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Author Topic: Class Warfare: Internal politics, scaling difficulty, and personalities  (Read 60386 times)

Andeerz

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #75 on: November 08, 2010, 08:31:25 pm »

So in otherwords...

A "Nation" doesn't exist in feudalism so to speak.


Yeah!

Not so much Rome. In fact that was one of the contributors to their eventual downfall.

Yeah, the eventual fall of the Republic after over 400 years... and the eventual fall of the empire after another 500 or so... :P

Agh... never mind.  I don't wanna derail this.
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Neonivek

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #76 on: November 08, 2010, 08:35:22 pm »

It is hardly derailing anyhow since for the most part the lower classes have often been used as fodder for the upper classes.

Nationalism is just another way in which this takes form.

Though I am not sure on all the reasons why the lower class are manipulated as such nor am I sure on the effectiveness. I've heard of both the lower classes treating those higher as "stupid" and I've also heard of the upper classes being able to use their lower classmen (heh) as puppets.

Where exactly does the truth lie?
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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #77 on: November 09, 2010, 10:42:43 am »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

anyways...

how would you define a nation then? you could have "influence" (as from Civ 3) but that might be a bit too much...
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Andeerz

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #78 on: November 09, 2010, 04:05:10 pm »

Hmmm... I think an "influence" sort of representation like in Civ 3 might be a good idea provided that this "influence" is generated from very real and observable interactions between individual entities in the game.  Ultimately, I think a nation is defined by peoples' attitudes, and not some sort of magical line in the dirt.

I would model it based sorta like how it's done now.  Dwarves, elves, humans, etc. right now have their allegiance to a nation already represented, which could serve as a framework for this.  I'll need to use a made-up example to show how I think this idea ideally would work.  But I'm going to have to think this one through pretty hard before I post it.  Basically, here are some of the things I need to figure out:

1. How someone can establish their relative dominance and influence over people
2. How to model to what degree other entities (either subject or dominant over someone) respect this dominance
3. How (from #'s 1 and 2) a hierarchy of power can be established and recognized as a government as a sort of individual entity itself
4. How this network of power and respect and government can influence people to identify themselves as belonging to the same group, which would in essence be a nation
5. How to have people recognize the idea of a nation as an entity separate from government (for example: Japanese still identified themselves as Japanese even after the collapse of their monarchy's power after WWII)

So, sorta what I'm thinkin' (and I'm no sociologist/poli-sci person or anything, so I'm not the best authority on this)... What initially makes a people united (as a nation, province, tribe, whatever) are, I think, two things (and I could be wrong!!!) a. having something in common (culture, lineage, etc.) and b. essentially a recognition of authority/government/social order of some sort; they have to recognize each other as being "family" sort of, and agree in general to work together somehow for the survival and common good of a people.

I think that these two things are what basically should operate at the base level of how entities in the game recognize things like different civilizations, nations, fiefs, provinces, etc, and belonging to such things.  Hmmm... any sociologists, political scientists, or historians got any useful models?
 
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Andeerz

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #79 on: November 09, 2010, 09:45:28 pm »

Also: I suggest the OP author and everyone else for that matter check this out:  http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/westciv/medsoc/

This is a pretty enlightening essay written by someone who knows their stuff.  It seems like social stratification could be rather nebulous, and the sense of patriotism and nationalism wasn't really a part of most peoples' lives until the rise of powerful centralized governments.  Hmmmm a LOT of food for thought there that I will undoubtedly post about later.

EDIT: ALSO COOL!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune_(medieval)  <--- ties in VERY nicely with the discussion at hand.  :D
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Neonivek

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #80 on: November 09, 2010, 10:12:39 pm »

Which of course Centralised Governments tend to exist quite often in Fantasy fiction.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #81 on: May 19, 2012, 02:44:24 pm »

The Sliding Scale of Difficulty:

There has been a recurring theme among those talking about the way in which DF is played, which is to say that DF is not hard, it's simply complex.  It's hard to learn, but once you have learned it, it's rather easy. 

In fact, very few things in DF are hard to accomplish once you understand the mechanics of how to do so, the difficulty largely comes from the fact that the game throws a hundred different things you can do in your face, and lets you drown in the choices you have to make.  Many people lose a fortress simply because they forget to set up a farm, not because setting up a farm was something they were incapable of doing.  People lose a fortress because they lost track of how their brewing job was canceled because of a supply chain hiccup, rather than because of a poor decision per se.

This is partly because DF has lost some of its "game" features, as discussed in DF Talk 17.  Where once there was a progression in the 2d game where the player moved to different roadblocks from the underground river or chasm or magma river, and new and more powerful enemies appeared at each point along that progression, along with more valuable materials to mine, now realism and simulationism have replaced this with a game where almost everything worth having is available from the start.  There are caverns, but they are no roadblock - they are easily bypassed, and the magma sea can be easily reached while avoiding them. 

My proposed solution is to make the solution to this problem go hand-in-hand with another problem people had with dwarven autonomy when I was trying to push for that idea a while back:

Spoiler: Long Toady quotes (click to show/hide)

So the idea here is to make the game more difficult in stages by making your dwarves more autonomous and demand more of the player in stages, as well. 






Spoiler: Town stage (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Barony Stage (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: County/Duchy Stage (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Kingdom Stage (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Zwergedämmerung Stage (click to show/hide)



By adding back in more clear progressions of challenges based upon how developed the player's fortress has become, we can add back into the game that "game-like" notion of progression and achievement and scaling difficulty, and do so in a way that enables

Further, we can allow players who only seek "constructionist" gameplay a chance to simply opt-out of the whole system if they are only interested in building large monuments, and not playing the game-like features that the "gamist" players are seeking.  They need merely not climb the "noble tree".




Oh boy, when I was starting this, I thought this was going to be a relatively simple thing to explain.  6000 words and a couple days later...
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Tierre

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #82 on: May 19, 2012, 05:41:29 pm »

Where do you find time to write all that? :):):) Adding some kind of challenge except for HFS and goblins is a good idea. There should be non-military channenges in vanilla too - but your idead are a bit too advanced for development yet. If some of this is done it will be in some years from now:(
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #83 on: May 19, 2012, 05:51:24 pm »

Where do you find time to write all that? :):):) Adding some kind of challenge except for HFS and goblins is a good idea. There should be non-military channenges in vanilla too - but your idead are a bit too advanced for development yet. If some of this is done it will be in some years from now:(

I write it in spurts over a couple days.  Frequently, I do most of my writing later at night, when I'm winding down, since I most of my focusing then.

I don't think this is too advanced for what Toady is going into, since I've gone over a lot of the things he's written or talked about.  Yes, it's going to take years, but this involves many of the things he's going to be heading into, anyway.

He's already going to be working on caravan arc (traders and economy) and army arc (the military things) and Personality Rewrite and taverns and those quotes of him wanting to work towards the player being administrators of a fortress, and the DF talks about where he wants the game to go, and how he wants to add the "gamey" challenges back into the game. 

In a sense, I'm just trying to unify a really wide net of ideas all under a single focused narrative in this suggestion, along with bringing out some of the ideas I liked about other City-building games to flesh out the "game" part of the advancement of a fort.

In another sense, Toady wants to scrap the current Happiness system, and do Personality Rewrites, but hasn't really come up with solid ideas of what they're going to entail, so I want to try getting out ahead into that idea so that I can try pushing the idea Toady is forming towards the things that will work well with all these other changes I'd like to see coming.
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GreatWyrmGold

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #84 on: May 20, 2012, 07:50:41 am »

On one hand, the idea of escalating desires and demands, and that of a "noble tree," seems senible and good enough for me.
I don't have much to add, except to suggest that "needs" be mainly a factor of personality and the fort's status, plus some stuff based on social status. Of course, that might have been mentioned, but...geez, that's a well-organized wall of text.

To note about your posting style: That's not much like how  do it. I let ideas ferment in my head for a few days, type, organize as I go, and post. Of course, my ideas usually don't go into as much detail of EXACTLY how it should be as others' usually are...
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #85 on: May 20, 2012, 02:35:33 pm »

Well, I tend to write as it comes to mind, myself.  I have to keep things sort of organized, because I'll stop mid-sentence when an idea strikes me, and run off to write another section. 

If I didn't keep section tabs through those spoiler's I might forget where I stopped a paragraph at a "The importance of "

Besides that, I tend to rearrange segments.  In fact, depending on how long this noble tree thing gets, I might put it as its own unique post, and put it in the OP. 

And I've been meaning to rewrite this idea for a year or so, now... It's less fermenting, and more turning to vinegar if I wait much longer.
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Waparius

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #86 on: May 20, 2012, 03:57:28 pm »

Quote
The Sliding Scale of Difficulty:

Impressive. I especially like the point that dwarves at the "7 Sods In A Hole" stage should be hardworking and more tolerant of adverse conditions, with the lazier dwarves showing up later.

Barony Stage -
Quote
At around this point, you should also be able to start just plain zoning land for sale.  Dwarves would be able to buy their own land out of your hands, and set up their own homes (which they pay property taxes on instead of renting) and set up their own workshops (where they buy raw materials from the fort but own the finished product), and have the ability to sell those products back to the fortress or to any travelers. 

This may be too hard, though it would be appealing to zone levels 6-8 to a dwarf who loves natural beauty and find he's built a big, breakable window in the side of his cavern-top dining room. If that's the case, perhaps this could tie into interacting with hill-dwarves - you plan and command the fortress, but you can send nobles into the hills to dig as they like, and zone their lands via a map screen. Of course they'd demand apartments, offices and other space in the mountain home. In the fortress itself you could probably get a compromise by digging out the needed space and assigning a noble to run a burrow, at which point the noble is responsible for enticing a population.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #87 on: May 20, 2012, 04:35:36 pm »

Quote
The Sliding Scale of Difficulty:

Impressive. I especially like the point that dwarves at the "7 Sods In A Hole" stage should be hardworking and more tolerant of adverse conditions, with the lazier dwarves showing up later.

Barony Stage -
Quote
At around this point, you should also be able to start just plain zoning land for sale.  Dwarves would be able to buy their own land out of your hands, and set up their own homes (which they pay property taxes on instead of renting) and set up their own workshops (where they buy raw materials from the fort but own the finished product), and have the ability to sell those products back to the fortress or to any travelers. 

This may be too hard, though it would be appealing to zone levels 6-8 to a dwarf who loves natural beauty and find he's built a big, breakable window in the side of his cavern-top dining room. If that's the case, perhaps this could tie into interacting with hill-dwarves - you plan and command the fortress, but you can send nobles into the hills to dig as they like, and zone their lands via a map screen. Of course they'd demand apartments, offices and other space in the mountain home. In the fortress itself you could probably get a compromise by digging out the needed space and assigning a noble to run a burrow, at which point the noble is responsible for enticing a population.

The major problem Toady had with earlier ideas to dwarven autonomy was that the early game needed to be easier to have more direct commands, so, the way to achieve that was to make the early game about direct commands, and make the later game about just zoning things and taking a more hands-off approach with more autonomous dwarves.

Part of how the zoning idea is supposed to work, though, is that they can't actually mine anything without your designating it for safety purposes, but they can furnish things. 

In fact, some people may not even like dwarves furnishing their own rooms, and so part of when I get to that is covering a system where you can sub-zone out where the bed goes, just to appease the people who aren't going to be happy if they lose interior decorating control. 
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #88 on: May 25, 2012, 10:46:58 pm »

Social Classes:

In the previous section, I talked about a general overview of how we could have a distinct gradient of difficulty in the game through using the already extant differentiation in the evolution of a fortress from a mere hole when you first strike the earth to a fortress worthy of a monarch. 

In this post, I want to talk about the internal politics that can be used to make that gradient of difficulty possible. 

Part of the point of this is that, in a sense, having the ability to take on the next challenge will be the reward of overcoming (at least, temporarily) the previous challenge.  Difficulty, in a sense, is its own reward, because it comes with a rank up in status. 


In terms of progression of a fort, wealthy freedwarves add to the prestige of a fort, and cause the desire of potential migrants to immigrate to go up, while serfs are a significant drag on the prestige of a fort, and heavily discourage migration (as they tend to indicate there are no jobs to be found there). In this way, migration to a fort is determined, in part, by the fact that there are enough jobs available to a fort for the dwarves that are already there to be working at least most of the time, while idlers that fall into serfdom are a warning sign that no jobs are going to be found there.

Spoiler: Class politics (click to show/hide)



There are, however, more factors to consider in politics than mere class differences, and as such, the player will be subject to ever-growing divides in their populace that they will have to manage in order to keep a successful fort that doesn't fracture into multiple warring factions.

This is achieved through different forms of loyalties that each dwarf has.  They have a sense of identity through each distinct group within a fortress that a dwarf belongs to, and each one of these groups vie for the loyalties of that dwarf. 

These loyalties are key to the identity of a dwarf: It represents how they see themselves as individuals, such as if they see themselves as a dwarf first, and therefore defined by their reaction to save their fellow dwarves from the external threats that barrel down on them, or do they see themselves more defined by their jobs as carpenters as opposed to the stoneworkers or something else?  Are they defined by being one of the wealthiest and most respected dwarves in the community, a pillar of society?  Or do they see themselves more as servants of Asmelnish, the goddess of trade? 

When threatened, which are they most loyal to?  Will they help their fellow dwarf first, or will they see their social or political or religious rivalries as more important a difference between themselves and other dwarves such that they would rather let goblins have a chance at getting into the fort rather than cooperate with their hated rivals.

Successful fortress managers keep all these vying powers in harmony with one another, and focused upon the common need for survival and communal prosperity, while unsuccessful fortress managers see their fortresses divide into bitter partisan warfare and civil wars that tear apart fortresses from inside that could have withstood any external siege easily.


Spoiler: Religious factions (click to show/hide)

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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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aka010101

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Re: Class Warfare, and the Pursuit of Happiness (System Overhaul)
« Reply #89 on: May 27, 2012, 03:09:45 pm »

Okay, I've been reading over this (a feat in and of itself, as no one can throw up walls of text like kohaku...) and while all the stuff that's been posted looks good so far, i have two questions about stuff that hasn't quite been posted.

The first is about the inherent differences between dwarves, and our only historical race of reference (I.E. Humans). Dwarves behave very differently than we do, and i'm wondering how that's going to affect politics and the system of government. For exmaple, for humans, the feudal system is based on land and it's ownership. The king gives land to his barons, barons rent it to lords, ect. For dwarves, who live underground, that sort of thing will have to be handled VERY differently, and i'm wondering how you plan to do that.

The second is a question of options. Do you want players to have a CHOICE in what kind of government their fort or civ has. For instance, what if i want to run my fortress as a republic, roman style? Or perhaps a straight up dictatorship, do what the overlord says, or face the hammer. How would that be handled, and how would one go about changing the government of a fort or civ that already exists. Will revolution and secession be possible. That sort of thing.
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