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[GoblinCookie]

It just seems like you've study economics on some level even if in an armature way, where as I like most people only care in so much as it effects my daily life.

It's actually politics that I am interested in.  To me the majority of economics is what I call "stealth advocacy", it is meant to further a particular set of policies by passing them off as some kind of eternal order. 

Actually I think Toady said that he still needs to code the quantity of a resource a site has access to because as it stand it just checks if its available and gives an unlimited quantity.

It is obvious that the larger world does not have an infinite oversupply because out fortress is able to sell all it's goods.  At the moment the scarcity in the 'real-world' is clearly soaking up the oversupply at fortress level so the whole system 'works'.

Pheromones directly effect brain chemistry unlike words and all thought is influenced by the brain's chemical levels that why for example depression and ADHD are treated by altering the chemistry of the brain so as a primary method of communication I imagine it would have roll on effects to the way the creature actually works psychologically which in turn would change how their society functions and grows.

Words affect brain chemistry.  If you insult a person their brain chemistry changes to an angry state. 

As far as I am aware ants brains are quite sealed away inside their carapaces, there is little way for a pheromone to directly affect their brains; instead pheromones are picked up by the ants antennae and then interpreted by the ants brain. 

An individual ant doesn't need the queen but unlike dwarves they do need a queen for the propagation of the species and one of the primary driving force of any species is the need to procreate, dwarves don't have this limitation and can therefore be more selfish before it results in the destruction of the site (fortress) or extinction of the species.

I only know of a couple ant species that allow for multiply queens per colony and the ones that do allow it are often related.

Having multiple queens per colony is actually the norm for ant species and it is universal in wasps, another social insect that works along the same lines.  Queens are also not 'monogamous' meaning that ants even in nests where one queen is the rule are only normally half-sisters. 

Queens are also not normally related because the flying ants when they leave their nest disperse themselves widely over the area rather than moving in groups.  What ants care about is not an individuals genetic relatedness to them but having the colony's pheromone signature. 

I see no reason that lowing surplus value would mean a single dwarf couldn't survive by themselves, they could live in a fungi wood cottage on the edge of an cavern lake like a human on the surface and very slowly mine a small personal fortress area.

The biggest danger of the caverns are the forgotten beasts and Giant Cave Spiders but with titans, dragons, Cyclops's , Minotaur's and giant animals above ground living alone in the caverns both fishing and gathering food wouldn't be that much more dangerous.

What you are describing is dwarves evolving to live in a different manner altogether.  I meant that a fortress dwarf cannot continue to live in his present lifestyle without cooperating, not that such a dwarf could not defect from the fortress in order to live a solitary live in the caverns.  That dwarf by so doing is removed from society and has no influence on the further development of dwarf society, whether on a biological level or a social level. 

Nothing binds the fortress he has left to his new lifestyle, so he has no influence upon it's further development.  Therefore the fortress's development is decided by those who did not leave and go their own way. 

in the absents of "magical" dark sight and magical caverns I think they would evolve towards being ant-people first by losing their eyes and then adapting further in that direction but they have dark sight and caverns filled with life so there's less pressure to evolve so radically.

I don't see why a fortress would be impossible, if dwarves start in the cavern an build a human society in those caverns, fishing in lakes gathering mushrooms and cave-wheat while hunting cavern animals for meat it would be possible for their society couldn't develop like the roman empire with the initial site gradually expanding up thought the stone over years until they reach the surface, with the first fortress being Rome itself.

That is what I think happened, a group of dwarves first digs themselves a fortress in the roof of the cavern they were living in, because it gave them security from the cavern nasties below.  Then they continued to dig upwards and whether deliberately or otherwise ended up digging into the surface.  The dwarves then set themselves to exploiting the resources of the surface world and cavern alike.  The fortresses thus quickly absorbed the remaining population living in the caverns and then 'recycled' them into hillocks or mountain halls in order to allow them to maximise their ability to exploit both the cavern and the surface world at the same time. 

The difference that you are missing between the dwarf fortress and Rome is that the small Latin villages whose surplus value eventually created Rome continue to feed and support Rome, which could not exist without them.  The 'cavern dwarves' may have created the fortress but they did so to live there and in no way does the resulting fortress then depend upon their labour in order to sustain itself. What seems to have happened is that the fortresses absorbed the cavern dwarves entirely and they ceased to exist. 

As I stated previously I've always believed biology to reign supreme, that article I link challenge that belief by stating that biology and nurture are equals in the development of an individual's personality and this mean it is equally cause and effect the two playing off of each other resulted in the current circumstance neither biology of sociology being the sole driving force.

Every defender of any unjust and dysfunctional institution have always declared it be 'natural'.  The reason they do this is because it provides a solid basis for whatever it is that not being human in origin it cannot be challenged by human (hence they the conservatives are always going to win), hence I am 'naturally' wary of any claims that things are based on biology.  The human race does not have a single universal society and societies change over time, all of which establishes that human nature has not simply created human society.

If the creature is biologically incapable to start off with of functionally living in a particular manner then they cannot live in that manner to start off with.  If proto-dwarves are not ant-like enough to create their first dwarf fortress then there will not be any dwarf fortresses at all.  If they are ant-like enough to create a dwarf fortress but not actually ant-people, then problems will occur as a result of this (problems which make the game fun for us to play).  This is where we get to what I said earlier.

If a fortress consists of dwarves that are more ant-like then that fortress will function better than other rival fortresses.  This means that it's chance of survival and thus the survival chances of it's dwarves children are greater than those rivals.  Since the less ant-like rivals perish at a greater rate than it does, in the end the very dwarf race become biologically more ant-like in the end. 

50% of the population is breeding capable then individuals can be more selfish because their long term survival isn't hinged on one lynch pin.

Your long-term survival is not affected in any way by your not producing children.  The collective survival of your species is affected but not you personally, if an ant only cares about itself why would it care that it cannot produce babies? 

Ants cannot always have had progenitor queens, originally they would surely have been just like our dwarves, all proto-ant females would have been able to reproduce.  However since the ant colony cannot support the huge number of babies all the insect females breeding together with the minimal rate of infant mortality created by the communal lifestyle would produce it is simply impossible for the colony for all the ant females to reproduce.  Since the majority of ant females have to live lives of celibacy anyway, the optimal strategy is simply to biologically undevelop the majority of female ants and fix at birth who the small number who will be able to reproduce are at birth. 

I get what your saying I just believe that the powers that be (wealthy) wont allow it to reach that point, they put in stop block by what ever means necessary to keep the status quo including limiting what people are allowed to produce for free by claim it copies their "private" intellectual property and enforcing restrictions (tightening) whats considered "free" use property by buying and owning entire idea's, anybody who uses elves has to pay the company that own the idea of elves even if yours elves are "different".

I also believe that enough people would prefer a system which can benefit their personal wealth over collective benefits for everyone that it won't be that hard for big companies to push their agenda.

To put it simply I see Shadow Run, Blade Runner, Deus Ex and Judge Dread as more likely futures then Star Trek.

The big companies will find it very hard to do that given that they have now very little power left, owing to the superabundance of what they are offering.  They will also find themselves rather short of wealth as well, given the sheer about of competition that there is. 

With neither wealth nor power, the companies in the Star Trek future find it very difficult to keep intellectual property rights from being undermined, legally or otherwise.  It all does rather hinge upon the development of the replicator however, without which the other kinds of futures become more likely. 

And yet I don't think that even with smart phone technology which can scan your thumb print no one would support a system where everyone thumbs are used to identify individual voters and enable every on to take part in an everyday consensus.

I do not quite get what you are getting at.....

I see a hive mind as being closer to an overmind then what we have now because it lowers the boundary's between individuals making them less then what we are now imho, that's mostly because I see our individuality as one of the most important aspect's of being human and the more you lower those boundary become the less individual we are, I am invoking the "Slippery Slope" fallacy but I still feel its true.

Does your individuality decrease the more people agree with you?  In a hive-mind everybody does what they want, it is merely the case that they end up doing the exact same thing because they have the same information and process it in the same way. 

I still think your to focus on the fact that because they build their society underground that are ants or Naked mole rats but the DF world have cavern for them to live in and I feel the fact that their current sites are all fortress like is a place holder until Toady builds a dwarven hamlets and towns in the cavern layer at which point the current dwarven society can broken down far more easily.

I used naked mole rats actually more to reinforce what I was saying about the evolutionary basis of ants.  That an ant-like existance results from social living in a constructed underground and not from insect biology. 

The fact that its the optimal society doesn't mean dwarves adopt it any faster then humans have irl.

I feel like the majority of dwarven society should live in hamlets scattered around the 1st cavern layer and that the first fortress should be their Rome and not the standard of their society.

Those 'hamlets' already exist, they are called mountain halls.  However like with hillocks on the surface they did not create the fortress, the fortress created them and does not need them to be there in order to exist.  Like with hillocks and human hamlets they also have the basic 'hutterite' communal existance as opposed to being the scattered peasants that were the basis of real-life Feudalism. 

Much like how the active world reduced the frequency and size of sieges was complained about? its not a bug but a change in the way DF's simulation works and the player has to adapt.

I'm pretty sure Toady said something about deepening the relationships between sites and the tribute system and making it so that hillock develop around your fortress so in the same way the active world required players to change the way they play so would the requirement of surrounding dwarven sites and if that means no embarking on an evil biome then the player will have to adapt their play-style because its the result of the simulation deepening and if you don't like it "Sorry but its to bad so sad" imho.

The fundermental nature of the game is that you are a potentially self-sufficiant site that is able to survive independantly of other sites.  This is the game that has been made, it is about 7 hard-working dwarves going off into an uninhabited wilderness to expand dwarf civilization.  It is not about a bunch of idle dwarf nobles establishing a fortified palace to live in and extracting wealth from the nearby peasants while they sit about living in a life of luxury. 

The self-sufficiancy of the fortress is the basic nature of the game.  The reduced frequency of sieges is not, that is a minor detail that does not alter the game but simply annoys the more bloodthirsty players. 

If framing, fishing and hunting is changed to cost more time and provide less food then hamlets and hillock need other site for protection there should also be mining sites that need food, the only purpose of farming hamlets and hillocks would be food production for fortresses and towns and other sites that can't produce enough for themselves.

This can act as an expansion upon the nobility system where hillocks around your fortress are the "Lands" of your baron, count or duke paying tribute to you in the form of the food your no longer able to produce for yourself.

Why would the hillocks ever pay your baron a penny?  Where would they have gotten the whole idea that they even owe his anything? 

Which is why we alter the simulation to make a palace or "fortress" need those peasants.

Thus making the whole game irrevocably different and alienating the existing player base. 

I would instead want dwarves to develop like I've suggested before, as humans underground with the first fortress being their Rome fueled by the surplus of other dwarven sites.

I just don't find what the current setup entails economically to be anything other then boring, I like stories with a darker tone both in the world itself and in the society's in that world.

I have no wish to be conscripted into playing along with your 'darker tones'. 

I don't think so, dwarves would get metal development first because its right in their face (cavern walls), over their head (cavern roof) and under their feet (cavern floor) but everyone else would get their on their own just slightly later because its not everywhere they look.

Except that dwarves also have a harder time disposing of the smoke and fumes from the forges than the other races do. 

"shrugs" It beat socialism and it doesn't really matter to me how or why just that it did.

I suppose to me its victory just makes it look superior, I'm sure if they had of develop at exactly the same time we would be in a different would but we don't because capitalism won the battle of ideology's.

I think that capitalism motivates hard work better then socialism, with a community based sharing system you only work as hard as necessary to "pay" for yourself, an example is that when I used to work at a factory their was a quota system and as long as you hit quota you where fine but the manager noticed that people worked to the quota never going over it so they tried a system where for every unit over the quota you did you got paid an extra $0.82 after they brought that in they stood a chance to make themselves more money they went up to between 50-90 over quota each day taking home an extra $200-$300 a week, money and personal wealth is a better motivator then "The Greater Good" of the company or community.

Socialism took a bunch of half-ruined, destitute countries and turned them into major powers to reckoned with.  Under Capitalism the richer/stronger countries feed from the poorer/weaker countries and the well-off areas in the former are then championed as examples of the wonders of Capitalism.  Then people in the Socialist countries who fall for this ideological trick start to think that if only they restored Capitalism they would also find themselves at the top of the heap and by the time they realise how wrong they were it is too late. 

'Capitalism' can be used to motivate people to work harder, but so can a whip.  One can imagine the site governments of a creature that is some combination of lazy and selfish being forced to make a choice between the two options and choosing the former.  That is the kind of basis under which 'Capitalism' would realistically arise under the present conditions, as mentioned earlier the 'economy' should be broken down into it's componants which are then implemented or not according to what happens historically based upon circumstances+nature/values of creature. 

There should however be other options to the same end.  A cruel creature (like a goblin) would simply resort to the above mentioned whip while a creature that is competative by nature could probably be motivated to work with some kind of score card/honorific/medal for doing so. 

I don't think it is the goal though, the dev page says

he long-term goal is to create a fantasy world simulator in which it is possible to take part in a rich history, occupying a variety of roles through the course of several games.

Again I think your stuck on the idea the DF is complete and that their adding "expansions" where as I see it as incomplete and every new feature expands the simulation, I feel that eventually you wont be able to run a self-sufficient fortress and will be at least partially dependent on imported goods just to keep running.

What the dev page says is so vague as to be essentially meaningless. 

By self-sufficient I did not mean that the fortress would not need to import goods in order to survive.  I meant that the fortress is always going to be producing surplus value, that is to say the total workforce will always be able to produce more value than the fortress as a whole consumes, indeed this is what would allow it to import goods at all (since caravans/traders consume surplus value as profits).

A palace on the other hand does not produce surplus value, it consumes surplus value produced by the taxpayers.  This can principle can be extended to governments in general, all goverments (except fully communist ones) have to consume the surplus value produced by the wider economy.  If they did not have to do this, taxes would not be neccesery as the government itself would be able to exist without external support, buying what it cannot produce itself using it's own surplus value. 

Taxes could still be collected, but it is now optional not necessery. 

I don't think they will continue to live as they presently do as the game develops.

There is a good chance that they will continue to live as do and start to behave in a manner that makes no sense given the way that they live.  That anachronistic institutions will simply be thrown in, despite the fact they make no sense in context as a result of unthinking aping of medieval models. 

Unless you make it so fortresses are not self sufficient hives but a palace or nobles keep dependent on the the community's around them.

Not merely dependant, dependant on an external source of surplus value.  A very crucial difference that you are not grasping. 

but if fortresses becomes the Rome of dwarven society feeding off of the surrounding dwarvn sites it make sense right? then a new fortress is an attempt to expand the empire/kingdom and the starting seven are just the first colonists funded by the crown.

They are not really regular colonists at all.  They are now government officials/nobles/beurocrats setting up a local tax office to extract revenue from whatever population happens to live in the area, whether dwarf colonists or natives. 

more interesting to whom? I've already said I find the current system boring so I'll give some example of my personal preferences.

Warhamer 40k > Fallout > Deus Ex > Shadow Run > Firefly > Star Trek
Warhammer Fantasy > Call of Cthulhu > Vampire the Masquerade > Dungeons & Dragons

I love dark and sinister settings where their is little or no hope of a better tomorrow and you'd best just hope you can survive until tomorrow, so personally I'd rather the game have those dark fantasy elements.

The game still has goblins in it.  I do not see any proceedural generation of goblin society will result in any other kind of socialist utopia than a gulag.  I do not want a vision of hell or a vision of heaven, I want a realistic world where evil beings have basically evil societies and good beings have basically good societies.

I find the idea of all civ values and social more developing during world gen with vast differences between two dwarven civ resulting in conflict between them to very interesting... What "scares" me is the idea that DF will have this (imho) boring perfect economy and social system when its "Complete", it just doesn't interest me in the slightest to have ant-people whom are all working together for the common good.

What I want to see is perfect creatures having perfect societies and flawed creatures having flawed societies.  As the creatures and their values change over time or meet new challenges, they ought to be shifts in the nature of the creature's society, adding in new elements or removing elements that were previously added in.  It would be even better if these changes were actually instituted by actual historical characters, so that a ruler is no longer simply somebody that sits on a throne. 

At the moment the perfect economy/society is actually annoying in that it means I do not feel I can make for instance goblins playable in fortress mode, nor any other evil creatures from D&D verse.  Once the economy is not a single monolithic thing imposed on all societies but is instead a series of seperate elements that appear and dissapear according to actual historical events, then I *can* make all these playable. 

I understand that its the competition between the existing system and "other" systems that resulted in the other systems failing, part of why communism failed is that it couldn't compete with the entirety of the rest of the world working against it.

When I think of things like this what goes though my mind is that it doesn't matter how you win just that you win, history after all is written by the victor.

What if the victors are rabid attack dogs?  Creatures which the virus has rendered hyper-agressive in a manner that will spread the virus around the world; their 'victory' in a sense is simply that everybody goes down together rather than they alone.  Historically people did start to develop actually rather along DF lines, with a whole lot of tribes scattered about the place but then something called the Empire always tends to come along and either destroy them or break them down into atomised peasants.   

In the end though, despite having becoming continent spanning empire whose total power would, if the system were actually functional been sufficient to quickly crush any opposition save from another similar continent spanning empire, they often come to a rather embarrassing end done in by a minor power.  The Persian Empire was done in by Alexander the Great, king of some tiny little kingdom north of Greece while the Roman Empire ends up as the playground of various kinds of German.  Had they been victorious because they simply were the best according to some social version of natural selection then they would surely have become invincible with their own vastly increased resources. 

but as you've said such a site would end up being cannibalized by the utopian society.

Not instantly.  I would expect a big fight in the fortress over the last plump helmet before the losers departed to 'utopias elsewhere'. 

Its silly how? how does having an armed mercenary decrease your life expectancy?

Because you are not the one in charge of the mercenary, he is the one in charge of you. 

Adventurer is just a term for player controlled characters because its "Adventure Mode", just look at the adventure mode arc "Merchant" his goal is profit and wealth not danger, also the most dangerous thing to any adventurer is the player themselves not the creature they run into, you don't try and fight a web spitter without cannon fodder and if you do its the player fault that the adventurer died.

The player is the only reason why the adventurer has any life-expectancy at all. 

It depend on how deep into the lore you get, but its possible to make some sense of it with enough lore book.

As with anything.....

I understand that you don't welcome the idea and I don't think many would.

I know random starting values are coming up and I'm really exited for it, I think it'll be done by extending the weighted preference system that personalty facets have to civ values.

for example dwarves would have
[HARD_WORK:0:30:50] a minimum starting civ value of 0 the median being 30 and max being 50

I am pretty excited by the random starting values. 

Actually my grandfather survived a ruptured aorta thanks to "private" health insurance, capitalistic health care saved my grandfather , so while it is a potentially lethal blow its does not guaranteed death.

The fact that a small insignificant society whom entire population is less then one capitalist town exists was an almost lethal blow but didn't kill because I feel that they use an inferior system and have achieved inferior results.

They did start out with 400 people.  The measure of success of something at growing is the rate of growth and not it's total size.

How do starving beggers factor into your definition of success JesterHell?  I am sure if you only notice the winners resulting from a state of affairs things seem ever so functional. 

Dwarven values of hard work and cooperation are civ values and not inherent to the dwarven creature like greed is, when you take random starting civ values, the change of civ values over time and though scholars and then combine it with fortresses being partially dependent of hillocks you get dwarves closer to what I feel is natural then the current ant people.

Realistically the institutions of a society would actually propogate the values they are founded upon.  So the way that dwarves live 'at the moment' results in the propogation of hard-work and cooperation values as opposed to the opposite and since society is constantly reinforcing the values it is based upon, it balances out the 'natural' effect.  Greed is not able to get any less but neither is it able to get any stronger, while the values are caught in a feedback loop that makes them stronger. 

The problem is balancing the power of established institutions to propogate their own values against the power of individuals to change things.  Too little and we end up either with biological determinism or random shifts.  Too much and we end with an 'end of history' where the above mentioned feedback loop between institutions and values results in the values becoming too strong for the institutions to ever change or be overthrown. 

I want change to happen over the course of history with the implementation and abolishment of social and economic standards and while I'm accepting of thing I don't like existing in game I would like to see some sort of basic economy that isn't like the current one exist at year 0, I don't want to have to troll though legends mode every time to ensure that the dwarves have developed an interesting economy that will be fun to play, other then that I don't really oppose such an economy simply existing anymore (you' have shown that it can exist) I just don't want to play with it as my economy.

So you are against any kind of procedural generation of society at all that affects your gameplay?  You want procedural generation of art forms but not societies which must all have one single eternal and uniform system.  The issue you raise is easily solved by allow you to simply look through your civilizations history during the embark process. 

I want to build a house for me not them, at most buying the land and materials for the house from them.

The official site response is:

  I want does not get.

[Untrustedlife]

In the next version players will be able to rent a room at an inn (Toady confirmed this), So that will help, and with the addition of philosophers and such you can assassinate those who disagree with you, and change society that way (since the world is alive now)

[JesterHell696]

It's actually politics that I am interested in.  To me the majority of economics is what I call "stealth advocacy", it is meant to further a particular set of policies by passing them off as some kind of eternal order. 

I don't doubt that "stealth advocacy" has been woven into every aspect of modern society.

It is obvious that the larger world does not have an infinite oversupply because out fortress is able to sell all it's goods.  At the moment the scarcity in the 'real-world' is clearly soaking up the oversupply at fortress level so the whole system 'works'. 

I feel that much like the goblin sieges of previous versions this unlimited soaking of surplus wealth isn't a depiction of the scarcity of other sites but a place holder until the frame work for supply and demand is installed, basically Toady installed a void in the other sites to soak all excess wealth and when these other sire where installed on the adv mode over map he just dumped all traded goods around the "buying" site.

Words affect brain chemistry.  If you insult a person their brain chemistry changes to an angry state. 

As far as I am aware ants brains are quite sealed away inside their carapaces, there is little way for a pheromone to directly affect their brains; instead pheromones are picked up by the ants antennae and then interpreted by the ants brain.   

What I meant is that pheromones bypass the conscious minds filter, an insult in a language you don't know cant hurt you just like an insult from a stranger "hurts" less than one from a loved one, because they bypass this filter they "directly" effect the brains chemistry and subconscious mind.

There is evidence that even humans have pheromones and that smelling them causes unconscious changes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromones-real/

The Trouble with Humans

So far, scientists have had some success in demonstrating that exposure to body odor can elicit responses in other humans. As in rodent research, human sweat and secretions can affect the reproductive readiness of other humans. Since the 1970s researchers have observed changes in a woman’s menstrual cycle when she is exposed to the sweat of other women. In 2011 a Florida State University group demonstrated that the scent of ovulating women could cause testosterone levels to increase in men.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=116833&page=1

The latest study, which appears in this week's issue of the journal Neuron, used PET (positron emission tomography) scanning techniques to analyze the brains of 24 men and women while they smelled chemicals almost identical to the naturally produced sex hormones estrogen and testosterone.

Women's hypothalami are activated when they smell the chemical similar to testosterone but not to the estrogen-like substance, whereas men's hypothalami have the opposite response: They are turned on only by the estrogen-like chemical and not the testosterone-like one. There is also sexual disparity between the specific sub-regions of hypothalamus that are activated.

http://www.livescience.com/3202-women-smell-man-intentions.html

Sure enough, the women's brains responded very differently depending on which sweat they sniffed. (And no, none of them passed out.) The sexual sweat, but not the normal sweat, activated the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, brain areas that help us recognize emotions and perceive things, respectively. Both regions are in the right hemisphere, which is generally involved in smell, social response, and emotion

So if the only method of communication for a creature is though pheromones then I feel safe in assuming that the subconscious effects would be greater.

Having multiple queens per colony is actually the norm for ant species and it is universal in wasps, another social insect that works along the same lines.  Queens are also not 'monogamous' meaning that ants even in nests where one queen is the rule are only normally half-sisters. 

Queens are also not normally related because the flying ants when they leave their nest disperse themselves widely over the area rather than moving in groups.  What ants care about is not an individuals genetic relatedness to them but having the colony's pheromone signature.   

I personally don't think it is the norm and looking into it I've found no source on information on whether monogyne (one queen) is more common then polygyne (multiple queens) or vice versa and even the same species of ant can apparently present both types of colony...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0124_020124_ants_2.html

What you are describing is dwarves evolving to live in a different manner altogether.

The type hermit I was thinking of

I meant that a fortress dwarf cannot continue to live in his present lifestyle without cooperating,

 

They only need to cooperate as much as the Romans did.

Therefore the fortress's development is decided by those who did not leave and go their own way.   

The existence of such hermits and lone wanderers can effect a fortress's development to a very small degree provided they interact with the existing social structure though trade.

That is what I think happened, a group of dwarves first digs themselves a fortress in the roof of the cavern they were living in, because it gave them security from the cavern nasties below.

I think that if safety was the primary goal they could have walled in the underground hamlets from the rest of the caverns easier then mining out an entire city, the fortress was in my opinion an extravagant royal palace or major "Rome" type city.

The fortresses thus quickly absorbed the remaining population living in the caverns and then 'recycled' them into hillocks or mountain halls in order to allow them to maximise their ability to exploit both the cavern and the surface world at the same time.   

I feel that the remaining population was not recycled and dwarven cavern sites not existing is because of development time constraints not because they ceased to exist.

The difference that you are missing between the dwarf fortress and Rome is that the small Latin villages whose surplus value eventually created Rome continue to feed and support Rome, which could not exist without them.  The 'cavern dwarves' may have created the fortress but they did so to live there and in no way does the resulting fortress then depend upon their labour in order to sustain itself. What seems to have happened is that the fortresses absorbed the cavern dwarves entirely and they ceased to exist.

If Dwarves living in fungi wood cottages on the edges of cavern lakes like humans do on the surface is the start of their society then as other sites where founded and the over all surplus from these sites got greater and greater they cloud expand the largest/most powerful site by building up into the stone above.

When you combine the farming changes (less productive fields) with supply and demand combined and any cavern "hamlet" being able to make basic crafts get to a situation with the fortress developing like Rome because it can only continue to exist if it is fueled by consumption of the surplus of other sites (like Rome) while it can't produce the surplus needed to "pay" back these sites because all the fortress efforts contribute to the growth of this proto "Rome".

So why do these sites support the fortress? the same reason that Rome itself was supported by other sites.

Every defender of any unjust and dysfunctional institution have always declared it be 'natural'. 

What's just or unjust is subjective in the mind of a moral relativist like myself.

The reason they do this is because it provides a solid basis for whatever it is that not being human in origin it cannot be challenged by human (hence they the conservatives are always going to win), hence I am 'naturally' wary of any claims that things are based on biology. 

I couldn't care less what their motive or the end result is, I only care about whether its based on the observation of objective truths or not.

The human race does not have a single universal society and societies change over time, all of which establishes that human nature has not simply created human society. 

Which is why I ultimately said biology is both cause and effect because they are not independent of one another and because biology is the basis of the species it is therefore the basis of society, this is a logical fallacy of false cause or "correlation is not causation" but I personally feel it to be true.

If the creature is biologically incapable to start off with of functionally living in a particular manner then they cannot live in that manner to start off with.  If proto-dwarves are not ant-like enough to create their first dwarf fortress then there will not be any dwarf fortresses at all.  If they are ant-like enough to create a dwarf fortress but not actually ant-people, then problems will occur as a result of this (problems which make the game fun for us to play).  This is where we get to what I said earlier.

its not that their biologically incapable you've shown such with the Hutterites, its that its both unlikely and undesirable imho.

I see the fortress not as an ants nest or bee hive but a a dwarven Rome which is a very different setup to what your suggesting and while I understand what your saying about the problems that can be introduced to the fortress I just find the other option preferable to ant-dwarves with social issues.

If a fortress consists of dwarves that are more ant-like then that fortress will function better than other rival fortresses.  This means that it's chance of survival and thus the survival chances of it's dwarves children are greater than those rivals.  Since the less ant-like rivals perish at a greater rate than it does, in the end the very dwarf race become biologically more ant-like in the end.   

Their no reason the other less ant like fortress couldn't destroy by the combined efforts of non-ant-dwarves sensing a threat to their way of life.

Your long-term survival is not affected in any way by your not producing children.  The collective survival of your species is affected but not you personally, if an ant only cares about itself why would it care that it cannot produce babies? 

Basic instinct, many people who don't care about society or are selfish on a personal level still care about their children, its why I said more selfish rather then completely self-serving.

Ants cannot always have had progenitor queens, originally they would surely have been just like our dwarves, all proto-ant females would have been able to reproduce.  However since the ant colony cannot support the huge number of babies all the insect females breeding together with the minimal rate of infant mortality created by the communal lifestyle would produce it is simply impossible for the colony for all the ant females to reproduce.  Since the majority of ant females have to live lives of celibacy anyway, the optimal strategy is simply to biologically undevelop the majority of female ants and fix at birth who the small number who will be able to reproduce are at birth. 

Apparently there are some ants species where the female worker reproductive track is functional but generally inactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_policing

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/science/the-ant-queen-is-dead-let-the-battles-begin.html?_r=0

When the queen dies, however, a tournament results. Female workers fight one another and a small group of them emerges as a new triumphant class to replace the queen. Their physiology changes, as does their behavior. Mating with their brothers in the colony, this new group of gamergates, as they are called, begin to reproduce.

The thing is I don't see sapient individuals doing this kind of thing for the "Greater Good", china was considered tyrannical when they brought in the one child law and many people seem to ignore the law anyway.

The big companies will find it very hard to do that given that they have now very little power left, owing to the superabundance of what they are offering.  They will also find themselves rather short of wealth as well, given the sheer about of competition that there is. 

With neither wealth nor power, the companies in the Star Trek future find it very difficult to keep intellectual property rights from being undermined, legally or otherwise.  It all does rather hinge upon the development of the replicator however, without which the other kinds of futures become more likely.

 

The big companies also found it vary hard to battle internet piracy at first but they are getting better at it, look at Microsoft's windows 10 has a "feature" which enables it to disable pirated programs.

The TPP has a clause that enables private corporations to sue the government if they introduce policy or legislation that hurts profits and some countries are even introducing Ag-gag[url] to appease big business.

I do not quite get what you are getting at.....

 

It was a bit of a tangent, basically even if we could have a perfect consensus government where every individual could vote in real time on government policy there would be enough opposition to it too stop if from being initiated.

Does your individuality decrease the more people agree with you?

People agreeing with you is not a hive mind because no one agrees on everything.

In a hive-mind everybody does what they want, it is merely the case that they end up doing the exact same thing because they have the same information and process it in the same way. 

 

Having the same information does not mean you process it the same way if all those involved are individuals, two people can have the exact same info and reach different conclusions because they have different personality values or beliefs, for instance I reject the ideas of god, the devil, good and evil and have arrived at the conclusion of moral relativism being the "truth" but I know people with all the same information as me who arrived at a different conclusion.

If every one process the same info the same way they are no longer individuals but one "super organism" with one personality spread across a thousand, million, billion bodies and that is subhuman imho.

I used naked mole rats actually more to reinforce what I was saying about the evolutionary basis of ants.  That an ant-like existance results from social living in a constructed underground and not from insect biology. 

But like ants naked-mole rats only live in a constructed underground environment, dwarves lived only recently in natural caverns with the "hive" being a relatively new thing.

Those 'hamlets' already exist, they are called mountain halls.  However like with hillocks on the surface they did not create the fortress, the fortress created them and does not need them to be there in order to exist.  Like with hillocks and human hamlets they also have the basic 'hutterite' communal existance as opposed to being the scattered peasants that were the basis of real-life Feudalism.   

And I feel that when Toady gets to doing the farming rewrite and supply & demand that fortresses wont be self sufficient but will require the surrounding sites to survive removing the placeholder communal existence because what we do know about the long term goal of DF is that having a more feudal system will help achieve certain dev goals like the hiring guards or buying a mansion.

The fundermental nature of the game is that you are a potentially self-sufficiant site that is able to survive independantly of other sites.   

The fundamental nature of an incomplete open alpha,  we know some of Toady's goals like starting scenarios are capable of changing the this fundamental nature, a temple "fortress" should run completely differently then a military "fortress" and as the other non-fortress mode aspects of the game get expanded is it that hard to believe that "fundamental nature" gets changed to keep it in line with the other elements? or do you think toady will limit himself and the simulations development to keep things inline with current fortress mode?

This is the game that has been made, it is about 7 hard-working dwarves going off into an uninhabited wilderness to expand dwarf civilization.  It is not about a bunch of idle dwarf nobles establishing a fortified palace to live in and extracting wealth from the nearby peasants while they sit about living in a life of luxury. 

What is the purpose of adding stating scenarios? to change what the game currently is... I think its part of that framework that Toady mentioned and I thinks its purpose is to change the purpose of a fortress form self self-sufficiant ant-colony to forward outposts (military fort) temple city's (religious fort) and new "townships" (city forts) of the dwarven (roman) empire.

The self-sufficiancy of the fortress is the basic nature of the game.  The reduced frequency of sieges is not, that is a minor detail that does not alter the game but simply annoys the more bloodthirsty players.   

For many versions dealing with sieges was a fundamental aspect of gameplay and because of that many player complained about the change because it changed the nature of the game for them and removed one of the things they liked most.

Removing self-sufficient sites would again change a fundamental aspect of gameplay but because DF is first and foremost a simulator with goals to recreate many standard fantasy tropes I see its removal as likely.

Why would the hillocks ever pay your baron a penny?  Where would they have gotten the whole idea that they even owe his anything? 

Why did peasants pay taxes to barons in medieval England?

Thus making the whole game irrevocably different and alienating the existing player base. 

No more so then "nerfing" sieges did, I know many player want an option to turn the old siege system back on but toady hasn't done so so far because unlike aquifers doing so can get in the way of other features on the dev list.

I have no wish to be conscripted into playing along with your 'darker tones'.   

I understand completely because there are aspects of your ideal DF that I don't want to be "conscripted into playing along with".

Except that dwarves also have a harder time disposing of the smoke and fumes from the forges than the other races do.   

And that somehow means they don't do it anyway? if you Just look at earlier human coal mining and how the issues with that didn't stop it from going forward so early dwarven blacksmiths probably suffered from something like "black lung" from furnace fumes.

Yay more 'dark tones'.

[JesterHell696]

Socialism took a bunch of half-ruined, destitute countries and turned them into major powers to reckoned with.   

So did Hitler with Germany.

Under Capitalism the richer/stronger countries feed from the poorer/weaker countries and the well-off areas in the former are then championed as examples of the wonders of Capitalism.  Then people in the Socialist countries who fall for this ideological trick start to think that if only they restored Capitalism they would also find themselves at the top of the heap and by the time they realise how wrong they were it is too late. 

Winning with subversion, misdirection and deceit is still winning.

'Capitalism' can be used to motivate people to work harder, but so can a whip.   

I agree, I'm down for some dwarven slavery... but toady already said his dwarves don't do slavery.

One can imagine the site governments of a creature that is some combination of lazy and selfish being forced to make a choice between the two options and choosing the former.  That is the kind of basis under which 'Capitalism' would realistically arise under the present conditions, as mentioned earlier the 'economy' should be broken down into it's componants which are then implemented or not according to what happens historically based upon circumstances+nature/values of creature.   

I have no real problem with economic generation occurring, I just don't want to play with "hutterite communal existence" and feel the simulation should be weighted against the forming of such society's by altering personality facets, not that they should be entirely impossible just very unlikely.

There should however be other options to the same end.  A cruel creature (like a goblin) would simply resort to the above mentioned whip while a creature that is competative by nature could probably be motivated to work with some kind of score card/honorific/medal for doing so.   

Goblins should most definitely be cruel slavers, it give a reason for all those kidnappings but [COMPETITION] is a civilization value not a creature personality facet so it likely that a civ with a high competition value is already capitalistic in some ways.

What the dev page says is so vague as to be essentially meaningless. 

Outside of contradiction with direct statements from Toady I use the dev page to help me guesstimate the overall goal of DF.

By self-sufficient I did not mean that the fortress would not need to import goods in order to survive.  I meant that the fortress is always going to be producing surplus value, that is to say the total workforce will always be able to produce more value than the fortress as a whole consumes, indeed this is what would allow it to import goods at all (since caravans/traders consume surplus value as profits).

A palace on the other hand does not produce surplus value, it consumes surplus value produced by the taxpayers.  This can principle can be extended to governments in general, all goverments (except fully communist ones) have to consume the surplus value produced by the wider economy.  If they did not have to do this, taxes would not be neccesery as the government itself would be able to exist without external support, buying what it cannot produce itself using it's own surplus value.

Taxes could still be collected, but it is now optional not necessery.   

I think that starting scenarios will implement some of the framework necessary for palaces to function, I think a temple site will consume lots but produce almost nothing making its living though "donations" and the tithe and likewise a military fort primary function wont be crafting "trade" goods but training soldiers and producing weapons & armor (offerings) for the crown.

All of this would make help make taxes necessary.

There is a good chance that they will continue to live as do and start to behave in a manner that makes no sense given the way that they live.  That anachronistic institutions will simply be thrown in, despite the fact they make no sense in context as a result of unthinking aping of medieval models. 

I disagree, I think that rather then just introducing an un-thought though aping of medieval systems Toady will alter dwarven personalty and civ value weights and ensure such a system makes sense.

As I've said I no economy expert but the following steps seem like they would help it be less anachronistic.

1. Change the game so that the first fortress is built after year 0 by the dwarven king to be his palace.

2. Reduce the effectiveness of farming until any site the size of a fortress depend almost entirely on imported food.

3. Change unskilled crafting to sometime destroy the resource and produce no item.

4. Introduce apprenticeships and negative quality levels for low skilled crafters and make training a grand master crafter from novice take 20 in-game years of even with a strange mood.

5. introduce more site types including cavern hamlets, mining sites, temple citys, military outposts ect. then make these site interdependent on one anther.

6. install supply and demand in all sites and modify production value or farming and crafting to reach a balance.


It still might not make sense to you.

Not merely dependant, dependant on an external source of surplus value.  A very crucial difference that you are not grasping. 

ok I'm not grasping why that such a "crucial" difference, I mean sure its a difference but it doesn't seem crucial to me.

But if it is that crucial then it seems like a part of what starting scenarios should handle is how to manage the difference between a mining colony that produces the surplus and the temple city/ palace that consumes it..

They are not really regular colonists at all.  They are now government officials/nobles/beurocrats setting up a local tax office to extract revenue from whatever population happens to live in the area, whether dwarf colonists or natives.   

It make sense to me because then dwarf fortresses are like the American colony's paying taxes to the English king.

The game still has goblins in it.  I do not see any proceedural generation of goblin society will result in any other kind of socialist utopia than a gulag.  I do not want a vision of hell or a vision of heaven, I want a realistic world where evil beings have basically evil societies and good beings have basically good societies.

Even if dwarf live in fortresses which have poverty stricken peasant it won't be "hell" because that is what goblin dark fortress ruled by a literal demon would be.

Goblins do have the [EVIL] tag but dwarves don't have the [good] tag, in fact the first creature in the standard creature raw with the good tag is unicorns so there appears to be no inherently "good" beings capable of civilization.

What I want to see is perfect creatures having perfect societies and flawed creatures having flawed societies.  As the creatures and their values change over time or meet new challenges, they ought to be shifts in the nature of the creature's society, adding in new elements or removing elements that were previously added in.  It would be even better if these changes were actually instituted by actual historical characters, so that a ruler is no longer simply somebody that sits on a throne.   

I want the ruler to BE ruler as well but there are no perfect creatures so having a perfect system is right out, also while I've heard of civ value changing I haven't heard anything about the creatures inherent values (personality facets) themselves changing.

I have said that I will accept hutterite culture its just that I'd prefer the system be weighted against it forming because I personally find it boring.

At the moment the perfect economy/society is actually annoying in that it means I do not feel I can make for instance goblins playable in fortress mode, nor any other evil creatures from D&D verse.  Once the economy is not a single monolithic thing imposed on all societies but is instead a series of seperate elements that appear and dissapear according to actual historical events, then I *can* make all these playable.   

The alignment system is my second most hated aspect of the DnD universe, mostly because I prefer grey and grey or black and black morality systems.

What if the victors are rabid attack dogs?  Creatures which the virus has rendered hyper-agressive in a manner that will spread the virus around the world; their 'victory' in a sense is simply that everybody goes down together rather than they alone.   

I declare the virus to be the winner, its a pyrrhic victory but a victory none the less, then again I'm both vengeful and spiteful which is why I've always liked Captain Ahab.

Historically people did start to develop actually rather along DF lines, with a whole lot of tribes scattered about the place but then something called the Empire always tends to come along and either destroy them or break them down into atomised peasants.   

Aren't the civs that the player plays supposed to be that empire?

In the end though, despite having becoming continent spanning empire whose total power would, if the system were actually functional been sufficient to quickly crush any opposition save from another similar continent spanning empire, they often come to a rather embarrassing end done in by a minor power.  The Persian Empire was done in by Alexander the Great, king of some tiny little kingdom north of Greece while the Roman Empire ends up as the playground of various kinds of German.  Had they been victorious because they simply were the best according to some social version of natural selection then they would surely have become invincible with their own vastly increased resources. 

Socialism fell to a little misdirection and deception, I don't think there is a perfect system but some systems seem to work better against others so its more like a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Because you are not the one in charge of the mercenary, he is the one in charge of you. 

Now this seems silly to me, if I hire the mercenary and he works for me then I'm in charge.

The player is the only reason why the adventurer has any life-expectancy at all.   

Well seeing as how adventurer refers to player controlled characters then the only reason they even exist at the moment is the player choosing to create them making the player the only reason the have any life-expectancy and the biggest threat to there life at the same time, if Toady ever adds the ability to take control of history figures (he talked about it in DF talk) then the player is the biggest thereat to every historical figure too.

As with anything.....

true.

I am pretty excited by the random starting values. 

On that we agree completely.

They did start out with 400 people.  The measure of success of something at growing is the rate of growth and not it's total size.

hutterites vs scientolgists

400 to 50000 over 500 years

in 1954 to 45000 in 1990 and 50000 in 2001

ARIS shows there were only 55,000 scientologist in U.S.A. in 2001
Fastest growing religion? by Hartley Patterson

american religious identification survey]http://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/ARIS/ARIS-PDF-version.pdf]american religious identification survey

How do starving beggers factor into your definition of success JesterHell?  I am sure if you only notice the winners resulting from a state of affairs things seem ever so functional.   

As I've said I see biology as the basis for society, creatures (animals) are driven by the instinctual desire it procreate, its why the male of creatures like spider or prey mantises will willing sacrifice themselves to breed and the reason why this behavior can be seen across the board in some species is because the male which didn't risk themselves didn't breed and eventually only males who where willing to take that risk genes where left.

I see society as a tool to enhance the survival chances of the species by helping the individuals of that species survival long enough to procreate, the success of the society is measured by how well it helps the creature's in that society propagate and if you look at it like this then the starving beggar that survives long enough to procreate is successful personally on a biological level and the society succeed in it primary purpose of helping the species propagate, the society that does this well is successful but the society that does it better is the better society.

A completely dystopian society with mandated breeding rules which while horrible to live in would succeed in fulfilling its purpose, now ants are extremely successful in this regard but they achieved this by giving up a portion of their individuality, ultimately they became a hive mind which while successful is also a lesser state of being imho and not desirable to any individual.

So while it is possible to see ant society as a dystopian society its uninteresting for me from a gameplay perspective and undesirable to me from an irl perspective.

Also despite its fall Rome was successful in the propagation of it citizens and many of its values have spread across the world because of this.

Realistically the institutions of a society would actually propogate the values they are founded upon.So the way that dwarves live 'at the moment' results in the propogation of hard-work and cooperation values as opposed to the opposite and since society is constantly reinforcing the values it is based upon, it balances out the 'natural' effect.  Greed is not able to get any less but neither is it able to get any stronger, while the values are caught in a feedback loop that makes them stronger. 

The problem is balancing the power of established institutions to propogate their own values against the power of individuals to change things.  Too little and we end up either with biological determinism or random shifts.  Too much and we end with an 'end of history' where the above mentioned feedback loop between institutions and values results in the values becoming too strong for the institutions to ever change or be overthrown. 

This doesn't seem to contradict any thing I said because I was talking about altering the base values of dwarf society so as to not have the values of hard work and cooperation result in ant-people and your talking about how ideas propagate themselves which I fully agree with, this is also why I'm opposed to have ant-dwarves as the base starting point because it means a measure of that system will always be there in dwarf society and personally I don't like it, I personally want greedy capitalist dwarves not socialist hutterite dwarves.

So you are against any kind of procedural generation of society at all that affects your gameplay?  You want procedural generation of art forms but not societies which must all have one single eternal and uniform system.  The issue you raise is easily solved by allow you to simply look through your civilizations history during the embark process. 

No I want procedural generation to be in every part of the game and effect all aspects of gameplay, I just want to rule out one specific arch type of society (ant-dwarfs/naked mole rat/hutterites) from happening anything else though is A OK.

True it could be move to the embark screen but that would just move that part of legend mode to the embark screen not fix the underlying issue, you said that ant society's would ultimately consume the other ones and that is a part of the problem so to fix both these issues I don't want to see the ant-society as one of the many possible generation results but I do think toady would leave it in as a possibility and at best apply a "weight" against it generating often.

The official site response is:

  I want does not get.

This is the suggestion forums where you post suggestions about features you want, why you want them, if it fits DF dev goals and how you think it could or should be implemented.



A quick synopses of our discussion is (I think) as follows.


This Topic is about adv mode housing and the OP stated what he wanted, why he wanted it, that he felt it fit DF and gave a couple idea on how it could be implemented.

Your response was that implementing what was wanted was anachronism and that only as a reward from site government made sense in the current system.

My response was to say you where over focusing on what DF is right now.

You responded with how its the only thing that made sense given the current DF economy.

I said the "old" economy was eventually going to come back.

Then we started discussing what was wrong with the old one and how the new one would or could be made to work.

I expressed dissatisfaction with the idea of ant-dwarfs being the basis of dwarven society.

You said the perfect dwarf was an ant-person.

We're discussing what the differences between ant and dwarves are.



Which pretty much brings us up to now and I think my original point about your initial focus on what fits DF now stands but that being said doing that synopses made me realize how far from the OP we are right now... I feel kind of bad about the derail.

[GoblinCookie]

What I meant is that pheromones bypass the conscious minds filter, an insult in a language you don't know cant hurt you just like an insult from a stranger "hurts" less than one from a loved one, because they bypass this filter they "directly" effect the brains chemistry and subconscious mind.

There is evidence that even humans have pheromones and that smelling them causes unconscious changes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromones-real/

The Trouble with Humans

So far, scientists have had some success in demonstrating that exposure to body odor can elicit responses in other humans. As in rodent research, human sweat and secretions can affect the reproductive readiness of other humans. Since the 1970s researchers have observed changes in a woman’s menstrual cycle when she is exposed to the sweat of other women. In 2011 a Florida State University group demonstrated that the scent of ovulating women could cause testosterone levels to increase in men.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=116833&page=1

The latest study, which appears in this week's issue of the journal Neuron, used PET (positron emission tomography) scanning techniques to analyze the brains of 24 men and women while they smelled chemicals almost identical to the naturally produced sex hormones estrogen and testosterone.

Women's hypothalami are activated when they smell the chemical similar to testosterone but not to the estrogen-like substance, whereas men's hypothalami have the opposite response: They are turned on only by the estrogen-like chemical and not the testosterone-like one. There is also sexual disparity between the specific sub-regions of hypothalamus that are activated.

http://www.livescience.com/3202-women-smell-man-intentions.html

Sure enough, the women's brains responded very differently depending on which sweat they sniffed. (And no, none of them passed out.) The sexual sweat, but not the normal sweat, activated the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, brain areas that help us recognize emotions and perceive things, respectively. Both regions are in the right hemisphere, which is generally involved in smell, social response, and emotion

So if the only method of communication for a creature is though pheromones then I feel safe in assuming that the subconscious effects would be greater.

Firstly words do elicit an emotional response prior to their consciously being understood, that is why insulting people can make people fly off the handle rather than responding rationally or properly.  It is also why verbal bullying works, the victims cannot always simply shut out the emotional reaction to the words even if they rationally they

Secondly, as interesting as the stuff about human pheromones is, are ants being insects really similar enough that research from one has any real relevance to the other.  The words/pheromone things was a functional analogy (they have the same social function) not a claim that the exact mechanics by which they function are identical save the actual physical medium (sounds vs scents) being used. 

I personally don't think it is the norm and looking into it I've found no source on information on whether monogyne (one queen) is more common then polygyne (multiple queens) or vice versa and even the same species of ant can apparently present both types of colony...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0124_020124_ants_2.html

Common can mean two things, the total % of ants in terms of population or the total number of ant species in total.  Generally ant species that have a large number of smaller nests are monogyne (so black ants) while those with a small number of larger nests (so wood ants) are polygyne.

It does not matter overly since the point was that individual ants do not cooperate because they are genetically related but on the basis of a unique pheromone that was applied to them by the colony to mark them as one it's members.  This means that ants cooperate on a social basis as opposed to a biological one, they do not check the biological relatedness of the other ants at all but only their artificial pheromone mark.

They only need to cooperate as much as the Romans did.

No, as already discussed in great detail the nature of the dwarf fortress's constructed underground lifestyle forces them to cooperate far more than the Romans, who live scattered about in individual houses none of whom require all the others to remain standing in order to exist. 

The existence of such hermits and lone wanderers can effect a fortress's development to a very small degree provided they interact with the existing social structure though trade.

Since the fortress is basically self-sufficiant and does not rely upon the taxes paid by some individuals to continue to exist, the fortress will end up influencing the wanderers far more than the reverse. 

I think that if safety was the primary goal they could have walled in the underground hamlets from the rest of the caverns easier then mining out an entire city, the fortress was in my opinion an extravagant royal palace or major "Rome" type city.

Except that as already discussed, the fortress does not function as either of those things. 

I feel that the remaining population was not recycled and dwarven cavern sites not existing is because of development time constraints not because they ceased to exist.

They had to exist but they no longer do and the fortresses initial population had to come from somewhere. 

If Dwarves living in fungi wood cottages on the edges of cavern lakes like humans do on the surface is the start of their society then as other sites where founded and the over all surplus from these sites got greater and greater they cloud expand the largest/most powerful site by building up into the stone above.

When you combine the farming changes (less productive fields) with supply and demand combined and any cavern "hamlet" being able to make basic crafts get to a situation with the fortress developing like Rome because it can only continue to exist if it is fueled by consumption of the surplus of other sites (like Rome) while it can't produce the surplus needed to "pay" back these sites because all the fortress efforts contribute to the growth of this proto "Rome".

So why do these sites support the fortress? the same reason that Rome itself was supported by other sites.

Rome depends for it's existance upon the ability to extract surplus value through rent/taxes (same thing before 17th century England) from the various Latin peasant farmers scattered about it's territory.  What you describe, the dwarves living in fungi wood cottages at the edge of cavern lakes is the dwarf equivilant and would result in a basically similar society (Feudalism+Capitalism), provided that the fortress's relationship to these 'cavern dwarves' is indeed equivilant.  It is all rather complicated actually......

Rome is fundermentally different from a dwarf fortress because it cannot survive without the rent/surplus extracted from the Latin peasants.  By this I do not mean that the Dwarf Fortress has to be able to grow enough food to feed it's own people (as at present), if it is able to produce goods of sufficiant value to buy itself enough food then it is still in a different situation to the situation that Rome is in.  Rome is not only unable to feed it's own people itself, it is also unable to produce enough goods to buy enough food to feed it's people. 

The reason the various Latin peasants pay their rent/taxes to Rome is because they have no choice.  They are too weak/scattered/divided in their small villages/individual homesteads to avoid paying their rent/taxes.  However Rome also offers them in their present state a modicum of security, to increase this benefit it's laws thus establish that they personally have the right to cultivate a given area of land and so that therefore the peasants are bound to Rome by self-interest as well. 

However there is a basic conflict here, Rome wishes to extract as much surplus value as possible from the peasants through rent/taxes but the peasants want to keep as much of their surplus value as possible while still enjoying the benefits of Roman protection and law.  There is however an alternative, instead of relying upon distant Rome, they could instead band together into a large communal village along the lines of a human hamlet in DF; thus they would no longer need Rome at all.  In response to this deadly threat Rome responds by strengthening privatisation in order to increase division among the peasantry and keep them dependant upon it. 

Elsewhere however that is exactly what happened.  Some peasants gathered together into said communities and then cannibalised all the remaining scattered peasants, either by persuading them to join or by burning down their houses and stealing their animals.  This leads to the whole division between civilization (scattered peasants exploited and ruled over by palaces) and barbarism (close-knit self-governing communities of peasants) upon which the Roman Empire (and other previous empires) are founded.  The Empire's job is two-fold, firstly to destroy the barbarian tribal arrangement and break the population up into scattered peasants that the imperial palace can safely exploit and secondly to destroy the other palaces to ensure that it can extract the maximum amount of rent/taxes to grow and prosper. 

What's just or unjust is subjective in the mind of a moral relativist like myself.

Granted that, the *fact* that somebody subjectively considers something to be unjust is quite objective.

The second person who defends the present order that the first person considers unjust cannot prove that the order he defends *is* just.  So instead he sets out to convince that person that the present order to the result of some objective reality that neither of them have any control over.  This works so well because normally the person opposed to what he considers an unjust order is the less powerful person, since he individually feels weak emotionally he is easily persuaded that what he opposes is invincible. 

It works even better if the first person manages to actually achieve some localised overthrow of the second person's favourite institution.  The second person can now covertly undermine the first person's society and then 'prove' what he was saying about objective reality. 

I couldn't care less what their motive or the end result is, I only care about whether its based on the observation of objective truths or not.

Objective truths cannot be observed, they can only be arrived at through Reason based upon necceserily subjective experiences. 

Which is why I ultimately said biology is both cause and effect because they are not independent of one another and because biology is the basis of the species it is therefore the basis of society, this is a logical fallacy of false cause or "correlation is not causation" but I personally feel it to be true.

How can societies change if they are the result of human biology?  Human biology does not change fast enough nor is it racially diverse enough to result in any notable diversity in institutions and culture; hence the ability of rapid social changes to occur disproves the notion that human biology simply created human society. 

I think that the society (whether human or animal) starts off intially 'stretching' the biology that they presently have.  The biology then slowly catches up, driven by the fact that those societies who develop a tailor-made biology for their society are more successful than those who retain the original biology and merely stretch it to fit.

its not that their biologically incapable you've shown such with the Hutterites, its that its both unlikely and undesirable imho.

I see the fortress not as an ants nest or bee hive but a a dwarven Rome which is a very different setup to what your suggesting and while I understand what your saying about the problems that can be introduced to the fortress I just find the other option preferable to ant-dwarves with social issues.

As explained already in order to make the fortress a dwarven Rome Toady One would have to make the fortress incapable of surviving without extracting rent/taxes from a scattered population of dwarf peasants that exist across an abstract territory that the fortress 'owns'. 

Their no reason the other less ant like fortress couldn't destroy by the combined efforts of non-ant-dwarves sensing a threat to their way of life.

That merely delays the inevitable. 

Basic instinct, many people who don't care about society or are selfish on a personal level still care about their children, its why I said more selfish rather then completely self-serving.

This is the difference between Dawkin's selfish genes and genes for actual selfishness.  Creatures may be selfish because of their genes but a gene that makes it's creatures so selfish that it cannot care for it's own offspring is not really being selfish at all.  Of course actual selfish creatures do not care about genes, the irony here is that the creature that does potentially care about genes is actually an altruistic one. 

The moment a creature starts to actually care for it's offspring, the compass is rather skewed towards altruism because on a genetic level the most potent selfishness genes are nonviable while the most potent altruism genes are quite viable.  One of the distinguishing traits of ants is that they actually care for their offspring, the majority of insects simply dump a large number of eggs into something and then leave them to fend for themselves. 

Apparently there are some ants species where the female worker reproductive track is functional but generally inactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_policing

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/science/the-ant-queen-is-dead-let-the-battles-begin.html?_r=0

When the queen dies, however, a tournament results. Female workers fight one another and a small group of them emerges as a new triumphant class to replace the queen. Their physiology changes, as does their behavior. Mating with their brothers in the colony, this new group of gamergates, as they are called, begin to reproduce.

The thing is I don't see sapient individuals doing this kind of thing for the "Greater Good", china was considered tyrannical when they brought in the one child law and many people seem to ignore the law anyway.

As I said the queens exist because there is a hive, the hive does not exist because there are queens. 

Yes queens do essentially exist as the social insect version of the one-child policy but with a difference. In order to keep the other insects from cheating on the rule the majority of the social insects were 'sterilised', leaving only a few able to produce children.  I would also think that the hostility of all social insects (save termites) to males is governed by the same logic, the presence of males adds 'temptation' into the system.   

The big companies also found it vary hard to battle internet piracy at first but they are getting better at it, look at Microsoft's windows 10 has a "feature" which enables it to disable pirated programs.

The TPP has a clause that enables private corporations to sue the government if they introduce policy or legislation that hurts profits and some countries are even introducing Ag-gag[url=http://to appease big business.

They can do that because the majority of the intellectual properties that the economy depends upon can only realistically be made by said companies.  Once the vast majority of people no longer have to produce basic goods and services they are free to flood the world with a torrent of freeware sufficient to negate any economic reliance that the government might have upon the intellectual property companies. 

It is the economic reliance of the goverment upon the economic powers that gives said powers the ability to influence goverment policy.  Once that is gone the companies cannot mantain intellectual property rights any more than King Canute could hold back the tide. 

It was a bit of a tangent, basically even if we could have a perfect consensus government where every individual could vote in real time on government policy there would be enough opposition to it too stop if from being initiated.

No government as such exists or is needed in a Hive-Mind.  It is information that is centralised (think wikipedia), not authority and all the individuals act in unison because they come seperately to the same decision based upon the same information.

Goverment is basically a shoddy substitute for a Hive-Mind.  It is what creatures produce when they need a Hive-Mind but owing to a lack of consensus or difficulty either in centralising information or in individual creatures accessing centralised information they need a means to accomplish the same ends of unified action.  The government centralises information to allow it to make a decision and then enforces a unitery course of action that would otherwise require a consensus. 

People agreeing with you is not a hive mind because no one agrees on everything.

That was not the question.

Having the same information does not mean you process it the same way if all those involved are individuals, two people can have the exact same info and reach different conclusions because they have different personality values or beliefs, for instance I reject the ideas of god, the devil, good and evil and have arrived at the conclusion of moral relativism being the "truth" but I know people with all the same information as me who arrived at a different conclusion.

If every one process the same info the same way they are no longer individuals but one "super organism" with one personality spread across a thousand, million, billion bodies and that is subhuman imho.

It just means that all the individuals are identical.  If there were 1000 other identical versions of you would you be less yourself as a result? 

But like ants naked-mole rats only live in a constructed underground environment, dwarves lived only recently in natural caverns with the "hive" being a relatively new thing.

Indeed, which means they are stretching their pre-existing biology through some means as opposing to having a biology custom built for that purpose. 

And I feel that when Toady gets to doing the farming rewrite and supply & demand that fortresses wont be self sufficient but will require the surrounding sites to survive removing the placeholder communal existence because what we do know about the long term goal of DF is that having a more feudal system will help achieve certain dev goals like the hiring guards or buying a mansion.

As already mentioned, merely having to buy food from the local hamlets does not chance anything fundermental.  Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are also not scattered peasants but large, centralised communes. 

The fundamental nature of an incomplete open alpha,  we know some of Toady's goals like starting scenarios are capable of changing the this fundamental nature, a temple "fortress" should run completely differently then a military "fortress" and as the other non-fortress mode aspects of the game get expanded is it that hard to believe that "fundamental nature" gets changed to keep it in line with the other elements? or do you think toady will limit himself and the simulations development to keep things inline with current fortress mode?

The fundermental nature of the game is built into the core mechanics.  There is no means other than simply prohibiting fortress dwarves from collectively producing enough surplus value to survive independantly without external income that this can be changed. 

What is the purpose of adding stating scenarios? to change what the game currently is... I think its part of that framework that Toady mentioned and I thinks its purpose is to change the purpose of a fortress form self self-sufficiant ant-colony to forward outposts (military fort) temple city's (religious fort) and new "townships" (city forts) of the dwarven (roman) empire.

There is a very great danger that Toady One will simply add in anachronistic starting scenarios because he does not understand how those things would simply not exist.

For many versions dealing with sieges was a fundamental aspect of gameplay and because of that many player complained about the change because it changed the nature of the game for them and removed one of the things they liked most.

Removing self-sufficient sites would again change a fundamental aspect of gameplay but because DF is first and foremost a simulator with goals to recreate many standard fantasy tropes I see its removal as likely.

Even if Toady One adds in inherantly negative value sites then it still matters who is paying them.  The development of a medieval economy only makes sense if it is scattered peasants that are doing the paying.

Dwarf Fortress is fundermentally a site-based game and adding more varients of sites is not going to change this fact.  Even if particular sites are made dependant upon payments from other sites or from a central government funded collectively by all sites then the basis of the society remains exactly the same. 

A real medieval society however is a land-based game. Sites exist as centres of abstract legal control over land and are sustained by the millions of peasants that lived dotted about the land that said sites own and the sites are dependant upon said peasants in order to exist. 

Why did peasants pay taxes to barons in medieval England?

Because the barons were the government of the area in which they live. Taxing a hillocks is not taxing individual peasants, it is taxing another government. 

The hillocks does not need the fortress in order to avoid anarchy; it is quite capable of governing itself without any input from the fortress at all.  Conversely given the fortress produces surplus value even if it did not produce enough food to feed itself it can still buy the food it needs, either from the local hillocks or from another fortress.  The result is that the hillocks has no reason to pay taxes and the fortress has no need to demand them. 

No more so then "nerfing" sieges did, I know many player want an option to turn the old siege system back on but toady hasn't done so so far because unlike aquifers doing so can get in the way of other features on the dev list.

I cannot comprehend how you think modifying the frequency at which sieges occur (they still do) is any comparison with essentially turning the whole game into Crusader Kings. 

I understand completely because there are aspects of your ideal DF that I don't want to be "conscripted into playing along with".

It is more work for you to get what you want than for me to get what I want.   

And that somehow means they don't do it anyway? if you Just look at earlier human coal mining and how the issues with that didn't stop it from going forward so early dwarven blacksmiths probably suffered from something like "black lung" from furnace fumes.

Yay more 'dark tones'.

Just point out that the surface races have some forging advantages, plentiful oxygen, easy removal of smoke and plenty of wood. 

So did Hitler with Germany.

Not particularly relavent given that we are talking about Capitalism in Hitler's case (despite the name of his party).  If you trying to argue that Socialism inherantly makes economies (and people) unproductive due to lack of 'incentives', then all Socialist countries should have gone backwards from when they started out.  The irony here is that only the implementation of Capitalist policies have ever caused a country to 'go backwards'.

Winning with subversion, misdirection and deceit is still winning.

In a competition you are not declared the winner simply because the kill off your rivals, the fact that you have done so actually invalidates the competition. 

The ability of the Capitalist countries to kill off the Socialist countries is quite seperate from the actual relative merits or functionality of the two systems.

I agree, I'm down for some dwarven slavery... but toady already said his dwarves don't do slavery.

By your definition they already do.  Dwarves go to jail for failing to meet noble's mandates. 

Slavery is not the same thing as forced labour.  It is about owning people as commercial property, not about forcing people to do stuff. 

I have no real problem with economic generation occurring, I just don't want to play with "hutterite communal existence" and feel the simulation should be weighted against the forming of such society's by altering personality facets, not that they should be entirely impossible just very unlikely.

All the existing creatures have personality facets/values that would undermine such a system so do not worry.  Dwarves system would fall apart because dwarves lack the personality/values to simply share everything but do have the values to cooperate to make stuff. 

Goblins should most definitely be cruel slavers, it give a reason for all those kidnappings but [COMPETITION] is a civilization value not a creature personality facet so it likely that a civ with a high competition value is already capitalistic in some ways.

I do not agree with you.  A highly competitive creature is easily motivated to work for the 'collective good' simply by making doing so into a kind of game where the winners get given a symbolic medal at the end of the season.  They do not care about owning the stuff they make or the tools to do so, they care about getting onto the 'high score board' of the site so that everybody can look at them with envy. 

I think that starting scenarios will implement some of the framework necessary for palaces to function, I think a temple site will consume lots but produce almost nothing making its living though "donations" and the tithe and likewise a military fort primary function wont be crafting "trade" goods but training soldiers and producing weapons & armor (offerings) for the crown.

All of this would make help make taxes necessary.

Taxes clearly exist already since the central goverment exists (we just do not pay them).  As already mentioned before however, taxes do not change anything about the society if they are paid by large communal entities to other large communal entities. 

ok I'm not grasping why that such a "crucial" difference, I mean sure its a difference but it doesn't seem crucial to me.

But if it is that crucial then it seems like a part of what starting scenarios should handle is how to manage the difference between a mining colony that produces the surplus and the temple city/ palace that consumes it..

It does not seem crucial because you do not yet understand the difference between one communal arrangement being dependant upon another and a communal arrangement being dependant upon a load of private producers.  As the saying goes.

"The one that pays the piper decides the tune."

It make sense to me because then dwarf fortresses are like the American colony's paying taxes to the English king.

Except that you are playing the tax office of the English King and not the colonists. 

Even if dwarf live in fortresses which have poverty stricken peasant it won't be "hell" because that is what goblin dark fortress ruled by a literal demon would be.

Goblins do have the [EVIL] tag but dwarves don't have the [good] tag, in fact the first creature in the standard creature raw with the good tag is unicorns so there appears to be no inherently "good" beings capable of civilization.

I fail to see the difference between a society having poverty stricken peasants and what a society ruled by a literal demon would be like. 

I want the ruler to BE ruler as well but there are no perfect creatures so having a perfect system is right out, also while I've heard of civ value changing I haven't heard anything about the creatures inherent values (personality facets) themselves changing.

I have said that I will accept hutterite culture its just that I'd prefer the system be weighted against it forming because I personally find it boring.

Hutterites have a normal human nature, so it is clear that it is sufficient to have the correct values and not neccesery to have a truly angelic inherant personality.

The alignment system is my second most hated aspect of the DnD universe, mostly because I prefer grey and grey or black and black morality systems.

I cannot see how you can get gray at all without having black and white to mix together. 

I declare the virus to be the winner, its a pyrrhic victory] to appease big business.

They can do that because the majority of the intellectual properties that the economy depends upon can only realistically be made by said companies.  Once the vast majority of people no longer have to produce basic goods and services they are free to flood the world with a torrent of freeware sufficient to negate any economic reliance that the government might have upon the intellectual property companies. 

It is the economic reliance of the goverment upon the economic powers that gives said powers the ability to influence goverment policy.  Once that is gone the companies cannot mantain intellectual property rights any more than King Canute could hold back the tide. 

It was a bit of a tangent, basically even if we could have a perfect consensus government where every individual could vote in real time on government policy there would be enough opposition to it too stop if from being initiated.

No government as such exists or is needed in a Hive-Mind.  It is information that is centralised (think wikipedia), not authority and all the individuals act in unison because they come seperately to the same decision based upon the same information.

Goverment is basically a shoddy substitute for a Hive-Mind.  It is what creatures produce when they need a Hive-Mind but owing to a lack of consensus or difficulty either in centralising information or in individual creatures accessing centralised information they need a means to accomplish the same ends of unified action.  The government centralises information to allow it to make a decision and then enforces a unitery course of action that would otherwise require a consensus. 

People agreeing with you is not a hive mind because no one agrees on everything.

That was not the question.

Having the same information does not mean you process it the same way if all those involved are individuals, two people can have the exact same info and reach different conclusions because they have different personality values or beliefs, for instance I reject the ideas of god, the devil, good and evil and have arrived at the conclusion of moral relativism being the "truth" but I know people with all the same information as me who arrived at a different conclusion.

If every one process the same info the same way they are no longer individuals but one "super organism" with one personality spread across a thousand, million, billion bodies and that is subhuman imho.

It just means that all the individuals are identical.  If there were 1000 other identical versions of you would you be less yourself as a result? 

But like ants naked-mole rats only live in a constructed underground environment, dwarves lived only recently in natural caverns with the "hive" being a relatively new thing.

Indeed, which means they are stretching their pre-existing biology through some means as opposing to having a biology custom built for that purpose. 

And I feel that when Toady gets to doing the farming rewrite and supply & demand that fortresses wont be self sufficient but will require the surrounding sites to survive removing the placeholder communal existence because what we do know about the long term goal of DF is that having a more feudal system will help achieve certain dev goals like the hiring guards or buying a mansion.

As already mentioned, merely having to buy food from the local hamlets does not chance anything fundermental.  Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are also not scattered peasants but large, centralised communes. 

The fundamental nature of an incomplete open alpha,  we know some of Toady's goals like starting scenarios are capable of changing the this fundamental nature, a temple "fortress" should run completely differently then a military "fortress" and as the other non-fortress mode aspects of the game get expanded is it that hard to believe that "fundamental nature" gets changed to keep it in line with the other elements? or do you think toady will limit himself and the simulations development to keep things inline with current fortress mode?

The fundermental nature of the game is built into the core mechanics.  There is no means other than simply prohibiting fortress dwarves from collectively producing enough surplus value to survive independantly without external income that this can be changed. 

What is the purpose of adding stating scenarios? to change what the game currently is... I think its part of that framework that Toady mentioned and I thinks its purpose is to change the purpose of a fortress form self self-sufficiant ant-colony to forward outposts (military fort) temple city's (religious fort) and new "townships" (city forts) of the dwarven (roman) empire.

There is a very great danger that Toady One will simply add in anachronistic starting scenarios because he does not understand how those things would simply not exist.

For many versions dealing with sieges was a fundamental aspect of gameplay and because of that many player complained about the change because it changed the nature of the game for them and removed one of the things they liked most.

Removing self-sufficient sites would again change a fundamental aspect of gameplay but because DF is first and foremost a simulator with goals to recreate many standard fantasy tropes I see its removal as likely.

Even if Toady One adds in inherantly negative value sites then it still matters who is paying them.  The development of a medieval economy only makes sense if it is scattered peasants that are doing the paying.

Dwarf Fortress is fundermentally a site-based game and adding more varients of sites is not going to change this fact.  Even if particular sites are made dependant upon payments from other sites or from a central government funded collectively by all sites then the basis of the society remains exactly the same. 

A real medieval society however is a land-based game. Sites exist as centres of abstract legal control over land and are sustained by the millions of peasants that lived dotted about the land that said sites own and the sites are dependant upon said peasants in order to exist. 

Why did peasants pay taxes to barons in medieval England?

Because the barons were the government of the area in which they live. Taxing a hillocks is not taxing individual peasants, it is taxing another government. 

The hillocks does not need the fortress in order to avoid anarchy; it is quite capable of governing itself without any input from the fortress at all.  Conversely given the fortress produces surplus value even if it did not produce enough food to feed itself it can still buy the food it needs, either from the local hillocks or from another fortress.  The result is that the hillocks has no reason to pay taxes and the fortress has no need to demand them. 

No more so then "nerfing" sieges did, I know many player want an option to turn the old siege system back on but toady hasn't done so so far because unlike aquifers doing so can get in the way of other features on the dev list.

I cannot comprehend how you think modifying the frequency at which sieges occur (they still do) is any comparison with essentially turning the whole game into Crusader Kings. 

I understand completely because there are aspects of your ideal DF that I don't want to be "conscripted into playing along with".

It is more work for you to get what you want than for me to get what I want.   

And that somehow means they don't do it anyway? if you Just look at earlier human coal mining and how the issues with that didn't stop it from going forward so early dwarven blacksmiths probably suffered from something like "black lung" from furnace fumes.

Yay more 'dark tones'.

Just point out that the surface races have some forging advantages, plentiful oxygen, easy removal of smoke and plenty of wood. 

So did Hitler with Germany.

Not particularly relavent given that we are talking about Capitalism in Hitler's case (despite the name of his party).  If you trying to argue that Socialism inherantly makes economies (and people) unproductive due to lack of 'incentives', then all Socialist countries should have gone backwards from when they started out.  The irony here is that only the implementation of Capitalist policies have ever caused a country to 'go backwards'.

Winning with subversion, misdirection and deceit is still winning.

In a competition you are not declared the winner simply because the kill off your rivals, the fact that you have done so actually invalidates the competition. 

The ability of the Capitalist countries to kill off the Socialist countries is quite seperate from the actual relative merits or functionality of the two systems.

I agree, I'm down for some dwarven slavery... but toady already said his dwarves don't do slavery.

By your definition they already do.  Dwarves go to jail for failing to meet noble's mandates. 

Slavery is not the same thing as forced labour.  It is about owning people as commercial property, not about forcing people to do stuff. 

I have no real problem with economic generation occurring, I just don't want to play with "hutterite communal existence" and feel the simulation should be weighted against the forming of such society's by altering personality facets, not that they should be entirely impossible just very unlikely.

All the existing creatures have personality facets/values that would undermine such a system so do not worry.  Dwarves system would fall apart because dwarves lack the personality/values to simply share everything but do have the values to cooperate to make stuff. 

Goblins should most definitely be cruel slavers, it give a reason for all those kidnappings but [COMPETITION] is a civilization value not a creature personality facet so it likely that a civ with a high competition value is already capitalistic in some ways.

I do not agree with you.  A highly competitive creature is easily motivated to work for the 'collective good' simply by making doing so into a kind of game where the winners get given a symbolic medal at the end of the season.  They do not care about owning the stuff they make or the tools to do so, they care about getting onto the 'high score board' of the site so that everybody can look at them with envy. 

I think that starting scenarios will implement some of the framework necessary for palaces to function, I think a temple site will consume lots but produce almost nothing making its living though "donations" and the tithe and likewise a military fort primary function wont be crafting "trade" goods but training soldiers and producing weapons & armor (offerings) for the crown.

All of this would make help make taxes necessary.

Taxes clearly exist already since the central goverment exists (we just do not pay them).  As already mentioned before however, taxes do not change anything about the society if they are paid by large communal entities to other large communal entities. 

ok I'm not grasping why that such a "crucial" difference, I mean sure its a difference but it doesn't seem crucial to me.

But if it is that crucial then it seems like a part of what starting scenarios should handle is how to manage the difference between a mining colony that produces the surplus and the temple city/ palace that consumes it..

It does not seem crucial because you do not yet understand the difference between one communal arrangement being dependant upon another and a communal arrangement being dependant upon a load of private producers.  As the saying goes.

"The one that pays the piper decides the tune."

It make sense to me because then dwarf fortresses are like the American colony's paying taxes to the English king.

Except that you are playing the tax office of the English King and not the colonists. 

Even if dwarf live in fortresses which have poverty stricken peasant it won't be "hell" because that is what goblin dark fortress ruled by a literal demon would be.

Goblins do have the [EVIL] tag but dwarves don't have the [good] tag, in fact the first creature in the standard creature raw with the good tag is unicorns so there appears to be no inherently "good" beings capable of civilization.

I fail to see the difference between a society having poverty stricken peasants and what a society ruled by a literal demon would be like. 

I want the ruler to BE ruler as well but there are no perfect creatures so having a perfect system is right out, also while I've heard of civ value changing I haven't heard anything about the creatures inherent values (personality facets) themselves changing.

I have said that I will accept hutterite culture its just that I'd prefer the system be weighted against it forming because I personally find it boring.

Hutterites have a normal human nature, so it is clear that it is sufficient to have the correct values and not neccesery to have a truly angelic inherant personality.

The alignment system is my second most hated aspect of the DnD universe, mostly because I prefer grey and grey or black and black morality systems.

I cannot see how you can get gray at all without having black and white to mix together. 

I declare the virus to be the winner, its a pyrrhic victory but a victory none the less, then again I'm both vengeful and spiteful which is why I've always liked Captain Ahab.

It is however the virus that wins not the host creature.

Aren't the civs that the player plays supposed to be that empire?

No, the goblins are more like that empire. 

Socialism fell to a little misdirection and deception, I don't think there is a perfect system but some systems seem to work better against others so its more like a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Not all Socialism fell and not all countries are 100% Capitalist either. 

Now this seems silly to me, if I hire the mercenary and he works for me then I'm in charge.

If you a random person, hiring the legendery mercenery to work for you is safe.  However being hired *by* said individuals clearly is not. 

hutterites vs scientolgists

400 to 50000 over 500 years

in 1954 to 45000 in 1990 and 50000 in 2001

The Hutterites did not go from 400 to 50000 over 500 years.  Their numbers were reduced by persecution to 400 and then they went from that to 50000 in 125 years.  So not did they manage to expand rapidly but also survive a major threat.

As I've said I see biology as the basis for society, creatures (animals) are driven by the instinctual desire it procreate, its why the male of creatures like spider or prey mantises will willing sacrifice themselves to breed and the reason why this behavior can be seen across the board in some species is because the male which didn't risk themselves didn't breed and eventually only males who where willing to take that risk genes where left.

I see society as a tool to enhance the survival chances of the species by helping the individuals of that species survival long enough to procreate, the success of the society is measured by how well it helps the creature's in that society propagate and if you look at it like this then the starving beggar that survives long enough to procreate is successful personally on a biological level and the society succeed in it primary purpose of helping the species propagate, the society that does this well is successful but the society that does it better is the better society.

A completely dystopian society with mandated breeding rules which while horrible to live in would succeed in fulfilling its purpose, now ants are extremely successful in this regard but they achieved this by giving up a portion of their individuality, ultimately they became a hive mind which while successful is also a lesser state of being imho and not desirable to any individual.

So while it is possible to see ant society as a dystopian society its uninteresting for me from a gameplay perspective and undesirable to me from an irl perspective.

Also despite its fall Rome was successful in the propagation of it citizens and many of its values have spread across the world because of this.

Rome was successful in the propogation of it's values across the world, in spite of the fact that those values ultimately resulted in their demise.  The virus therefore consumed it's host (Rome) but in the process spread itself across the world to begin the process of host capture all over again.  So in the end Rome was not a success, but a rabid attack dog that consumed itself while spreading the virus that was consuming it around the world. 

This doesn't seem to contradict any thing I said because I was talking about altering the base values of dwarf society so as to not have the values of hard work and cooperation result in ant-people and your talking about how ideas propagate themselves which I fully agree with, this is also why I'm opposed to have ant-dwarves as the base starting point because it means a measure of that system will always be there in dwarf society and personally I don't like it, I personally want greedy capitalist dwarves not socialist hutterite dwarves.

I personally want socialist hutterite dwarves.  The question here is how to have values propogated realistically by society but still have enough randomness that we will potentially see both kinds of dwarves (and everything in the middle) in the same world.  Then we can have some dwarf version of the Cold War. 

No I want procedural generation to be in every part of the game and effect all aspects of gameplay, I just want to rule out one specific arch type of society (ant-dwarfs/naked mole rat/hutterites) from happening anything else though is A OK.

True it could be move to the embark screen but that would just move that part of legend mode to the embark screen not fix the underlying issue, you said that ant society's would ultimately consume the other ones and that is a part of the problem so to fix both these issues I don't want to see the ant-society as one of the many possible generation results but I do think toady would leave it in as a possibility and at best apply a "weight" against it generating often.

It would be quite possible to have societies start with raw-defined economic institutions.  Those institutions would then develop or dissapear in the normal manner. 

Ant-Society would only consume the other one's if the creatures are capable of managing it, whether naturally or in their values.  If the superior utopian society absorbs enough of those from the inferior dystopian society who are incapable of living in that society then it is likely that the society itself would change to become more dystopian.  So the virus is consuming it's present host only to find itself another. 

[JesterHell696]

Firstly words do elicit an emotional response prior to their consciously being understood, that is why insulting people can make people fly off the handle rather than responding rationally or properly.  It is also why verbal bullying works, the victims cannot always simply shut out the emotional reaction to the words even if they rationally they

This is why I bought up language comprehension because if your insulted "polity" in a language you don't understand it can't effect your mood, first you have to understand the insult then you can feel offended.

Whether the way they respond to an insult is proper or not is subjective, in ancient times an insult could lead to a duel to the death and that was the "proper" response so the people who "fly off the handle" first understood they where insulted and then based of their personality facets react in an instinctual way.

Secondly, as interesting as the stuff about human pheromones is, are ants being insects really similar enough that research from one has any real relevance to the other.  The words/pheromone things was a functional analogy (they have the same social function) not a claim that the exact mechanics by which they function are identical save the actual physical medium (sounds vs scents) being used.   

Yes and no, pheromones in all animal trigger automatic subconscious responses based on that creatures brain chemistry so if the only type of communication is though pheromones you get a "brain washing" effect where individuals are subconsciously brought in line with the "social" norm.

It does not matter overly since the point was that individual ants do not cooperate because they are genetically related but on the basis of a unique pheromone that was applied to them by the colony to mark them as one it's members.  This means that ants cooperate on a social basis as opposed to a biological one, they do not check the biological relatedness of the other ants at all but only their artificial pheromone mark.

And I see pheromone as being primarily biological, their cooperation is because of "brain washing" individual behavior out of their workers to a greater degree then words alone can do.

No, as already discussed in great detail the nature of the dwarf fortress's constructed underground lifestyle forces them to cooperate far more than the Romans, who live scattered about in individual houses none of whom require all the others to remain standing in order to exist. 

And I've rejected your stance, I feel like they live as Romans in the caverns and the fortress is their Rome. What your basing your stance on is what I think is just a place holder for future developments in which smaller less populated site support larger sites.

Their no reason to think that the current site are the finale sites because Toady has shown the willingness to completely rework a system that doesn't fit in with his goals for DF, I think that Toady will reduce the overall size/population of hamlets and replace them with smaller more "scattered" about sites if that necessary for the "capitalistic" economy to work even if he has to completely scrap the current site system to do so.

Since the fortress is basically self-sufficiant and does not rely upon the taxes paid by some individuals to continue to exist, the fortress will end up influencing the wanderers far more than the reverse. 
 

I don't think fortresses will remain self-sufficient if it gets in the way of dev goals working "just right".

Except that as already discussed, the fortress does not function as either of those things.   

Not currently but in the future I think it will.

They had to exist but they no longer do and the fortresses initial population had to come from somewhere.

Where did Rome's population come from?

Rome depends for it's existance upon the ability to extract surplus value through rent/taxes (same thing before 17th century England) from the various Latin peasant farmers scattered about it's territory.  What you describe, the dwarves living in fungi wood cottages at the edge of cavern lakes is the dwarf equivilant and would result in a basically similar society (Feudalism+Capitalism), provided that the fortress's relationship to these 'cavern dwarves' is indeed equivilant.  It is all rather complicated actually......

So what I was saying about adjusting what a fortress actually and what sites exist can make them into Romans was partially correct, which is what I'd prefer over socialist hutterite dwarves even if it requires a three year development and a total rewrite of world gen sites functionality.

Rome is fundermentally different from a dwarf fortress because it cannot survive without the from the Latin peasants.  By this I do not mean that the Dwarf Fortress has to be able to grow enough food to feed it's own people (as at present), if it is able to produce goods of sufficiant value to buy itself enough food then it is still in a different situation to the situation that Rome is in.  Rome is not only unable to feed it's own people itself, it is also unable to produce enough goods to buy enough food to feed it's people. 

Part of the supply and demand development is that world gen sites can run out of resources and founding a new "fortress" can be the result of the old fortress running out of resources and the offings is your sending back is the "rent or extracted surplus", I can easily see a future where your required to give "offerings" and failure to do so result in a siege from for parent civ, the king demands that you pay your taxes.

The reason the various Latin peasants pay their rent/taxes to Rome is because they have no choice.  They are too weak/scattered/divided in their small villages/individual homesteads to avoid paying their rent/taxes.  However Rome also offers them in their present state a modicum of security, to increase this benefit it's laws thus establish that they personally have the right to cultivate a given area of land and so that therefore the peasants are bound to Rome by self-interest as well. 

And once digging sieges and attacker are in a single fortress is too weak to hold off the dwarven kingdom when the king demands his taxes be paid, its either pay taxes or face the world with no support (new migrants from the home civ) and a new enemy civ that want to take over your site.

However there is a basic conflict here, Rome wishes to extract as much surplus value as possible from the peasants through rent/taxes but the peasants want to keep as much of their surplus value as possible while still enjoying the benefits of Roman protection and law.  There is however an alternative, instead of relying upon distant Rome, they could instead band together into a large communal village along the lines of a human hamlet in DF; thus they would no longer need Rome at all.  In response to this deadly threat Rome responds by strengthening privatisation in order to increase division among the peasantry and keep them dependant upon it. 

This is where your parent civ cuts off your supply of traded fresh food, stops immigration happens by sieges you on both the surface and in the caverns just starving you out for not paying your taxes to the crown.

Granted that, the *fact* that somebody subjectively considers something to be unjust is quite objective.

Just like you can objectively say murder is illegal in America but that doesn't make killing another human being objectively illegal because what is classified as murder varies case by case.

The second person who defends the present order that the first person considers unjust cannot prove that the order he defends *is* just.  So instead he sets out to convince that person that the present order to the result of some objective reality that neither of them have any control over.  This works so well because normally the person opposed to what he considers an unjust order is the less powerful person, since he individually feels weak emotionally he is easily persuaded that what he opposes is invincible. 

It works even better if the first person manages to actually achieve some localised overthrow of the second person's favourite institution.  The second person can now covertly undermine the first person's society and then 'prove' what he was saying about objective reality. 

Even if you can prove a system as a stems from some inherent objective facet of reality doesn't make the system just, that's a naturalistic fallacy. This is why I've said that my personal preference is having greedy capitalistic dwarves because its not a just system, its an entertaining system to play with.

Objective truths cannot be observed, they can only be arrived at through Reason based upon necceserily subjective experiences. 

Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution in objectively observable though fossil record and DNA testing.

How can societies change if they are the result of human biology?  Human biology does not change fast enough nor is it racially diverse enough to result in any notable diversity in institutions and culture; hence the ability of rapid social changes to occur disproves the notion that human biology simply created human society. 

Its the basis kind of like the foundation of a building, the foundation of a building doesn't need the building on top of it but the building does need to foundation and the "changes" are either renovations to the old building or knocking it over and building something new in its place but either way you constrained by the limits of the foundation.

I think that the society (whether human or animal) starts off intially 'stretching' the biology that they presently have.  The biology then slowly catches up, driven by the fact that those societies who develop a tailor-made biology for their society are more successful than those who retain the original biology and merely stretch it to fit.   

I think I might agree with this, I just see humans and by extension dwarves as still being in the "stretching" phase and find the idea of adapting our biology to a temporary society as a bad evolutionary path, remaining mostly as we are and building and destroying society continually as in the past is the best path forward for the species as a whole, basically never binding ourselves to any one society type completely.

I feel that capitalism is far more fluid society type then socialism, there's more potential for it to change, succeed or fail all of which helps drive us forward as individuals but with a "perfect socialism" system that "drive" is gone and only thing that remains is the "common good"... no thank you.

As explained already in order to make the fortress a dwarven Rome Toady One would have to make the fortress incapable of surviving without extracting rent/taxes from a scattered population of dwarf peasants that exist across an abstract territory that the fortress 'owns'.   

If an adventurer refers to a player controlled creature in adventure mode then a "fortress" only refers to a player controlled site in fortress mode and staring scenarios will make some types of fortresses that are incapable of surviving without extracting rent/taxes for instance a temple "fortress" will surviving on the tithe form local sites giving some of the framework necessary to make the civ capital a dwarven Rome

What I've been trying to say is that I feel Toady will make such a change in the long run because if this type of relationship between sites doesn't occur then toady will have to give up on some of the development goals he has and I think he's proven that he is willing to take a long time to completely redevelop a system that to meet his goals.

This is the difference between Dawkin's selfish genes and genes for actual selfishness.  Creatures may be selfish because of their genes but a gene that makes it's creatures so selfish that it cannot care for it's own offspring is not really being selfish at all.  Of course actual selfish creatures do not care about genes, the irony here is that the creature that does potentially care about genes is actually an altruistic one.   

I disagree, its the different from helping someone because its the "right" thing to do and helping them because there's a potential reward.

The moment a creature starts to actually care for it's offspring, the compass is rather skewed towards altruism because on a genetic level the most potent selfishness genes are nonviable while the most potent altruism genes are quite viable.  One of the distinguishing traits of ants is that they actually care for their offspring, the majority of insects simply dump a large number of eggs into something and then leave them to fend for themselves.   

I disagree, I see altruism as taking an action that has no potential reward worth its expenditure in effort but caring about offspring does have a benefit worth its expenditure, in ants it provides workers for the colony whom in turn work for the "greater good" of the colony (the queen).

As I said the queens exist because there is a hive, the hive does not exist because there are queens. 

From the research I've been doing it seems that's true.

Yes queens do essentially exist as the social insect version of the one-child policy but with a difference. In order to keep the other insects from cheating on the rule the majority of the social insects were 'sterilised', leaving only a few able to produce children.  I would also think that the hostility of all social insects (save termites) to males is governed by the same logic, the presence of males adds 'temptation' into the system.   

When you combine naked mole rats and hutterite society it not assured but defiantly possible for dwarven hives to exist.

They can do that because the majority of the intellectual properties that the economy depends upon can only realistically be made by said companies.  Once the vast majority of people no longer have to produce basic goods and services they are free to flood the world with a torrent of freeware sufficient to negate any economic reliance that the government might have upon the intellectual property companies.

It is the economic reliance of the goverment upon the economic powers that gives said powers the ability to influence goverment policy.  Once that is gone the companies cannot mantain intellectual property rights any more than King Canute could hold back the tide. 

I understand what your talking about I just think about it as "what would I do if I stood to lose billions dollars" the answer "whatever I had to" after all "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king".

No government as such exists or is needed in a Hive-Mind.  It is information that is centralised (think wikipedia), not authority and all the individuals act in unison because they come seperately to the same decision based upon the same information.

Goverment is basically a shoddy substitute for a Hive-Mind.  It is what creatures produce when they need a Hive-Mind but owing to a lack of consensus or difficulty either in centralising information or in individual creatures accessing centralised information they need a means to accomplish the same ends of unified action.  The government centralises information to allow it to make a decision and then enforces a unitery course of action that would otherwise require a consensus.   

what I was saying is that even if we could build an artificial hive mind with technology based telepathy (free WiFi in your head) there would be enough opposition to that system that it would never "get off the ground", I for example would oppose it because I'd oppose the very idea of group telepathy and would rather live with the "shoddy substitute".

That was not the question.

I feel that it has the potential to decrease it.

It just means that all the individuals are identical.  If there were 1000 other identical versions of you would you be less yourself as a result? 

Yes and no, I consider my a unique individual and while many people my be similar none are exactly the same and so even though I'd still be a separate "me" from the other 999 but each "me" is worth less (0.0001) then if there only one me (1.0), so even if there was only one identical copy of me I'd want to destroy him and as much as he'd want to destroy me, in the words of highlander "there can be only one".

As already mentioned, merely having to buy food from the local hamlets does not chance anything fundermental.  Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are also not scattered peasants but large, centralised communes.   

I think Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are meant to represent scattered peasants and not be centralized communes, they don't do it very well but the game is still in early alpha and there's time to change that.

The fundermental nature of the game is built into the core mechanics.  There is no means other than simply prohibiting fortress dwarves from collectively producing enough surplus value to survive independantly without external income that this can be changed.   

I think that changing values in those core mechanics could do it.

Toady already reduced the amount of stone mining can produce and he could reduce it further.

Change how crafting works from increasing the time crafting takes to adding "failed" crafts that waste raw resources and produce nothing.

Make skill gain rates a lot slower so it takes 40 years or more to go from novice to grand master and still take 20 years with a strange mood.

Have dwarves in the fortress consume what the fortress does produce. (children will apparently play with toys next release, musicians are a thing)

Give all items xXwareXx rates and have all items "break" with use. (children break toys, musicians break instruments)

Add workshop zones and make them require tools that wear out faster the more there used.

Lower quality good wear out faster. (a normal hammer lasts about 3 years with regular use and masterwork about 30)


basically what he would need to do is lower dwarven production and add on site consumption of potential trade goods and adjust values of both until you get large fortress sites collapsing from internal demand outstripping the production of both food and trade goods and then he can start working on the economy's return, hence all the talk about installing the framework first.

There is a very great danger that Toady One will simply add in anachronistic starting scenarios because he does not understand how those things would simply not exist. 

I feel that the ultimate goal of DF is to create the dev's ideal game and if that results in you being unhappy with anachronism then tough and if it result in me being unhappy with hutterite dwarves thats equally tough.

Even if Toady One adds in inherantly negative value sites then it still matters who is paying them.  The development of a medieval economy only makes sense if it is scattered peasants that are doing the paying.

Dwarf Fortress is fundermentally a site-based game and adding more varients of sites is not going to change this fact.  Even if particular sites are made dependant upon payments from other sites or from a central government funded collectively by all sites then the basis of the society remains exactly the same. 

A real medieval society however is a land-based game. Sites exist as centres of abstract legal control over land and are sustained by the millions of peasants that lived dotted about the land that said sites own and the sites are dependant upon said peasants in order to exist.   

The new site types aren't the answer in and of themselves, add new sites alter old sites change the mechanics of fortress mode are all a part of the framework that goes into making fantasy kingdoms with a fantasy trope economy.

Because the barons were the government of the area in which they live. Taxing a hillocks is not taxing individual peasants, it is taxing another government.   

The mayor taxes the hillocks then the baron taxes the mayor and the king taxes the baron, if the peasants don't pay the mayor then the mayor doesn't pay the baron and the baron come in with is military to seize the taxes and "punish" the mayor, thus order and civil society is maintained.

The hillocks does not need the fortress in order to avoid anarchy; it is quite capable of governing itself without any input from the fortress at all.  Conversely given the fortress produces surplus value even if it did not produce enough food to feed itself it can still buy the food it needs, either from the local hillocks or from another fortress.  The result is that the hillocks has no reason to pay taxes and the fortress has no need to demand them.   

Why buy for what your military power suggest you can take for free, hillocks don't have much in the way of military so they need fortress based armies to fight of goblin and elven armies and to get this protection they must pay taxes.

I cannot comprehend how you think modifying the frequency at which sieges occur (they still do) is any comparison with essentially turning the whole game into Crusader Kings. 

Its about developing the game to be closer to what the devs want it to be and if crusader king DF is closer to what the dev's want then it is the same thing because both require changes that alter an aspect of gameplay people are familiar with and potentially fond of.

It is more work for you to get what you want than for me to get what I want.   

No doubt about that but Toady will do whatever he wants and if that requires 10x the work of want I want then he'll do 10x the work, this was actually one of your first complaints. 

Just point out that the surface races have some forging advantages, plentiful oxygen, easy removal of smoke and plenty of wood. 

I can see the smoke removal but they have oxygen from cavern trees and wood from those same trees.

Not particularly relavent given that we are talking about Capitalism in Hitler's case (despite the name of his party).  If you trying to argue that Socialism inherantly makes economies (and people) unproductive due to lack of 'incentives', then all Socialist countries should have gone backwards from when they started out.  The irony here is that only the implementation of Capitalist policies have ever caused a country to 'go backwards'.

You said that socialism turned poor broken counties into a superpower and so did Hitler I feel its a relevent comparison.

and socialist countries might have moved forward from where they started but they never really matched their competition so it certainly didn't make them more competitive.

In a competition you are not declared the winner simply because the kill off your rivals, the fact that you have done so actually invalidates the competition. 

I say that if you kill the competition you win by default and winning is winning whether its by an inch or a mile or your opponents untimely demise. 

The ability of the Capitalist countries to kill off the Socialist countries is quite seperate from the actual relative merits or functionality of the two systems.

It is separate from the merits but not the functionality, capitalism was functionally better at destroying it competition

By your definition they already do.  Dwarves go to jail for failing to meet noble's mandates. 

Slavery is not the same thing as forced labour.  It is about owning people as commercial property, not about forcing people to do stuff.   

Which is why I think Toady will change the status quo.

All the existing creatures have personality facets/values that would undermine such a system so do not worry.  Dwarves system would fall apart because dwarves lack the personality/values to simply share everything but do have the values to cooperate to make stuff.   

I'm not really worried because I'm confident that Toady will make a system that enables the full extent of inherent dwarven greed to be represented.

I do not agree with you.  A highly competitive creature is easily motivated to work for the 'collective good' simply by making doing so into a kind of game where the winners get given a symbolic medal at the end of the season.  They do not care about owning the stuff they make or the tools to do so, they care about getting onto the 'high score board' of the site so that everybody can look at them with envy.   

That does make sense with just a high competition and median greed value it could work, money is basically a score point system anyway.

Taxes clearly exist already since the central goverment exists (we just do not pay them).  As already mentioned before however, taxes do not change anything about the society if they are paid by large communal entities to other large communal entities. 

True, sites taxing each other is not the same as them taxing its own citizens.

It does not seem crucial because you do not yet understand the difference between one communal arrangement being dependant upon another and a communal arrangement being dependant upon a load of private producers.  As the saying goes.

"The one that pays the piper decides the tune."

Nope I don't.

gotta say that I've never heard that saying before.

Except that you are playing the tax office of the English King and not the colonists. 

The initial seven are colonists and their colony is funded by the crown but as the site start actually producing value the crown wants its investment back plus interest resulting in a certain level of value in "offerings" to the king being demanded and perhaps only of certain types of goods... like a mandate on your whole fortress from the king.

I fail to see the difference between a society having poverty stricken peasants and what a society ruled by a literal demon would be like.   

its the difference between manslaughter and murder, if poverty stricken peasants are a side effect of the economy that's manslaughter but if there existence is the goal its murder, I see the demon as wanting there to be poverty stricken peasants because it enjoys their suffering (me ) while in the other society their just "collateral" damage.

Hutterites have a normal human nature, so it is clear that it is sufficient to have the correct values and not neccesery to have a truly angelic inherant personality. 

They are also as boring as the Amish.

I cannot see how you can get gray at all without having black and white to mix together.   

You get grey and grey when there's no white or black left to mix and all that's left is grey.

It is however the virus that wins not the host creature.

I did say that I declare the virus to the winner.

No, the goblins are more like that empire. 

True Goblin defiantly are but I do feel that the player civ is supposed to be like an empire as well.

Not all Socialism fell and not all countries are 100% Capitalist either. 

True its not completely gone but I feel that its closer to the total collapse end of the spectrum then the big success end, also true about countries not being 100% capitalist but for the ones that are capitalist I feel that most of them are over 50% capitalist.

If you a random person, hiring the legendery mercenery to work for you is safe.  However being hired *by* said individuals clearly is not. 

Ah I get you now, your saying that the PC is also a mercenary and being hired by him is dangerous but you seem to ignore that "adventurer" only means "player controlled character" not that you actually do any adventuring.

Edit:with the addition of bards and traveling musicians will there be followers who's motivation is not death and glory?

Yeah, you can have your performance troupe that just wants to perform, with no wanna-die checks at all.

The life of a merchant or travailing bard then that not as dangerous and that's where "hiring" was mentioned in the dev page so I suppose it depend on what your hiring them for because even if the "legendary mercenary" hires you if its to do something like guard his private property or look after his sheep that's no more dangerous then standard hamlet life with the added benefit that anyone with commonsense won't won't to anger Urist Mcgoblingenocide the slayer of Demons, Dragons, Night Creatures, Hydras and owner of a very nice mansion over in the hamlet of TradeIorn.

The Hutterites did not go from 400 to 50000 over 500 years.  Their numbers were reduced by persecution to 400 and then they went from that to 50000 in 125 years.  So not did they manage to expand rapidly but also survive a major threat.

While they did expand faster then I originally thought Scientology still did better and that stuff just plain crazy with no sense to it at all.

Rome was successful in the propogation of it's values across the world, in spite of the fact that those values ultimately resulted in their demise.  The virus therefore consumed it's host (Rome) but in the process spread itself across the world to begin the process of host capture all over again.  So in the end Rome was not a success, but a rabid attack dog that consumed itself while spreading the virus that was consuming it around the world. 

I still say that because it propagated its own values that it was at lest partially successful, The attack dog succeeded in ultimately killing its enemy because its values helped form the nations that defeated the one that defeated it.

I personally want socialist hutterite dwarves.  The question here is how to have values propogated realistically by society but still have enough randomness that we will potentially see both kinds of dwarves (and everything in the middle) in the same world.  Then we can have some dwarf version of the Cold War. 

A Dwarven cold war That.... actually does sound kind of interesting, still not a fan of hutterite dwarves but the ability to defeat them in game... Hmm I think I can Dig it.

It would be quite possible to have societies start with raw-defined economic institutions.  Those institutions would then develop or dissapear in the normal manner. 

Raw defined starting point would be nice, you start where you want and I start where I want.

Ant-Society would only consume the other one's if the creatures are capable of managing it, whether naturally or in their values.  If the superior utopian society absorbs enough of those from the inferior dystopian society who are incapable of living in that society then it is likely that the society itself would change to become more dystopian.  So the virus is consuming it's present host only to find itself another.

I have to say that if the "superior utopian society" gets consumed from the inside by the dystopian one then its not all that superior imho

[GoblinCookie]

This is why I bought up language comprehension because if your insulted "polity" in a language you don't understand it can't effect your mood, first you have to understand the insult then you can feel offended.

Whether the way they respond to an insult is proper or not is subjective, in ancient times an insult could lead to a duel to the death and that was the "proper" response so the people who "fly off the handle" first understood they where insulted and then based of their personality facets react in an instinctual way.

No, insulting people and otherwise verbally bullying people does hurt them regardless of what they do in response.  You are right that person has to understand the language but the process of understanding language is a subconscious one not a conscious one, so that person who is insulted is hurt by being insulted whether they want to be or whether they admit to being affected or not.

This is why people everywhere lash out in response to an insult, whether verbally or otherwise.  That is because words have an emotional effect prior to any rational decision being made, a person becomes angry because the words when understood transmit anger; if they do not retaliate it is because they have repressed the emotional effect, not because the word has failed to make them less calm. 

Some societies understand this and so sympathise with the victim that lashes out while others side with the bullies and 'blame the victims' for getting hurt. 

Yes and no, pheromones in all animal trigger automatic subconscious responses based on that creatures brain chemistry so if the only type of communication is though pheromones you get a "brain washing" effect where individuals are subconsciously brought in line with the "social" norm.

That is true also of words and pretty much all forms of communication used by anything ever.  Surely you understand that words have an emotional 'charge' than can effect other people and are not just cold information transmitters.  If a person hears a word with an emotional charge and understands it, then their emotions will be affected whether they want to be affected or not. 

And I see pheromone as being primarily biological, their cooperation is because of "brain washing" individual behavior out of their workers to a greater degree then words alone can do.

Ants are 'conscious' of pheromones in a similar fashion that we are conscious of basically the written word.  When an individual ants goes off on it's own to scout for food they 'paint' a trail of pheronomes leading back to the ant colony.  The other ants in are not affected in some mysterious chemical way, they actually deliberately follow the trail as if they can 'see' it in order to arrive at the food. 

Since are evidently able to make deliberate decision based upon pheromones that are laid down deliberately by other ants, thus the idea that the pheromones have some magical brainwashing power because humans are unable to detect how pheromones are influencing them is quite baseless.  Humans do not have any awareness of the pheronomes that they emit nor of their effect on others, ants on the other hand use pheronomes in a deliberate fashion. 

And I've rejected your stance, I feel like they live as Romans in the caverns and the fortress is their Rome. What your basing your stance on is what I think is just a place holder for future developments in which smaller less populated site support larger sites.

Their no reason to think that the current site are the finale sites because Toady has shown the willingness to completely rework a system that doesn't fit in with his goals for DF, I think that Toady will reduce the overall size/population of hamlets and replace them with smaller more "scattered" about sites if that necessary for the "capitalistic" economy to work even if he has to completely scrap the current site system to do so.

Everything I am saying is based upon the core game mechanics, that is the fundermental structure of the game.  You in response conjure up an entirely imaginery DF whose core mechanics bear no resemblence at all to any presently existing reality. 

There is something called the site limit that gets in the way of ever implementing a large number of scattered about sites. 

I don't think fortresses will remain self-sufficient if it gets in the way of dev goals working "just right".

The dev goals so far have always been about developing the internal life and productivity of the fortress.  If the idea is to turn all the dwarf fortresses into palaces with a ruler with a retinue of guards and servants, then why bother at all with all that? 

Not currently but in the future I think it will.

DF will never become Crusader Kings and if it does then I will stop playing the game. 

Where did Rome's population come from?

Nobody actually knows and it does not really matter. 

So what I was saying about adjusting what a fortress actually and what sites exist can make them into Romans was partially correct, which is what I'd prefer over socialist hutterite dwarves even if it requires a three year development and a total rewrite of world gen sites functionality.

If the devs had wanted to do that, then why did they not simply do it?  They have chosen to develop the productive elements of the game while leaving the political elements of the fortress interacting with the hillocks entirely undeveloped. 

Part of the supply and demand development is that world gen sites can run out of resources and founding a new "fortress" can be the result of the old fortress running out of resources and the offings is your sending back is the "rent or extracted surplus", I can easily see a future where your required to give "offerings" and failure to do so result in a siege from for parent civ, the king demands that you pay your taxes.

That makes absolutely no sense.  If the existing fortress runs out of resources it obviously cannot afford to build any new fortresses. 

It also cannot afford to besiege the new fortress for not paying taxes since it does not have the resources to sustain the army to do so.

And once digging sieges and attacker are in a single fortress is too weak to hold off the dwarven kingdom when the king demands his taxes be paid, its either pay taxes or face the world with no support (new migrants from the home civ) and a new enemy civ that want to take over your site.

Yes, we definately need to develop the central government.  However this is quite different from individual peasants paying their taxes because as already mentioned, if sites pay taxes to sites what we end up is a site-based legal system rather than an individual based one.

"Those who pay the piper pay the tune" remember?

This is where your parent civ cuts off your supply of traded fresh food, stops immigration happens by sieges you on both the surface and in the caverns just starving you out for not paying your taxes to the crown.

All of which costs them far more than it is worth. 

You have no reason to pay taxes and they have no need of your taxes.  The capital city can quite happily support the monarch and his court, while the various barons can be supported by the local sites that are the barons of.  Hence the central goverment can survive in peacetime without any need of taxation, the only context in which taxation would actually make sense would be in wartime in order to support the troops drafted from the various sites. 

Just like you can objectively say murder is illegal in America but that doesn't make killing another human being objectively illegal because what is classified as murder varies case by case.

There are things which people think are unjust, irrespective of whether they are or not.  What I was saying is that it makes sense for the people trying to defend that thing to claim that that thing is the result of an objective reality beyond human control. 

Even if you can prove a system as a stems from some inherent objective facet of reality doesn't make the system just, that's a naturalistic fallacy. This is why I've said that my personal preference is having greedy capitalistic dwarves because its not a just system, its an entertaining system to play with.

The trick is not intended to convince the other side that the institution is just.  It is merely designed to demoralise them by making it look like they are up against something more solid and permenant than simply the people who defend the insitution. 

The enemy is not convinced to switch sides, it is merely convinced that resistance is futile.

Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution in objectively observable though fossil record and DNA testing.

There is no such thing as an objective observation.  You can observe things that are falling but no observation of things falling is ever an objective reality of a falling object. 

That is because an objective thing is something that exists independantly of being observed.  An observation cannot exist independantly of being observed. 

Its the basis kind of like the foundation of a building, the foundation of a building doesn't need the building on top of it but the building does need to foundation and the "changes" are either renovations to the old building or knocking it over and building something new in its place but either way you constrained by the limits of the foundation.

The society is the foundation for the biology not the other way around.  The ant society created the ant biology pretty much entirely to the order of the needs of ant society, even the majority of individual's own personal ability to reproduce ended up being biologically erased for the greater good of society.  So even the propogation of the individuals own genes cannot prevail against the needs of society. 

I think I might agree with this, I just see humans and by extension dwarves as still being in the "stretching" phase and find the idea of adapting our biology to a temporary society as a bad evolutionary path, remaining mostly as we are and building and destroying society continually as in the past is the best path forward for the species as a whole, basically never binding ourselves to any one society type completely.

I feel that capitalism is far more fluid society type then socialism, there's more potential for it to change, succeed or fail all of which helps drive us forward as individuals but with a "perfect socialism" system that "drive" is gone and only thing that remains is the "common good"... no thank you.

Change is only a good thing if it is change from a less perfect state to a more perfect state.  A perfect socialist society does not need to change being it is already perfect, any change implies a degeneration into a worse state.  Since the present dwarf society is presently perfect for the needs of a dwarf fortress, any change to it is a change towards a worse state of affairs that works less well and has more problems.  The question that needs to be asked is what forced the fortress to adopt a less perfect system than what we have at the moment? 

If an adventurer refers to a player controlled creature in adventure mode then a "fortress" only refers to a player controlled site in fortress mode and staring scenarios will make some types of fortresses that are incapable of surviving without extracting rent/taxes for instance a temple "fortress" will surviving on the tithe form local sites giving some of the framework necessary to make the civ capital a dwarven Rome

What I've been trying to say is that I feel Toady will make such a change in the long run because if this type of relationship between sites doesn't occur then toady will have to give up on some of the development goals he has and I think he's proven that he is willing to take a long time to completely redevelop a system that to meet his goals.

To be realistic several starting scenarios will have to be dependant upon an external source of income, (at minimum the prison colony and militery fortress) should recieve an external source of income from an outside source and there is a quote from the dev page that covers the potential self-sufficiancy dilemma.

We'd rather see the labor list removed entirely in many circumstances, depending on fortress citizen status, but that'll have to wait until starting scenarios are completed.

In order to keep certain sites from becoming self-sufficiant he is planning to actually remove the standard labour list from particular individuals so the player cannot simply assign them to do labour and sustain the fortress in the normal sense.  However the way he is doing it does strongly suggest that the normal fortress is going to continue to be independantly viable in surplus value terms because external mechanics are being used to keep certain people working in certain scenarios.

It is not the relationship of some sites being dependant on other sites that prevents Feudalism/Capitalism from arising as it did historically.  It is that the sites do not depend upon individuals that exist seperately of the sites, that is scattered peasants.  If Rome is dependant upon individual peasants then the laws and economy is based upon the individual, the question that goes through the rulers minds is "How much Socialism do we need to ensure the welfare of the individual?".  If Rome is instead dependant upon peasant communes then the question is now "How much Capitalism to we need to ensure the welfare of Rome.

I disagree, its the different from helping someone because its the "right" thing to do and helping them because there's a potential reward.

Most people help other people because it makes them feel good inside or because it makes them look good in the eyes of others.  Not many people help people because it is the right thing to do without feeling good about it. 

People refrain from helping other people normally because they feel the cost is too great, because they do not care about the welfare of the people they would be helping or because they have believe that they would only make things worse *by* helping. 

I disagree, I see altruism as taking an action that has no potential reward worth its expenditure in effort but caring about offspring does have a benefit worth its expenditure, in ants it provides workers for the colony whom in turn work for the "greater good" of the colony (the queen).

No, Altruism is not privilaging yourself and your own needs over those of others.  Expending more effect than the reward of that effort is worth is simply 'negative value production', rather like taking a priceless metal artefact and pressing the Melt button on the keyboard. 

Offspring are negative value producers, they start off consuming more value from their parents or other carers than they produce.  Only when they grow up do they produce surplus value, but they will want to spend that on their own offspring rather than their own parents. 

I understand what your talking about I just think about it as "what would I do if I stood to lose billions dollars" the answer "whatever I had to" after all "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king".

There is no need for the intellectual property companies of the Star Trek to have gone to the grave peacefully.  They also likely succeeded for a while, but could not withstand the inevitable in the end. 

what I was saying is that even if we could build an artificial hive mind with technology based telepathy (free WiFi in your head) there would be enough opposition to that system that it would never "get off the ground", I for example would oppose it because I'd oppose the very idea of group telepathy and would rather live with the "shoddy substitute".

Yet we all happily edit wikis of various kinds, which are the informational equivilant of hive minds.  It is rather more likely that people would gradually transition towards the hive mind essentially by accident than that they would one day decide to implement it. 

I feel that it has the potential to decrease it.

What does?

Yes and no, I consider my a unique individual and while many people my be similar none are exactly the same and so even though I'd still be a separate "me" from the other 999 but each "me" is worth less (0.0001) then if there only one me (1.0), so even if there was only one identical copy of me I'd want to destroy him and as much as he'd want to destroy me, in the words of highlander "there can be only one".

So you want people to disagree with you? 

I think Hamlets/Hillocks/Mountain Halls are meant to represent scattered peasants and not be centralized communes, they don't do it very well but the game is still in early alpha and there's time to change that.

That is why I do not generally argue based upon them, we do not really know how they internally work.  However as far as we know they are based upon the fortress society that created them, which means the centralised settlements make total sense. 

I think that changing values in those core mechanics could do it.

Toady already reduced the amount of stone mining can produce and he could reduce it further.

Change how crafting works from increasing the time crafting takes to adding "failed" crafts that waste raw resources and produce nothing.

Make skill gain rates a lot slower so it takes 40 years or more to go from novice to grand master and still take 20 years with a strange mood.

Have dwarves in the fortress consume what the fortress does produce. (children will apparently play with toys next release, musicians are a thing)

Give all items xXwareXx rates and have all items "break" with use. (children break toys, musicians break instruments)

Add workshop zones and make them require tools that wear out faster the more there used.

Lower quality good wear out faster. (a normal hammer lasts about 3 years with regular use and masterwork about 30)

basically what he would need to do is lower dwarven production and add on site consumption of potential trade goods and adjust values of both until you get large fortress sites collapsing from internal demand outstripping the production of both food and trade goods and then he can start working on the economy's return, hence all the talk about installing the framework first.

Those measures would certainly make the player fortress poorer, but would not inherantly change the communal nature of the society.  Only when the fortress can only survive by taxing individual peasants scattered across the fortress land as opposed to other sites do we end up with Feudalism (and hence Capitalism).  That however would require inverting the present messed up situation where the fortress worker's appear to be enormously more productive with anyone else's with the opposite messed up situation where your workers are massively less productive than anybody else's. 

Basically, if your worker's cannot produce surplus value then why would the peasants/hillocks/mountain homes worker's be able to afford to support you?

I feel that the ultimate goal of DF is to create the dev's ideal game and if that results in you being unhappy with anachronism then tough and if it result in me being unhappy with hutterite dwarves thats equally tough.

Anachronism is generally added in without thought. 

The new site types aren't the answer in and of themselves, add new sites alter old sites change the mechanics of fortress mode are all a part of the framework that goes into making fantasy kingdoms with a fantasy trope economy.

The new sites are generally there to de-abstract the world economy.  For instance we know that humans have metals, but in order to have metals they must have mines and where are the mines?

The mayor taxes the hillocks then the baron taxes the mayor and the king taxes the baron, if the peasants don't pay the mayor then the mayor doesn't pay the baron and the baron come in with is military to seize the taxes and "punish" the mayor, thus order and civil society is maintained.

The peasants elected the Mayor.  The hillocks is also a replica of the Fortress that created it, if the fortress that created it works in a certain way then the hillocks will replicate on the surface the underground society of the dwarves. 

Why buy for what your military power suggest you can take for free, hillocks don't have much in the way of military so they need fortress based armies to fight of goblin and elven armies and to get this protection they must pay taxes.

Nothing at all prevents hillocks from having a strong military, they even have a militia commander of their own. 

Its about developing the game to be closer to what the devs want it to be and if crusader king DF is closer to what the dev's want then it is the same thing because both require changes that alter an aspect of gameplay people are familiar with and potentially fond of.

If the devs had wanted Crusader Kings they would have made it.  As it stands they have focused on the mechanics that of least interest to Crusader Kings, (how the peasants produce the stuff) and ignored the planned mechanics that are of interest to Crusader Kings. 

No doubt about that but Toady will do whatever he wants and if that requires 10x the work of want I want then he'll do 10x the work, this was actually one of your first complaints. 

What makes you think that Toady One is on your side and wants everything that you want? 

I can see the smoke removal but they have oxygen from cavern trees and wood from those same trees.

Fungi do not produce oxygen. 

You said that socialism turned poor broken counties into a superpower and so did Hitler I feel its a relevent comparison.

and socialist countries might have moved forward from where they started but they never really matched their competition so it certainly didn't make them more competitive.

Socialist countries tended to end up right in the middle between the richest Capitalist countries and the poorest ones.  If the wealthy Capitalist countries feed off the poorer ones, then that is exactly what you would expect. 

I say that if you kill the competition you win by default and winning is winning whether its by an inch or a mile or your opponents untimely demise. 

If the competition is actually a war then yes, otherwise you just end up in prison.   

It is separate from the merits but not the functionality, capitalism was functionally better at destroying it competition

Correct.  However that may simply be that Socialism had not evolved an effective counter to the strategies used against it, whether ideological or strategic. 

I'm not really worried because I'm confident that Toady will make a system that enables the full extent of inherent dwarven greed to be represented.

Dwarves are only slightly more greedy than humans. 

That does make sense with just a high competition and median greed value it could work, money is basically a score point system anyway.

The consistant losers however are likely to get depressed and maybe kill themselves.  So even using competition as a means of motivation is not without it's casualties. 

Nope I don't.

gotta say that I've never heard that saying before.

Maybe it's a British saying not an American one. 

The difference is that whether the site is 20, 200, 2000, 20,000 in size the site is a collective thing.  This means that any legal system or economy tends to be written to maximise the welfare of the site.  The individual producer has few rights, especially property rights in the resulting system because the site has basically no reason to give such rights to anybody. 

If the site is dependant upon the wealth produced by the individual taxpayer because *it* cannot manage to collectively produce surplus value, then the site is rendered dependant upon private production.  Since the site cannot survive without taxes, they have no power to defy these people and therefore indulge them by making sure to give them the greatest amount of rights and privilages possible. 

The initial seven are colonists and their colony is funded by the crown but as the site start actually producing value the crown wants its investment back plus interest resulting in a certain level of value in "offerings" to the king being demanded and perhaps only of certain types of goods... like a mandate on your whole fortress from the king.

Now your site is producing surplus value again.   

its the difference between manslaughter and murder, if poverty stricken peasants are a side effect of the economy that's manslaughter but if there existence is the goal its murder, I see the demon as wanting there to be poverty stricken peasants because it enjoys their suffering (me ) while in the other society their just "collateral" damage.

I doubt the poverty stricken peasants care much for the difference. 

They are also as boring as the Amish.

I do not know any personally, but I would imagine there are plenty of conflicts going on.   

You get grey and grey when there's no white or black left to mix and all that's left is grey.

You have what I like to call 'colourless fiction'.  Since everybody is the exact shade of grey, all conflicts have no real meaning and no third parties (like the reader) have any reason to care about the outcome. 

I did say that I declare the virus to the winner.

Yes you did. 

True Goblin defiantly are but I do feel that the player civ is supposed to be like an empire as well.

Fantasy dwarves are normally supposed to be more Switzerland than Rome; defensively minded, greedy and isolationist. 

True its not completely gone but I feel that its closer to the total collapse end of the spectrum then the big success end, also true about countries not being 100% capitalist but for the ones that are capitalist I feel that most of them are over 50% capitalist.

Well you could say it is like an evolutionary arms race.  What if the collapse simply killed off the weak links that had not developed properly effective ideological defenses, while leaving the stronger variants alone?

Ah I get you now, your saying that the PC is also a mercenary and being hired by him is dangerous but you seem to ignore that "adventurer" only means "player controlled character" not that you actually do any adventuring.

Edit:with the addition of bards and traveling musicians will there be followers who's motivation is not death and glory?

Yeah, you can have your performance troupe that just wants to perform, with no wanna-die checks at all.

The life of a merchant or travailing bard then that not as dangerous and that's where "hiring" was mentioned in the dev page so I suppose it depend on what your hiring them for because even if the "legendary mercenary" hires you if its to do something like guard his private property or look after his sheep that's no more dangerous then standard hamlet life with the added benefit that anyone with commonsense won't won't to anger Urist Mcgoblingenocide the slayer of Demons, Dragons, Night Creatures, Hydras and owner of a very nice mansion over in the hamlet of TradeIorn.

This is a genuine problem.  How do we end up with the correct henchmen for the lifestyle that the player character has to offer? 

While they did expand faster then I originally thought Scientology still did better and that stuff just plain crazy with no sense to it at all.

Religions tend to be just plain crazy with no sense at all (to those who do not believe in them).  Scientology has the advantage of being perfectly well adapted for Capitalist society, since it worships money.  Scientology on the other hand never manages to create a whole society according to it's program, but since it believes so devoutly in $, is that really a loss?   

I still say that because it propagated its own values that it was at lest partially successful, The attack dog succeeded in ultimately killing its enemy because its values helped form the nations that defeated the one that defeated it.

A society is not exactly the same thing as it's values, values are simply something it has.  The whole project was a success from the point of view of the virus, but the attack dog was destroyed even if it's virus went on to make many more attack dogs of those who killed it.  The same thing happened to the Persian Empire when Alexander the Great smashed it was equally ludicrous ease given how strong (on paper) it should have been. 

Raw defined starting point would be nice, you start where you want and I start where I want.

The starting point is sort of arbitery really, as unless you intend to play say in Yr 10 every society will have adjust it's economic institutions to fit it's current values and dominant creature personality anyway by the time that world-gen finished. 

Think of like how Liberal Crime Squad works, there the team shows they can manage the evolution of political/economic systems.  The main difference is that by default, rather than everybody starting off Conservative, everybody starts of as Elite Liberal; which essentially means things work as they do now.  But unless the creature has a suitably extreme 'left-wing' values/personality policies will then shift towards mere Liberal or even further if the creature has 'right-wing' values/personality.  You can however custom start it so that particular policies start off at a value above 0 but things will naturally shift towards the proper value.

The main difference is that while the policies in Liberal Crime squad are measured seperately, the economic policies are clustered around 4 pillars, with a seperate 'health' value and help to hold the pillars up but these policies all exact a 'seperate' toll from society.  These pillars relate to four basic concerns that the fortress economy would face. 

1. Production: How do we get the dwarves to produce sufficiant wealth rather than lazying around.  [CRAFTSMANSHIP] [SKILL] and [HARD_WORK] help increase production while [MERRIMENT] [INTROSPECTION] and [LEISURE_TIME] undermine production.
2. Regulation: How do we get the dwarves to produce the right kind of wealth rather than doing just what they want. [SELF_CONTROL] [HARMONY] and [COOPERATION] increase regulation while [INDEPENDANCE] [COMPETITION] and [ARTWORK] undermine regulation.
3. Distribution: How do we make sure that goods are distributed 'fairly' rather than being corruptly hoarded by the powerful.  [SACRIFICE] [SELF_CONTROL] and [FAIRNESS] increase distribution while [FAMILY] [FRIENDSHIP] and [POWER] undermine distribution.
4. Hospitality: How do we made sure that visiting outsiders are cared for without being taken advantage of.  [LAW] [TRUTH] and [DECORUM] increase hospitality while [COMMERCE] [ELOQUENCE] and [CUNNING] undermine hospitality. 

Economic policies are clustered around these four pillars.  Sites can come to grief is basically four ways, their beings do not produce enough (production), their beings refuse to work in a unified way (regulation), the powerful corruptly hoard all the wealth or outsiders smuggle their wealth away (hospitality).  All four pillars when undermined result in a loss of site productivity and policies get enacted as a result of the site coming to realise both that it has a problem and the problem is not universal.  This can happen in two ways, the first way is for them to trade with another site that has fewer maluses than they do and the second is when the people 'in charge' cannot get all their basic needs (food, drink, clothing). 

The economic policies that are implemented to 'solve' the crisis depend upon a mixture the values of the civilization and the personal values of the ruler (s).  These policies mitigate the damage done in economic terms but also create new problems; the most extreme policies have the greatest effect but cause the largest amount of problems.  Policies are repealed or moderated when a suitable ruler comes to power whose has values opposed to the core value of the policy, provided that it's repealing does not make the site uncompetative.  When policies exist that are at odds with the values of the population there is an increased chance of the ruler being overthrown, the more extreme the policies the more that is so (this helps to bring a ruler into power to remove policies. 

I have to say that if the "superior utopian society" gets consumed from the inside by the dystopian one then its not all that superior imho

This brings us back to the whole question of biology.  If the reason the creature is bad is down to values (nurture) then the superior utopian society can simply indocrinate the newcomers, who are not very well disposed to their old society anyway but if the creature is bad because of it's personality (nature) then they have a problem. 

[JesterHell696]

No, insulting people and otherwise verbally bullying people does hurt them regardless of what they do in response. 

Whats this in relation to? I said that verbal insults "Hurt" less when done by a stranger in comparison to when said by a loved one even if the words are the exact same the response is different, why? because its filtered though the conscious mind and what their response is happens after its filtered.

You are right that person has to understand the language but the process of understanding language is a subconscious one not a conscious one, so that person who is insulted is hurt by being insulted whether they want to be or whether they admit to being affected or not.

if it a subconscious process the why doe people often do a double take when insulted unexpectedly? and why does it matter who is insulting you?

If its a subconscious process the first should never occur and the second shouldn't be as pronounced unless the conscious mind act as a buffer though which the information has to be processed and only after that processing can the subconscious response happen.

This is why people everywhere lash out in response to an insult, whether verbally or otherwise.  That is because words have an emotional effect prior to any rational decision being made, a person becomes angry because the words when understood transmit anger; if they do not retaliate it is because they have repressed the emotional effect, not because the word has failed to make them less calm. 

my point is that the understanding is conscious, have you ever been so focused on something that you miss whats said when some one start talking to you or have you ever been distracted by something during a conversation and had to say "sorry can you please repeat that"? if the understanding is subconscious you would still understand what has been said even though your conscious mind is else where.

Some societies understand this and so sympathise with the victim that lashes out while others side with the bullies and 'blame the victims' for getting hurt. 

Its perfectly possible to not care about an individual to the point that their opinion becomes irreverent to you at which point both praise/compliments and criticism/insults both result it a "meh" response and this isn't an a case of the "burying" how they feel because they just don't care about anything that person has to say in the slightest.

It works like this because the subconscious mind applies a value to people for example your mother is worth more then a total stranger ans just like their are methods to teach yourself to be more empathetic you can teach yourself to be less empathetic.

So the society that sympathizes with the victim takes the path that teaching the bully to empathize with their victim fixes the issue (someones feeling being hurt) the "others" take the path that teaching the victim not to care about their bully fixes the issue (someones feeling being hurt).

That is true also of words and pretty much all forms of communication used by anything ever.  Surely you understand that words have an emotional 'charge' than can effect other people and are not just cold information transmitters.  If a person hears a word with an emotional charge and understands it, then their emotions will be affected whether they want to be affected or not.   

I never said that words have no effect, I did say that the effects of pheromones are greater on the subconcsious mind because they bypass the consciousness's "buffer" effect.

Ants are 'conscious' of pheromones in a similar fashion that we are conscious of basically the written word.  When an individual ants goes off on it's own to scout for food they 'paint' a trail of pheronomes leading back to the ant colony.  The other ants in are not affected in some mysterious chemical way, they actually deliberately follow the trail as if they can 'see' it in order to arrive at the food. 

I disagree, I firmly think that they (ants) are effected on a more profound level with pheromone communication then a human reading written text and the affect is not "mysterious" its a subconscious compulsion to follow the pheromones "command".

Since are evidently able to make deliberate decision based upon pheromones that are laid down deliberately by other ants, thus the idea that the pheromones have some magical brainwashing power because humans are unable to detect how pheromones are influencing them is quite baseless.  Humans do not have any awareness of the pheronomes that they emit nor of their effect on others, ants on the other hand use pheronomes in a deliberate fashion. 

I can't find any proof that its a "deliberate decision" any more then proof that its pheromone "brain washing", its something scientist are still studying in ants and with the lack of evidence one way or the other I choose to believe in the brainwashing hypothesis.

While this link is for bees it can be applied to ants with little difficulty.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070719-bee-control.html

Everything I am saying is based upon the core game mechanics, that is the fundermental structure of the game.  You in response conjure up an entirely imaginery DF whose core mechanics bear no resemblence at all to any presently existing reality. 

There is something called the site limit that gets in the way of ever implementing a large number of scattered about sites.   

I actually brought this up before but in a different way, your focusing on what DF is now and how to expand upon current mechanics while I'm focusing on what it could become and given that Toady has no problem with completely changing the way something works and even said

Threetoe:    Okay, the next question is from Robbert, and he asks, "Is there any particular function you would like to redesign, refactor, or even remove from dwarf fortress mode, and if so, why?"

Toady:    We were thinking about this one a little bit and, uh, it seems like everything works that way, he he he.

Threetoe:    Yeah, I think if you had to say something general, it would just be the interface, probably, right?

Toady:    Yeah... I mean if we're going to the obvious things, the interface and all that is terrible. I mean, redoing the fluids, redoing the pathing, redoing everything... All of the industries, how the buildings work, I don't even know if I'd come back with workshops or just go with the zones approach that we've all been talking about for so long. There's really a lot of things that could be changed, and that's kind of just the regular process of game development, is just moving forward and gutting things, especially on a project like this.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_22_transcript.html#22.38

Nothing is set as the finished ideal, also the maximum site limit in advance world gen is  -1 to 100000 that's quite a lot of potential sites once optimization get handled.

The dev goals so far have always been about developing the internal life and productivity of the fortress.  If the idea is to turn all the dwarf fortresses into palaces with a ruler with a retinue of guards and servants, then why bother at all with all that? 

If "adventurer" refer to a player controlled creature then "fortress" just means player controlled site, part starting scenarios is the handle different site types, the "prison" fort, the "temple" fort or the "military" fort are all different sites that are just call "fortress" which is a reference to player controlled sites, this doesn't mean that you should expect them to remain synonymous with the current world gen "fortresses", which is the "palace" I'm talking about.

I did say that I feel the current world gen site are place holders.

DF will never become Crusader Kings and if it does then I will stop playing the game. 

I don't know this seems kind of Crusader Kings'y

Rainseeker:   So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

Toady:   Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_20_transcript.html

If the devs had wanted to do that, then why did they not simply do it?  They have chosen to develop the productive elements of the game while leaving the political elements of the fortress interacting with the hillocks entirely undeveloped.   

Because Toady wants to have semi-regular releases and to do that he draw a line and say's "that's enough on that subject for now" and release.

That makes absolutely no sense.  If the existing fortress runs out of resources it obviously cannot afford to build any new fortresses. 

It also cannot afford to besiege the new fortress for not paying taxes since it does not have the resources to sustain the army to do so. 

So Rome couldn't afford to found any new sites or besiege anyone little group that doesn't pay their taxes or tries to rebel?

My point is that the year 0 fortress is an early young Rome and all other sites are founded for "Romes" expansion.

Yes, we definately need to develop the central government.  However this is quite different from individual peasants paying their taxes because as already mentioned, if sites pay taxes to sites what we end up is a site-based legal system rather than an individual based one.

"Those who pay the piper pay the tune" remember?

Remember those adventure mode tropes that are heavily dependent on an individual based one, to have that system in adventure mode is to have it in fortress mode.

All of which costs them far more than it is worth. 

You have no reason to pay taxes and they have no need of your taxes.  The capital city can quite happily support the monarch and his court, while the various barons can be supported by the local sites that are the barons of.  Hence the central goverment can survive in peacetime without any need of taxation, the only context in which taxation would actually make sense would be in wartime in order to support the troops drafted from the various sites. 

If the capital is Rome then they do need those taxes and you will provide them or suffer Romes wrath.

The enemy is not convinced to switch sides, it is merely convinced that resistance is futile.

Which is misdirection and deceit winning the competition for the deceiver.

There is no such thing as an objective observation.  You can observe things that are falling but no observation of things falling is ever an objective reality of a falling object. 

That is because an objective thing is something that exists independantly of being observed.  An observation cannot exist independantly of being observed. 

What I mean by objective is that personal subjective opinion or observational tools "eyes" does not effect the results, so an objective observation is one conducted using a system that removes all subjective aspects leaving only the objective truth.

What you seem to be talking about is more towards Schrodinger cat.

The society is the foundation for the biology not the other way around.  The ant society created the ant biology pretty much entirely to the order of the needs of ant society, even the majority of individual's own personal ability to reproduce ended up being biologically erased for the greater good of society.  So even the propogation of the individuals own genes cannot prevail against the needs of society. 

Social wasp biology created created the first hive and when that society needed to expand (bigger hives) and the biology was altered (foundation expanded) to support this expansion of society, society first emerges from biology and then social pressures can change biology.

Change is only a good thing if it is change from a less perfect state to a more perfect state.  A perfect socialist society does not need to change being it is already perfect, any change implies a degeneration into a worse state.  Since the present dwarf society is presently perfect for the needs of a dwarf fortress, any change to it is a change towards a worse state of affairs that works less well and has more problems.  The question that needs to be asked is what forced the fortress to adopt a less perfect system than what we have at the moment? 

Unless you see the act of change itself as holding the potential for good, a "perfect society" is also a more stagnate one and runs the risk of overspecialize and being unable to adapt to sudden changes to the larger picture after all it is perfect as it is. To ensure that such a society can never fully develop is important if you don't want to run that risk of "perfection", in which case a more fluid imperfect social system which is prone to sudden chaotic changes is preferential then the static perfect one.

To be realistic several starting scenarios will have to be dependant upon an external source of income, (at minimum the prison colony and militery fortress) should recieve an external source of income from an outside source and there is a quote from the dev page that covers the potential self-sufficiancy dilemma.

We'd rather see the labor list removed entirely in many circumstances, depending on fortress citizen status, but that'll have to wait until starting scenarios are completed.

In order to keep certain sites from becoming self-sufficiant he is planning to actually remove the standard labour list from particular individuals so the player cannot simply assign them to do labour and sustain the fortress in the normal sense.  However the way he is doing it does strongly suggest that the normal fortress is going to continue to be independantly viable in surplus value terms because external mechanics are being used to keep certain people working in certain scenarios.

I see this as a place holder because these site are intended to be dependent but without other aspects of the framework for the economy like supply and demand he's using a place holder to "pin" it in place for now to be expanded upon at a later date, after all if he tries to do it all at once it could be 5 years of development before starting scenarios can be released.

It is not the relationship of some sites being dependant on other sites that prevents Feudalism/Capitalism from arising as it did historically.  It is that the sites do not depend upon individuals that exist seperately of the sites, that is scattered peasants.  If Rome is dependant upon individual peasants then the laws and economy is based upon the individual, the question that goes through the rulers minds is "How much Socialism do we need to ensure the welfare of the individual?".  If Rome is instead dependant upon peasant communes then the question is now "How much Capitalism to we need to ensure the welfare of Rome.

Expand the historical figure system to enable sites to depend upon individuals that exist separately of those same sites, I know Toady's not happy with the way historical figures are handled now so its an option.

Most people help other people because it makes them feel good inside or because it makes them look good in the eyes of others.  Not many people help people because it is the right thing to do without feeling good about it.   

Then their not being altruistic.

People refrain from helping other people normally because they feel the cost is too great, because they do not care about the welfare of the people they would be helping or because they have believe that they would only make things worse *by* helping.   

The cost is to great is a selfish "I come first" mentality and not caring is sociopathic "this is a you problem not a me problem" mentality, only the thought of potentially making it worse is a "good" reason.

No, Altruism is not privilaging yourself and your own needs over those of others.  Expending more effect than the reward of that effort is worth is simply 'negative value production', rather like taking a priceless metal artefact and pressing the Melt button on the keyboard. 

This is simply not being selfish but its also not the same thing as being altruistic or selfless, altruism is acting in a selfless way that does not benefit you but does benefit others.

Offspring are negative value producers, they start off consuming more value from their parents or other carers than they produce.  Only when they grow up do they produce surplus value, but they will want to spend that on their own offspring rather than their own parents. 

It does depend upon the animal which is why I used ants as an example, the worker will do more for the colony (those that raised it) then the resource and effort need ed to raise it. basicly there a benefit for social creature, lion prides gets hunters, ancient humans got workers and caretakers ect. its unsocial creatures where there's no personal benefit.

There is no need for the intellectual property companies of the Star Trek to have gone to the grave peacefully.  They also likely succeeded for a while, but could not withstand the inevitable in the end.   

I don't think its inevitable and I don't think you understood what I mean be anything, if that means WW3 and nuclear apocalypses (replicate me some nukes) and sending the human race back to the stone age then so be it, I would rule an apocalyptic empire before I would serve in utopia so basically "It is better to rule in hell then to serve in heaven".

Yet we all happily edit wikis of various kinds, which are the informational equivilant of hive minds.  It is rather more likely that people would gradually transition towards the hive mind essentially by accident than that they would one day decide to implement it. 

Its possible but I don't see it happening.

What does?

Does your individuality decrease the more people agree with you?

So you want people to disagree with you? 

Not 100% I don't, between 45%-90% but no higher and yes lowers is OK, its good for conflict.

That is why I do not generally argue based upon them, we do not really know how they internally work.  However as far as we know they are based upon the fortress society that created them, which means the centralised settlements make total sense. 

I just see more place holder systems in game then completed systems.... in fact I can't think of a single completed system.

Basically, if your worker's cannot produce surplus value then why would the peasants/hillocks/mountain homes worker's be able to afford to support you?

how did the subjugated sites support Rome?

The new sites are generally there to de-abstract the world economy.  For instance we know that humans have metals, but in order to have metals they must have mines and where are the mines?

That is certainly one of there purposes but I also thinks it part of the framework for doing the economy both for adventure mode and fortress mode.

Nothing at all prevents hillocks from having a strong military, they even have a militia commander of their own. 

They are meant to have a peasant militia you are meant to have the military elites.

Rainseeker:   So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

Toady:   Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_20_transcript.html

If the devs had wanted Crusader Kings they would have made it.  As it stands they have focused on the mechanics that of least interest to Crusader Kings, (how the peasants produce the stuff) and ignored the planned mechanics that are of interest to Crusader Kings. 

Their building a world simulator from the ground (peasants) up to the sky (kingdoms) and when you look at Crusader Kings 2 what it is now with all the expansion is different from what it was at release, basically its a work in progress.

What makes you think that Toady One is on your side and wants everything that you want?   

I never thought of it as him being on my side but of me being on his and I know he doesn't want every thing I want because I want sewers and "filth" and he doesn't want sewerage drowning traps.

Fungi do not produce oxygen.     

Well something down there does.

If the competition is actually a war then yes, otherwise you just end up in prison.   

Only if caught, if your better a deceit and manipulation then honest competition then play to your strengths and cheat them.

Dwarves are only slightly more greedy than humans. 

True

The consistant losers however are likely to get depressed and maybe kill themselves.  So even using competition as a means of motivation is not without it's casualties. 

LoL, that made me think of Japanese dwarves committing seppuku... "I have dishonored my family and fortress"

Maybe it's a British saying not an American one. 

The difference is that whether the site is 20, 200, 2000, 20,000 in size the site is a collective thing.  This means that any legal system or economy tends to be written to maximise the welfare of the site.  The individual producer has few rights, especially property rights in the resulting system because the site has basically no reason to give such rights to anybody. 

If the site is dependant upon the wealth produced by the individual taxpayer because *it* cannot manage to collectively produce surplus value, then the site is rendered dependant upon private production.  Since the site cannot survive without taxes, they have no power to defy these people and therefore indulge them by making sure to give them the greatest amount of rights and privilages possible.   

Huh, that does make sense.

Then having the game record master-crafters as private historical figures, the game could record the master apprentice relationship between blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, clothiers ect and every new historical figure act as the private source for site production then theses elite crafters could form guilds during world gen to lobby for their privatization rights, would that work?

The initial seven are colonists and their colony is funded by the crown but as the site start actually producing value the crown wants its investment back plus interest resulting in a certain level of value in "offerings" to the king being demanded and perhaps only of certain types of goods... like a mandate on your whole fortress from the king.

Now your site is producing surplus value again.   

Well yes and no, the taxes "offerings" are from you most valuable resources iorn, steel, gold, platinum but all the production that goes into making that is negative value because it goes to the crown not the fortress leaving you with an inability to produce enough to both pay the crowns taxes and keep yourself stocked and hay presto poverty stricken peasant because of the crown and as your site grows hillock's grow around it and to supplement your negative value production enforced be the king you taxes the hillocks giving them poverty stricken peasants, yay.

Combined this with the stuff to make your fortress poorer and you have something close to what I've been suggesting.

You have what I like to call 'colourless fiction'.  Since everybody is the exact shade of grey, all conflicts have no real meaning and no third parties (like the reader) have any reason to care about the outcome. 

Its not that its all the same shade of grey, if good and evil are on a slider with pure good having a value of 100 and pure evil a value 0 then grey & grey should have a min of 20 and a max of 80 so its just that there's no pure white paladins (I hate paladins) or pure black necromancers.

With conflict having no real meaning that depends on what you consider a "real" meaning and as for not caring about the outcome I don't think that's true but that mostly because I have no problem choosing a side arbitrarily.

Fantasy dwarves are normally supposed to be more Switzerland than Rome; defensively minded, greedy and isolationist. 

I know nothing about Switzerland but that does sound like dwarves.

Well you could say it is like an evolutionary arms race.  What if the collapse simply killed off the weak links that had not developed properly effective ideological defenses, while leaving the stronger variants alone? 

I'd ask why the stronger variants haven't been about to achieve what the weaker variants did.

This is a genuine problem.  How do we end up with the correct henchmen for the lifestyle that the player character has to offer? 

I guess that it'll start be allowing you to ask them to join you for specific reasons and as more possiblitys get added having you "negotiate" the terms of their employment and give them the ability to leave if you try something that wasn't negotiated.

Religions tend to be just plain crazy with no sense at all (to those who do not believe in them).  Scientology has the advantage of being perfectly well adapted for Capitalist society, since it worships money.  Scientology on the other hand never manages to create a whole society according to it's program, but since it believes so devoutly in $, is that really a loss?   

I just learned about the Xenu stuff and was WTF   so yeah no loss

A society is not exactly the same thing as it's values, values are simply something it has.  The whole project was a success from the point of view of the virus, but the attack dog was destroyed even if it's virus went on to make many more attack dogs of those who killed it.  The same thing happened to the Persian Empire when Alexander the Great smashed it was equally ludicrous ease given how strong (on paper) it should have been. 

If the society is the "body" and the citizens are the "cells" then the value are the "genes", while the body did die it managed to pass on its genes to the next generation succeeding in a sense.

The starting point is sort of arbitery really, as unless you intend to play say in Yr 10 every society will have adjust it's economic institutions to fit it's current values and dominant creature personality anyway by the time that world-gen finished. 

with raw defined starting points and personality facets it'd be possible to lock dwarves to greedy capitalists.

Think of like how Liberal Crime Squad works, there the team shows they can manage the evolution of political/economic systems.  The main difference is that by default, rather than everybody starting off Conservative, everybody starts of as Elite Liberal; which essentially means things work as they do now.  But unless the creature has a suitably extreme 'left-wing' values/personality policies will then shift towards mere Liberal or even further if the creature has 'right-wing' values/personality.  You can however custom start it so that particular policies start off at a value above 0 but things will naturally shift towards the proper value.

I've never played Liberal Crime Squad so I have no idea how it works but I get what your talking about, I think they should start of closer to the middle then as elite liberals.

The main difference is that while the policies in Liberal Crime squad are measured seperately, the economic policies are clustered around 4 pillars, with a seperate 'health' value and help to hold the pillars up but these policies all exact a 'seperate' toll from society.  These pillars relate to four basic concerns that the fortress economy would face. 

1. Production: How do we get the dwarves to produce sufficiant wealth rather than lazying around.  [CRAFTSMANSHIP] [SKILL] and [HARD_WORK] help increase production while [MERRIMENT] [INTROSPECTION] and [LEISURE_TIME] undermine production.
2. Regulation: How do we get the dwarves to produce the right kind of wealth rather than doing just what they want. [SELF_CONTROL] [HARMONY] and [COOPERATION] increase regulation while [INDEPENDANCE] [COMPETITION] and [ARTWORK] undermine regulation.
3. Distribution: How do we make sure that goods are distributed 'fairly' rather than being corruptly hoarded by the powerful.  [SACRIFICE] [SELF_CONTROL] and [FAIRNESS] increase distribution while [FAMILY] [FRIENDSHIP] and [POWER] undermine distribution.
4. Hospitality: How do we made sure that visiting outsiders are cared for without being taken advantage of.  [LAW] [TRUTH] and [DECORUM] increase hospitality while [COMMERCE] [ELOQUENCE] and [CUNNING] undermine hospitality. 

Economic policies are clustered around these four pillars.  Sites can come to grief is basically four ways, their beings do not produce enough (production), their beings refuse to work in a unified way (regulation), the powerful corruptly hoard all the wealth or outsiders smuggle their wealth away (hospitality).  All four pillars when undermined result in a loss of site productivity and policies get enacted as a result of the site coming to realise both that it has a problem and the problem is not universal.  This can happen in two ways, the first way is for them to trade with another site that has fewer maluses than they do and the second is when the people 'in charge' cannot get all their basic needs (food, drink, clothing). 

The economic policies that are implemented to 'solve' the crisis depend upon a mixture the values of the civilization and the personal values of the ruler (s).  These policies mitigate the damage done in economic terms but also create new problems; the most extreme policies have the greatest effect but cause the largest amount of problems.  Policies are repealed or moderated when a suitable ruler comes to power whose has values opposed to the core value of the policy, provided that it's repealing does not make the site uncompetative.  When policies exist that are at odds with the values of the population there is an increased chance of the ruler being overthrown, the more extreme the policies the more that is so (this helps to bring a ruler into power to remove policies. 

This all does seem to make a lot of sense and could result in some Crusader Kings type civil wars. 

This brings us back to the whole question of biology.  If the reason the creature is bad is down to values (nurture) then the superior utopian society can simply indocrinate the newcomers, who are not very well disposed to their old society anyway but if the creature is bad because of it's personality (nature) then they have a problem.

True, I liked your use of indoctrinate. 

[GoblinCookie]

Whats this in relation to? I said that verbal insults "Hurt" less when done by a stranger in comparison to when said by a loved one even if the words are the exact same the response is different, why? because its filtered though the conscious mind and what their response is happens after its filtered.

Because the identity of the speaker, much like our understanding of the words is interpreted subconsciously and then emerges into conscious awareness.  Only when you do not know the language (or the person) does the conscious mind have to interest itself in determining these things. 

if it a subconscious process the why doe people often do a double take when insulted unexpectedly? and why does it matter who is insulting you?

If its a subconscious process the first should never occur and the second shouldn't be as pronounced unless the conscious mind act as a buffer though which the information has to be processed and only after that processing can the subconscious response happen.

Because while the emotional effect of the insult is subconscious (why insulting people works), the active response to the insult is initiated by the conscious mind, ablait under the influence of emotional effect.  While the insult subconsciously causes anger, the person hits the other person as a result of a conscious decision; a decision however that 'makes sense' because an insult psychologically hurts the person whether they want to be hurt or not. 

my point is that the understanding is conscious, have you ever been so focused on something that you miss whats said when some one start talking to you or have you ever been distracted by something during a conversation and had to say "sorry can you please repeat that"? if the understanding is subconscious you would still understand what has been said even though your conscious mind is else where.

This gets to the nature of consciousness, which is very relavant to the question of the role of pheromones.  Consciousness is very, very much partial, we are only consciously aware of the portion of our subconscious experiance that is considered 'important' at the moment.  Consciously only has a limited 'memory', so in order to increase our performance in one area we have to sacrifice our conscious awareness of other areas; so in answer to your question the emotional effect is there but not the conscious awareness of the the source of the effect.

Humansm, unlike most animals have a very limited consciousness of smells/pheromones (exact same thing).  The extent of human conscious awareness of smells is largely limited to "yummy eat this" and "yuck don't eat this"; flowers smell nice even though we do not eat flowers because the pheromones emitted by the flowers tell the bees "yummy eat this" but they also work on human noses as well so that even though we do not eat flowers we register them as smelling 'nice'.  It is a mistake however to assume that other creatures have the same limited conscious awareness of pheromones, the majority of animals in fact deliberately use pheromones as a form of communication and humans are unusual in that they do not do this. 

When a solitery ant on walkabouts finds a jam sandwich, it leaves a trail of pheromones that leads back to the colony.  The other ants can small the trail and know that it means that there is something to eat at the end of it; this allows one ant to alert the whole colony as to the location of to the jam sandwich, which then dissapears with suprising rapidity as a result  .  To say that ants are not consciously aware of pheronomes, given that ants actively communicate information to eachother using pheromones is as stupid as saying that humans talk to eachother but are not aware that they are speaking.

Its perfectly possible to not care about an individual to the point that their opinion becomes irreverent to you at which point both praise/compliments and criticism/insults both result it a "meh" response and this isn't an a case of the "burying" how they feel because they just don't care about anything that person has to say in the slightest.

It works like this because the subconscious mind applies a value to people for example your mother is worth more then a total stranger ans just like their are methods to teach yourself to be more empathetic you can teach yourself to be less empathetic.

So the society that sympathizes with the victim takes the path that teaching the bully to empathize with their victim fixes the issue (someones feeling being hurt) the "others" take the path that teaching the victim not to care about their bully fixes the issue (someones feeling being hurt).

It is perhaps possible for a person to indoctrinate themselves so deeply that the emotional content of their words are eliminated at a subsconcious level, but certainly that would take far too long to avoid the psychological damage inflicted by their insults. 

I never said that words have no effect, I did say that the effects of pheromones are greater on the subconcsious mind because they bypass the consciousness's "buffer" effect.

Pheronomes (other than what we like to call smells) certainly bypass the consciousness of humans.  However the same applies to words that we hear and understand the emotional content of, but are not presently paying attention to.  This is reason why we are bombarded on internet websites constantly with ads, even though we pay little to no attention to them; the advertisers like the fact we are distracted because it allows them to bypass our conscious mind and implant us with the desired emotional response to their product. 

I disagree, I firmly think that they (ants) are effected on a more profound level with pheromone communication then a human reading written text and the affect is not "mysterious" its a subconscious compulsion to follow the pheromones "command".

That is called hypnosis in humans.  While it is certainly possible that ants are hypnotised by the pheronomes they use to communicate, there is no evidence for it. 

I can't find any proof that its a "deliberate decision" any more then proof that its pheromone "brain washing", its something scientist are still studying in ants and with the lack of evidence one way or the other I choose to believe in the brainwashing hypothesis.

While this link is for bees it can be applied to ants with little difficulty.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070719-bee-control.html

That is actually one of the worst scientific articles I have ever read. It does not matter that homovanillyl alcohol supresses dopamine because the dopamine is in the bees brain, which is sealed away behind a layer of chitin.  The creatures blood (which feeds the brain) is also sealed away behind the same carapace.  The only way then for an external chemical to affect the bees brain directly is for the bee to breathe it in, which means that we are basically talking about something working like tobacco or marijuana.  We are not talking then about a pheronome at all, but rather a drug with a direct psychological effect but a drug cannot be used to command anybody simply because it contains no informational content.  A queen bee could use the drug to calm down other bees who are distressed by something (think DF Mayor), but it gives her no ability to actually communicate with them. 

Their inability to distingush between a scent that is smelled by the bee using it's antennae, potentially transmitting informational and a drug which is something absorbed into the bloodstream with an emotional effect renders this article useless.

I actually brought this up before but in a different way, your focusing on what DF is now and how to expand upon current mechanics while I'm focusing on what it could become and given that Toady has no problem with completely changing the way something works and even said

Threetoe:    Okay, the next question is from Robbert, and he asks, "Is there any particular function you would like to redesign, refactor, or even remove from dwarf fortress mode, and if so, why?"

Toady:    We were thinking about this one a little bit and, uh, it seems like everything works that way, he he he.

Threetoe:    Yeah, I think if you had to say something general, it would just be the interface, probably, right?

Toady:    Yeah... I mean if we're going to the obvious things, the interface and all that is terrible. I mean, redoing the fluids, redoing the pathing, redoing everything... All of the industries, how the buildings work, I don't even know if I'd come back with workshops or just go with the zones approach that we've all been talking about for so long. There's really a lot of things that could be changed, and that's kind of just the regular process of game development, is just moving forward and gutting things, especially on a project like this.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_22_transcript.html#22.38

Nothing is set as the finished ideal, also the maximum site limit in advance world gen is  -1 to 100000 that's quite a lot of potential sites once optimization get handled.

Sites take a massive toll on the memory, that is why the site limit exists in the first place.  While the theoretical maximum is huge, the memory does not support so many sites but only a maximum of about 4000, which is only possible if you spead the number of historical characters thin, thus resulting in a rather boring world. 

While it may be sometimes neccesery for a game developer to replace existing mechanics if they are shoddy, an efficient developer should initially implement mechanics that are not in themselves shoddy and are consistant with the future mechanics that they intend to create in the future.  I do not wish to donate money to a developer that engages in the design equivilant of digging in holes and filling them in again.

If "adventurer" refer to a player controlled creature then "fortress" just means player controlled site, part starting scenarios is the handle different site types, the "prison" fort, the "temple" fort or the "military" fort are all different sites that are just call "fortress" which is a reference to player controlled sites, this doesn't mean that you should expect them to remain synonymous with the current world gen "fortresses", which is the "palace" I'm talking about.

I did say that I feel the current world gen site are place holders.

If they are place holders then we have been financing incompetant game design.  If they decide to throw out the whole basis of the game (the site) in order to make DF Crusader Kings then I will stop playing, not because I do not enjoy Crusader Kings but because such a move proves that the team are too incompetant to efficiantly develop a game. 

I don't know this seems kind of Crusader Kings'y

Rainseeker:   So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

Toady:   Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_20_transcript.html

What he is saying is that your fortress will provide a core of elite soldiers for a larger army drawn from the local hillocks.  What he is doing is developing the present abstracted militery relationships that already exist in world gen and allow large-scale battles to happen.  Nothing is getting replaced, in other words the development is quite efficient unlike what you would have. 

Because Toady wants to have semi-regular releases and to do that he draw a line and say's "that's enough on that subject for now" and release.

Toady can always abstract away the production elements, given that in DF Crusader Kings we do not actually have any direct role in production.  Crusader Kings does not bother itself with the details of how the peasants grow stuff or make stuff, these are abstracted away to focus on the political elements.  Eventually Toady One intends to work on the political elements, but given the nature of the core mechanics of his world it does not make sense to have actual Feudalism, since the basic mechanics of the game work against that.

So Rome couldn't afford to found any new sites or besiege anyone little group that doesn't pay their taxes or tries to rebel?

My point is that the year 0 fortress is an early young Rome and all other sites are founded for "Romes" expansion.

Indeed, Rome itself could not afford to do any of those things.  The only means by which it can do those things is to have subordinate peasants and smaller settlements dependant upon their own peasants to channel sufficiant value their way.

Remember those adventure mode tropes that are heavily dependent on an individual based one, to have that system in adventure mode is to have it in fortress mode.

The individual did not go anywhere.

If the capital is Rome then they do need those taxes and you will provide them or suffer Romes wrath.

Since your taxes pay for Rome's wrath, there is no wrath to fall on you if everyone does not pay your taxes.  Unlike with scattered peasants that need a government to protect their property and avoid anarchy, the Hillocks/Mountain Halls/Present DF Fortresses have no need of Fortress Rome at all.  It cannot afford to crush them because nobody at all needs it, resulting in nobody being willing to pay for it to crush anyone. 

Which is misdirection and deceit winning the competition for the deceiver.

Indeed, this is why you treat all claims of Natural Order or Sociobiology with utmost scepticism.  If you know how the trick works, why would you allow yourself to be decieved by it? 

What I mean by objective is that personal subjective opinion or observational tools "eyes" does not effect the results, so an objective observation is one conducted using a system that removes all subjective aspects leaving only the objective truth.

What you seem to be talking about is more towards Schrodinger cat.

You seem to be confusing subjective with incorrect.  I am not saying that the observations are incorrect, I am saying that observations cannot exist independantly of being observed; which is what objective means. 

All objective truths are arrived at from subjective experiances via a process of reasoning; there is absolutely no way to arrive at objective truths from direct observation alone.  1000 observations are no more objective than 1 observation, they merely provide a greater rational basis to derive objective laws.  If you reasoning is bad however, all the observation in the world will not bring you any closer to the actual objective laws. 

Social wasp biology created created the first hive and when that society needed to expand (bigger hives) and the biology was altered (foundation expanded) to support this expansion of society, society first emerges from biology and then social pressures can change biology.

As we know from naked mole rats, living in a constructed underground leads to an ant society being optimal, which ultimately leads to an ant biology in order to make said society stronger.  Social wasps on the other hand are a replication of the original subterranean ant society on the surface, which does not naturally lead to that kind of society but a more regular one of competing individuals. 

The ants are the original fortress, while the wasps and bees are hillocks created by the fortress on the surface.  The hillocks replicate the fortress society and it works, but the surface does not naturally result in that kind of society but one of scattered peasants and palaces. 

Unless you see the act of change itself as holding the potential for good, a "perfect society" is also a more stagnate one and runs the risk of overspecialize and being unable to adapt to sudden changes to the larger picture after all it is perfect as it is. To ensure that such a society can never fully develop is important if you don't want to run that risk of "perfection", in which case a more fluid imperfect social system which is prone to sudden chaotic changes is preferential then the static perfect one.

The act of change, as was worked out by the ancient Greek philosophers is only good if it is the change from an imperfect state to a more perfect one; a perfect state is therefore 'not perfect' if it is subject to change as any change would be a change towards a worse state. This is why perfect societies do not make good stories, a story needs change in order to be what it is.

As we can see from the paralell evolution of mole rats, ant society and biology exists as a result of living in a constructed underground.  However as we can see from the existance of wasps and bees; that society is also quite capable of being transplanted onto the competative, individualistic surface world without having to fundermentally change.  While the ant society is the result of their constructed underground enviroment, their society is still entirely viable on the surface while the surface world society is forced to become the ant society. 

I see this as a place holder because these site are intended to be dependent but without other aspects of the framework for the economy like supply and demand he's using a place holder to "pin" it in place for now to be expanded upon at a later date, after all if he tries to do it all at once it could be 5 years of development before starting scenarios can be released.

He is planning to introduce a hack essentially for the labour list in order to keep certain sites that should not be economically viable independantly from becoming so, this is because the core mechanics support self-sufficiancy in surplus value.  Had DF Crusader Kings been the plan however then there would have no need for anything but a narrow range of labours to start with and a great amount of abstracted peasant production. 

Expand the historical figure system to enable sites to depend upon individuals that exist separately of those same sites, I know Toady's not happy with the way historical figures are handled now so its an option.

Yes, if Toady One went about actually introducing Feudalism that is how he would do it.

Then their not being altruistic.

They are being altruistic, they are simply enjoying not putting themselves first. 

The cost is to great is a selfish "I come first" mentality and not caring is sociopathic "this is a you problem not a me problem" mentality, only the thought of potentially making it worse is a "good" reason..

The point is that the question is a relative one.  A selfish person is a person who is biased towards their own particular good, they are happy for there to be more bad stuff for everyone else as long as they personally are better off.  An altruistic person is a person that regards the total good of everybody, without distinction as to whether that good is their own good or not. 

This is simply not being selfish but its also not the same thing as being altruistic or selfless, altruism is acting in a selfless way that does not benefit you but does benefit others.

That is not altruism but simply inverted selfishness.  Putting the selfishness of others above your own selfishness is not being altruistic. 

It does depend upon the animal which is why I used ants as an example, the worker will do more for the colony (those that raised it) then the resource and effort need ed to raise it. basicly there a benefit for social creature, lion prides gets hunters, ancient humans got workers and caretakers ect. its unsocial creatures where there's no personal benefit.

Thinking generally about what is good for the colony even it is imparts a cost to you personally is altruism not selfishness. 

I don't think its inevitable and I don't think you understood what I mean be anything, if that means WW3 and nuclear apocalypses (replicate me some nukes) and sending the human race back to the stone age then so be it, I would rule an apocalyptic empire before I would serve in utopia so basically "It is better to rule in hell then to serve in heaven".

The intellectual copyright authors when they lose simply become freeware developers, they really do not have to create armageddon. 

Its possible but I don't see it happening.

They do not see it happening either. 

Not 100% I don't, between 45%-90% but no higher and yes lowers is OK, its good for conflict.

It is fascinating that you see your own value as being your abscence of any actual ability to accomplish anything because of all those opponants.  It is almost as if you see yourself as a commodity, the less of you there is the more valuable you become.....

how did the subjugated sites support Rome?

There are no subjugated sites because there are no peasants to fund Rome in order to subjugate them. 

That is certainly one of there purposes but I also thinks it part of the framework for doing the economy both for adventure mode and fortress mode.

The economy does not inherantly have a problem with abstracted AI production, indeed memory constraints will enforce it to some extent. 

They are meant to have a peasant militia you are meant to have the military elites.

Both of which are neccesery for an actual army correct? 

Their building a world simulator from the ground (peasants) up to the sky (kingdoms) and when you look at Crusader Kings 2 what it is now with all the expansion is different from what it was at release, basically its a work in progress.

Feudalism works backwards, production is abstracted while politics is personal.  That is because production is somebody elses problem and you *are* politics. 

I never thought of it as him being on my side but of me being on his and I know he doesn't want every thing I want because I want sewers and "filth" and he doesn't want sewerage drowning traps.

Yet you seem so confident that he will end up overturning the entire game in order to implement your notions of Dwarven Rome. 

Well something down there does.

Oxygen can get there the way it does in actual caverns, namely from the surface whether directly through caves or from the water. 

Only if caught, if your better a deceit and manipulation then honest competition then play to your strengths and cheat them.

Which only works if the competition cannot figure out your game.  Once they do it comes down to what the competition is actually supposed to be about.  North Korea can provide free healthcare to all it's citizens but the far richer and more 'democratic' America somehow cannot manage to do this. 

Huh, that does make sense.

Then having the game record master-crafters as private historical figures, the game could record the master apprentice relationship between blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, clothiers ect and every new historical figure act as the private source for site production then theses elite crafters could form guilds during world gen to lobby for their privatization rights, would that work?

Public sector unions seldom support privatisation. 

Historically private property did not really exist in the full sense of the word until 17th Century England.  The local 'palace' typically claimed absolute ownership of the land and other economic resources and then ultimately leashed property to individuals, who then tended to defend said claims politically to the extent they could.  The end result was that eventually the individuals managed to break free of the leash holds they were under and the old palaces (Feudalism) were ruined; only to be replaced by neccesity new urban palaces (the modern Capitalist state) that was based upon the explicit recognition of the individuals inherant property rights (along with a whole list of 'human rights', which serve as a kind of ethical cloak). 

The reason why the palaces gave individual leaseholds in the first place was because it increased the collective dependance of the peasantry upon the authority of the palace while at the same time keeping them divided.  Individuals are given their own private plots to live seperately, but nobody can actually manage to be an island; hence the peasants 'need' the palace.  What private leashold property prevented was the peasants banding together to create something like a dwarf fortress site, a self-sufficiant collective unit capable of self-government and not needing the palace for anything at all.

Well yes and no, the taxes "offerings" are from you most valuable resources iorn, steel, gold, platinum but all the production that goes into making that is negative value because it goes to the crown not the fortress leaving you with an inability to produce enough to both pay the crowns taxes and keep yourself stocked and hay presto poverty stricken peasant because of the crown and as your site grows hillock's grow around it and to supplement your negative value production enforced be the king you taxes the hillocks giving them poverty stricken peasants, yay.

Combined this with the stuff to make your fortress poorer and you have something close to what I've been suggesting.

As already mentioned as "you pay for Rome's wrath", this parasitic dwarf palace is not needed for anything.  That means that nobody will either allow it to exist in the first place or allow it to continue to survive as what it is.  It cannot just crush rebellion by force because it cannot sustain itself let along it's armies once enough sites have rebelled against it, which every other site will do since no sites need it for anything. 

Its not that its all the same shade of grey, if good and evil are on a slider with pure good having a value of 100 and pure evil a value 0 then grey & grey should have a min of 20 and a max of 80 so its just that there's no pure white paladins (I hate paladins) or pure black necromancers.

With conflict having no real meaning that depends on what you consider a "real" meaning and as for not caring about the outcome I don't think that's true but that mostly because I have no problem choosing a side arbitrarily.

Pure white paladins cannot be 100 good in an uncomplicated way, simply because they kill people they are somewhat grey.  A battle between 70 good and 30 good is not substantially different from a normal Black vs White battle really. 

I'd ask why the stronger variants haven't been about to achieve what the weaker variants did.

Because things in Real-Life politics play out over decades and centuries, much as they do in Dwarf Fortress. 

I guess that it'll start be allowing you to ask them to join you for specific reasons and as more possiblitys get added having you "negotiate" the terms of their employment and give them the ability to leave if you try something that wasn't negotiated.

Yes that makes sense. 

If the society is the "body" and the citizens are the "cells" then the value are the "genes", while the body did die it managed to pass on its genes to the next generation succeeding in a sense.

If a person dies of a deadly virus, they did not survive simply because the virus was part of them. 

with raw defined starting points and personality facets it'd be possible to lock dwarves to greedy capitalists..

Yes but equally you could lock them as ant-people.

I've never played Liberal Crime Squad so I have no idea how it works but I get what your talking about, I think they should start of closer to the middle then as elite liberals.

I was talking of starting off in a development sense, dwarves start off with whatever initial policies are defined in their raws.  As the various policies get more extreme, they get further away from the present economic setup; while the lack of policies gives you basically the way things work at the moment.  'Socialism' then is a negative thing, it is the absence of the institutions of 'Capitalism' as opposed to a set of policies that are implemented.  This situation derives from the 'backwards' way that the DF government is initially self-sufficiant of any external input from scattered peasants; the catalyst however is that the creatures lived in a different manner before Yr 0. 

This all does seem to make a lot of sense and could result in some Crusader Kings type civil wars. 

The key thing here is that the objective four pillars of any economically independant site; at the moment these realities are there but their solution is abstracted away.  It does not matter whether the creature is an angel or a demon, Communist ant-person or Capitalistic Farengi, those pillars are there.  The society must 1. get it's creatures to work, it must 2. get them to work efficiently, 3. it must distribute the wealth produced in an orderly way and it must 4. keep outsiders from leeching away more value than they produce.  To refer to the dev page plans.

Fortress Starting Scenarios

    Framework
        Expand framework of law, custom, rights, property and status as needed to provide a variety of scenarios
        Foundation of laws, both natural and supernatural
        Explicit standing of different citizens vs. civilization authorities
        Possible expansion of religious and family concepts to provide sufficient scenarios

As written, the foundation of laws appears to have to be simply be some combination of natural raws and the supernatural RNG (random number god).  However on closer thought, the foundation of the majority of laws, custom, rights, property and status are related to the above 4 pillars of a functioning economy.  The laws against theft for instance are directed against problem No.4, thieves are what we call a type of outsiders that leech away value but do not add an equal or greater amount of value (the latter group we call merchants ). 

The reason why the palaces did not set legally set up a system of common ownership despite the 'site-based' nature of their existance is because as a tax dependant site they do not have to worry about the 4 pillars; however the pillars do apply to the thousands of individual peasant producers that pay the taxes, thus despite the fact that the peasants do not have the power to make the laws the fact that they pay the taxes causes the real-world laws to privilage private property to the extent they do. 

True, I liked your use of indoctrinate. 

It is funny that indoctrinate is actually a good word in this context.  You see how Biology is very much on the Dark Side, if the goblins mainly inherantly evil then they will destroy their own societies before moving on to destroy everybody else's through migration.  If the goblins are mainly evil ideologically, then the goblins being evil simply leads to the cannibalising of the goblin society by the other societies who can then indoctrinate them into become non-evil. 

[Ribs]

Comrad Cookie is still hijacking threads to write long essays about how dwarf fortress is a communism simulator, I see. Some things never change am I right guys? *smiley face*. Let me see if I can contribute!

Socialism took a bunch of half-ruined, destitute countries and turned them into major powers to reckoned with.

Through slavery and mass murder? Great point. You can certainly build up productivity by the way of the whip, as you said yourself. The funny thing is countries that claimed to be communist seemed to have been extremely more cruel than any capitalist country to achieve a fraction the same level of productivity. Lenin killed millions, and Stalin said that he wasn't doing real communism. So when Stalin ended up killing even more people, Mao said he real communism was what he was about to do. Even more people died. Hilarious, right?

And here I am living in South America right next to Venezuela, observing them turn what was a relatively prosperous country in the region into the most aggressive, autoritarian, anti free speech, etc. country when they went full left. Their leaders claim to love communism, and that they are only being set back by the evil right-wing capitalist pigs from the opposition (I'm not even exagerating, it's exactly what they say), but as soon as they get rid of them everything will be fantastic. And then you see Chile, the most liberal-conservative, pro free-market country in the region become the most prosperous.

Your claims that pre-historic socialist utopias (or at least highly desireable societies) were alive and well until they were "empire'd" out of existence holds little water. The idea that ancient empires were evil forces that spread oppression is extremely overly simplistic. Consider how the ancient romans spread, along with slavery and death, sanitation, advanced farming techniques, engeneering, etc. I find this idea to be lacking, especially seeing how the modern equivalent of this is virtually unexistent. In fact what I see today are functional (if much less than perfect) capitalist societies where people are just minding their own business when suddenly some ideologues come along and impose their utopia on them, for less than stellar results.

[GoblinCookie]

Comrad Cookie is still hijacking threads to write long essays about how dwarf fortress is a communism simulator, I see. Some things never change am I right guys? *smiley face*. Let me see if I can contribute!

I do not hijack threads Ribs, I merely expand them; I am actually very good at expanding threads  .  The topics that end up being discussions of the relative merits of Capitalism vs Communism are universally discussions about economic matters.  You on the other hand seem to aiming here to take the discussion completely off line, seemingly wishing to talk not as I have been all along about the historical circumstances under which various Capitalist/Socialistic institutions would realistically arise but instead seeming to want a pure discussion of real-world politics (there is a forum for that).

Socialism took a bunch of half-ruined, destitute countries and turned them into major powers to reckoned with.

Through slavery and mass murder? Great point. You can certainly build up productivity by the way of the whip, as you said yourself. The funny thing is countries that claimed to be communist seemed to have been extremely more cruel than any capitalist country to achieve a fraction the same level of productivity. Lenin killed millions, and Stalin said that he wasn't doing real communism. So when Stalin ended up killing even more people, Mao said he real communism was what he was about to do. Even more people died. Hilarious, right?

And here I am living in South America right next to Venezuela, observing them turn what was a relatively prosperous country in the region into the most aggressive, autoritarian, anti free speech, etc. country when they went full left. Their leaders claim to love communism, and that they are only being set back by the evil right-wing capitalist pigs from the opposition (I'm not even exagerating, it's exactly what they say), but as soon as they get rid of them everything will be fantastic. And then you see Chile, the most liberal-conservative, pro free-market country in the region become the most prosperous.

Your claims that pre-historic socialist utopias (or at least highly desireable societies) were alive and well until they were "empire'd" out of existence holds little water. The idea that ancient empires were evil forces that spread oppression is extremely overly simplistic. Consider how the ancient romans spread, along with slavery and death, sanitation, advanced farming techniques, engeneering, etc. I find this idea to be lacking, especially seeing how the modern equivalent of this is virtually unexistent. In fact what I see today are functional (if much less than perfect) capitalist societies where people are just minding their own business when suddenly some ideologues come along and impose their utopia on them, for less than stellar results.

1. The success of the Soviet Union was built on the labours of millions of ordinery Soviet workers and peasants, not the minority of prisoners in gulags who were actually supported by said labours.  This is because prisons are never self-sufficiant, the surplus value of the labour of prisoners forced labour is always consumed in entirety by the guards and other supporting staff of the prison, there is rarely an overall surplus produced.  By making the prisoners work the society simply reduces the cost of the prison, it does not make the prison a valuable productive resource.  Slaves are only a productive resource if slaves are dispersed enough that they cannot really collectively challenge their slavery, that is possibly why the Romans/Greeks were never able to develop an industrial revolution; once you start having large-scale slave factories the neccesery guards consume the profits of that factory.

2. The leaders of Venezuala likely know far more about what is going on in their own country than you do and their measures are quite proportionate to the threat posed by their internal enemies; remember that they actually overthrew their government at one point.  That modern Chile is also only pro-market because of a certain Fascist dictator called Auguste Pinochet who liked to massacre thousands of his opponents in stadiums, something that neither Hugo Chavez nor Nicholas Maduro have ever done; it rather puts things in perpective does it not? 

3.  The Romans got their slaves to build them sanitation (in their cities), they were only really interesting in militery engineering and the idea that they were somehow efficiant farmers is close to being a joke as they imported the majority of their food from North Africa.  It was also amusingly enough also the Roman State, not the Free Market that set all that stuff you admire about them up; towards the end all that stuff crumbles away as the private villas of the rich start to get ever more lavish.

[Ribs]

You on the other hand seem to aiming here to take the discussion completely off line, seemingly wishing to talk not as I have been all along about the historical circumstances under which various Capitalist/Socialistic institutions would realistically arise but instead seeming to want a pure discussion of real-world politics (there is a forum for that).

The problem is that you start throwing your political ideologies around and people naturally get argumentative. I wouldn't be dismayed if someone stopped people from starting these discussions (that you usually start) here in the first place, but until someone is upset enough to report this we may as well go all in.

gulags

I wasn't thinking of gulags in particular. I was speaking more of the greater accomplishments of the great Soviet Union, like ethnic and ideologic cleansings. as well as the mass killing of part of the arrogant peasantry that opposed the glorious maoist revolution. But you're right, tens of thousands of those who survived and were imprisioned and sent to gulags to be forced into slavery should have been very thankful for being supported by the new society that flourished under the agrarian reform that followed the revolution.

The leaders of Venezuala likely know far more about what is going on in their own country than you

I'm sure you think that they know more about it than the people living there. Especially those millions of ignorant people who oppose the regime, and all the censorship and dispair that came along with it.

That modern Chile is also only pro-market because of a certain Fascist dictator called Auguste Pinochet who liked to massacre thousands of his opponents in stadiums, something that neither Hugo Chavez nor Nicholas Maduro have ever done; it rather puts things in perpective does it not?

What, that right-wing dictatorships are also bad? What's new about that? That's a very mainstream and agreeable position to me and I think to most people as well. I don't see myself pressed into defending other people's wrongdoings to protect my ideology. I'm not an ideologue.

What's interesting is that what happened in Chile was the opposite of what happened to Cuba ( where the far-left got into power instead), and in fact, Pinochet's excuse (as well as all non-communist SA dictators in the 20th century) was that the far-left was anti-democracy and that the military coups were to impede other communist adventurers from taking over their countries.

I think they were wrong about everything with one exception - the far-left is indeed anything but democratic, and seem to view democracy as a bourgeois formality that should be surpassed. Thankfully, after the fall of the Soviet union most left-wing people seem to have abandoned that point-of-view.

History is a great teacher, and one of the reasons dictators like Chavez and Maduro haven't done a full ideological cleansing is because the consequences today for these action would be disastrous. Their government is currently crumbling though, and hopefully they never end up resorting to such tactics.

the Romans got their slaves to build them sanitation (in their cities), they were only really interesting in militery engineering and the idea that they were somehow efficiant farmers is close to being a joke as they imported the majority of their food from North Africa.

By north africa you mean Carthage and Egypt. Carthage in particular was more technologically advanced than Rome when it was conquered, and Egypt was incredibly fertile and much more suited at the time for the production of grain. They were still very efficient farmers, with sicily and sardinia producing a big chunk of the Empire's grain. and their thechniques were far more advanced than several of the people's they conquered, expanding their production methods throughout the rest of Europe and parts of the middle east.

It was also amusingly enough also the Roman State, not the Free Market that set all that stuff you admire about them up; towards the end all that stuff crumbles away as the private villas of the rich start to get ever more lavish.

I don't remember even implying that Rome's economy was particularly incliened towards what we currently call the "free market". Not surprisingly, the greedy roman state, that had the practice of making conquered land public and leasing it to the local population, collapsed. Too bad they didn't have the common sense at the time to privatise land and sell it cheap, like the americans did.

[angus_burger]

Holy crap!

I've got to say GoblinCookie, this is the one of the most informative threads I've ever read on the internet. Seriously, I'm sending this link to people who don't even play dwarf fortress. I loved the way you slowly break down opposing arguments; explaining why surplus labor is nonsensical in an ant-person based society, how bandits, a world that requires adventurers, and several other added features creates Anachronism, and the difference between a massive organization that absorbs surplus (Rome) versus one that creates it (a Fortress).

I don't know how much got through to Jester (you really did need to repeat that last point excessively for him, and his insistence on "starving peasants" and "dark tones" and "what Toady wants" indicated his maturity very well), but I've learned a ton about economics from you. Thanks for taking the time to write this all out, and arguing so patiently with someone much younger than you. You'd be crazy to report this thread, GoblinCookie even took the time to explain the fallacy behind forcing the coin based economy. Imagine how much time could have been saved if the devs took this into account initially!

This suggestion went from sounding somewhat interesting to being a totally impractical fantasy solely because of how you broke down every counterargument. Of course an adventurer would never have anything to offer to guards that a fortress wouldn't, without simply creating a fortress site himself! The thread does seem to be heartily derailed now, but it was amazing while it lasted.

[GoblinCookie]

The problem is that you start throwing your political ideologies around and people naturally get argumentative. I wouldn't be dismayed if someone stopped people from starting these discussions (that you usually start) here in the first place, but until someone is upset enough to report this we may as well go all in.

No, these topics are always essentially ideological to start with.  There is no mechanical problem with the present economic system, especially with the new work scripts and the only problem in a game-play sense is the micromanagement, which can be solved with simple automation based upon what Toady One is calling "spreadsheets and numbers" and we have the perfect economic system for the fortress. 

The problem with the Status Quo is entirely ideological, "dwarves are supposed to be people" and "people are not supposed to live that way", by which I mean selflessly working for the group they belong to and being given what they need by the group.  It is not that the world economy cannot function perfectly under that system, but that they should be doing things a different way because of X ideological reason.

The answer I decided upon was simply not to have a One True Economy at all, whether that be along present the present Communist lines or the Capitalist lines of the Old Economy.  We break the Economy down into it's components, then we have the beings of the worlds argue and fight about what mixture of components should be implemented, so they can argue ideology so we do not have to.   

I wasn't thinking of gulags in particular. I was speaking more of the greater accomplishments of the great Soviet Union, like ethnic and ideologic cleansings. as well as the mass killing of part of the arrogant peasantry that opposed the glorious maoist revolution. But you're right, tens of thousands of those who survived and were imprisioned and sent to gulags to be forced into slavery should have been very thankful for being supported by the new society that flourished under the agrarian reform that followed the revolution.

None of those things did anything to make the country more productive, that Communism managed to make progress despite those things does rather call further into question to Capitalist argument that Communism cannot work because of Reason X. 

I'm sure you think that they know more about it than the people living there. Especially those millions of ignorant people who oppose the regime, and all the censorship and despair that came along with it.

Yes the political losers are not happy about losing.  However what about the millions of people that think that Chavez&Maduro are a great thing and consistently vote for them? 

What, that right-wing dictatorships are also bad? What's new about that? That's a very mainstream and agreeable position to me and I think to most people as well. I don't see myself pressed into defending other people's wrongdoings to protect my ideology. I'm not an ideologue.

You are like a person that like to eat meat while claiming to be a vegan because "they are morally against slaughtering animals". You praise the arrangement of things in Chile, but yet condemn the means by which this was brought about; without your Pinochet regardless of whether Chile would be better off or not, the 'free-market' Chile you praise would not exist. 

You are also very much an ideologue.  The reason you cannot see this is similar to how "dwarf fishery worker" is just called "fishery worker" in the game while a "goblin fishery worker" gets the full title.  If an ideology is normal enough it becomes invisible it's advocates. 

What's interesting is that what happened in Chile was the opposite of what happened to Cuba ( where the far-left got into power instead), and in fact, Pinochet's excuse (as well as all non-communist SA dictators in the 20th century) was that the far-left was anti-democracy and that the military coups were to impede other communist adventurers from taking over their countries.

I think they were wrong about everything with one exception - the far-left is indeed anything but democratic, and seem to view democracy as a bourgeois formality that should be surpassed. Thankfully, after the fall of the Soviet union most left-wing people seem to have abandoned that point-of-view.

If there is a war then people tend to get killed.  It is all about escalation, to start off things remain peaceful and both sides restrain themselves to words.  Then somebody actually gets what they want, at which point the other sides escalates to trying to sabotage that thing so they can prove it does not work.  They then respond by forcefully repressing said attempt at sabotage, which then leads to violent reactions etc.. 

Eventually we get to the equivilant of DF No Quarter and then we get the likes of Pinochet but also the likes of Stalin.  What drives the process forward is that the side that escalates wins if the other side does not do likewise, this means that the ultimate outcome (mass-murdering dictatorship) did not occur because anybody planned it but because of a sequence of events. 

History is a great teacher, and one of the reasons dictators like Chavez and Maduro haven't done a full ideological cleansing is because the consequences today for these action would be disastrous. Their government is currently crumbling though, and hopefully they never end up resorting to such tactics.

You are very much deceived.  Chavez and Maduro are not dictators but extremely popular democratic leaders who won multiple elections and if their government is crumbling it is because they have not escalated sufficiently while the opposition has (the opposition murders government people).

By north africa you mean Carthage and Egypt. Carthage in particular was more technologically advanced than Rome when it was conquered, and Egypt was incredibly fertile and much more suited at the time for the production of grain. They were still very efficient farmers, with sicily and sardinia producing a big chunk of the Empire's grain. and their thechniques were far more advanced than several of the people's they conquered, expanding their production methods throughout the rest of Europe and parts of the middle east.

Those places were already major grain producers before the Romans came along.  The Romans themselves (ie Latium) neither invented anything nor produced much food at all.  The Romans stole nearly all their technology and food from those who they conquered.  They stole the engineering from the Greeks, their sanitation from the Etruscans, their food from the North Africans and even their famous style of weaponry was Spanish. 

I don't remember even implying that Rome's economy was particularly incliened towards what we currently call the "free market". Not surprisingly, the greedy roman state, that had the practice of making conquered land public and leasing it to the local population, collapsed. Too bad they didn't have the common sense at the time to privatise land and sell it cheap, like the americans did.

Well, while it is anachronistic to talk about private property in the full sense, the Romans did come the closest to approximating the situation with the way that they leashed land essentially with minimals conditions to retired soldiers in their legions.  They stole the land from those they had conquered and then they 'quasi-privatised' that land, carving up the collective system of land ownership of the various conquered into private plots which were leashed to individual soldiers.

The same system brought them down in the end, since they ended up dispersing their core population while at the same time tying them to a life of landed prosperity without any real obligations of military service (that being the original setup) but only to pay tax revenue.  This is contrasted against the DF-like system which the Germans operated under, where there are a number of tribal communities (sites) banded into tribal confederacies (civilizations) with wandering mercenary warbands (adventurers).  The former had their own forces to defend themselves against the Romans while the latter ended up drawn into service of the Roman legions, since that gave them the opportunity to truly have their own individual land, something not possible "back home".

So in the sense what drew them into service of Rome is basically the topic of the OP, they could have really have their own land in Germany and were thus consigned to wander about doing the bidding of the various tribal communities in return for supplies until they 'retired' and simply became a normal person again.  By becoming a Roman legionary however, they would be able to accomplish the dream of the OP, to retire as more than what they started off as. 

[JesterHell696]

Because the identity of the speaker, much like our understanding of the words is interpreted subconsciously and then emerges into conscious awareness.  Only when you do not know the language (or the person) does the conscious mind have to interest itself in determining these things. 

Because while the emotional effect of the insult is subconscious (why insulting people works), the active response to the insult is initiated by the conscious mind, ablait under the influence of emotional effect.  While the insult subconsciously causes anger, the person hits the other person as a result of a conscious decision; a decision however that 'makes sense' because an insult psychologically hurts the person whether they want to be hurt or not. 

I don't think that our understanding of language is subconscious, our ability to infer intent from the tone of the voice is not a subconscious understanding of words used, a insult said in the same tone as that of a compliment is indistinguishable from a compliment to the subconscious mind this I why I bought up language comprehension because even if you don't understand the language if the tone is hostile or insulting you understand that subconsciously but if its said in a friendly manner then the subconscious is taken out of the equation and this is where it becomes apparent that language itself is conscious in nature.

At best the subconscious can pick up a single word like "dinner" or "listening" and draw conscious attention to them but it can't understand a sentence or words in general because "Dinners going to be late" and "Dinners ready!" can both trigger the same subconscious response of "food" if the listeners not paying attention.

This gets to the nature of consciousness, which is very relavant to the question of the role of pheromones.  Consciousness is very, very much partial, we are only consciously aware of the portion of our subconscious experiance that is considered 'important' at the moment.  Consciously only has a limited 'memory', so in order to increase our performance in one area we have to sacrifice our conscious awareness of other areas; so in answer to your question the emotional effect is there but not the conscious awareness of the the source of the effect.

I understand consciousness, if you think of all animals as being biological von-neumann machines (I do) then the brain is the computer control system and the conscious mind is the computers "user" and the subconscious mind is all the background processes that the user doesn't directly effect.

Humans, unlike most animals have a very limited consciousness of smells/pheromones (exact same thing).  The extent of human conscious awareness of smells is largely limited to "yummy eat this" and "yuck don't eat this"; flowers smell nice even though we do not eat flowers because the pheromones emitted by the flowers tell the bees "yummy eat this" but they also work on human noses as well so that even though we do not eat flowers we register them as smelling 'nice'.  It is a mistake however to assume that other creatures have the same limited conscious awareness of pheromones, the majority of animals in fact deliberately use pheromones as a form of communication and humans are unusual in that they do not do this. 

I see this as the result human consciousness being of a higher order, if the brain is a computer then a human brain is a modern computer with an OS like windows 10 installed while an ant brain is like an old analog computer, by comparison to our modern computer the "user" (consciousness) of an analog system is far more limited in both what infomation they receive from the system and what commands they can give the system.

The ant "consciousness" is aware of pheromones because pheromones are a simple "analogue" information "food", "follow", "attack", "defend", "ours", theirs" ect and the effects that this has is more pronounced on their simple computer then our modern one because they have 5 background "processes" and less processing power while we have 50 background processes and power to spare, so what input they do receive from pheromones has a much larger effect on the computers overall processes making the "user" aware of it.

Because of pheromones simple analog nature and our computers greater capacity we've been "phasing" out there use for thousands of years making them a smaller part of the overall input we receive resulting in them being reduced to a background process that the "user" is unaware of, yet even so they can have profound effects on our physiology and psychology.

When a solitery ant on walkabouts finds a jam sandwich, it leaves a trail of pheromones that leads back to the colony.  The other ants can small the trail and know that it means that there is something to eat at the end of it; this allows one ant to alert the whole colony as to the location of to the jam sandwich, which then dissapears with suprising rapidity as a result  .  To say that ants are not consciously aware of pheronomes, given that ants actively communicate information to eachother using pheromones is as stupid as saying that humans talk to eachother but are not aware that they are speaking.

Is it a "conscious" decision or is it a simple analog system responding to input? I personally feel that an ant "consciousness" is far to simple to actually be called a consciousness at all when comparied to mammals but whether they are consciously aware of pheromones or not (I think they are) isn't really relevant when my whole point in this topic of discussion is that pheromones have a stronger more inherent effect on the system (brain) then that of words.

It is perhaps possible for a person to indoctrinate themselves so deeply that the emotional content of their words are eliminated at a subsconcious level, but certainly that would take far too long to avoid the psychological damage inflicted by their insults. 

Correct, the problem is that the indoctrination process for the second system (indifference to bullies) generally does not start until after the bulling has already begun leading to the damage you mentioned while the indoctrination process for the first system (universal empathy) is started after birth but if you start the indoctrination for indifference earlier then this isn't an issue because the system will be in place before the bulling begins.

Pheronomes (other than what we like to call smells) certainly bypass the consciousness of humans.  However the same applies to words that we hear and understand the emotional content of, but are not presently paying attention to.  This is reason why we are bombarded on internet websites constantly with ads, even though we pay little to no attention to them; the advertisers like the fact we are distracted because it allows them to bypass our conscious mind and implant us with the desired emotional response to their product.   

I think that it mostly tone and infliction that bypass consciousnesses and carry the emotional content.

As for advertisement the fact that we pay little or no attention is bad advertisement, a subconscious desire for a product of a certain type (food) doesn't make as want their product this is why many add are design using music, tone, infliction or colorful imagery so that you do pay attention and want their product.

That is called hypnosis in humans.  While it is certainly possible that ants are hypnotised by the pheronomes they use to communicate, there is no evidence for it.   

Hypnosis is mind control if powerful enough and I'd imagine that its effect is stronger on simple minds.

That is actually one of the worst scientific articles I have ever read. It does not matter that homovanillyl alcohol supresses dopamine because the dopamine is in the bees brain, which is sealed away behind a layer of chitin.  The creatures blood (which feeds the brain) is also sealed away behind the same carapace.  The only way then for an external chemical to affect the bees brain directly is for the bee to breathe it in, which means that we are basically talking about something working like tobacco or marijuana.  We are not talking then about a pheronome at all, but rather a drug with a direct psychological effect but a drug cannot be used to command anybody simply because it contains no informational content.  A queen bee could use the drug to calm down other bees who are distressed by something (think DF Mayor), but it gives her no ability to actually communicate with them. 

Their inability to distingush between a scent that is smelled by the bee using it's antennae, potentially transmitting informational and a drug which is something absorbed into the bloodstream with an emotional effect renders this article useless. 

Pheromones are chemicals that effect with brain chemistry and drugs are also chemicals that effect with brain chemistry, there's only one thing that really separates the two ones source is inherent to the animal (pheromones) and the others source is not inherent (drugs).

Basically pheromones are drugs which is what I've been saying about them having greater effect then words and language

pheromone

Definition of pheromone in English:
noun
Zoology
A chemical substance produced and released into the environment by an animal, especially a mammal or an insect, affecting the behavior or physiology of others of its species.

drug

Definition of drug in English:
noun
1A medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body: a new drug aimed at sufferers from Parkinson’s disease
More example sentences

1.1A substance taken for its narcotic or stimulant effects, often illegally: [as modifier]: a drug addict figurative mass adoration is a highly addictive drug

This is why I see the scientific article about the bee queens "drug" pheromone as valid.

Sites take a massive toll on the memory, that is why the site limit exists in the first place.  While the theoretical maximum is huge, the memory does not support so many sites but only a maximum of about 4000, which is only possible if you spead the number of historical characters thin, thus resulting in a rather boring world. 

The point is it a soft cap not a hard cap, there's room to increase the basic amount of sites with optimization and I've gone as high as 2000 sites without culling history figs but it takes a long time to gen.

While it may be sometimes neccesery for a game developer to replace existing mechanics if they are shoddy, an efficient developer should initially implement mechanics that are not in themselves shoddy and are consistant with the future mechanics that they intend to create in the future.  I do not wish to donate money to a developer that engages in the design equivilant of digging in holes and filling them in again.

I said way back when this discussion started that I support Toady in making his dream game even if he not the most "efficient" developer also Toady started game development as a hobby.

Toady One's Wiki Page

In 2006, he started his post doctorate in Texas A&M, which was his goal since his undergraduate days. He decided to leave during the first year due to the increasingly stressful situation[3] and is said to have broken down in the head of department's office. He left in the same year after receiving a stipend, to devote his full attention to developing Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby. He said, "At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that’s not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you’re done? That’s pretty damn cool."[2]

He's learnt allot since then but if features he introduced early need to be removed or altered to advance further then so be it.

If they are place holders then we have been financing incompetant game design.  If they decide to throw out the whole basis of the game (the site) in order to make DF Crusader Kings then I will stop playing, not because I do not enjoy Crusader Kings but because such a move proves that the team are too incompetant to efficiantly develop a game.

The basis of the game is fantasy world simulation, fortress mode is just how the player interacts with the game world and changing what sites are doesn't change the "basis" of the game anymore then sieges being taken from world pop reducing siege frequency and size does.

What he is saying is that your fortress will provide a core of elite soldiers for a larger army drawn from the local hillocks.  What he is doing is developing the present abstracted militery relationships that already exist in world gen and allow large-scale battles to happen.  Nothing is getting replaced, in other words the development is quite efficient unlike what you would have. 

Rainseeker:  The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?

Toady:   because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet,

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_20_transcript.html[/quote]

So the fact that hillocks around your fortress are meant to be your hillocks under your abstract control isn't a change? seems to me like your fortress is the barons keep or castle town and the hillocks are your "lands" and the residents your peasantry a la CK.

Toady can always abstract away the production elements, given that in DF Crusader Kings we do not actually have any direct role in production. 

Except that he decided that he does want to model the production elements and not abstract the game any more then strictly necessary for it to function.

Crusader Kings does not bother itself with the details of how the peasants grow stuff or make stuff, these are abstracted away to focus on the political elements. Eventually Toady One intends to work on the political elements, but given the nature of the core mechanics of his world it does not make sense to have actual Feudalism, since the basic mechanics of the game work against that.

So what? how does it matter whether Crusader Kings bothers with those details or not? having similar elements "feudal politics" doesn't mean that the entire game is copied, DF has a far more grandiose goal then CK does anyway.

Indeed, Rome itself could not afford to do any of those things.  The only means by which it can do those things is to have subordinate peasants and smaller settlements dependant upon their own peasants to channel sufficiant value their way. 

Then why cant the fortress be modified do the same?

The individual did not go anywhere.

What I meant was system run by private individuals (nobles, wealthy merchants) for private individuals.

Since your taxes pay for Rome's wrath, there is no wrath to fall on you if everyone does not pay your taxes.  Unlike with scattered peasants that need a government to protect their property and avoid anarchy, the Hillocks/Mountain Halls/Present DF Fortresses have no need of Fortress Rome at all.  It cannot afford to crush them because nobody at all needs it, resulting in nobody being willing to pay for it to crush anyone. 

As I've said I hold the position that things will develop in a way where the the Hillocks/Mountain Halls/Present DF Fortresses will become more like Rome or medieval England or any ancient economy system that had taxation of individuals by local lords and of those lord by the crown.

Indeed, this is why you treat all claims of Natural Order or Sociobiology with utmost scepticism.  If you know how the trick works, why would you allow yourself to be decieved by it?   

You can know its a trick and choose to play along as to reap the benefits of that system for yourself at which point your no longer being deceived but joined the deceiver in deceiving the sheeple.

You seem to be confusing subjective with incorrect.  I am not saying that the observations are incorrect, I am saying that observations cannot exist independantly of being observed; which is what objective means. 

I'm not confusing anything because I know what they mean, its just that somethings have no objective truth.

What subjective means is.

Definition of subjective in English:
adjective
1Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions: his views are highly subjective there is always the danger of making a subjective judgment Contrasted with objective.

1.1Dependent on the mind or on an individual’s perception for its existence.

What objective means is.

Definition of objective in English:
adjective
1(Of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts: historians try to be objective and impartial Contrasted with subjective.

1.1Not dependent on the mind for existence; actual: a matter of objective fact

From what I can tell part of the issue is my dyslexia, this.

Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution in objectively observable though fossil record and DNA testing.

Was meant to say this

Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution is an observable objective truth that can be observed though fossil records and DNA testing.

I got it the wrong way around and I did a double take when I reread it just then. 

All objective truths are arrived at from subjective experiances via a process of reasoning; there is absolutely no way to arrive at objective truths from direct observation alone.  1000 observations are no more objective than 1 observation, they merely provide a greater rational basis to derive objective laws.  If you reasoning is bad however, all the observation in the world will not bring you any closer to the actual objective laws.   

An objective truth exists independent of our observation of it, gravity and evolution are observable objective truths because they are true regardless of our ability to observes them but can be observed, however knowing or understanding an objective truth comes though reasoning but something that is based purely in subjective experience like morality or ethics has no objective truth to be observed because like beauty it only exists in the mind.

As we know from naked mole rats, living in a constructed underground leads to an ant society being optimal, which ultimately leads to an ant biology in order to make said society stronger.  Social wasps on the other hand are a replication of the original subterranean ant society on the surface, which does not naturally lead to that kind of society but a more regular one of competing individuals. 

The ants are the original fortress, while the wasps and bees are hillocks created by the fortress on the surface.  The hillocks replicate the fortress society and it works, but the surface does not naturally result in that kind of society but one of scattered peasants and palaces. 

Dwarves aren't ants or mole rats and them living in "hives" is a new thing and as I've said a number of time I see the current situation with the first fortress as a place holder because dwarves aren't like that imho.

Given that all aspect of the game are replaceable and that in version 21.93.19a an entire civilization amounted to only a single fortress, town, dark fortress or forest retreat but now we have civ's that grow with multiple site type and that starting scenarios are to introduce new site types there is no reason to think that the statue qou with year 0 forts will remain.

I think that there is a number of possible way for Toady to bring in a private individual based economy but for them to make sense within the simulation would require change to other aspect of the game and we know Toady doesn't have a problem doing that.

The act of change, as was worked out by the ancient Greek philosophers is only good if it is the change from an imperfect state to a more perfect one; a perfect state is therefore 'not perfect' if it is subject to change as any change would be a change towards a worse state. This is why perfect societies do not make good stories, a story needs change in order to be what it is.

I think that whats good is an entirely subjective issue because it depends on your personal values after all I am a morale relativist so I've already rejected Plato’s ethics on "the good"

Just this part of Kelly's post on Free Keene sums up my thoughts on the matter.

What is it that defines good? According to Webster’s dictionary, it is defined as “being positive or desirable in nature “. Is good then a subjective value to be determined by each individual according to what they find desirable? If that were the case it would mean that there is no such thing as good or evil, that man’s life has no meaning, that there is no existence outside of consciousness; that the world is nothing but an accidental playground of pure, unbridled nihilism and that we are the devil’s children with empty, cackling, infinite nothingness as our total sanction and final purpose.

She goes on to say this belief is "wrong" and only held by psychopaths but its the one I hold to be true and I'm no psychopath as I'm pretty sure the psychologist I saw for manic depression would have picked it up.

So while ant society is perfect from many points of view its imperfect from mine. There's also the fact that I view the act of change itself as good while static perfection as bad, so never "committing" to a single social structure but having a constant state of flux is the natural truth and ideal.

Ant's: objectively perfect but subjectively imperfect and bad for change.

Human capitalism: objectively imperfect but subjectively perfect and good for change.

Ultimately I think that you like the ancient Greek philosophers but I prefer people like Stephen Hawking because physics, chemistry and biology provides objective answers while philosophy provides subjective answers.

As we can see from the paralell evolution of mole rats, ant society and biology exists as a result of living in a constructed underground.  However as we can see from the existance of wasps and bees; that society is also quite capable of being transplanted onto the competative, individualistic surface world without having to fundermentally change.  While the ant society is the result of their constructed underground enviroment, their society is still entirely viable on the surface while the surface world society is forced to become the ant society. 

The society of ants and naked mole rats is not necessary for living underground its just ideal there are animals that live underground without devolving into ants and the thing is its also an "ideal" system on the surface but it doesn't happen because its not necessary, dwarves only need to cooperate as much as the Romans, Egyptians, Incas and who ever built Derinkuyu did becasue each of them built something that was akin to a fortress and before you bring up fortress self sufficiency I will say again that I think that its just a place holder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city http://sometimes-interesting.com/2014/05/09/derinkuyu-the-underground-cities-of-cappadocia/

He is planning to introduce a hack essentially for the labour list in order to keep certain sites that should not be economically viable independantly from becoming so, this is because the core mechanics support self-sufficiancy in surplus value.  Had DF Crusader Kings been the plan however then there would have no need for anything but a narrow range of labours to start with and a great amount of abstracted peasant production. 

I think the hack is a place holder nothing more and once the political framework, supply & demand, law's & ownership is in he can work on making a system that'll stop that independent viability from being a problem and its not that Crusader King is the "Goal" but that its a side effect of the goal, much like the difference between demon intending to create poverty stricken peasants and poverty stricken peasants merely being a side effect of the economy as I mentioned earlier.

Toady doesn't like abstracting things so why would he abstract that? I mean look at how he's done temperature where every single "cells" temperature is checked constantly he could have abstract it and it would have been easier or trees he could have just made them all generic "wood" like most games do but no that's not what he wants he wants a simulator that can simulate all aspects of the world from the ground up and I'm sure if it was possible he'd have every single peasant in the world be a tracked history figure.
 

They are being altruistic, they are simply enjoying not putting themselves first. 

Its not altruism if the goal or motivation is that enjoyment then its just a reward system at work.

The point is that the question is a relative one.  A selfish person is a person who is biased towards their own particular good, they are happy for there to be more bad stuff for everyone else as long as they personally are better off.  An altruistic person is a person that regards the total good of everybody, without distinction as to whether that good is their own good or not.   

That is not altruism but simply inverted selfishness.  Putting the selfishness of others above your own selfishness is not being altruistic. 

The definition of altruism is not relative and it mean selflessness.

altruism

Definition of altruism in English:
noun
1The belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others: some may choose to work with vulnerable elderly people out of altruism

1.1 Zoology Behavior of an animal that benefits another at its own expense.

If their motivation has any self interest its not altruism because it is the "reward system" disqualifying them from being considered selfless or altruistic as far as I'm concerned and it means that working towards equality is not altruism because its not selfless because equal rights for others reinforces the belief of that you have rights yourself.

selfless

Definition of selfless in English:
adjective
Concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one’s own; unselfish: an act of selfless devotion

Synonyms
unselfish, altruistic, self-sacrificing, self-denying;
considerate, compassionate, kind, noble, generous, magnanimous, ungrudging, charitable, benevolent, openhanded
View synonyms

You are welcome to think of it like you do but I don't and its unlikely I ever will.

Thinking generally about what is good for the colony even it is imparts a cost to you personally is altruism not selfishness. 

The motivation is more important than the action itself, if the motivation for having more "workers" is that there's less work for you then its not altruism but selfishness because its ultimately about making your own life easier and this is why social behavior exists in the first place because it has personal benefits "I'll watch your back if you watch mine" and the good feeling you attribute to altruism is a biological reward mechanisms that trains the individual to act in a certain way where the personal benefits aren't immediately clear.

The intellectual copyright authors when they lose simply become freeware developers, they really do not have to create armageddon.   

I never said that they had to just that I think at lest some of them would rather do that then be reduced to a mere peasant.

It is fascinating that you see your own value as being your abscence of any actual ability to accomplish anything because of all those opponants.  It is almost as if you see yourself as a commodity, the less of you there is the more valuable you become.....

I am a commodity, you are a commodity, every single human is a commodity, your only worth is the value that others in your society assign you this is why your life is more valuable to your family and friends then to a stranger and it also why people without any family or friends can die without even causing a ripple, being forgotten and rotting away in their apartment or home for weeks/months until it start to inconvenience others with the smell or though unpaid bills.

I think that society is founded on selfish desires and everybody works together not for the common good but for personal gain, ants have just taken this so far as giving up on any selfish desires completely by converting to a communal good system on a biological level and have become a lesser creature for it.

Both of which are neccesery for an actual army correct? 

Yes, but the elites are better one for one and a hillock doesn't have enough numbers to soak the damage elites can do and while yes they can all band together and starve out the fortress with Gandhi style non violent resistance so the question is how do you stop them from doing that? by dividing and conquering.

Yet you seem so confident that he will end up overturning the entire game in order to implement your notions of Dwarven Rome.   

I've never seen it as "overturning" the game just that the result of the implementation of certain dev goals result in there being something similar to a dwarven Rome.

Oxygen can get there the way it does in actual caverns, namely from the surface whether directly through caves or from the water. 

Given the amount of fauna that live in the DF caverns and the size of some of the fauna I feel that something must be producing enough oxygen for it all.

Which only works if the competition cannot figure out your game.  Once they do it comes down to what the competition is actually supposed to be about.  North Korea can provide free healthcare to all it's citizens but the far richer and more 'democratic' America somehow cannot manage to do this.   

That's why you use deceit to hinder the competition and stop them from figuring out your game. as a note Toady does want to introduce lying and misinformation to DF.

Public sector unions seldom support privatisation.

I wasn't thinking of the crafters as public sector workers but private workers contracted by the public sector with the guild being their "corporate" front.
 

The reason why the palaces gave individual leaseholds in the first place was because it increased the collective dependance of the peasantry upon the authority of the palace while at the same time keeping them divided.  Individuals are given their own private plots to live seperately, but nobody can actually manage to be an island; hence the peasants 'need' the palace.  What private leashold property prevented was the peasants banding together to create something like a dwarf fortress site, a self-sufficiant collective unit capable of self-government and not needing the palace for anything at all.

So what to stops Toady from introducing those private leaseholds for the exact same reason?

As already mentioned as "you pay for Rome's wrath", this parasitic dwarf palace is not needed for anything.  That means that nobody will either allow it to exist in the first place or allow it to continue to survive as what it is.  It cannot just crush rebellion by force because it cannot sustain itself let along it's armies once enough sites have rebelled against it, which every other site will do since no sites need it for anything. 

You keep saying this over and over again as if I don't understand that if everybody rebels the system fails and that with the statue quo that rebellion is inevitable but I do understand this because Gandhi's whole premise was that if everyone refuses to follow an "unjust" system it stop working which is the only reason why non violent resistance can work.

This is also why the phrase "divide and conquer" exists, changing the statue que to enable the parasitic Roman "fortress" by dividing the hillocks both from each other as sites and internally though individual competition its only way you can subjugate them and have a dwarven Rome because if you don't change the statue quo it just wont work.

Pure white paladins cannot be 100 good in an uncomplicated way, simply because they kill people they are somewhat grey.  A battle between 70 good and 30 good is not substantially different from a normal Black vs White battle really.   

Personally I see a difference, when I think pure "white" DnD's lawful good is what I picture and when I think pure "black" DnD's chaotic evil is what comes to mind. True morality cant be measured on a good vs evil scale and is Infinitely more complex which is why game systems tend to abstract it though measurable values and why I don't like those purist systems.

Because things in Real-Life politics play out over decades and centuries, much as they do in Dwarf Fortress. 

I guess we'll see then. 

If a person dies of a deadly virus, they did not survive simply because the virus was part of them. 

Which is why I called the values of a society its genes, while genes can lead to the death of the creature that creature can still be considered successful if it passes its genes on to the next generation, to put it in the terms you used, if someone whom posses a congenital defect passes that it on to their children they succeed even if the defect kills them.

Yes but equally you could lock them as ant-people.

I have no problem with you locking them as ant people so long as I don't have to play with ant people and there's an economy system in game that supports a capitalistic play style.