Bay 12 Games Forum

With or without uniforms, maintaining order of battle in a large group involved lots of shouting and trumpets and drums and the occasional bagpipe.

...if you indeed have a large group, yes. Thousands of men, not the groups of 7-8 that independently acting DF invading squads use. They would all know each other extremely intimately, and be able to recognize members of the other squads personally, too. You would know the dents in your comrades' armor, and their specific types of clothing, etc. already as well as a uniform.

...and more relevant to this thread, if you're all the same species, then you might need the extra boost in recognition from insignia. AND you wouldn't therefore have any advantage over your enemy in recognition, either.

If however, you are in a small group and you are using race as a bonus, but your enemy is not using race, then you have a huge potential advantage by being the first one to use the obvious racial cue, and thus maintains just as much order of battle without uniforms while they lose theirs and suffer confusion. I.e., any time you have a bunch of race-blind civilizations, there's a huge "evolutionary" adaptation to using it firest (just behavioral though and easily learned, not actual evolution)

If you just draw a cutoff at 5% or something to stop calculating further (stop considering attack), it might be a really helpful shortcut too.

A proper system would use Bayesian updating to construct the creature's beliefs, and a loss function

That would be pretty epic. But also pretty laggy I would imagine. Not for invasions (once an attack occurs, you can stop calculating for everyone), but for caravans and things that don't reach criteria it might be.

A Bayesian system would still take into account race too, by the way, not just roll a weighted die based on nearby goblin civ populations. With 3 medium sized civs nearby one of which is a bit larger, the racial features give you maybe a 95% chance of guessing right (errors for immigrants, etc.), the latter would only guess right maybe 40% of the time. Prior to things like halt who goes there and such.

So I don't think it really resolves the current debate at all, but it's a great idea! Bayesian models are pretty easy to code up. Couple of hours to read about it and make one. Might be worth a try to see if it is indeed laggy or not! That's the sort of thing you can definitely brag about in interviews.

I am looking for a way to turn them off without manually having to turn off each in turn.

Turn it off in the raws... as I mentioned above.

Go to raw/objects/material_template_default.txt, and find:
Delete the red highlighted line.

And so on for milk, etc. They will then not be valid cooking targets to begin with, and your dwarves will not cook with any of them from any animals by default for future forts. (and maybe your current fort, not sure)

The booze would require going through every plant entry that has booze and doing this, though, unfortunately. But IIRC there is a high level option for no booze cooking, isn't there? (I.e. don't have to turn off each one?)

There is forced perspective in that drawing, so it's hard to tell, but it looks roughly the size of the dude, which would be more like 50,000-60,000 size, like a dwarf is.

You're going to be hugely slowing down your gameplay and likely limiting embark size and fort stuff (you might crash halfway through a fort) by forcing worldgen to keep track of an absurd number of things. I wouldn't be delicate about it -- go down a size and cut your world gen memory by 4x and be safe. It shouldn't affect anything other than engravings, seems a very small price to pay for not having a fort crash randomly some year.

They were ahead of the curve and crucially they are an area that has plenty more contact with black people than medieval Europe, thus refuting the concept that homogeneous societies develop racism.

1) No it's not just North Africa. You still haven't apparently bothered to read that small section of text linked...
2) If documented racism occurs among people with lots of contact, that does not "refute" anything about homogenous societies. Obviously, homogenous societies with zero contact won't have DOCUMENTED racism, regardless of whether they are flagrantly racist or not at all, because there's no opportunity to have incidents that get recorded. They can just sit around being racist with nothing of note coming from it. It is the areas where occasional contact occurs that you have to look to to see what was underlying the society previously. Iberia and North Africa are actually decent examples of this, precisely because they didn't just have easy, open borders for both peoples to grow up with large exposure to other races, but both water and a desert in the way and thus made occasional contact, revealing not-particularly-logical widespread racism when they did.

Another nice example of this is if you've ever raised a puppy from a very young age in a homogenous home. It's hard to find human examples of people who have never seen another race member these days (yet are old enough to show racism), but happens all the time with pets. My family's current dog was born in a white breeder's house, has white fur himself, and grew up in our white home. Within his first few weeks, when he started going on walks far enough out, it was obvious: white people walk by, wags tail, licks. Black/hispanic people walk by: flipped his shit and ferociously barked at them, until we trained him not to eventually. VERY first contact, no history of them in any inferior roles (or any roles at all), no abuse from some hispanic guy in the past, nothin.

They are just the Unknown. The Unknown is scary and threatening. It's really as simple as that. Same exact reason people are afraid of change and the darkness.

The central point I am making is that racism historically arose (or at least became notable) as a result of these particular conditions and is not something that has always been there.

I know that. The issue is that your central point has no evidence to back it up.

It is critical to note that even if there WERE no evidence at all of racim prior to the 17th century (although there is), that would by no means be evidence of lack of racism, anyway. To prove that, you need specific accounts of people of different races meeting and affirmatively getting along great in various places. Which you have not provided.

If there were just no evidence at all either way, then the conclusion is "We don't know whether there was racism one way or the other for sure" NOT "There wasn't racism." Because you can't distinguish between no racism Vs. just not writing as much stuff down Vs. just not encountering as many outsiders due to more difficult travel, etc.

They treat a human or an elf or another dwarf in exactly the same way as they would a goblin, provided that they come from that particular hostile civilization.

This is impossible and irrelevant until you explain to us how a dwarf has any idea what civilization a visitor is from aside from race in a split second from 30 yards away, when nobody wears identifying images on their clothing.

unless you check the non-racial cues whatever they are.

Quoted for emphasis. You can't think of any.

Whereas I can cite very clear racial cues: individual civilizations have within-species racial features to them. When you embark, your civ mostly has olive-skinned dwarves or mostly has pale skinned dwarves, and mostly has connected earlobes, or whatever. You can go look for yourself in game (in fact, I think you taught me this earlier). I.e., you can easily distinguish who the bad guys are by race -- proper race as we mean it more modern-ly, not species. And not really any other way.


In fact, not being racist in DF world would be pretty stupid!

Yes I realize the code probably uses that...

But there's no logical justification for that being what actually happens in roleplaying / in-universe explanations. Since they attack on site with absolutely no identifying markings and a strange goblin they couldn't possibly have met before. There is only one explanation: It's a goblin.




A settlement is an entirely different matter -- you walk in there as an adventurer, you have NO idea what their history is. That might be the result of 7 generations of living together and building trust, which only initially began with exhaustive cautious diplomatic efforts, blah blah blah. Nothing about settlements in adventure mode therefore really tells us anything one way or the other, because they could have infinitely many possible stories behind them.  Your fort, though, you know the story (or lack thereof).