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Author Topic: Industrial Reduction  (Read 4053 times)

Cespinarve

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #15 on: June 16, 2010, 01:26:15 am »

Merge the "Wood Furnace", "Ashery", "Kiln" to the "Kiln".  From research on the subject and personal experience with making charcoal, lye, and potash...  There's very little reason to have three buildings for these closely related processes.  Most people now and historically, usually, did all their wood burning tasks close to the same firepit, furnace, or kiln.
A "building" in DF is not quite the same as a building in real life. A DF building is a station where an activity takes place. In this case, a wood burner is really just a place where we burn wood to charcoal or ash, with considerations for making the process safer for our dumb dwarves (who can't seem to grasp when they are on fire). An ashery is a place where we turn ash into lye or potash, together with all the paraphenalia we need to do that. The kiln is the only building of this set that is a proper building.

Remove "Pearlash" and replace with using "Potash".  Pearlash is just more refined Potash.  For the purposes of the game, Potash will work just fine, as Potash was used in glass for quite some time.
I beg to differ. Potash refers to any potassium salt, and can refer to potassium oxide (a fertilizer), potassium hydroxide (caustic potash or lye), potassium chlorate (various uses, including in agriculture), potassium chloride (another fertilizer), potassium nitrate (saltpeter, oxidizing agent, food preservative and yet another fertilizer), and potassium permanganate (various chemical uses) as well as potassium carbonate (pearlash proper). Of these, potassium oxide, potassium chloride, and potassium nitrate are good fertilizers, as potassium is a large percentage of the chemicals by weight. Potassium carbonate (pearlash), however, is much less due to the fact that the carbonate ion is heavier than the other cations (except the nitrate ion) and the fact that it doesn't dissolve readily in water, so it is not nearly as effective at potassium fertilization as the other three.

On the other hand, none of the potashes forms of a major component in glass making except pearlash. You need to be able to refine potash to turn it into an appropriate material for glassmaking. Fertilizer quality potash is not the same as glass quality potash, having quite different chemistry.

Merge "Tanner's Shop" and "Leather Works" to "Leather Works".  I could see a little benefit in having a separate building for tanning, but you could just build a dedicated Leather Works off to the side with a work list kept empty to handle automated tanning jobs.
No. As pointed out, tannery is a potential source of unhappy thoughts for dwarves. It's messy and never performed anywhere near where you do leatherworking. By your own standards, they don't belong in the same building. They belong on opposite sides of the fort.

Merge "Kitchen" and "Soap Maker's Workshop" to "Kitchen".  Much like the Tanner's Shop, it can be nice to have some distinct separation of buildings for tasks... but soap making isn't too complicated of a process that a Kitchen couldn't handle.
No. Soapmaking involves nasty chemicals (lye), and you don't want it anywhere near where you prepare food. By your own standards, they don't belong in the same building.

"Lye" should be a more of "Kitchen" task.  Lye is made by drenching Potash and collecting what seeps out from the pile.  Also... as of right now, Lye could be removed as it's only is used to make soap.  Since Lye is made from Potash in a process that could easily done in the process of soap making, Potash could replace the Lye requirements for soap.  If Lye starts to be needed elsewhere, it can be added to the Kitchen.
Not only no, but HELL NO! Even dwarves are not stupid enough to prepare a toxic, caustic chemical in the same place they prepare stuff they actually eat.

Merge "Bowyer's Workshop" with "Craftdwarf's Workshop".  Woodcrafters in the Craftdwarf's workshop could take care of everything the Bowyer's do, easily.
As others have pointed out, a bowyer is not the same as a woodcrafter. The tools to make a bow or a crossbow are different from the tools of a woodcrafter, and the skill is different, too. Furthermore, although dwarves only use crossbows, DF is not a dwarf-only game: each civ in the game is potentially playable with the addition of a single tag, and other civs can find more use out of the bowyer, such as making blowpipes, self bows, and compound bows.

Merge "Dyer's Shop" and "Loom" to "Textile Workshop".  The Loom and Dyer's Shop are closely related and could be merged without changing the game much.  As with the Tanner's shop merge, you can set aside a Textile Workshop to handle automated tasks that the Loom does.  This also reduces the amount of stuff needing to be hauled around between different shops.
No. Dyeing, like soapmaking, is a messy process. You don't want to dye anywhere near your loom, where aerosolized dyes can migrate to the work currently on the loom and stain it.

I love Dwarf Fortress, but it has some SERIOUS numeric, fodder, item, skill and process glut.
Most of the glut is taken up by pathfinding. Your improvements will not be significant. Further, you are eliminating only a few of the many tasks/items that the game offers.

Complicated is good, but you have to be complicated with decent enough reasons or it just gets annoying.  From the experiences of designing my own pen and paper RPG with tweaking mechanics, defining skill lists, and reducing the system to key components and getting rid of extraneous parts...  You need to know when to prune.  It seems like DF was pretty front heavy early on and it might be time to cut back a few things to allow the rest of the game room to grow correctly.  And anyway, anything removed can ALWAYS be added later when it is needed again.
The Dwarf Fortress part of DF is not an RPG — it's a realtime strategy game. RPGs and RTSes are quite different beasts, with different dynamics and draws. In RTSes, resource and task management is part of the fun, and the Fun.

We know that several of your suggestions for pruning, such as animal dissection (which is not nearly the same skill as butchery), are slated for improvements by Toady that will hopefully pay for their inclusion with enriched gameplay. Until their full form and utility emerges, we cannot evaluate whether or not they need to be axed, and until then, they are completely ignorable.

What DF needs is not reduction, but streamlining. The manager has a more substantial task to do than merely okaying a bunch of busywork. A proper manager will be able to manage entire production chains, making sure things get done in the right order, and that sufficient resources are availible and reserved for the tasks.

I quite agree with your points, although, as catsplosion points out you do use lie for bagels, and things like soft German pretzles- but there's a difference between the amount of lye you'd make pretzels with and the amount of lye you'd need for 'heavy' industrial purposes.
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Nice one, not sure when I'll be feeling like killing a baby but these things are good to know.
This is why we can't have nice things... someone will just wind up filling it with corpses.
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Rowanas

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #16 on: June 16, 2010, 03:51:43 am »

...but there's a difference between the amount of lye you'd make pretzels with and the amount of lye you'd need for 'heavy' industrial purposes.

That depends somewhat
on the size of your pretzels
and demand for them
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I agree with Urist. Steampunk is like Darth Vader winning Holland's Next Top Model. It would be awesome but not something I'd like in this game.
Unfortunately dying involves the amputation of the entire body from the dwarf.

G-Flex

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #17 on: June 16, 2010, 04:41:47 am »

The comparison to P&P games is important, but invalid. I say "important" because it brings up a key point: Computers have advantages that a tabletop game never does.

You can make things arbitrarily complicated in a computer game as long as it's processed fairly and presented in a reasonable fashion to the user. There are tons of suggestions (as I hinted earlier) about consolidating skills, setting up synergies, turning them into a sort of hierarchy, and other ways to interrelate them such that having a very large number of skills doesn't cause severe gameplay issues. Right now, the game doesn't do much of anything like that, so things look a bit clunky.
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Wyrm

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #18 on: June 16, 2010, 02:16:55 pm »

If and when toggleable labor groups for individual dwarves and teams of dwarves get implemented, the plethora of skills/labors will not seem nearly as horrifying.
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Cespinarve

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #19 on: June 16, 2010, 02:52:53 pm »

...but there's a difference between the amount of lye you'd make pretzels with and the amount of lye you'd need for 'heavy' industrial purposes.

That depends somewhat
on the size of your pretzels
and demand for them

Touché. I suppose it all depends on scale. Are dwarven pretzels scaled to their own size, or are they hopelessly large? I suppose this would be controlled by civilization types. Are they more rational, logical dwarves, or the oversized hopelessly complicated megaproject dwarves?

This is a legendary pretzel. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. It menaces with spikes of kosher salt and has been masterfully banded with lye.
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Nice one, not sure when I'll be feeling like killing a baby but these things are good to know.
This is why we can't have nice things... someone will just wind up filling it with corpses.
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

alamoes

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #20 on: June 16, 2010, 04:32:48 pm »


Remove Small Animal Dissection.  There probably was an intended purpose for this, but between Trapping, Hunting, and Butchering...  I can't see a strong case for it.  Anything in its domain is covered by other skills.

Merge Wood Burning and Potash Making to Kiln Operator.  This is in conjunction with the industrial process reduction.  There's just not enough reason looking at the processes involved (in game and real world) to have two limited domain skills of this nature.

Remove Lye Making.  Lye Making is no more difficult than Cooking or Soap Making.  It could be taken care of by a few other skills depending on the context of lye use.  (Also, my Lye-Makers usually end up becoming fodder for the militia draft.)

Remove Fish Dissection.  The process of cleaning a fish... is damn near dissecting it.  Also, Butchering could take care any processes that require Fish Dissection or these process could be alluded in Fishing or Fish Cleaning.  (Speaking of Lye-Makers... these guys are also part of the minute militia draftees.)

We could put these into sub-categories of bigger skills like bow making into wood working. 
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malroth

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #21 on: August 30, 2010, 12:39:48 am »




This is a legendary pretzel. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. It menaces with spikes of kosher salt and has been masterfully banded with lye.

sigging this
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mLegion

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Re: Industrial Reduction
« Reply #22 on: August 30, 2010, 12:51:06 pm »

It would be nice if workshops where totally redone to function more like a nobles room, so a workshop would be a designated area and would require you to build tables/chairs and place/buckets/barrels/anvils etc.. in the area for it to be able to be used. place 2 anvil's in the blacksmith's area and 2 dwarves can can forge at once but will slow each other down as they wait for the single barrel of water to become available to quench things etc...
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