Bay 12 Games Forum

They may be easy, but it's very dwarfy to make a mechanism that pokes everyone with sticks, killing any babies or pets that cross its path.

...will locking your soldiers in a small room lined with continuously erupting spear traps be considered the most humane way to train them.

...and yet mothers will drag their children into said rooms or into full combat and get depressed when they die.
...will being soaked by an icy waterfall be considered the highlight of your day.
...will crops grown underground be affected by the seasons where crops exposed to the elements will not.
...will failure to meet the impossible demands of management result in brutal punishment of random individuals.

(No, wait, that sounds a LOT like a company I used to work for.)

I just wanted to propose a simple change to the existing skill system to get rid of things like Fish Dissectors.  Instead, I find myself having to fight to get the thread back on topic away from a proposal which is pretty much the opposite of what I suggested.

It is obvious which proposal carries more support.  As I am outvoted, I concede and withdraw my proposal.

"Atom-smash" them.
That is, pasture them under a raised bridge that extends directly on top of solid floor and then drop it on them.

Two questions:

1)  If you designate your Captain of the Guard as a crossbow user, will he hammer with the crossbow or shoot it at offenders?
2)  Which is the worse material for bludgeoning (i.e. the best for a hammerer/captain)?  Bone or wood?

I have two suggestions to make animal husbandry easier:

1)  Allow the player to view an animal's description from the list (and easily transition back).  This would make it easier to cull herds for genetic selection without having to painstakingly search the entire pasture for the animals you want.  (e.g. To offer up the skinny, weak animals to the shop and leave the fat, muscular ones to breed.)

2)  Sorting.  Rather than order-of-birth/migration only, it would be nice to be able to be able to group by species, species & gender, pet status, etc.

Yes, but that will never arise naturally.  The player won't let their dwarf gain skills in so many skills, because that's not efficient (and he'll likely die before gaining them anyway); so if such a dwarf arrives by migration he seems like a RNG fluke, not real.

Yes, and neither of our proposals eliminate RNG flukes.  However, my proposal is intended to make RNG flukes more manageable by eliminating bad rolls from the skill table.  It's also intended to make "bad" rolls on the Strange Mood table less frustrating by having single skills cover more ground.

Your alternative proposal adds more bad results to the skill table by divying up existing skills into more fine-grained, lower utility individual combinations.  You get dwarves that are more broadly mediocre at a wider variety of tasks unless they repeatedly train doing the one thing you wanted them to be good at.  (And don't hold your breath that a Strange Mood is going to get lucky and boost that unless you've already trained that combination higher than all others.)

Sure, you can more easily cross a dwarf from one task to the other without having to start from dabbling, but a good fortress economy thrives on highly-focused specialists, not on jack-of-all trade generalists.

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Those are two of my latest migrants.  There's no synergy between their skills right now, without multiplying the places at which the RNG can screw you over, which is what your proposal suggests.

It's the other way around, you can always find some synergy in the skill matrix[...] [D]warves would typically do a row or column of jobs in the matrix, not a single x-y(-z) combination.

And they would do them poorly compared to someone who was already skills in all the aspects of the job they needed to do.  You don't want a Leather Mechanic -- you want a Stone (or Metal*) Mechanic.  You cares if he can both half-ass leather bags and mechanisms?  If your fortress is working properly, you're going to want him to specialize in one of those skillsets and let someone else cover the others.

(* Yeah, I forget you can forge metal mechanisms because I've never had a use for them.)

Basically, I see no more advantage in a Skilled Leather (Material), Skilled Mechanic (Product) under your system than I do in a DF2010 Adequate Leatherworker, Adequate Mechanic.  You're just half as skilled in two unrelated areas.  If broad mediocrity is your goal, then fine.  It's not mine, though.

(Making mechanisms ought to be crafting or smithing, while installing them ought to be mechanics proper, anyway.)

For the love of Armok, why?  You just actually proposed keeping the mechanics skill around and then making it less useful for no discernible reason.

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It makes some skills less useful than they already are.  (e.g. Glassmaking, Leatherworking.)

On the contrary: if you have two glassmakers in a unique skill system they are useless for anything else...

That's fine.  If I have a Legendary Glassmaker that I leveled up from Novice through churning out raw green glass for my Jewelers to practice with, then I want him to be just as good at making large, serrated disks as coffins, tubes, or vials.  I don't want to spend several evenings getting this dwarf to churn out each of those products to get high quality ones.

I also don't want a jeweler who achieves mastery by leveling up on said glass gems to be only semi-competent with the rare, irreplaceable, dug-from-the-ground gems in my fortress.  I want him to be a legendary jeweler, not a legendary glass jeweler (and middling anything-else jeweler).  The system you propose would ensure that you have to consume rare, valuable materials to get good at them.  No practice using cheap "training" materials; no practice building "simple" goods to get ready to build expensive ones.

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It focuses mostly on breaking up skills which produce items with quality, complicating leveling them.

How so? You limit a dwarf to the jobs you want him to train. Then he goes off and trains them. That is true for both systems.

Well, for one thing, depending on your interface, it can become very hard to limit said dwarf if they're enabled to work on all jobs with a particular material and all jobs producing a single type of good.  If not, then I imagine that fiddling with new migrants' skill selections will be a common and irritating chore.

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You completely ignore the quagmire of useless skills for farmers, rangers, and fishers (e.g. the widely hated Fish Dissector.)  The material system does little to fix that, and proposing another incompatible, independent matrix of food skills on top of that would only produce more confusion.

I've taken the need for a simplifying revision and redefinition of skills for granted, really. We can use a general "food" category, make a basic distinction between meat, fish and plants, or (theoretically) have a different skill for each tissue type of each species (lamb chops are not the same as pork chops, I tell you! :p ). That is all a matter of making the right associations between jobs on one hand and skills and tools needed and trained on the other hand, and it should be possible to do that in the raws.

Good Lord.  You're actually proposing that a system in which a dwarf might only be good with handling a single type of creature out of hundreds is an improvement over the current quagmire of useless farm labor?

Okay, let's ignore that moment of (holy crap I hope) hyperbole and just go with fish, plant, meat.  Now you've got a grid full of even more pointless, empty selections.  Do leatherworkers and bone crafters have to treat fish & meat differently?  Is there a point to being a good Plant Milker?  Do we still separate Herbalist & Grower?  Where do bees come in?  Are there actually any skills outside of butchery/dissection/cleaning that have enough overlap to justify a grid?

Will I want to kill a Fish Armorer any less than my fifth Presser migrant?

In addition, there will be many future additions to the game and we don't want to have to debate again and again to determine each time which skills ought to be scrapped and which not. If for example a new material is added in a matrix system, that will automatically combine with all furniture, items you could make of it and we won't have to consider whether to add a <material>crafting category too or only a <material>weaving category too.

Yeah, that's great, except that you have to decide:
a)  Does this combination make ANY sense?  (Which, we've decided with many existing combinations is not true.)
b)  What workshop does it associate with?

It's hardly automatic, and you'd have to add tags in the entity, workshop, & reaction raws for each combination anyway.

My main feeling is that differences between skills should be eliminated when they don't represent a real "choice" on the player's part -- fish cleaning and fish dissecting, say, should obviously be merged, because you're just going to train them both any time you want either, reducing them to pointless fiddling and tracking on the player's part rather than a real choice.

I think that's a pretty good summary! 

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Proposal 7.  Merge Leatherworking into Clothesmaking?  (Retain separate shops.)

No.  As I said above, these skills do very different things, and represent a substantial difference in focus for your fort, both in terms of the materials you're building your economy around and in the goals your economy is focused on -- making players make a 'guns vs. butter' choice between them is, I think, a good thing.

Yeah, I put a question mark there because I was iffy on it -- more because of the differences in actual tools and techniques used.  However, you raise a pretty good point there against that proposal as well.  I might delete it eventually if there's enough opinion voiced against it.