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Author Topic: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements  (Read 11243 times)

Cassicotca

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #90 on: February 10, 2011, 10:34:29 am »

Dwarven hive mind, one of them knows all of them now
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therahedwig

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #91 on: February 10, 2011, 01:03:06 pm »

Alright, let's get the difficulty thing out of the way.

The basic skills needed for a dwarf fort would be:
Mining, Masonry, Carpentry, Farming and Brewing. Yes?

-Mining: Mining requires a basic sense of Geology and architecture, so it can be a basic skill in that regard. What if mining is the base skill of dwarves as a race, all dwarves know something about mining(and arguably are all novice miners) due to geology knowledge being an important part of the dwarves common knowledge-set?

-Masonry: Masonry at it's most simple needs knowledge of materials. However, the lack of knowledge of materials would result in destruction of the material, and is thus prefered to be abstracted away. Let's assume that a random idiot would be able to make simple things like tables and chairs, but perhaps not how to make a floor grate.

-Carpentry: Would need knowledge of materials, again that is abstracted. I can see a random idiot being able to make a bed, but not so much a barrel with would need to be water-proof. Unfortunatly, barrels are quite important in DF.

-Farming: Anyone can throw some seeds onto the floor and hope they'll grow. In a more detailed farming system the thing that seperates the boys from the men would be knowing what conditions are needed to make a plant grow and being able to inform the player of these instructions. In the meantime however your first year would be able to sustain of a plumphelmet farm that doesn't do so well in the second year for 'mysterious' reasons.

-Brewing: As the chemics knowledge required is quite refined and it's a part of dwarven culture, I would suggest that this should be and inherit skill of the dwarves.

For more specialisized skills.

-Butchering, shouldn't be to hard to do though dwarves who are a bit meek should probly be hestiant and have the animal in question escape a lot. The skill lies mostly in identifying the parts and preserving the meat. So... bad quality meat will go off quicker and a bad butcher won't be able to get as much meat from a cow as a good butcher would.

-Cooking. How many people can't bake an egg here? Cooking is probly taught by parents to their children. Some exotic product might need a difficulty modifier for either being unknown to the specific civilisation or for being hard to handle(baking an egg is easy, baking a salmon just right isn't)

-Tanning: This skill requires knowledge, an perhaps products of a bad tanner would go off more quicker or the tanning proffesion can't be assigned at all unless the dwarf in question has some skill in it.

-Weaving, learning how to weave is simple. The result's not very pretty, but it's simple. However, making a loom should be quite difficult.

-Dying: is at heart a simple skill, and simple to make a workshop for. Result wouldn't be too pretty, but hey.

-Clothesmaking, this ones a bit weird. While clothes making would require basic knowledge of measurements, you could argue it was very common in medieval times and most people(women) knew their way around a piece of cloth. You could again say it might be an inherit skill for adults but on the other hand you could throw in some flavour and say it's a speciality of the humans or something. (Most forts can do without clothing industry for a while anyway)

-Leatherworking, I'm going to say that leatherworking has the same issues as clothesmaking, but then combined with some of the specialised products of leatherworking(Waterskins, though leather).

-Crafting and gemcutting: I'm going to say this would most require knowledge of material(but knowledge of material is abstracted). Perhaps gemcutting would need some mathematical knowledge, and some of the crafting skills would need knowledge, but otherwise it can go under the old system. Though, I'm not to certain about the yeweler's workshop.

-Bowyering: Sure it's easy to put a string on a stick, but better bows actually require combining layers of wood that vary in flexibillity. Perhaps bad bows break quickly?

-Siege engineering: To be honest, I really wouldn't know how to make any kind of siege-engine without an example.

-Taming/Training, would require a specific trainer to know enough about the animal so they can train it succesfully. But I guess that's what the pet-exotic tag's for.

-Glassmaking: Would require knowledge about glass and ovens.

-Mechanisms: Would require mathemathics.

-Soap making: Would require knowledge about making soap. I dunno about the medieval production, but I think the production can be quite dangerous?

-Blacksmithing: requires material knowledge, is abstracted. Probly the same as masonry and carpentry. Can make basic stuff easily.

-Weapon-smithing and Armour makng: Again, material knowledge, whichis abstracted. I think bad quality equipment shouldn't last long.

-Strandextracting: I dunno anything about extracting adamantine from it's ore, so I can't say anything. You guys?

-Woodburning, potashmaking, lye making and pearlashing would probly require the exact instructions how to do it. I don't know much about this either TBH.

-Milling shouln't be too hard, because the machine does most of the work. However, how many of you know how to maintain a mill?

------------------------------
New jobs:

Pottery: Shouldn't be hard, but glazing might be a bit more difficult. So no water-tight pottery.

Beekeeping: Needs knowledge about how to catch a swarm, how to properly get to a 'tame' swarm and how to force a swarm to split up.

Feel free to correct me. I think that it would be better for the gameplay if certain skills are inherit to a race if it's vital for their survival(brewing). Perhaps also skills that are tied to a culture rather then a race(So one dwarven civ that's good at leatherworking and another dwarven civ that's good at siege engineering. It could make for a nice bit of difference between playing different civs)
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Demicus

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #92 on: February 10, 2011, 07:43:11 pm »

Pretty good post therahedwig. Going to go over a few points. Any that I skip either I agree with and/or I can't think of anything to add
[...]
-Dying: is at heart a simple skill, and simple to make a workshop for. Result wouldn't be too pretty, but hey.
Stopping here for a bit of off-topic. When I first saw that my mind jumped to the other dying, and my thought was, "Dwarves don't need a skill for that." Then I looked again and felt silly.
Quote
[...]
-Siege engineering: To be honest, I really wouldn't know how to make any kind of siege-engine without an example.
In general, effective siege engineering requires knowledge of materials, general knowledge of ballistic physics, and knowledge of mechanics.
Quote
[...]
-Soap making: Would require knowledge about making soap. I dunno about the medieval production, but I think the production can be quite dangerous?
Nah, traditional soap making isn't that dangerous from what I can find, unless you're being an idiot and being reckless with the lye. Lye can be dangerous, as it will turn any lipids into soap, even the lipids that make up your skin.
Edit: Okay, I just looked at the article I looked at before again, and medieval soapmaking could be dangerous, as it involves boiling the fat and the lye together till it was soap. And one of the common ways of checking if it was done was to taste it. If the substances was done with the saponification process (the process of becoming soap), the bright- distinctive taste of lye vanishes when the mixture if fully saponified. This is bad because Lye is caustic, like I said before.
Also, I want traps that allow me to pour bubbling lye onto my enemies. Goblin Soap, great for washing walls, right?
Quote
-Blacksmithing: requires material knowledge, is abstracted. Probly the same as masonry and carpentry. Can make basic stuff easily.

-Weapon-smithing and Armour makng: Again, material knowledge, whichis abstracted. I think bad quality equipment shouldn't last long.
Agreed, though there needs to be synergy added between blacksmithing, weapon-smithing, and the other metal skills, since working in one increases knowledge and skill at working the metals that are also used in the others. (in an ultra-relistic system, these skills would be broken down, rearranged, and welded into skills by metal type instead of skills by task type)
Quote
-Strandextracting: I dunno anything about extracting adamantine from it's ore, so I can't say anything. You guys?
In my best guess, this skill is the ability to pull strands of admantine out of a tangled clump of strands, which is what I see a boulder of raw admantine to be, without one's hand arm limb being reduced to a bloody stump.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2011, 07:59:59 pm by Demicus »
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Andeerz

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #93 on: February 16, 2011, 09:35:00 pm »


Quote
A crossbow is simply a bow on a stick, and a bow is simply a crossbow without a stick.

..As someone who has seen someone make crossbows for a living, and how they work mechanically, you are quite wrong on so many levels. Espically since bows are manually operated weapons that require pullback, while crossbolts are mechanically loaded and fired rather then done with a drawstring. Espically as both have a very different process to beign constructed.

There's no mechanical difference between drawing back a string with your hand and pulling back a string with a stick. The only difference in the composition of the bow is that crossbows are typically stouter because they can have a heavier draw. Modern crossbows can be mechanically complex. These are not the type of crossbows used for 80 centuries. The most complex crossbow in those times was the repeating crossbow used for hunting, and the winch-operated kind that found favor in the later middle ages.

Oooo... I just can't let this go!!! XD  Sorry!  But, yeah, after looking at crossbow mechanisms for a bit, it now does not surprise me why hand bows predated crossbows for so many millenia.  The mechanisms needed for a practical crossbow, though simple, required some decent metallurgical skills. 

http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/military-history/about-difference-between-chinese-western-archers-5137.html
Yeah, it's not a peer reviewed publication... I know... but down some ways down the page is a nice schematic of eastern and western crossbow designs.  Both required something stronger than wood to hold the string back (bronze or iron) and the western design required a springy steel (pretty hard to come by throughout a majority of the middle ages in Europe!!!) for the simple springs.  Getting metal, especially springy metal and metal resistant to deformation, is no simple task and requires a very involved economic infrastructure that takes many centuries to develop if we are talking about getting enough metal to make a widely used tool!  :D  Bronze and steely iron were well suited for crossbow design.  I would argue that copper, softer bronze alloys, weaker iron alloys, tin, lead, or any other metal available throughout the medieval and earlier eras besides the harder bronze and iron alloys used would not be sufficiently strong for making crossbows of decent pull and effective range.

I would need to get into some engineering related math that is beyond my expertise to really prove my point... so I can't say I'm right.  But I think it is likely that I am.
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Stove

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Re: Skill level should have more meaning/Skill requirements
« Reply #94 on: February 24, 2011, 02:41:14 am »

But, your (Stove's) ideas still apply nicely to tables and chairs.  Someone making a chair would still have to know that chairs exist and address a need.  They would also still need to know how to make a chair.  And the skill would be separate from this knowledge, regardless of what other crafts that skill would apply to.  The person would not be able to make a chair without knowing what one is.

In my original suggestion, I represented knowledge as 'milestone' skill levels for the sake of simplifying things, so that we wouldn't have to keep track of both skills and knowledge separately. However, the more I think about it, the more I see the merit of tracking knowledge separately from skills. Still, it would be excessive to track such knowledge as "what a chair is". Knowledge should directly relate to tasks, and be abstracted enough to avoid bogging down the player with too much information to keep track of. (Although there could be applications of knowledge not relating to tech/skills—including something pertaining to magic which I may mention in a future post.)

A piece of knowledge might even be something stored in raws, with the following information:
Prerequisite knowledge and skill (which could lead to a tech-tree of sorts)
A value which abstractly represents the amount of information that the piece of knowledge consists of and/or the amount of effort required to learn the knowledge
Values which represent the difficulty of creating this piece of knowledge, in relation to mental attributes. This would have an affect during world generation, for example, determining how easily a civilization or faction can innovate. It also would also allow for the possibility of an individual in fortress mode to innovate in the absence of a book or trainer.

Though this might cause the sort of problem where Urist McSmith, making lots of swords, brings her weaponsmithing skill up to legendary before learning the knowledge of crossbow construction, at which point she can already make really good crossbows due to the high weaponsmithing skill, which doesn't really make sense. This kind of problem can probably be solved by fiddling with what skills are needed for what. Perhaps constructing a metal crossbow requires the crossbow making knowledge, and the result is based upon some combination of the bowyer and weaponsmithing/metalsmithing skills.

You could also still have knowledge requirements for skill progression, which means the tanning example I used earlier could still work. It could also be used solve the above issue, but not in an ideal way.

So, a dwarf would require knowledge and a minimum of skill to perform certain jobs.

There should also be a screen (probably governed in some way by the manager noble) which can be used to enable labours and instruct dwarves to train. It should give you information such as which labours are understaffed and which dwarves are underworked. You would be able to sort through dwarves based on their abilities, as well.
When a dwarf is instructed to train, they will prefer to learn from a teacher. If a teacher is unavailable, they will seek out a book. If there is also no book, then, depending on the dwarf's attributes and the knowledge's relevant values, they may be able to figure it out on their own.
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