Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smeeprocket]

 including transgender dwarves would be pretty awesome, I have to admit.

[Badger Storm]

I'd like to see same-sex couples adopt orphaned children.  I don't think Urist McDeadParents is going to mind having two daddies as long as he is taken care of. 

[Tacomagic]

I'd like to see same-sex couples adopt orphaned children.  I don't think Urist McDeadParents is going to mind having two daddies as long as he is taken care of.

I'd love to see that too.  However I think that would require adoption in fortress mode to be a thing first.  Regardless, it's something that really is missing and would be awesome to see added.

[taptap]

Mebzuth's Science of Happy*

While Ozornil has seen three couples out of the original seven, these six dwarves all alive 15 years later, the date of the experiment, socially it was a dead place. No children, little love and even an astonishing lack of smalltalk. Expedition leader Mebzuth Bakustled has now developed the „Science of Happy“ to reconquer the future of dwarvendom. In his successful work as relationship counsellor Mebzuth managed to greatly reduce stress levels in Ozornil. During these demanding times involving a lot of yelling and crying Mebzuth developed the core tenets of what is now known as the Science of Happy (MSH).

MSH will develop dwarves to their full potential in four stages.
1) Be happy.
2) Talk a lot.
3) Make friends.
4) Live family life as in days of old.

While successfully implementing the first stage by removal of stressors, adding a waterfall to the barracks and general appreciation for the work they had done in the last 15 years, Mebzuth had trouble to bring the inhabitants to talk. [Original dwarves had average monthly conversationalist xp gain of less than 3 xp w/ most of them around 450, later dwarves had equally low gains but arrived with some skill.] So he devised the first happy experiment.

Log of the first happy experiment (focus is conversationalist xp, measured with DwarfTherapist in 40.14):

Participants: 24 dwarves, in other words everyone in Ozornil, results reported only for the six remaining founders unless stated otherwise (better to track via DT when <1000 xp)

23 Galena 44 to 1 Sandstone 44:
Activity: Preparation of the experiment, preparing new clothing for everyone, slaughter of most animals, caravan arrival, quite a busy time, comparable to pre-experiment times.
Results: Skill gain 2.5. (Suitably close to long term average of 2.64 per month.)

1 Sandstone 44 to 2 Timber 44:
Activity: More preparation, livestock reduced to a few dralthas, cave swallows and cave crawlers in manageable number, last harvest, closing swimming school and militia training.
Results: Skill gain 3.

2 Timber 44 to 1 Moonstone 44
Activity: Most activities phase out. Some brewing, vermin catching still going on. Deconstructing the trade depot. Walling off from outside – only path in the fortress is through the automatic building destroyer traps. Locking alternative meeting areas.
Results: Skill gain 15.

1 Moonstone 44 to 1 Opal 44
Activity: Normal activities phased out. Making and placement of statues to limit free squares in dining hall (only 10 tables and chairs + entrances free). Much more proximity between dwarves after placement.
Results: Skill gain 9.7. As the six monitored dwarves include the mason and the potter (stoneware statues) this may be biased. A control group shows increased skill gain this month.

1 Opal 44 to 1 Obsidian 44
Activity: Party.
Results: Skill gain 14.7. Significance unclear giving results from timber.

1 Obsidian 44 to 1 Granite 45
Activity: Scientific results have shown dwarves are shy, they build more contact by rubbing shoulders and backs not by looking at each other. Rearrangement of tables and chairs according to these principles.
Results: Skill gain 11.3. Dwarves spread more over the dining hall, but even before a lot of sitting or dancing on tables was going on since the placement of statues. The rearrangement and temporary lack of chairs and tables may have kept dwarves from partying for a while.

1 Granite 45 to 1 Slate 45
Activity: Party.
Results: Skill gain 15.3. Highest skill gain so far.

1 Slate 45 to 1 Felsite 45
Activity: Party. Some messing around with assigning overlapping rooms to allow multiple parties.
Results: Skill gain 24.5. Highest so far.

1 Felsite 45 to 1 Hematite 45
Activity: When rubbing shoulders helps, why not move a little closer. Preparing the happy bunker (2 weeks heavy activity) incl. 6 chair/6 table dining hall in shoulder/back socialising theory, 5 bed dormitory, stockpile. Two weeks bunker happiness with locked lead doors.
Results: Skill gain 21.5. Almost as high as the best month so far.

1 Hematite 45 to 1 Malachite 45
Activity: Happiness in the bunker.
Results: Skill gain 38.2. As earlier many new friendships, 2 new romantic relations.

1 Malachite 45 to end of Malachite 45 (end of experiment)
Activity: Opening the happy bunker. Re-embracing the world. Bunker dining hall remains as fortress dining hall. A few necessary works (vermin catching, trade depot building).
Results: Skill gain 18.3.

Results: Monitored dwarves gained on average 174 skill points during the experiment, the total average was 170 skill points. Empathy gains were really low 1-4 points, 2 points in most dwarves. This is still abysmally slow (training from novice to proficient would require 100 month happy bunker assuming an optimistic skill gain of 40 per month) compared to times before the spread of elvish social theories unsuited for dwarves who only ever love once and are not immortal. (I suspect goblins got infiltrated by elves as well, why else would they never come to challenge use here close to their main fortress?) Still, there is a glimmer of hope.

Comment: I originally was interested because I intended to cross-train empathy (via social skills), I became worried about the extinction of dwarves only later. Conversationalist is a good enough stand-in for social activity / social skills in general and unlike relationships it can be quantified. I am far from sure the table-chair rearrangement helped that much. Small enough dining halls will have dwarves on tables all the time. Not clear whether the main benefit in the bunker was the even smaller meeting area or the restriction on bedrooms. I am also aware that the results are hardly novelties, but I had to test it myself.

Future plans: I am building honeymoon suites now. (Preemptively, because I am going to lock romantically involved couples into them to see what happens.) Other ideas: Test of normal bedrooms (individual 2x3 in my case) versus dormitory. Furniture deprivation to combat the excessive pleasure and interest in furniture at the detriment of fellow dwarves.

* Hope this is a sufficiently creepy name, while not actually the name of a cult existing irl.

P.S. I believe arranged marriages not catering to modern identity politics would be more suitable to a quasi-medieval fantasy setting.

[smeeprocket]

the only downside of same sex parents is that is one more future bad thought when goblins pulp them. If they were just orphaned once, but more than once would suck. I don't like my dwarves having relationships. They get unhappy so easily lately.

On the upside, maybe the couples would adopt any number of the wandering babies I get when I send mothers into battle.

[Zorromorph]

Thanks very much for your contributions taptap.  I had read rumors here and there that marriages were basically impossible in recent versions(scary since I'm doing a generational fort). 

[taptap]

Leave that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2pwmjw/help_my_dwarves_wont_make_babies/

[Urist Tilaturist]

This may be a daft question, but why do you want lots of babies? Migrants, though many are unfairly cruel to them, largely arrive ready to work. The only time I can imagine taking a Ceausescu-style approach to dwarf breeding is if all other dwarves are dead and there are no migrants.

Personally I keep child cap at 1/10th of population and mostly rely to migrants to raise my fort population. Babies are supported, but not encouraged.

Why would you send mothers into battle, unless everyone is needed to fight? I only ever had 1 stray baby after a web collecting mother was killed by a giant cave spider, and it should really have been available for adoption.

[taptap]

This may be a daft question, but why do you want lots of babies? Migrants, though many are unfairly cruel to them, largely arrive ready to work. The only time I can imagine taking a Ceausescu-style approach to dwarf breeding is if all other dwarves are dead and there are no migrants.

Marriages don't happen by itself anymore and very few people report successful marriages in the fortress (as opposed to migrating couples) and even that only after drastic measures. People who take an interest in this often play generational forts or with pop cap or extinct dwarf civ, the rest only drops by to say how children are useless because they don't grow up before they pull the self-destruction lever or fps grinds the fort to a standstill.

[Loud Whispers]

This may be a daft question, but why do you want lots of babies? Migrants, though many are unfairly cruel to them, largely arrive ready to work. The only time I can imagine taking a Ceausescu-style approach to dwarf breeding is if all other dwarves are dead and there are no migrants.

You just answered the question. A Fort under continuous siege, a Fort so renown for its death that migrants bypass it, a Fort that has exhausted its supplies of migrants or whose civilization is dead and a Fort that is in to survive for the longterm must secure a future for Dwarf children to grow up into healthy kidney wrecking Dorf adults. Of particular relevance is the Fort which has lost a large proportion of its adult population in some terrible calamity that it must maximize the number of viable offspring it gets from what available couples it can form.

[Urist Tilaturist]

If a fort gets migrants, those will usually have married couples which produce babies.

Would fps grind a fort to a standstill if population was capped and animal numbers were kept at sensible levels?

[Loud Whispers]

If a fort gets migrants, those will usually have married couples which produce babies.

Yeah, if it gets migrants. As said before, there are many situations where a Fort will not get migrants or it will have had a large number of its couples widowed or its adult population decimated.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Somewhat neat, a graph charting one of my all-military Fort's population. After a first few years of migrants causing the initial population spike (and the initial baby boom caused by immigrating married couples) it's been reliant on native-born children to replace all the Dwarves lost through attrition ever since. The rate of children born has also decreased with the widowing of many of those migrant couples who contributed to the original baby boom. As for the worth of children themselves, probably the best thing about children is that they're blank slates, the only labour-related skills they can gain are mood skills or farming skills. Providing they don't mood as children they're a reliable source of peasants who you can give novice armour/weaponsmithing and so vastly increase your chances of getting artifact armours and weapons.
Also a Dwarven child born in your Fort will almost certainly never live to die of old age, which is always a bonus. It's annoying to see your all legendary meltalsmiths or elite soldiers die of old age after you've invested so much in them. Thematically there is also something much more fun and challenging in trying to make a Fort sustainable for generation after generation instead of relying on migrants, most Forts aren't built to survive decades - a Fort that relies on children by necessity has to. There's always a special moment in my eyes when an old veteran dies and his armour and weapon passes down to the next generation, his profession and name carried on by his children, his efforts ensured by these adolescent Dwarves who didn't just adopt the Fortress - they were born in it.

Would fps grind a fort to a standstill if population was capped and animal numbers were kept at sensible levels?

If you kept item production to a minimum, probably no.

[pisskop]

I thought marriage in the fort didn't happen?  I just had a baby from my S7.  They got married when I wasn't looking.  Im actually stoked, considering I need hands

[Urist Tilaturist]

Item numbers can usually be kept down by trading and atom smashing. However, old clothes tend to pile up and I can rarely find them to dump or trade them. How do you usually deal with this?

If the fort gets even a few married couples of dwarves in a migrant wave, they will produce enough offspring to ensure the survival of the next generation. I always design sustainable forts, but a fort can easily become sustainable after receiving good breeders in a migrant wave.

The only time I can imagine trying to get marriages being worthwhile is if the fort has received no married migrants.

[Loud Whispers]

Item numbers can usually be kept down by trading and atom smashing. However, old clothes tend to pile up and I can rarely find them to dump or trade them. How do you usually deal with this?

In the depot search for items that start with 'x' and 'xX.' You'll end up with a list of all tattered clothing, mangled furniture and ibex leather clothing.

If the fort gets even a few married couples of dwarves in a migrant wave, they will produce enough offspring to ensure the survival of the next generation.
I always design sustainable forts, but a fort can easily become sustainable after receiving good breeders in a migrant wave.
The only time I can imagine trying to get marriages being worthwhile is if the fort has received no married migrants.

You need to keep at least around 20 couples alive to sustain a Fort's generation in the high-100s, especially taking into account Dwarf mortality rates and Dwarf child mortality rates (naturally, many will not make it past the 12 year mark). You also have to take into account Dwarf couples separated by death and insanity, of which a Dwarf Fortress will never be in short supply. There also comes the issue of making a 3rd generation when the time comes and the 1st gen is all dead and migrants are nonexistent. This is especially prudent after great calamity has wiped out much of the Fort's population. Flooding the Fort and finding an angry metal FB comes to mind.
And those artifacts! Priceless!

One thing I am looking at is if native teenage Dwarven soldiers are more valuable as new recruits than migrant recruits. Dwarf teenagers will have lived through 12 years of tragedy (if not they'd already be dead) whereas a migrant recruit will be experiencing what the Dwarf teenager had been experiencing since it was 2 years old. One would be well enameled to the effects of horror and tragedy, another entirely new to it.