Very interesting thoughts. From a practical standpoint, I think you may be overthinking the problem a bit, but DF doesn't have to be about practical standpoints :-)
I don't believe chained conditions will be more efficient than non-chained conditions. I am almost 100% sure the entire list will be iterated over each time. I don't have data one way or the other, but programmers have certain styles of doing things and that seems to be Toady's style. Having said that, I doubt that it will have any appreciable effect on FPS. Activation of management tasks happen at most once a day. There are 1200 ticks in a day, so any calculations there will impact FPS at least 2 orders of magnitude less than other things (like temperature calculations, water pressure calculations, etc). Also, it is not feasible to create complex enough orders to take any appreciable time. We're talking *max* 1-2000 calculations. So at 100 FPS, we're talking probably under 1% of the load. At 20-30 FPS, it will have even less impact.
As for keeping low stock levels, I do it all the time and get no cancellation spam (except for milking and shearing, but only a few each season). Usually my stock levels for each intermediate item (something that is used in construction of something else) is 5 and for final items (something that is used directly by the dwarfs) is 3. Of course it depends on the item.
I was going to write my usual long description of stockpiles and workshops, but sometimes people just like doing things the way they like doing things, so it might be a waste of bits. The main hints are: almost always make 1 item at a time. Since the job is checked every day, that means only making 1 a day. Trust me, this is fine for almost all automated tasks. Make a specific input stockpile for each workshop right next to the workshop (I literally surround the workshop with 16 stockpile tiles). Generally, don't use containers in these stockpiles. There are ways to do it, but it is very prone to error. Since you never need more than 5 tiles per item, there is almost nothing that requires a container. Make your stockpile big enough so that you can build the replacement and haul it before you run out of stock. Since you are only making one item a day, and it takes a fraction of a day to make something, this means you really only need to keep a stock of size one. A stock of size 5 allows your dwarfs 5 whole days to haul the goods.
You might be wondering, why 1 item a day is enough. There are 336 days in the year. Making 1 item every day means that you can make 336 items a year. For most things, that's *way* more than enough. For a few industries, you may need more. For cloth, for example, if you want new outfits for every dwarf every year, you might need to do 4 jobs a day. That would mean weaving/dying 4 jobs a day. But even with that, if you have pigtail, yarn, silk and rope reed, then you are only doing one of each per day. And there is no reason why you can't have 2 workshops.
You are correct that demand is linear on population size, but I'm struggling to think of a way to utilise that information. There are only a few things that you can't "pull" on demand: rock because you have to mine it manually, wood because you have to chop it down manually, to some extent plants because you have to build farm plots manually, leather because you have to butcher manually, wool and milk because you have to choose a job size that corresponds to your flock size.
It would be cool to be able to say, "I have 100 dwarfs, so I will auto mine 300 rocks, and auto chop 5 trees, and my flock size is bigger than I need, so I'll butcher x animals, and I need more plant capacity so I will build farm plots", but none of those things are possible.
Still, the idea of a water integrator that fills up a reservoir as people step on a pressure plate is a very cool idea :-)
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Topic: Functional Dwarven Integrators (Read 1177 times)