Cotton Gin, the steam engine... but then again, you could argue that even those things were just more sophisticated versions of more primitive tools or were combinations of older tools in a novel fashion. Heck, a nuclear reactor is nothing more than a steam engine with a different heat source! Actually, I think every invention I can think of basically boils down to that (though if you can name me an invention that doesn't, I'd like to hear/read it). Think about it: human civilization has always been doing the same things throughout history, except now, with better technology (more refined tools and concepts), we do the same activities but better! Think about agriculture, mining, logging, medicine, refinement of raw materials/manufacturing, government, exploration, education, research, warfare... it's all gone on since time immemorial in one form or another, and today civilization is doing the exact same things in essence but with different/more refined methods. So, the talk about having improvements in tools and workshops you talk about is in essence describing invention in a way. But I have ideas of how to accomplish the sort of "outright invention" you talk about, which I'll get to later.
Also,
Even when we are talking about China and the Arab world, though, with all their wealth, they still weren't able to seriously advance their culture beyond the point they were in around 500 AD. The entire reason the Europeans were able to not just catch up after being thrust back to virtually caveman levels of civilization in the Dark Ages, but totally eclipse all the other cultures of the world around the 1600s in spite of them having every possible advantage to allow them to do so was because nobody had seriously created any technological advancements that actually altered the way that the average peasant lived their lives in thousands of years.
Back that up. I believe that is not a very well informed statement.
What constitutes and advancement in culture? I'd say expanding an empire to encompass all of the middle east, northern Africa, and Spain seems like an advancement to me, as well as the founding of universities (some of which still stand today), discovery of various natural phenomena and formal development of mathematical concepts that laid the foundation for modern mathematics, medical practices that laid the foundations of modern medicine... the list goes on an on. The same can be said of the Chinese. Of course, these two civilizations had their hardships, much like the romans, and as such sort of "fell behind". And Europe going back to "caveman levels"? Sure, with the collapse of the Roman empire and with it the economy and infrastructure to maintain relatively secure environment Europe fell into a chaos of sorts. Knowledge was lost and forgotten as libraries were burned or lost to time, educational systems fell apart, and there was not a stable enough environment for people to (in as large a scale as before) engage in pursuits of the mind when other, more pressing matters of survival were at hand. But they certainly were not reduced to nothing. Culture changed and advanced in some ways, and technology certainly chugged ahead, just not as fast as before due to economic and social/political reasons. What can also be said is that the infrastructure and economy to implement some technologies (or have need of them) did not exist in Europe. Agh... I will continue further later. I have to go before my parking meter runs out...
And I swear I will get back to this and make my suggestion of how I think technological progression can be modeled and it all stems from the following bloat:
Bloat27, ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM, (Future): Implement a more abstract "knowledge" system. Right now it tracks what items a civilization uses and what creatures it has seen, but there could be general things like how good their crossbow making knowledge is or even points of philosophy and law, etc. Knowledge could be transferred, lost and rediscovered.
I will get back sometime in the near future!!!
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Once again, I'm not talking about how there were "no advancements", but that those advancements are not translatable into the game of DF as it currently stands, especially by simply locking out features of the game.
The cotton gin is a good example of this - it made it possible to sell cotton for export profitably because it significantly reduced the labor requirements to turn cotton the plant into cotton the textile... But as I talked about in the thread about using bags for flour, we can already nearly instantly turn any plant into their thread, so there is no way to meaningfully simulate that "faster, easier" component.
Heck, even a nuclear reactor is pointless in DF, as we can make a virtually infinite amount of energy simply through waterwheels. What is the point of a nuclear reactor if you can generate millions of kilowatts of energy on pump, trench, and wooden axle power alone?
As for China and the Arab world... I said it before: With all that advancement, the life of the average peasant didn't really change that much (forget libraries or advanced chemistry that didn't matter to the common man and never hit serious production, those don't matter, since they weren't used to actually produce something different, which is the only thing that matters in the context of DF). They were given the ability to farm more efficiently, especially in the Arab world, but that's about it... and the changes in the farming system are, again, not translatable in DF by some sort of bonus to food production, but would be represented by having a player who better understood how to make the most of his farms, as these advancements were from a top-down rethinking of how to organize agriculture, and public works projects to irrigate it properly.
As for Europe hitting "caveman levels", I'd say that we're disagreeing over what "caveman" means. Like I said, virtually every technology in this game existed in at least some primitive form back before civilization itself existed. (If that is too disagreeable for you, if you prefer, imagine I said "barbarian" instead... which was literally what they were before they took over, although barbarian is a term that is so flexible as to be virtually meaningless, so I prefer to avoid it.)
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..... research "The wheel".....Depending on his intelectual skills, he may research "The wheel" in a day or in a year.
How does one research 'the wheel' hehe.
That gave me a funny thought of cavemen sitting around a fire discussing their latest invention, the wheel :)
Maybe if there is any added technology, it would be best to leave most of it to world-gen. Perhaps the longer you gen the world, the more chance of higher tech there is.
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... random useful stuff...
So what sort of Roman technology was lost when Rome fell? Well living standards of everyone who wasnt a Roman noble didnt lower substantially, and the living standards of the goths and vandals increased due to the loot. So its pretty hard to say that technology the Romans had researched was lost, like Andeerz seems to imply. So what WAS lost? Well, alot of Roman 'technology', for instance, was the desire to build aquaducts, or the foresight to plant trees alongside roads to provide shelter for troops. And sewers. And military tactics - stuff that we just stopped doing for a while after the Romans. So unless your Dwarf physics workshop is going to output discoveries like 'you have learnt to build walls next to a floor in order to channel water over an open space', or 'you have learnt how to plant trees next to roads', I dont see Dwarven tech trees working very well either.
Enough of that. Heres what I'D like to see. I think it would be pretty sweet if every buildable object in vanilla had a date < 1000 in which it was "invented", moddable workshops could have this property as well. So, for instance, the floor may have been invented a few years after world gen, and the mechanism perhaps ~500 AWG. Metal forging was probably invented ~50 (10 years after the kiln, the charcoal, and the axe) since theyre dwarves but perhaps magma forging is a relatively recent idea, maybe only invented in ~700. Hammers? 10 AGW. Long swords? 100 AGW. The purpose of all of this is for challenge games and successions: in vanilla DF, the player starts at > 1050 AGW. Pressing the spacebar before worldgen is complete allows for play in an earlier year, which could make for some awesome challenge games - wanna defend against goblins in a world before doors or bridges were invented? See how long you last!
Daniel
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Think of your typical Roman noble, and the levels of excess they had. Palatial estates, silks and fruits imported from across the known world, running water, etc etc.
Then compare to a goddamn Dark Age king who had a house made of rocks, some barrels full of food in his oubliette, and maybe a tapestry of a goat.
To say the fall of the Roman empire 'maybe resulted in a few lost pieces of tech' is simpleminded and kinda wrong. There's more to a civ than just 'can they build this?' There's all sorts of cultural and diplomatic infrastructure like trade routes and similar.
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Think of your typical Roman noble, and the levels of excess they had. Palatial estates, silks and fruits imported from across the known world, running water, etc etc.
Then compare to a goddamn Dark Age king who had a house made of rocks, some barrels full of food in his oubliette, and maybe a tapestry of a goat.
To say the fall of the Roman empire 'maybe resulted in a few lost pieces of tech' is simpleminded and kinda wrong. There's more to a civ than just 'can they build this?' There's all sorts of cultural and diplomatic infrastructure like trade routes and similar.
I think the problem here is the difference in focus. We're talking about the everyday peasant (or slave in the case of the Romans), and you are only talking about the kings.
Medieval kings and Roman Emporers had massive differences in wealth, but it's not like people forgot how to build boats of any kind, or how to travel and trade. The difference there is just in how much raw manpower and wealth they had... which isn't technology. Hell, the Vikings were capable of trading as far as China and exploring the New World in nothing but open single-deck longships. They were even LESS sophisticated than the typical European power.
And again, this does nothing to address the question I keep asking: How would you translate these "tech upgrades" into DF? Do you make a power loom that suddenly spins thread into cloth even faster than the nigh-instantanious dwarf with at least 5 skill ranks in sewing?
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Sorry for the long delay… I’ve been gone for a few weeks (Pennsic War, W00T!) and also have been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel (best book evar!!!!) which has given me food for thought…
Oh, I see what you mean now, NW_Kohaku, and what you are getting at! I agree that the life of the average peasant probably didn't change much regardless of the civilization in medieval times until the political, economic, and technological situation came about that gave more social mobility to the lower class. I also have some rough answers for how to translate these "tech upgrades" into DF.
For your example of the power loom, I think the main problem lies in the issue of how skills and economic activities are modeled. If one cannot model the need for spinning thread faster, then there would be no use for a power loom and a hand spindle would work just fine; no tech improvements needed or desired. If time and productivity of certain crafts were modeled better, than the merit of making available certain technologies in game would be apparent. As you mentioned before, many tech advancements are simply just developing ways of doing things that could be done before but better and/or faster. Sometimes these improvements could lead to being able to do novel things ("unlocking" certain activities, i.e. being able to process iron ore after improving furnace design for working with something similar, maybe). So, in order to satisfy your question of how to meaningfully translate tech upgrades into DF, time and material requirements, among other things, of certain activities need to be better modeled. At least, I hope this satisfies it.
Also, with regard to your statement of raw manpower and wealth, that's pretty well put. Economic factors are what ultimately determine the implementation of technology, whether it be by a civ in general or a social class, or an individual. If there isn't the right infrastructure to support or reason to implement, say, a given farming strategy, then even if it's known about, it won't be used. Or, on the social class level, if the commoners of a certain society cannot afford to make or purchase or trade for certain implements, then they won't be used.
As for what I would propose for tech advancement in the game and how to model how knowledge can be transferred and lost... I'm basically going to reiterate what I mentioned in this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=46550.15
We need the following things to be in the game in order for my idea to be feasible: writing, the earlier mentioned Bloat27, the ability to interact with other civs/forts/people outside of the fort and for those interactions to actually have an effect on the world. I know that's a tall order... but some if not all of this stuff is planned...
So, for the abstract knowledge system of Bloat27, ideally I think individual bits of knowledge should be able to be "known" by an entity much like (though I don't know specifically how this is done in DF) how legends, individual preferences, and stuff are recorded, except individuals should contain that knowledge if they don’t already.
This knowledge should be separate from associated skills (if applicable) in that one should be able to know about something yet not know how to enact it efficiently (if applicable), like knowing about how to make tables, but not being good at it.
Bits of knowlege should be transferrable through individual interaction (here things like teaching, philosopher, and other related skills could modify the ability of doing so) or through writing. They should also be able to be lost (like if the entity or book that contains the information is killed/destroyed).
Some bits of knowledge should be able to be acquired on one's own if the motivation, inspiration, and appropriate pre-requisite knowledge (if applicable) are there. How motivation, inspiration, and pre-requisite knowledge would be modeled, I don’t know. But I will propose some food for thought.
So, how would an entity come up with a novel bit of knowledge, like a new furnace design for smelting iron, or how to extract poison from GCSs or something? I think it could be as follows: Using furnace design as the example, the entity in question would have to have prerequisite knowledge (in this case furnace operation and building, knowledge of copper smelting, knowledge that pumping air into a fire gets it hotter etc.). The entity would also have to be motivated and have the time to engage this motivation (factors in this case could include presence and access to iron ore, inherent curiosity of the individual, intelligence, etc.) The entity, meeting the prerequisite knowledge and motivation, would spend some of his/her working time devoted to experimenting, building a new furnace design, perhaps with the help of others and perhaps being able to fail at the endeavor. This represents coming up with something through inspiration/motivation and not through accident or a more gradual realization of something. These other kinds of coming up with new ideas could be modeled differently maybe… I dunno.
Individual technologies would have to be something coded in the raws, as I don't think the sophistication of video game AI (as good as it is in DF) is to the level where video game entities have the ability to think things up as is done in real life. But it can be modeled loosely, with developing certain bits of knowledge necessitating certain prerequisite knowledge. So, yeah, a tech tree… This will require a LOT of thought and research to make it a plausible one.
Oh, and regarding books and how it can work with this: books should be a vessel for knowledge in the game, able to pass down information through generations and across cultures. In addition, books should also be vital for tasks such as record keeping of stockpiles, wages, and government related stuff, as I think that's a big part of why writing came about in the first place. Basically, writing should serve as it does in real life as a technology/tool to help one to "remember" something they otherwise couldn't efficiently, like large amounts of mind-boggling numbers in mathematical operations, data during experimentation, code of laws when administering justice, histories of entire civilizations, etc.
As for your (NW_Kohaku’s) previous statement “changes in the farming system are, again, not translatable in DF by some sort of bonus to food production, but would be represented by having a player who better understood how to make the most of his farms, as these advancements were from a top-down rethinking of how to organize agriculture, and public works projects to irrigate it properly”...
Perhaps things that involve “top-down rethinking” may not be able to be modeled for a player run fort… things like architecture and engineering, in addition to farming as you stated, come to mind. !!!BUT!!! I do think they could be modeled for npcs and their forts, though. For example: crop rotation knowledge could allow the AI controlling another fort or city to implement it. The same goes for architectural motifs and engineering principles perhaps. Those NPC forts with masons/engineers with knowledge of, say, arch construction, would possibly have doorways that are arch like (as far as the game can portray that and the physical characteristics of the structure). The knowledge could even be present in the dwarves in your fort, but they wouldn’t matter since you, the player, are in control, and not the computer, for the things where this knowledge applies. The knowledge could be passed through your fort to others like any other knowledge. This would require a lot of tweaking to get right for the AI; one would have to model the motivating factors behind the implementation of these afore-mentioned technology-strategies.
How could Toady make the AI know when it’s appropriate and desirable to utilize a technology? I don’t think this will be at all easy. Let’s use aqueduct technology as an example: Say the AI perceives the need (how this would be done, I dunno) of getting water from point A to point B. What determines the strategies available to the AI for executing this would be the knowledge contained in the fort by its dwarves or whatever. Say the AI’s fort has dwarves in it that have knowledge of arch-building, scaffolding strategies, etc. This could allow the AI to execute a strategy (hard coded?) of building an aqueduct in a particular style (think Roman ones) if doing so would be considered the “best” of the strategies available. What would determine one strategy being used over another would probably involve things like taking stock of available resources, estimated time of completion, etc… Perhaps this would be WAY too difficult to implement and not worth it given how little it would impact the human player, but I’d love to see it done. Then in adventure mode, forts would look more like forts than just mazes of corridors and arbitrarily sized rooms. Blargh.
With some further thinking and refining, I think my suggestions could set up a framework for technology acquisition, transfer, and loss that fits with Toady’s goals of making a game that procedurally generates a fantasy world with a modicum of verisimilitude.
Perhaps people may think this implementation of transferable knowledge and stuff a task not worth pursuing, but I think it would be something that would set this game apart from all others. Modeling tech transfer and development like I mentioned would be not only of interest to me and perhaps some parts of the DF gaming community, but I guarantee you that it would get a LOT of attention from many branches of the scientific community (for whatever that might be worth).
Sorry if this is tl;dr-worthy... my brain is fried now.
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So, does anyone like or hate this idea?
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Sorry, I forgot to respond to this one earlier. I looked this one over, but wound up resonding to others, and lost track of this... (And I guess I'm the designated tl;dr reader around here...)
Also, with regard to your statement of raw manpower and wealth, that's pretty well put. Economic factors are what ultimately determine the implementation of technology, whether it be by a civ in general or a social class, or an individual. If there isn't the right infrastructure to support or reason to implement, say, a given farming strategy, then even if it's known about, it won't be used. Or, on the social class level, if the commoners of a certain society cannot afford to make or purchase or trade for certain implements, then they won't be used.
Something I wanted to put out there earlier, but never really had a better chance to use the example:
China once, back around the 13th century (sorry, going off of memory alone, here), had a legendary naval commander named Zheng He. (That's pronounced like "Jang Hey".)
Zheng He was a eunuch - the special administrators and buerocrats at the top of the Chinese courts could not have families so that they could not accrue power for their family line, supposedly to keep them from having a permanent power base. (Instead, they gained a dark reputation among the Chinese for being willing to sacrifice their families for personal power, but this may just be because you could place the blame for catastrphoic government policies on the faceless eunichs just fine, but blaming the Emperor was treason.)
Zheng He was a eunuch, but he was also from a muslim merchant family, and essentially a childhood friend of the emperor, who convinced the emperor to devote resources to the development of a great navy.
China, by and large, had plenty of river boats to go up and down its several great rivers, but was too isolationist to trade along the ocean. Zheng He changed that - he created some of the largest ships the world would see for centuries in a massive armada that sailed the world's oceans, trading as far as the Cape of Good Hope and most likely landing on the coast of California, beating Columbus by a few centuries. Everywhere he went, he impressed (even the Turkish empire) with the might of China's navy, and brought back ambassadors and gifts from the nations of the Eastern world, making China the effective U.N. where all the nations had an embassy in the court, and China could wield its dominant power in settling international disputes.
Then the emperor died. Zheng He lost his backing (but died at sea before returning to get his power stripped away, anyway), as another emperor, and other eunuchs took power, and they burned all the ships, and killed all the shipmakers so that nobody would have the technology to ever even try building the sort of mighty navy that could bring the world to its knees before China again. China had the technological power to create true empire, and burned it to ashes.
It was because the Chinese feared all that trade and technology and cultural exchange, and would rather remain locked in purposeful, self-inflicted Medieval Stasis than risk the social change that could come from global trade. (Plus they hated all the foreigners, including Zheng He - DAMN MUSLIMS! BRINGING US TRADE AND WEALTH AND PROSPERITY! NO MORE PERMITS FOR MOSQUES! DOWN WITH THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT!)
Which is, like I said, an idea of just how radically different the notion of technology is now than it was in Medieval times. Power to accrue wealth and dominate your neighbors? Throw it away, QUICK! Now, technology is the solution to every problem.
We need the following things to be in the game in order for my idea to be feasible: writing, the earlier mentioned Bloat27, the ability to interact with other civs/forts/people outside of the fort and for those interactions to actually have an effect on the world. I know that's a tall order... but some if not all of this stuff is planned...
I understand it, but can't say that this is the sort of idea that can get me excited...
You see, this means that, in order to work, you have to either A) play multiple forts over and over again to make gradual incrimental change or B) just keep respawning worlds until you happen to get a perfect confluence events to give you the technologies you want.
A) Is problematic for me because whenever I'm playing, I'm typically testing out some mod I just made, and when I finally abandon that old game, its' because I've added a new set of stuff I need to respawn a new world for... so I have to dedicate myself to making forts for a decade or so to push forward technology, and then abandon it... But I like to play to put every idea I have into practice, and focus on architecture, I don't really like making a fort just to make a better fort later, every fort is my goal unto itself.
Worse, I tend to like the game to be shaken up a little - why have the same elves and goblins every time? (Especially since they'll probably all be dead eventually...) (Of course, this is part of why I always mod...) I get basically the same fort, but this time, I start with a +20% weaving speed... WOOOHOO!
B) Is less dramatically problematic, although it seems to be going down a totally different route, because this mean that instead of having "technological progress", what we have is actually a "technological crapshoot". We respawn worlds, get random tech bonuses from the worldgen history (although how long worldgen goes on may become a major issue here). This means that every game, you get dealt a completely different hand of cards (which is fine by me, pre-decision randomness is my favorite kind of game philosophy), but it also means that the whole notion of "progress" is kind of scrapped. It also means that we will undoubtably have people looking for "Dwarf Heaven", that one worldgen that spawns a dwarf civ with every terrain feature tech upgrade at the start, while a few "hardcore" players will be playing "caveman dwarf" games. (And believe me, it's the nature of the player that they're going to want to see every single feature of the game at least once, and preferably all in their first fort.)
Now then, again, it's not a terrible idea to have your forts be different because one is going to have SUPAH FARMIN UPGRADE! while another has ULTRA STEEL, but it has absolutely nothing to do with making the player want to make libraries or preserve knowledge for future generations because most players are going to adopt Boatmurdered "F*** The World" strategies because they have no reason to care about future generations or the rest of the world... at least, unless you force them to care, that is. (Which is a big part of what I've been doing in the Farming Improvements thread, and the Class Warfare thread - trying to come up with ways to force players to care.)
(This is leaving aside the benefits of books for giving you skill points... I've had that argument before, and it wound up with me being called "short-sighted" far more fervantly than this thread has.)
I should probably post a bit on the actual effects of technology and what is appropriate for the game... but will leave that for another post, as I'm not sure I won't just get lost in my own thinking again, and wander away.
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Hmmmm... I guess you and I have different preferences and ideas of what the game could be. I wouldn't really find it terrible that if I start a fort early on during world gen, that I would have maybe, say, bronze-age technologies or something, and by late world gen have have a fort with circa 1400's tech.
Also, in response to point A:
I don't think I really follow what you are saying. I think that with my suggestion (in its ideal case with a lot of other things in place first), you wouldn't get the same goblins and elves (or dwarves for that matter) every time, as there might be differences in their technological level every time since it would be a procedurally generated sort of thing. Knowledge spread would happen in a way dependent on interactions between civs, cities, and individuals, and development of new technologies would be dependent upon preexisting knowledge, the social/political/economic situation, and a little bit of luck.
In response to point B:
What do you mean by technological crapshoot? The way I see it, if the technologies included have reasonable prerequisites for coming about, they would occur in plausible ways, so it wouldn't be totally random. You wouldn't have, say, dwarves able to technically work iron but not have the knowledge to build a simple furnace. Progress would occur in a believable way, especially if things like your farming suggestions and class warfare suggestions get into the game! These, among other sorts of suggestions that aim to bring in realistic economic, social, and physical factor sort of things, would naturally bring about reasons for having technological progress in game. I really don't see how the ideas I presented scrap the idea of technological progress. I think they offer the ability for technological progress to exist. I think someone wants DF to be a game where every idea they have can be put into practice every time, then the idea of technological progress being in this game needs to be abandoned all together, and every technology/economic activity/whatever should be available from the get go.
Also,
Now then, again, it's not a terrible idea to have your forts be different because one is going to have SUPAH FARMIN UPGRADE! while another has ULTRA STEEL, but it has absolutely nothing to do with making the player want to make libraries or preserve knowledge for future generations because most players are going to adopt Boatmurdered "F*** The World" strategies because they have no reason to care about future generations or the rest of the world... at least, unless you force them to care, that is. (Which is a big part of what I've been doing in the Farming Improvements thread, and the Class Warfare thread - trying to come up with ways to force players to care.)
How would it have nothing to do with making the player want to make libraries? If I want to preserve my knowledge of my fort's SUPAH FARMIN UPGRADE or ULTRA STEEL sort of things, I would want to have a library so that when my workers might die and if their apprenticeship falls apart, maybe the knowledge could be passed on to future generations in my fort. Also, there could be other reasons for libraries, like keeping records and stuff which could have another meaningful impact on gameplay. I guess if a player has a Boatmurdered F*** The World strategy, their fort won't have much of a positive impact on their civ or the world, which could be fun and interesting in its own way... that sort of seems like a kind of strategy the Chinese did in your example when they burned all the ships and killed the shipmakers. With the ideas presented in my suggestion, knowledge could actually be forgotten for good in this manner. Also, you wouldn't have to have libraries if your fort didn't need it.
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I'm not saying that I'd only play advanced tech worlds. I'm saying that the general tendancy would be for people to play the games that give them the most stuff, especially at first, and then slowly work their ways down towards having less. "Dwarf Heaven" in 40d was a massively popular embark because it had every single feature. Only a handful of people embark on glaciers just because it has almost nothing.
Anyway, these aren't two "points", these are two paths. This is either taking the path of (A) repeatedly abandoning and embarking in the same world so that you can guide the same techonological growth upwards over time, or (B) you generate new worlds every time. The point is to explore the consequences of your suggestion down both types of playstyle paths.
(A) Means repeatedly embarking over and over just to have an influence on how the game develops its technology, something that, by the looks of how you are describing it, requires really, really devoted playing to notice the real effects of this, as it seems like it would take generations for these effects to take place.
As for (B), it's still a crapshoot by the eyes of the player. They generate a world, look at what technology there is, and can either keep the roll, or regen the world and try again. Yeah, sure, you might put in a really detailed roadmap/tech tree, but if the player doesn't have to do anything to progress along it besides hit the "Create World Now" button until they find themselves in the sort of position along that tech tree they want, it's functionally a total crapshoot to what the player is doing.
And this is the problem - when you have your technology level handed to you on a platter, there's no real reason to preserve it. How many players abandon and embark on the same world over and over again instead of generating a new world every time? How many players play beyond 5 or 10 years? Forget preserving knowledge for future generations, many players just dump children into magma because they know they aren't going to be playing long enough for those children to hit 12 years old!
Which brings me back to my point: What are you going to do to make players care about this? If technology only advances at a pace that takes place along a scope that makes their own playtime in any one world largely insignificant, why should they care about preserving knowledge for future generations that will never exist because they stop playing at year 6, when their FPS drops to 20, and that's when they just delete their game because they don't play games below 20 FPS?
In order to make the players care, then preserving technology or making libraries has to be solution to a problem. And if there isn't a problem, and you want that solution, anyway, you have to invent the problem for you to solve. (See this thread here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0 - The entire thread is based around creating the problem that will be solved by the ability to make all the extra furniture pieces.)
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Hmmmm... I guess I'm in the minority of players that occasionally embarks in the same world over and over again, plays past 5 or 10 years, and doesn't just dump children into magma... There's not much of a reason for engaging in this play style, as the activities of one's fort has virtually no impact on the goings on of the world outside it, but if it did, then I would choose more often to run my fort non-suicidally and with more dedication.
If the time and material requirements of various economic activities are modeled realistically, the activities of the fort come to matter to entities outside of the immediate vicinity, and the game gets optimized to a point where the FPS ceases to be an issue, then the issues you posited would be solved. There would be a reason to play past 5 or 10 years, a reason to embark in the same world over and over again, and, through this, a reason to preserve knowledge and (regardless of writing) have a system in place for entities to be able to spread/gain knowledge.
So, I guess, what I would do first is optimize the game, and put in all of the prerequisites I mentioned earlier.
Also, I don't know what you mean by "technology level handed to you on a platter". What (I hope) my suggestion implies is that what you and your dwarves are able to do in a fort is dependent on the knowledge pool available from all the dwarves in the present fort. Even if your civ regularly practices advanced iron working, if no one in your fort knows how to do it, then you can't do it. This would present another reason to preserve knowledge in a fort, either via books, apprenticeship, education, or what-have-you.
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I think the best way to describe this is to relate an essay I remember reading about the making of a fantasy story or RPG: Never start off with a long intro about the importance of your fantasy culture's history. (See DM of the Rings (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612) for the reason why.) Players generally want to just check what they can embark with, because they generate a world when they're interested in playing the game.
Once you have them playing, and they have some kind of vested interest in the game setting, THEN you can spring the backstory on them. Then they have a reason to care, and it's not just so much tl;dr. (Otherwise, they'll decide to just reroll the whole world, and wipe out the history. Keep in mind that, at this point, all game histories are generally very generic, with alot of wars that get alot of people killed, but with no more purpose or sense of historical arc to them than a game of Risk where red units beat all the blue units, and claimed Indonesia, so that they could claim the +2 soldier bonus for getting all of Australia.)
So what do people look for when genning a world? They look for the ability to make the things they want to make. They might want sand and volcanos if they want to make some glass. Often, they want flux to make plenty of steel. Often, they want a brook or river just to get some easy replinishing water. Sometimes, they go out of their way to make it harder on themselves, and go looking for an embark in a glacier with no running water. Or they look for evil embarks so they can fight more interesting enemies. If they're paying attention, they remember to look for what other civs have access to their embark. That's what's salient to their gameplay: what's on the map, and who can attack them.
So now, people are going to look at technology trees where the progress of their dwarves along that tech tree are like another feature of an embark - lots of tech tree progress is like an embark with running water and sand and flux and a volcano on an evil mountain range and a joyous wilds-aligned jungle. Little tech tree progress off the start is like starting in an evil glacier. This is what I mean by playing it like a crapshoot. They aren't going to care about the progress of society, how technology was gained or tragically lost, they only care if they get True Steel or Wootz Steel or if they have to settle for Crude Steel or Bronze, and how much of a bonus to damage does Wootz Steel get, anyway?
Does that mean I think this entire idea is wrong? No, of course not, what I'm saying is that you have to find a way to bait people into wanting to know about this stuff. I've looked up what felsic and mafic magma and igneous rocks are because DF has made me interested in it. But most people only want to look up what layers they get flux from. Give them a reason to care.
(And remember, if you're just going to delete the save, anyway, there's no reason NOT to blow up the world. Some people consider the goal of Adventure Mode to be to kill every living sentient being in the world, ushering in an Age of Emptiness.)
As for the last part, sorry, I must have been misunderstanding what you had meant, as I assumed that when you start a new fort, dwarves would be able to make anything that was enabled for their civ.
What you are suggesting, then, is that dwarves have sets of boolean flags as a part of themselves, such as "knows how to make steel", which not every dwarf will be able to do, and it's not just a civ-wide boolean "can make steel"?
This, however, then raises the question of "what do I have to do to keep that ability?" Right now, people don't embark with doctors, because the skill rusts too easily, and because someone's just going to walk into their fortress with Grand Master in Diagnosis, anyway. That means you just need to embark with the tech you really need, and wait for the stuff you want to come waddling in your front door. If you lose your last "can make a power loom" dwarf, then it's just a matter of waiting for the next one to immigrate to your fortress.
There's still not much reason to want to educate your children if you aren't going to play long enough to actually see dwarves die of old age (and dwarves live for up to 150 years), so that your legendaries with all their boolean flags might actually need replacing. If you want to start making THAT stuff matter, you have to start talking about ways to make people play fortresses that actually do go THAT far into the future.
(And remember, there's a reason why people abandon after 5 years - after the first few years, it's very, very easy to have everything you need in a fort - a stable, mature fort is a boring fort. The challenge in the game is in setting everything up, and there's nothing to do but wait for the next seige after the first 3 or so years. If you want to make people play longer, you're going to have to find a way to make people interested in maintaining a long-lived fort... Which is, again, the entire point of this: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61620.0)
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I see what you mean. :D I agree with your concerns. I guess it's really easy to make me care about stuff, and I actually like the situation you describe as a crapshoot. I would be totally cool with viewing civ tech status as another aspect of embarking. But I see what you mean about it not being as appealing to other players.
Thinking about my motivations for my suggestions a little further, the reason I would want this knowledge transfer stuff put in is to enrich the world gen so that the world/game setting is much more interesting and compelling than it is now, so that there is more to explore in the world and all the more reason to delve into the unique history and current situation of the procedurally generated world that is different every time. The tech stuff is simply a mechanic to help make the events and situation of the world when it's done generating actually have meaning, so that wars have causes, civs have reasons for being as they are, and so that there are meaningful ways for the fort and actions of the player to affect the world outside of the fort, and vice versa (of course, more than just tech would have to be included for this). That's enough reason in and of itself for me to care...
But I totally see what you mean. Hmmmm... I'll have to think about it some more.
This, however, then raises the question of "what do I have to do to keep that ability?" Right now, people don't embark with doctors, because the skill rusts too easily, and because someone's just going to walk into their fortress with Grand Master in Diagnosis, anyway. That means you just need to embark with the tech you really need, and wait for the stuff you want to come waddling in your front door. If you lose your last "can make a power loom" dwarf, then it's just a matter of waiting for the next one to immigrate to your fortress.
Also, you hit it right on the head as to what I was suggesting. To answer your question: that's where education/apprenticeship and even libraries come into play. Waiting for immigrants, or requesting specialists from a guild or something would be another option. This depends a lot on how immigration, skill rusting, and other aspects are handled in the future.
Again, you raise the good following point:
There's still not much reason to want to educate your children if you aren't going to play long enough to actually see dwarves die of old age (and dwarves live for up to 150 years), so that your legendaries with all their boolean flags might actually need replacing. If you want to start making THAT stuff matter, you have to start talking about ways to make people play fortresses that actually do go THAT far into the future.
And again I say that if FPS issues are remedied, as well as time and material requirements of various activities are modeled more realistically, that would partly address this. In addition, if sieges, warfare, managing lands outside of the fort, the stuff you mentioned in your farming and class warfare threads, and other things are handled well, those will address other major parts of your concern, I think.
As it is now, a mountain can be entirely mined out in a few seasons, mega-projects completed in ridiculously short time scales, sieges staved by a single wall tile, a single ring made out of an arbitrarily sized bar of metal, etc. A lot of these factors skew the importance and time-scales of various economic activities and over-simplify the kind of infrastructure needed to get certain industries up and running. If these are made more realistic, I can almost guarantee that it will take a lot more thinking, effort, and game years to get things working. Of course this would be impossible to do without optimization of the code to keep FPS high and the years ticking at a decent clip.
In essence, I think implementing some sort of tech/knowledge arc thing would best go in after a LOT of other things are optimized and better modeled.
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NW, did you have an opinion on my alternative (quoted in the OP?) I believe that it addresses many of your concerns?
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Lord_Shonus: Basically, I'm not happy with it at a specific level, but fine with it on a general level.
Losing the ability to cast bronze puts you in utter stone age tech. The only thing above that is steel right now. So it's basically just making "technology" about whether you have steel or not.
In order to make this make sense, you'd need to start putting in various levels of tech - "Crude Steel" (possibly worse than bronze), "Wootz Steel", "True/Dwarven Steel", and maybe a "Meteoric/Thunderbolt (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThunderboltIron) Iron" that can be mined out of small deposits of meteor on the map. These being progressions along the path to making a better steel, which make the previous versions obsolete and replaced.
As for the rest of the game, however... I'm generally opposed to the notion of actually barring any of the things we have right now from being made. (Sorry, your civ hasn't researched beds yet, now sleep in the mud!) This means that either we need progressive levels of finished product (and how do you make a better table, really? Does it give you a +20% upgrade to its levelness?) which only makes sense when we are talking about, say, types of armor, where we could have players start with scale mail or banded mail and only make field plate armor that can totally cover the body at the higher tech levels, or if we are talking about tools/workshop upgrades or finished products and trade goods that can be cut on or off.
Workshop upgrades: This requires a revision of the entire production cycle to even start being viable, as production is largely a matter of moving from the stockpile to the workshop and back, not the time it takes to make something. I DO, however, like the idea of having "Ad hoc" workshops that hurt overall item quality, with the ability to make better tools for completing the job, which give you better quality workshops that make better quality products... but quality is a minor concern in this game right now.
Andeerz: It's going to take a major set of changes to the game, not just FPS, but plenty more late-game challenges to keep the game interesting beyond the challenge of self-sustainance to make that sort of generational thing work... you might want to get on some threads for creating late-game challenges, and advocating for or inventing some ways to keep the player occupied. (Empire mode? The player stays in his fort, running it mostly on auto-pilot while planning to take over the world?)
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(Empire mode? The player stays in his fort, running it mostly on auto-pilot while planning to take over the world?)
Mmmmm... now that's an idea to perhaps explore further. Me likey...
EDIT: And I just read the "Dwarven Imperialism" thread thus far. I like the where that thread is going. :3 Perhaps I will chime in in the near future. It gets me thinking that maybe tech progression and stuff would be most meaningful game-wise if a kingdom/empire mode was made (which I am all for). In that way, that possible aspect of the simulation could be more readily observable and interacted with by the player. :D Sort of three levels to the game: adventure, fort, and empire, each able to influence each other! Whee! It makes me happy just thinking about it! And it makes me remember this:
# Core30, KINGDOM, (Future): If you manage to get the monarch of the dwarves to arrive, you should obtain at least indirect control over the entire corresponding dwarven civilization. This includes the movement of all dwarven armies on the map and the ability to make the most important diplomatic decisions. Requires Core28.
So, this could be in keeping with the vision of the Great Toady One!!! :3