Bay 12 Games Forum

The hamlet was destroyed and then the kobolds moved into the ruin.  Happens all the time.

i could be wrong but i believe the reason for the randomness of dwarf preferences is because they don't exist until you (the player) reveal them. i don't think it creates an entire life for every individual (yet) and i can't imagine the difficulty of setting that up

There is no reason we cannot use the system for historical characters and newborn children. 

No, GoblinCookie, the defining characterize is the belief in a conspiracy.  There is plenty of silly political beliefs that are not conspiracies.  For instance the Laffer curve diehards who believed that the Regan and Bush tax cuts increased rather then decreased revenues was a political theory however it was not a conspiracy theory.

A conspiracy is simply a political actor that is not acting in the open.  If you expose a conspiracy then it is no longer a conspiracy any more; that is how the whole term is loaded, the fact that something is being called a conspiracy theory implies it is false, since a conspiracy that actually exists is not any longer if it is exposed. 

Not being believed in is the requirement for a conspiracy to work.  Once people believe you are doing what you are doing, you become a political actor and not a conspiritor; equally if a political actor does something openly but people refuse to believe in it then their actions then become conspiritorial despite the fact they were done openly. 

To say that you are conspiracy theorist is kind of a paradox.  It means that you believe that something that you have exposed is acting secretly, despite the fact that your knowing about it means that it is not a secret any more. 

Missed a not, there, I do believe. And they don't use that term because a conspiracy theory is a fairly specific sort of belief. Notably, it involves and requires a conspiracy, which most beliefs don't.

In any case, ant, I don't think it really does display a failure of reason and whatnot. The subset of beliefs that fall under conspiracy theory generally are held by marginal populations -- most people are not convinced by them. That some are is usually not so much a failure of reason so much as a failure of neurology. In any human population you're not going to have a 100% consensus on basically anything. A strong methodology can only do so much with flawed technology, and there's no fault in the methodology implied when the technology involved fails.

Normally a conspiracy theory is a perjorative term that involves a belief involving a conspiracy that I do not agree with.  If you believe in it, it isn't a conspiracy theory anymore; it is a political theory. 

What I mean is the fortress produces goods. People come to the fortress to sell stuff from other lands and to buy stuff from the fortress. Why should the fortress itself send out caravans or, in other words, become yet another trader?

We need to be careful not to start the whole capitalism vs communism thing again here.

But essentially the "state" usually only needs to invest in trade when it comes to creating new routes or something, such as building a harbour and boats and sending them out to discover america.

Let us assume that the socio-economic Status Quo which shall remain nameless is in place in order to avoid any such 'thing' from happening. 

Fortress A produces a caravan which it then sends to Fortress B to trade copper for cloth.  Fortress A wants cloth and produces copper, Fortress B wants copper and produces cloth, which Fortress A wants.  The fact that the two fortresses produce what the other wants means that there is a potential trade route between the two, the question here is why did Fortress A not simply wait for Fortress B to send a caravan to it?

The answer I think is what is called 'First Movers Advantage', once Fortress A has sent a caravan to Fortress B the profits of the caravan trading with Fortress B go to Fortress A and not merely the cloth from Fortress B; it can therefore get more cloth in return for it's copper basically.  However once it has 'moved', Fortress B is unable to recipricate by sending a caravan of it's own to Fortress A because the result is a direct competition between the two caravans.  The act of creating the second competing caravan is Mutually-assured Destruction for both parties, since once there are two caravans both settlements can force eachothers caravans to trade at a loss, since if they do not get what they want from the caravan that visited their fortress their own caravan can buy it from the other fortress anyway.  Complicated isn't it? 

Thing is that in order to make economic sense a caravan must make a profit, that is because the resources and labour used by the caravan would otherwise be employed elsewhere by the fortress whose caravan it is.  The end result of the situation above mentioned, where both settlements send a caravan to eachother is that both settlements end up paying the cost of a caravan and neither settlement can make a profit to cover that cost.  This means that what drives the creation of caravans (or trading ships or river barges for that matter) is a race to 'own' as much of the trade as possible along a particular route because once you own the trade route between two settlements, then nobody can compete with you along the exact same route without the result being thedestruction of both you and them.

A settlement is thus willing to undergo the initial cost of creating a caravan as opposed to waiting for it's neighbor to do so because whoever moves first gets to 'own' the route forever, not in the legal sense but because anybody who invests in setting up a rival along the exact same route stands to ruin themselves.  This means that their is a scramble to snap up as many profitable trade routes as possible, a scramble that could easily result in war; you pay the expense of setting up your caravans in order to grab trading 'territory' rather than allow others to take that 'territory'. 

This makes perfect sense - they send caravans to us why not us sending them out to other cities and Fortresses?   We can sell them our fine goods or try to see if they will take all the junk we get from corpses or the local dump.   Win/win!   

Of course, caravans would have some overhead - so maybe that would keep people more honest.  You would want to make enough to cover the cost and still make a profit.  Darn, I just shot down my own idea of selling the Elves used clothing.   

At the moment outside of fortress mode the minor sites trade with the major sites and the major sites all trade with eachother.  I would gage that the former is to be dealt with in the starting scenarios release while the latter is to be dealt with in the caravan/trader arc.  In that sense we would be sending caravans out to other major settlements and they would be sending caravans to us; as opposed to us trading only with the civilization as a whole (though there is a reason to have a special civilization caravan as well). 

Seems like a simple enough thing to implement once the rest of the planned caravan infrastructure is in place. What's the advantage of making your own caravan? And who (historically) owns caravans anyway?

The advantage is that you get the profit rather than the other guy.   

You`re wrong. In addition at your eras I also have age of elves, age of dwarves, twillight age, golden age and age of fairy tales. But I havent seen age of heroes and age of legend anymore as in 34.11. Age of Myth the must usually era.
I have not modify game at all

It all depends upon number of historical characters, size of world, number of sites and so on.

How high does this have to be? I started to test it and even with a biome support for ANY_WETLANDS of 10000 they still barely grow, if at all. Does it need to be done at the entity level or at the creature level (if that's even possible)?


Edit: How the hell do I restrict a position by gender? I've tried putting [ALLOWED_CREATURE:REPTILE_MAN:MALE] [REJECTED_CREATURE:REPTILE_MAN:FEMALE] [GENDER:MALE] in every single position but it won't work. Am I getting the arguments wrong?

The maximum Biome Support is 10 and it has to be done at the entity level obviously.  Try removing all vegetable food producing jobs from the entity as well, I do not know if this does anything but it means more folk obviously will end up as hunters/fishermen/animal herders, so perhaps more meat food to go round.  You will not end up with a large population, but you should end up with a population that is viable.

As for restricting position by gender, just take a look at the elves.