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[Shades]

Sim City, however, is actually fairly abstracted and simplified.  Although I never played the most recent versions of Sim City, I do remember that you have no real control over nor concern for what actual industry gets produced in your town.

Not wanting to detract from your general push here but you actually had a surprising amount of control in Sim City with regards to interest rate. After the first one at any rate. The levels of control are through the three densities (high/medium and low) and the various industry specific tax rate. Although you can't say 'Do not build' the level of effect of the tax groups was very close to this.

Now obviously populations in DF are much much smaller so you tend to have a much closer view, and personally I like building the industry directly. I could live with dwarves picking up the jobs themselves and other automation along those lines, as long as you could encourage quality of final products that is.

[NW_Kohaku]

Not wanting to detract from your general push here but you actually had a surprising amount of control in Sim City with regards to interest rate. After the first one at any rate. The levels of control are through the three densities (high/medium and low) and the various industry specific tax rate. Although you can't say 'Do not build' the level of effect of the tax groups was very close to this.

Now obviously populations in DF are much much smaller so you tend to have a much closer view, and personally I like building the industry directly. I could live with dwarves picking up the jobs themselves and other automation along those lines, as long as you could encourage quality of final products that is.

Well, I don't remember being able to see specific industries in Sim City in any way more detailed than "light" versus "heavy" (and developed versus lower value), but it may just have been the length of time since I played one.

There are a few different ways that we could have autonomy, though...

One is having actual capitalist dwarves.  Perhaps by setting up shops, the dwarves who buy them can also set up a back of shop area that you can zone for that shop, as well, and dwarves could build the means to stock their own shops.  This would give competition to the Command Economy and potentially break up the monopoly your "government services" have on the market.  The capitalist can buy raw resources or get them himself, such as buying pig tails, then set up a quern to grind them himself, and a loom to make his own clothing for less price than buying direct from the government, and selling those clothes in his shop.  Your own fortress goods will have prices set by your own Command Economy, but capitalists would try to shift to selling whatever the government was running out of so as to take advantage of higher demand than supply.  If they are not particularly good at making any given item (and quality is more important than low price), then capitalists might even hire on other dwarves by offering them more pay.

Another way of making autonomous dwarves was what I had originally suggested in the original thread, which was that dwarves are zoned their own rooms, and furnish it themselves.  The thread itself was meant to add plenty more to the notion of what goes into dwarven housing, including more furniture and an importance of "Location", but generally, this autonomy stands as "they have control of their own personal lives (no arranging individual dwarven furniture), but you still dominate their work lives".  The only problem with this is that some dwarves still wind up being nothing more than haulers for all eternity just because nothing else was ever enabled for them.

The other is "idlers can temporarily activate certain labors on themselves when nobody else will do it", although some (such as woodcutting or making a steel breastplate) jobs would not be involved in this, possibly by designation in an option, or just plain a Job Priority system.  This, frankly, isn't all that autonomous.

On the total other end of the spectrum, however, is the sort of Majesty style of jobs, where there are no real labor designations, you just pay different rates for different jobs, and dwarves pick what they want to do based upon how much pay they get, and personal preferences for specific jobs.  Setting up pay grades so that anyone more than Competent in a job makes much more money than people with novice ranks should keep dwarves who have started to gain skills on the path to developing those skills. As the game goes forward, and the economy's later stages get enabled, and you have both a finite budget for your government (so dwarf salaries do not just appear from nowhere), and you need to levy taxes upon dwarves to pay the salaries of the dwarves who work for the government.  At this time, you could also have captialist dwarves trying to compete with some government services, such as selling food or clothing or furniture, and they will also be competing with the government to hire the skilled dwarves to do those jobs.  (Although a privatly owned soapmaking company will still be as capable of selling soap as a government one will.)

I would like to say, with regards to the last one, that yes, that would be somewhat more complex and require you to fight against some of your own dwarves a little... and that's the whole point.  Currently, the game has almost nothing that presents a challenge to a large, established fortress, and the only real challenge is presented in the form of nobles and their mandates.  This would hopefully add a real mechanic rather than an annoying random production demand to entertain players trying to keep their fortress running in ways that don't just involve designating animals for slaughter or designating more trees for chopping or requeueing workshop orders because you ran out of logs at one point.

[monk12]

Rather than having the huddled unwashed masses be unable to better themselves because the government is unable to find work for all of them, entrepreneurial dwarves can make and sell their own things to better themselves as they see fit.

Or they can just hang out and chill with their friends. Leave the entrepreneurialism to the humans.

Sit around, doing nothing but getting high and talking about how high you're getting while you let the Humans build their miserable little towns and expand over the world?!  BAH! That's some fine Elf Talk!

Dwarves are stout creatures of INDUSTRY!

Now grow a beard, and get to work, man!

It should be pretty easy to incorporate this into the existing personality traits. Lazy dwarves would just hang out wherever, lazy dwarves who are social would throw parties, musical dwarves would grab a harp and rock out, entrepreneurial dwarves would start businesses related to their preferences, etc. It would also go a long way to making those personality traits more meaningful since the various combinations make the dwarves react differently to the same situations.

[jseah]

I would love this.  If it was implemented, I'd probably end up moving my "main" portion of the game away from initial start and infrastructure (read: megaprojects) to management of economics. 

In fact, if dwarves started their own competing industry for food, I'd just phase out the government farm.  Maybe even order 100 stacks of food from them to get them going (and build an emergency store) and just sell all my farms to them.  Would be extremely awesome if I could do things like negotiate a contract for them to make me my 100 stack emergency store in exchange for the 6 4x3 plots of farmland. 
Then the dwarves would adjust the various crops based on demand and keep the rest of the fort happier (due to better meeting of liked foods and possibly higher quality from auto-fertilization), taking that load off me and adding a large amount of flavour to the fort's culture. 

Doing things like sinking a new magma pumpstack would become as easy as ordering 100 iron screw pumps from a fort entity and watch as the dwarves automatically shuffle labours around to temporarily increase the employment in the metal industry. 


EDIT: Even better idea, instead of giving a gift of X roasts or rock crafts, I could easily just gift the merchants with 1000 fort currency, and they'ld just buy 1000 worth of goods they want from the economy and take that as a gift. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, that's hopefully the idea behind more automation, especially in combination with the economy.

[TolyK]

you, my good people, are geniuses.

i salute you.

...

yes, I think that this will make DF a timeless game... blood for the blood god Armok!

[goodvibesforyou]

I like this idea alot. I love the concept of A.I. Something that we program that can make decisions of its own that will be benefitial. It's kind of like in The Sims where you can choose whether your Sims do most things on their own, or choose to make EVERY decision for your Sim in their entire lifetime.

While Dwarves right now are pretty smart, they don't adapt as well to the situation they are in. In a fortress like that, you'd want people that can quickly take over for others when the need arises. When one becomes idle, they should start searching for ways to become a benefit to the Dwarven community again. If there is a low supply of meat and the Dwarf is idle, it should go out and hunt but always keep itself safe enough.

They SHOULD have a mind of their own because it would make the game even more fun to play. Those silly Dwarves doing stupid stuff again.

[Halnoth]

I don't know if it has been mentioned yet, but if dwarves could make crap on their own free time I would want an expanded forbid system. Currently it is either "don't touch this" or "go ahead and use this" but if they were able to make useless crap themselves I'd like a middle option "for fortress work only" or some such.

[Drakeero]

To be honest, I somewhat prefer the great degree of micromanagement.

I could go into a long explanation as to why but I need to go to bed now.

So I'll just add one reason instead of several.

Just think for a moment, of what dwarves do stupidly.  Build from the wrong side of the wall and trap themselves in hell.  Strand themselves on constructions.  Drink booze while on fire, or not even notice they are on fire.  Have strange moods.  Bonesetters who cannot find buckets.  Dwarves who can't pick up the soap without dropping in repeatedly in a spam of job cancellations.  Using crossbows as melee weapons.  Going on a break while the goblins seige.  Deconstruct a floor while another dwarf is still standing upon it.  The list can go on forever.  Do you REALLY want these guys to start doing more things without you knowing about it at first?

[Wastedlabor]

I'd be glad enough with permanent, lower priority tasks, so they don't cancel brewing and making lavish meals when the fortress runs out of ingredients, but they don't spend the rest of their life mincing cat brains.

[NewSheoth]

I'd really like my dwarves to do more stuff by themselves, be more self-sustained. However, I'd really NOT like it to be hooked up with the economy, since as of now it's a horrible, horrible thing (in my opinion). What I would like to see would be, for example, dwarves brewing plump helmets while keeping in mind that there must be a certain number of them left in their raw form, so that I don't have to control my brewing industry manually all the time; at the same time, dwarves making just enough barrels to suit the needs of the breweries; I would like breweries to start up if the brew stockpiles run dry, etc. Like the current fishery/butchery/tanning systems, and similarly to them, with a trigger enabling or disabling this. That way, I would've been able to bring many control buttons together and wire them to a single one. Same with designating stuff to be moved to the depot: having an option to designate a certain good or a type of goods to be automaticaly moved to the depot when a caravan arrives. Maybe I will edit more ideas in later.
Now that would be a way of reducing micromanagement that I'd like.

[Daetrin]

Something that would need to be done with a more complex economy is allow the player to shift excess production capacity around. Given a mature fortress, your economy should provide more than enough food and goods. This would be the point where you decide to do a megaproject (building capacity), send out armies (military capacity), or corner the market on gold or platinum or whatever (economic capacity).  Obviously this would be a more analog decision, rather than picking one of three choices.  I have no idea what form this would take, and it'd have to take into account a finished army and trade arc - there would probably be more than three choices, at that, for what to do with your excess. Just as long as there is something to do with it other than hoard it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, after being away for several months, I see this thread got a brief spark of attention before dying back down.

Two I want to focus on.

I'd really like my dwarves to do more stuff by themselves, be more self-sustained. However, I'd really NOT like it to be hooked up with the economy, since as of now it's a horrible, horrible thing (in my opinion). What I would like to see would be, for example, dwarves brewing plump helmets while keeping in mind that there must be a certain number of them left in their raw form, so that I don't have to control my brewing industry manually all the time; at the same time, dwarves making just enough barrels to suit the needs of the breweries; I would like breweries to start up if the brew stockpiles run dry, etc. Like the current fishery/butchery/tanning systems, and similarly to them, with a trigger enabling or disabling this. That way, I would've been able to bring many control buttons together and wire them to a single one. Same with designating stuff to be moved to the depot: having an option to designate a certain good or a type of goods to be automaticaly moved to the depot when a caravan arrives. Maybe I will edit more ideas in later.
Now that would be a way of reducing micromanagement that I'd like.

This gives a pretty good example of the sort of balance between positives and negatives that a player can see in the idea. 

Also:

To be honest, I somewhat prefer the great degree of micromanagement.

I could go into a long explanation as to why but I need to go to bed now.

So I'll just add one reason instead of several.

Just think for a moment, of what dwarves do stupidly.  Build from the wrong side of the wall and trap themselves in hell.  Strand themselves on constructions.  Drink booze while on fire, or not even notice they are on fire.  Have strange moods.  Bonesetters who cannot find buckets.  Dwarves who can't pick up the soap without dropping in repeatedly in a spam of job cancellations.  Using crossbows as melee weapons.  Going on a break while the goblins seige.  Deconstruct a floor while another dwarf is still standing upon it.  The list can go on forever.  Do you REALLY want these guys to start doing more things without you knowing about it at first?

A good example of the distrust of the things that can possibly go wrong with greater autonomy.


The trick is, obviously, working out ways to nullify or mitigate the bad while reaping as much of the good as possible.

For starters, a lot of the problem is that "dwarves are stupid", which is a problem that would need to be addressed no matter how much we micromanage them, unless we were to go to the utter extreme of manually controlling each one, which we aren't going to be able to do.  Dwarves are simply going to need to eventually learn that "Fire HOT!" whether or not we give them more autonomy.

In other words, if we are going to be speculating about how we want the direction of the game to go, we have to give Toady at least enough credit that he isn't incompetent, and that he will address some of the lingering problems eventually, especially if some of the workarounds for dwarven stupidity start becoming less workable, and it really becomes a game-stopping problem.

The economy, for one, is finally about to see some work put into it. 

Hopefully, the soap and some of the other problems will see a little work put into them soon, as well.


Because of the Toady quote back on the second page (about not becoming Majesty, and having the assumption that actions were for survival), I have tried to put more thought into the way that the system would change over time.

Part of what I want to do with some of my suggestions is try to turn the game into less of a difficulty cliff, where survival of the first year or so is harsh and unforgiving, but beyond that point, it is smooth sailing.

In much the same way that baronies or the economy only applies at certain population milestones, the game could use a gradient system that gradually starts making dwarves more autonomous and less reliant upon your commands as time goes on, and your fortress becomes more complex and filled with dwarves.

As I see it, a cutoff point could be 20 civilian dwarves.  Below that point, the fortress operates similarly to how it does now, with the assumption that every dwarf works for his own survival, and needs to keep his fellows alive so that the society as a whole can survive another day.  (Civilian dwarves to make military fortresses with signfiicant military populations, and a probable player preference for direct control of military affairs not have to actually deal with much of this stuff.  An init option to turn it all off, would, of course, also be welcome.) 

After you have 20 civilian dwarves in a fort, the dwarves start to become more personalized.  The lazy dwarves will start figuring that someone else can handle it, and work at their own leisure, assuming that if there's already 4 other miners in the fort, then having just ONE slack off shouldn't hurt the fortress too much, right?  The workaholic dwarves would continue as they always had.  This variable could be a function of population, with at or below 20 dwarves meaning the dwarves are comitted to survival, but a small, but ever-growing variable will make lazy dwarves slack off greater and greater periods of time as the population grows, up until it hits the point where they only work whenever they really feel like it, or their wallets are so empty that they just have to get some money to eat.

Likewise, if dwarves are given more leisure activities, and a demand to do them, then they will only demand these activities when there are enough dwarves in the fort, and the fort is well-enough established that they can honestly feel that their fort's existence is not under threat, and that a day of watching some goblin being fed to the elephants at the arenas would be a nice way to unwind after work. 

The game would have a sliding scale of this autonomous time that dwarves have based upon the perceived threat to the fortress's existence - sudden drops in population would snap the autonomy back into "survival of the fortress" mode. 

This would offer the player the ability to have the dwarves become more autonomous in their choices of activities, but only at points in the fortress when there are so many dwarves milling about in the fortress that you can't really manage to micromange each of them very well, anyway.  It makes the game, instead, slide more towards managing the society of dwarves rather than individual dwarves, giving dwarves rewards for certain behaviors and disincentives for other behaviors when you have enough dwarves that maximum efficiency isn't necessary or perhaps even possible, and idlers can be left to figure out what jobs they might like to do, while players in small fortresses, potentially with big militaries that they directly micromanage, would have a greater direct control over their units.

[abadidea]

I skipped some of the posts but I just wanted to share this:

Has anyone here played Tropico 1? (You can pick it up for a few bucks on Steam.) It has highly autonomous citizens. You (the government) own all the businesses, and you can fire people but you cannot force people to take a job. You can only raise the salary and other benefits. Similarly, you cannot force them to live in a certain place, etc etc. Your job is providing what the citizens need to be happy, and their job is doing what makes themselves happy.

[NW_Kohaku]

No, I haven't played Tropico, although I bought Majesty just because of earlier discussions on this subject.

... I haven't played it yet, though, as I have spent too much time on DF.