Bay 12 Games Forum

I have a little off topic question.... which is the version in which people used to create the age of twilight, killing everything in adventure mode? iirc correctly things in 34.11 respawn too.

Things do not respawn instantly.  If you killed so many people that it exceeds the rate of respawn you could turn every site of a particular type into a ruin.  If I kill everybody in a site it turns into a ruin that then has it has to be reclaimed, but no reclaiming can happen if no civilization is left that knows about the site which is the correct town type to reclaim. 

At the moment the population growth of sites happens as with the player fortress by migrants arriving, the majority of said migrants are not real people but were simply conjured into existence in order to fill up the migration wave.  Only historical characters reproduce in the normal manner and sometimes non-historical characters can get promoted into historical characters, such as when they kill a historical character or when they are given a government position.

Population in AI Sites is limited not by the population limit as with the player fortress but by the available food supplies.  The amount of food produced in a site is determined by it's biome support, by the available types of food that the creature can eat (carnivores populations are always lower), by whether the creature is allowed to farm overground and underground and lastly by how many kinds of food producing professions it has. 

Major sites (called markets) like a fortress which trade with lesser sites on an exclusive basis can import food from those sites in their orbit, allowing their population to increase beyond the level that they could based upon their own core resources.  Goblins however do not have to eat, so their population is limited only by the hard-coded maximum population cap of 10,000 for major sites and 500 for minor sites.  They do however still produce food, which results in them exporting that food and spamming all the nearby sites with troll meat. 

They're carnivores, carnivores don't work right in worldgen that's why Toady made it so Goblins don't eat. If you take [CARNIVORE] out they'll reproduce more quickly.

Carnivores do work fine, it is just that they remove any benefit they get from farming.  Carnivores work directly based upon biome support, if that is high enough carnivores are quite viable.

In order to have complex interactions between dwarves and a group of animal people, we'd have to first make the overground animal people minor entities that stay confined to a single village within their savage biome, rather than separated groups of nomads, and define nobles for each to have (such as a chieftain). I do think that the chieftain's personality could influence how the tribe in general reacts to your presence. You could get a lliason (with some security) to try to negotiate with them, and his personality could influence the effectiveness of these negotiations. (So you would want to get a high-tempered dwarf if you want peace.)

Why can we not just have the nomads roam about in the vicinity of the fortress?

Agreed. Looks very well thought out.

It's honestly a touch concerning Toady had to get involved on that other thread, and you'd think that would be enough of a red flag to cool it with what is essentially constant arguing about communism.

As to some of what GoblinCookie has said, I find it somewhat odd that he keeps insinuating the fortress or whatever invents the concept of a private workshop for example, when that's not the fortress, that's the game being developed to allow more freedom and autonomy in the AI of the units we control, and with what I had come up with, can be countered by an eviction/seizure if the place is inconveniently located or otherwise in the way.

Just as we can't tell our soldiers to go for the legs or stop attacking an enemy's armored head, why should we have absolute and complete control over what they do with any money they come into?

I will however concede to one thing, and that's that it would be kinda cool to have your soldiers pick things up off invaders they killed after a battle and keeping them in thier rooms as reminders/trophies. Who knows, maybe later down the line off-duty combat veterans could use those items to help tell the story of how he took a helmet or shoe after decapitating or slicing the leg off of an invader, perhaps imparting a little bit of knowledge while doing so (such as a very tiny bit of xp towards the weapon they used and the fighter skill to the listeners.)

It'd also make sense on that subject that less martial cultures might frown on that sort of thing, since they may view fighting more as a necessary evil best forgotten and not celebrated.

Because it does invent the concept of the private workshop and institutes that concept in law.  Nothing about the inherant nature of any workshop makes it *your* workshop, the workshop by it's inherant nature is available for use by anyone.  It only becomes *your* workshop when somebody invents the concept of private workshops and gets the government to make that concept law.  If the concept obviously only disrupts the running of the fortress, then the government will not make the concept law. 

If we have a set of laws and institutions that simply make the game harder, then all we are doing is arbiterily tying up the player to sacrifice their own dwarves for the sake of a set of principles that have no actual substance in reality, while if we give the player the freedom all the work of adding them in was for nothing.  That is why I am proposing that the laws/economy exist for a definite reason based upon the values of the creature, rather than simply being there preset for eternity or being random.

A very martial culture wants to make warfare profitable as a lifestyle, hence it rewards the items of defeated enemies to it's warriors.  A moderately martial culture wants to profit from warfare but does not want to encourage the kind of barbarism and trophy taking above mentioned, so it makes the loot property of the fortress a whole.  A unmartial culture would be ashamed to profit from others death, however neccesery and so it sends all the equipment of their defeated foes back to the sites they came from. 

The overall amount of freedom the player has to follow of break the rules (with internal political consequences) is determined by the civ's [LAW], a lawless civilization thinks that the site should make the rules up as it goes along anyway while a lawful civilization ties the site governments hand to conform with the rules of the civilization.

God, I hope not. It would be a waste of his time to be honest. Someone probably just reported us, and that forced him to skim through some of our ridiculous shitposting

You hope not? Do you really think that you have nothing to contribute? 

You have missed my point. I used quotation marks for "inventing religion" to point out how ridiculous is the idea that you'd need to invent something like that. It's like saying you'd need to "invent" the concept of private or communal property. Yes, I understand that more advanced concepts than developed modern capitalism would be anachronistic in DF's proposed timeline, but simply owning a house and being self-employed isn't, and it also isn't something the fortress needs to "invent" in order to exist. 

There is a difference here you are not grasping, some things like questions of whether or not gods exist are objective questions.  God either does or not exist, if he does he does whether or not you believe in him.  In that sense the dwarves are believing something about the world, wrongly or otherwise as it actually is, so religion is basically similar to historical research or botany or the many other things that will be added in next release.

Private property on the other hand, even the possession of the clothes on your back are not objective facts.  Nothing about those objects makes them yours, it only other people who are powerful backing up your claim on those objects that makes them yours.  This makes the whole question of anachronism complicated, if there is no actual reason for a dwarf fortress (or other site since they are organised the same) to invent private property of any kind then the kind of things you are talking about become anachronistic. 

Without a reason to introduce the correct forms of private property, nobody would logically be self-employed and nobody would have their own houses, meaning adding those things into the game is anachronistic.  What happened or did not happen in the middle ages is not relevant because there is a basic divergance between the DF world and Middle Ages in terms of historical development that cannot be rectified easily and were it rectified would essentially make it a different game altogether. 

I was talking about your winky ironic comments. It can be seen as impolite and can turn a friendly argument into something ugly.

Also, I don't have anything agaist Marxism on the forums or on Dwarf Fortress. Believe me or not, if you were instead a libertarian extremist banging about how Marxism would make no sense in DF at every opportunity, I'd be arguing against you for the presense of communist economics in DF instead.

My beef with you is that you seem to want to avoid having anything too close to a capitalist system on DF in the first place (including things that are already in the game such as coins), using very confusing arguments that mostly make sense only to you. Make no mistake, your logic is not nearly as convincing to most people as you think it is, and at times it appears to be very circular (as it has been pointed out by Bumper in our last thread).

The winky ironic conflicts are intended to lighten the tone and avoid conflicts.  I raised the problems of having individual workshops privately owned by dwarves and your response was simply to propose that we have collective workshops!  So I have to repeat myself over and over again because we keep going around in circles; the reason being that I am bieng the only person in the debate that actually adds new ideas into the system (the exception here being Enchiridon). 

The audience thankfully enough is not the other people on the forum but the devs, so it does not matter what you and random other people think.  I therefore propose mechanics for the games expansion, not vague dreams about future dwarf fortresses 20 years down the line.  Coins are in the game, the reason why the coins are in the game but have so little actual function is because the devs reflectively added in without actually thinking too much about why coins would actually exist.  The equivilant of the addition of coins is the very thing I want to avoid happening in the future, I will explain.

Coins are valuable because they have two things that normal objects do not have; a fixed value and an infinite demand.  Since at present *all* items in the game have a fixed value and infinite demand coins are therefore completely valueless.  Coins would only be invented when we end up with the situation where the value of objects is *not* fixed forever and only a limited amount of the items are actually in demand.  Because neither of these conditions are met, nobody would care or even notice if coins were to dissapear from the game altogether (they already largely have) because they have no actual value at all. 

This assumes that the State (or the player) is more efficient at quickly constructing workshops than individual dwarves. This is not always the case, as the player often gives too much ephasis on specific industries, and when some other industries needs attention it's hard for them to shift production.

The industries that do not get built are the industries the player/state does not care about.  Having individual dwarves build their own workshops to do those things means that resources are being siphoned away from the things that the player/state does care about to build things they consider valueless.  If dwarves want things enough they should complain/rebel at the player in order to influence state policy. 

This is why I proposed a lack of [COOPERATION] as the value that would lead to private workshops being built.  If it is not possible to get all the dwarves to actually cooperate towards the ends of the player/state then the player/state might want to restrict access of dwarves to workshops while at the same time forcing the dwarves to produce certain goods for the fortress as a tax to the player in order to avoid being punished for tax evasion and/or lose their property (depending upon how strong the private ownership is). 

In the abscence of Labour Property which is tied to [INDEPENDANCE] the dwarves would own the workshops, but not the actual items they produce which would actually be fortress goods.  This means that the individual dwarves are still working for the State but with tools that they own, the ownership of their tools allow the State to 'tax them' which means not handing over private goods but simply producing stuff the state wants as opposed to what the individual thinks the fortress ought to want.  If Labour Property is high then the dwarves will actually own the goods they produce in their own workshops but will hand over some of them as taxes, what most people would consider the normal situation. 

How do you know how complicated it would be? Remember that site relationships in world gen only started to be heavily worked on around 2012. A lot of things were in the way of this, like basic domestic stuff in dwarf mode such as farming, animals and how to handle soldiers, etc. Making a vassal/tributary-lord relationship between sites seem like a time-consuming advancement, but one that they have constantly talked about wanting to do for several years now. Also, they seem to be on their way to accomplish that:

[picture that takes up too much space]

As complicated as dividing up the map into areas and adding an abstracted peasant population that initially functions more or less identically to animal people.  There is no need for Toady One to initially code in all the details of the dwarves working because all goods are brought by peasants drawn from the abstracted peasant pool (like how animals populate the map in a way) in order to pay the taxes.  The game thus initially focuses entirely on site relationships, the whole stuff about work and what the peasants get up to are left entirely abstracted since they are more or less purely decorative anyway (since the player does not get directly involved in their lives).

What the devs are actually done is the very opposite of a what Feudal Fortress develop would do.  They have focused on the elements of lowest priority to such an arrangement, the details of the peasants working, the organisation of their work and abstracted the elements of highest priority to Feudalism.  As a result they have accidentally created a non-Feudal Fortress because when the government's own core 'palace' can initially produce enough surplus value to sustain itself without an external contribution then it is freed of the need to sell government to other entities (collecting taxes), which is what Feudalism is based upon. 

That is because of the basic conflict that exists between the seller of any commodity and the welfare of the society he is selling it too.  The seller wants there to be a scarcity of what they are selling but the society wants there to be an abundance of it.  The difference between selling government and selling any other commodity however, is the act of selling allows the seller to alter society how the seller wisher.  If you are the seller, then you alter society to drive up the demand for your own commodity, thus harming the welfare of society for your own gain; you basically propogate anarchy as a local level so you can sell government to the people. 

A DF site has absolutely no need to sell government to others and nobody who would actually want to buy it.  This means if one DF Site rules over another, as is planned for the DF Fortress then the relationship is based upon one site selling another central government instead of simply government, that is offering the lesser sites the benefits of being part of a larger whole.  If the Dwarf Fortress starts to disorganise it's hillocks in order to reduce the amount of government locally available so it can sell it's government to them (as above), then the hillocks simply declare independance and look for another fortress to provide them with central goverment instead.  There is also no reason for this to happen, a central government is more valuable to a local government the larger it is and the stronger it's companants are; both for 'advertisment' reasons and because it means there are more resources available for collective projects that benefit all the member sites.

Given dwarven average morals, I doubt a dwarven civ would ever work like this.

Not normally, but values are intended to change over time; meaning that such an arrangment could happen (but would be vanishingly rare). 

Why "invent" religion in the first place then? You speak as if only the state had the power to introduce or manipulate popular culture

Invent religion?  As opposed to inventing what, Goblin Atheism or Elf Pantheism?  It is possible for the officials in charge of the system to themselves believe in religious ideas is it not? 

Yes, without private property it is pretty much only the State that has the ability to noticably introduce or manipulate popular culture.  The ability of an individual to independantly of the State make a substantial contribution to popular culture is not there unless the individual has private property, otherwise the medium he is using to do so is going to have to be controlled *by* the State, so the State can simply dissallow him from propogating his views.  If he tries to influence things simply on his own powers, the contribution of the DF Capitalist is simply cancelled out by the extremist DF Communist who thinks that the Status Quo is not Communist enough because the family still exists and people still own the clothes on their backs. 

This creates a huge problem for the topic of the discussion.  The individual not only cannot directly create private property without the backing of the State but he also cannot create a mass movement to demand it without the backing of the State.  The end result is that no private property is invented unless it suits the ends of the State for it to exist. 

Of course hereditary leadership is the norm. What I'm questioning here is that if dwarf fortress really is such a perfect collective society, why would it "invent" a hierarquical monarchy in the first place?

Because they are not social insects.  This means that their social groups have a heirachy, because they do not have a Hive Mind by which they all have the same information and all automatically form a consensus. 

If dwarf values for the [FAMILY] fall low enough, it makes sense for them to 'suspend' the hereditery nature of all positions.

They also presently enjoy the privilege of condemning commoners to be physically punished for not making the useless things they ordered. I guess "it makes sense", as dwarves usually just nod and go on with their lives after some random carpenter is beaten to death by a guard for not making a table in time, even though the people in charged forgot to make the order in the first place. *winky face*

Making up arbitery production targets and punishing people seemingly at random.  Reminds me of someone in particular.

All you need is for the site to have more than a single administrator (like the manager). He could pretty much do the same job as the baron. You could also train diplomats when necessary. There's no point to a nobility in this collective utopia that you imagine df as being right now. What I'm telling you is that DF right now is a dysfunctional society, clearly intended to be vaguely feudal but couldn't because it was too complicated to design a proper feudal economy. All I'm trying to say is that maybe, in the future, we'll see one, as Toady seems to be attempting to go into that direction.

The game makes no distinction between nobles and administrators.  The manager however is not the same job as the baron because the job of the baron is to represent the fortress at the central government level, the manager however is preoccupied with running the economy at a site level. 

It would not be complicated for Toady One to have initially created a Feudal economy.  All he would have to do is divide the generated map into abstract territories with abstracted peasant populations, carve the territories up among a number of sites and have the sites collect resources/manpower from the territories that it rules. 

It's not hard to understand what the term surplus value means. According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labour-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold. It is very much a term used in marxian economics, and for someone to believe it to be detached from it is strange to me. If you're using marxist jargon in a discussion about economy, expect people to call you out on it.

Also, you have completely ignored my main argument: while "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to. So, in the future, even "normal fortresses" could be able to sustain themselves through taxes and not by being "self-sustained", whether you think such situation would bee anachronistic or not.

Marx did not himself invent the term, the developed the concept.

Surplus value means just what it says on the tin, value that is surplus.  There is no viable society where the worker does not produce more value than the worker personally consumes.  This applies equally to Animals, Hunter-Gatherers, Feudalism, Capitalism, Marx's ideal Communist society etc.  It is however the crucial difference between the Feudal Castle of History and the Dwarf Fortress in Yr 0; the latter produces surplus value while the former does not. 

Since you do not like the concept of surplus value let us put it like this: A Feudal Castle has to mantain the 'value' of it's commodity in order to survive (taxation).  Any self-government and organisation among the peasants results in them needing those in the Castle less and thus the value of the government (the amount of taxes they are willing to pay) goes down.  If it goes down too much then the Castle will not be able to pay for itself. 

This means that private property among the peasantry is a no-brainer because it reduces the amount of government that there is locally.  As with any commodity the less of it there is the more valuable it becomes.  If the government however does not have to sell it's government commodity (collect taxes) then it will conclude that having the peasants have lots of government will mean they need to 'make' less government themselves, resulting in them creating something along the lines of a DF Hillocks, with their own governments and armies. 

Again, if in the future a fortress will be able to become more similar to a medieval fortress, it'll be a viable comparison

No it will not.  As a mine the dwarf fortress produces value in it's construction, even if the dwarves do not do anything but construct it. 

Oh, I thought we were attempting to make polite conversation here, gobbman. I see how quickly you go back to your winky self. I could go that rout too so, how fast do you want this thread locked?

Anyway, marxist nonsense aside, I have nothing against public property in dwarf fortress, even some that are geared towards production. If it makes sense, who cares? Having dwarves possess their own individal workshops, however, also sounds appealing to me but it could be a nightmareto make it work given the game's limitations. Once we see what replaces VPL, it will become a bit clearer if such a thing is possible. To be fair, you can kind of arrange that in a way right now by giving each workshop you have to an individual dwarf when you have a manager.

There is no rule in the forum against Marxism, so I can actually be as Marxist as I damn well like.  If you want to escalate things into a full on flame-war that gets the thread banned, that is entirely your perogative but remember that is is your own thread that gets locked.

I have my reverse engineered quasi-Marxism and you have in response only what I can only politely call Confusion.  The constant inability to distinguish between Cause and Effect, DF and Middle Ages, DF Present and DF Distant future, Question and Answer; since that is all you have been able to so far muster so far, I am not surprised at your desire to ban Marxism.

It is inefficiant to have private workshops in DF because the craftsmen is not always working, a public workshop on the other hand can be used 100% of the time since as one dwarf exits the workshop another can take over.  There is no private workshops yet because the fortress has not invented them, so give me a reason why they would invent them?

If they are more efficient at producing what they want, they are better at meeting the needs of everybody because, well, they are everybody. You could argue that letting them use certain strategical resourses that are very limited (like steel for instance) would be bad for the fortress, so maybe it would be better to control the circulation of those particular resourses. You can also help those who can't find work by allowing them to use public dormitories and by giving them access to food. Or even better, they would probably go willingly accept joining the army or other appointed sevice for the realm. There's a middle ground for these things, you know? I assume we'll see a few options for these probems once the economy is up and running again.

No they are not everybody, they are always somebody in particular with particular skills and needs.  If you have a master dwarf craftsmen, your fortress benefits if he labours to produce dwarf crafts for the whole fortress, not simply for himself.  The fortress also does not want to have unemployed people that exist at it's expense, it wants everybody to work because even if their labour does not manage to produce surplus value it mitigates some of their cost. 

Scarce resources (like steel) can be distributed by tradable rationing cards with a use-by date.  No sensible fortress would attempt to ration goods using money, since they would never be able to set the prices correctly without knowing how much money people both have and are willing to part with. 

A lot of these are redundant or confusing, like "Military Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer." Why would military prowess influence this at all? If anything, the sense of pride and respect for the law would influence this the most. A very proud dwarf (or dwarven civ), amost religious about his respect for the law would maybe consider using equipment from a defeated foe theft and therefore a dishonorable act.

A lot of them are potentially redundant simply because they are all intended to potentially exist/not exist quite independantly of eachother and when combined a lot of them form a larger whole that is greater than what they alone make.  Your answer here is an example of what I earlier referred as the confusion between Cause and Effect or Question and Answer. 

In a society that has high levels of Military Property, the religiously law-abiding dwarf is quite happy to take things from his defeated enemies; that is because legally speaking, their property belongs to him!  By contrast at low levels of Military Property, the property of the defeated enemies is considered Foreign Property so it's new owner is decided by the laws of the civilization the defeated comes from.  At medium levels of Military Property the defeated enemies items end up belonging to the site as a whole and hence are treated according to it's Goverment Property laws.

As for why [MARTIAL_PROWESS] would decide anything, that is pretty easy.  If you were an adventurer and you saved a village from goblins, you would not want said village to operate under laws that said that the items of the defeated goblins did not belong to you?  Societies that want to encourage becoming a professional warrior then introduce laws that reward the victorious warrior with the spoils of war while societies who want to discourage that kind of thing deprive the warrior of the spoils of war in order to reduce the profitability of his lifestyle. 

The way to go about this kinda ties in with my zones thread...

But other than that, I am all for a bit more autonomy in the fortress as long as it is meaningful and makes itself notable.

EDIT:

Quote from: Ribs on October 20, 2015, 01:21:28 am

... nonsense...

My God... The Toad walks among us...

Indeed, the Toad actually reads our lengthy economics threads. 

Not all human actions and institutions are made for the sake of "efficiency", because humans aren't worker ants. They are adding the institution of Temples in the game. Do they make sense? I mean, current dwarven society seems to work fine without those.  Some of the concepts start making sense if more problems are added into the game. The addition of temples wouldn't make sense unless you also make dwarves want them.

Temples are not productive institutions, they are a form of value; an end not a means.  The question of efficiency in that context is rather then like asking whether dwarf society would be more efficient if the dwarves stopped wearing clothes.

What we talking about is the question of how the temples get built and as far as I can tell between the present setup and a hypothetical individualistic economy based upon private property, the former builds more temples than the latter.  This is why I ask the question of why would anybody ever introduce the latter kind of economy?

None of these things are necessary. Currently, fathers have zero influence in the raising of their children, and mothers feel only the need to carry the baby around for one year before they virtually abandon them. It makes you think: what is the point of fathers at all? If they are so collective, maybe they should never marry and just have children like spores, and leave the babies in "baby farms" (a concept you apparently approve).

Now the reason that I can safetely say that is not the direction of how the game will approach raising of children and sexual/parental relationships in the future is because 'that' is completely alien behavior in most (if any) known human societies.

If children talk with either parents they get happy thoughts for doing so.  The full extent of family relationships is presently abstracted away, much like pretty much the whole game world; either for reasons of dev time or memory. 

If a civilization has [FAMILY:-50] I could percieve them basically dumping their children on the baby farm as soon as they are born; where they would then be adopted by primary caregivers pretty much as pets are adopted.  If a civilization has [ROMANCE:-50] as well I could envison them concieving babies with random strangers as ordered by the manager, considering this just another king of 'work'. 

Why would the state allow such ridiculous beliefs? Dwarf fortress has no interest in dwarves having these beliefs, because it doesn't help the collective. Selfish dwarves practicing religious ideas should be arrested and given suitable, nasty punishments for oding so.[/sarcasm]

My point is, some institutions are in the game not becaus they are "mechanically optimal", but because we as humans can relate to them

If the ridiculous beliefs teach the dwarves to labour for the site they live in, then the state will likely crack down on people who consider those beliefs ridiculous.

Can you honestly say this justify the existence of a royal dynasty? It's like saying that it would make sense for a president in a modern democracy to only train his or her children in the art of presidency. This is simply no analogous to human hisory.   

We are not talking about a modern democracy where the qualifications for leadership frequently often seem to be being "the best liar".  Hereditery leadership is quite the norm throughout human history and I have given you a reason why it might be adopted.  It does not however mean that Dwarf Kings are identical in role to the kings of Real-Life Civ X however. 

If we have to have monarchy schools everywhere in order to get a skilled king then the majority of the graduates would be better off learning how to do something useful since there can be only one King. 

And again, these positions are dynastical why? What's the point in making a different class of people with different privileges if you consider higher nobles to be simple "governemnt bureaucrats"?

The only privilages they presently seem to enjoy is nicer rooms.  As the rooms get handed out to individuals by the beurocrats, it "makes sense" that they end up with the nicest rooms; not in the sense that it makes sense for the fortress as a whole but for those doing the appointing . 

The dynastic bit is pretty easy to work out too.  The barons as implied in the baron-appointement window are supposed to be the middle link in the chain between the King/Central Gov and the Mayor/Site.  The site sends a candidate off to the king who then officially appoints the baron. 

If they are appointed by the king then things are weighted towards the king and things become too centralised.  If they are appointed by the site in some manner, either directly elected or appointed by the Mayor then things get too de-centralised.  If we have the barons however train their children to become barons after them, much as with the kings then the barons are not longer beholden to either side of the coin so we end up with a golden mean of sorts between centralisation and de-centralisation. 

Do you seriously think there would be no reason to build a fortress in a place whithout enough resources to sustain itself?  You could build your immediate fortress in a place where there is very little in terms of food, bacause it's a great defensive/strategic location. The villages that produce food could be a few miles from the site to support a larger fortress population. If you are successful in taxing hose people, you could sustain a fortress that is mostly composed of dwarves that don't "produce" much of anything, and is basically populated of soldiers or nobles.

While "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to.

Also, friendly reminder that the term "surplus value" is a central Marxist concept and very unique to marx's view on economy. If you don't want an ideological debate, I'd advise you to be a little more conservatve about throwing those terms around. Doing so makes it hard for people to argue against your points without trying to debunk several aspects of marxist economical theory, and these arguments proved themselves to be unproductive.

No, surplus value is a basic economic term that means something specific that has nothing to do with Marxism beyond the fact that it makes use of it.  It means the amount of wealth produced by a worker in excess of the amount that the worker consumes.  If in DF terms we have a fishermen that produces 20 fishes but eats 10 of them, that means we have a surplus value of 10 fishes which allows the fisherman to feed his children.  It is impossible for a society to survive without surplus value, because children obviously are not born able to produce more food than they eat.   See, no Marxism; just the undeniable reality that workers must in every society produce more wealth than they consume. 

If the regular fortress/hillocks/mountain halls is the fishermen, then militery outpost/palace/temple/prison fortresses are the equivilent of the fisherman's children; with the unfortunate difference being that they never 'grow up'.  What happens if the fisherman stops feeding his eternal children, the children either 'grow up' or they starve.  To return to the question of how the DF History messes up the normal historical development then the difference is that dwarf society starts off with a fortress that then creates new dwarf sites; a pattern repeated every time the civilization colonises a new area.  This means that the fisherman writes the rules and his children do not. 

To contrast with history: the fishermen in history would be a bunch of scattered about peasants with no effective government.  The goverment on the hand is very much a fisherman's child, which means that the result is that the government makes the rules to make sure that at all costs ensure that the peasants do not form their own government, because their very survival depends upon it.  I shall leave it there before I slip into 'Marxism'. 

They were not necessarily to protect workers agaisnt the state, but to protect workers agaist other workers. That's why I (and many historians) compared them to cartels. Becaue when a bunch of businesses band together, that's pretty much what you get: a cartel.

Workers that are free to join the guild provided they meet the qualifications.  By allowing qualified workers to not join the guild, the guild reduces it's bargaining power against the State because they can no longer command the whole labour power of their craft.  You also have to remember that the guild members are not acting as single company but a whole load of independant self-employed producers and for that reason are still competing against eachother whether they are all guild members or not. 

No, there were castles in the Alps covering southern germany with villages and farmland wherever the earth was fertile. It's not hard to compare the two

If you know nothing about the economics of surplus value it is easy to compare the two. 

Not necessarily. There could be a large, central workshop for public or guild use that could support several dwarves working there at the same time, possibly for their own individual projects.

We are back to collective ownership of the means of production then are we not?  Karl Marx would be proud of your suggestion Ribs  .

First of all, when you say "efficient", you mean that in very relative terms. It's very hard to say that a "realistic" individualist system (that probably wouldn't even be possible to program in DF) wouldn't be more efficient. If dwarves were intelligent enough to pruduce things regardless of your orders and according to their own necessities, maybe they would do a better job than you ever could. But that's not how the game will ever work, so there's no point discussing it.

Also, you know that VPL has it's days numbered. So what people have been telling you all along is that there is no use in being so attatched to that system when it's not going to be as influencial in the future.

I know that and I will be happy to see VPL go; since it is an interface nightmare (would prefer a system of custom classes).  However I know that Toady One has recently put a lot of work into developing the whole labour system on that basis, I am pretty much sure that whatever system replacing it will be to use an analogy, a graft.  The basic code will inevitably be the same underneath but the interface on top of it will be different and definately customisable to different dwarves.

Yes individual dwarves would be more efficiant at meeting their own needs than the player would be.  That is however exactly what we do not logically want, we want the dwarves to meet not only their own needs but everybody else in the fortress's needs as well.  Maximum efficiency means everybody getting all the stuff they need, not merely a few top workers with the required skills to make everything they need. 

You're bieng very simplistic in your view of "cooperation". A cooperative dwarf wouldn't blindly follow orders that go against every other value that he has. If the dwarf highly respects commerce, and you set up a fortress with laws that severely cripples commerce, then cooperating with said fortress' official's orders would be a conflict of interests to said dwarf.

Also, you imply that a dwarf that believes in private propery wouldn't believe in cooperation. Why wouldn't they? If you believe in private property, you would do poorly in team sports? If you're going to make it a tag you may as well name it COLECTIVISM.

Toady One set up the values to be as they are not I, if I made the game I would have used explicitly ideological values along the lines of your proposed [COLLECTIVISM] value because I would have intended to one day make us of them in an explicitly political sense. 

Values are not supposed to be necceserily how the dwarves behave personally, they are what the dwarf believes in.  A dwarf that would in my system believe in private property but still is good at team sports is an example of the combination of a low [COOPERATION] value with a low [DISCORD] personality.  They do not believe in everybody simply working together as one unit under the site manager, but they still by nature find it easy to work together harmoniously with others all the same.

The scenario you mention is the reason that some people "view cooperation as a low ideal not worthy of any respect" .  [COOPERATION] is about putting aside your personal goals in order to work together as part of a larger whole, a being with [COOPERATION:50] does not allow his gripes about the commercial policy of the fortress to stop him working together as part of the fortress.  If he did then he would be [COOPERATION:0] instead, because his cooperation with the fortress is conditional rather than unconditional.  This does not mean that he starts liking the fortress commercial policy, but that he does not let it get in the way of his cooperating.

I am here talking about one single form of property, that is ownership of capital.  There should be multiple independant types of property and different levels of privatisation of each form of property, the tricky thing is ensuring that they can exist independantly.  A list of the various types of property I can think of a civilization introducing and the value that promotes them, either in high levels (+) or at low levels (-).

Noble Property: [POWER+]: To what extent do legitimate position holders have a right to continue to occupy their office.
Family Property: [FAMILY+]: To what extent and degree of closeness do family members get to make use of what their relatives have. 
Sentimental Property: [TRADITION+]: To what extent do objects that it is agreed are of special personal importance to them.
Intellectual Property: [ARTWORK+]: To what extent do authors of intellectual or artistic works have rights over the ideas or forms they have created (not the physical objects).
Capital Property: [COOPERATION-]: To what extent are workshops and tools owned by private individuals. (what we were talking about)
Labour Property: [INDEPENDANCE+]: To what extent do workers have rights over what they personally produce.
Residential Property: [COMPETITION+]: To what extent do people have rights over the rooms or other spaces they occupy. 
Emigrant Property: [SACRIFICE+]: To what extent do people have the right to take things with them when they emigrate.
Government Property: [HARD_WORK-]: To what extent are non-assigned goods owned by the site restricted from public use by it's own members.
Outsider Property: [COMMERCE-]: To what extent are fortress goods made available for free/subsidised for use by visiting outsiders.
Militery Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer.
Foreign Property: [PEACE+]: To what extent and to what length of time do items lost by foreign sites, individuals or civilizations continue to belong to them.
Body Property: [HARMONY+]: To what extent does the individual have rights over their own physical body.
Personal Property: [TRANQUILITY+]: To what extent does the individuals personal items belong to them.