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[Zwergner]

Hey everyone, been lurking a while and just made an account.  I came up with this idea of a challenge (well, two challenges) and was wondering if anyone had tried either.

The idea is based off the concept taught in basic economics class, specialized labor, people doing what they're best at, leads to high efficiency.

The original idea was to make it so each dwarf can only do one thing.  Dwarfs that can ONLY mine, dwarfs that can ONLY farm, dwarfs that can ONLY cook, etc.  How nitpicky you want to be is subjective (i.e. should a stone mason also be a stone crafter?), but the hope is that you get dwarfs that are extremely good at one thing.  The challenges are that if you aren't really on top of getting work orders out, you may have a lot of wasted "dwarf cycles" in which work could have been done.  Also, if you were to have only one brewer and they were killed for whatever reason, you're going to have trouble making more booze until you get another wave of immigrants to train.

I don't really want to do that challenge, sounds like a lot of work ;p

The other idea was just the complete opposite of the same idea.  Every dwarf can do everything!  No one is specialized.  The obvious problem is that you're going to get a lot of shoddy work; and probably some other problems I haven't foreseen yet.  But the benefit is that anything you need done should get done pretty fast.  But also, dwarfs might stop something important (like brewing, once again) to go help some guys mine out some stuff.  The only exception I would make would probably be military dwarfs just to prevent unhappy thoughts.

That's a challenge I could get into!  So if you've ever tried either one of these ideas, I'd love to hear how it went.

[shadow_archmagi]

I always specialize my dwarves as soon as I can. Early on of course, your farmers must also brew and such.

But as soon as I can I get everyone doing their job round the clock and leave peasants for hauling.

[Quiller]

I've been wanting to try the second one myself.  Some challenges of it that I see: 1) farming is not going to produce much in the way of seeds, 2) most items are going to wind up pretty low quality, 3) trade is going to be tough with only low-quality goods and no specialized trader, 4) despite this trade could wind up being vital for decent weapons, 5) noble mandates won't be any harder than normal to meet (probably easier when anyone can work on them), but noble demands will be harder when decent items or engravings are so rare.  Probably, they will just have to have bigger rooms than normal or just be unhappy (or just be killed off in the egalitarian society).

There are actually two ways of going with the soldiers.  One is to have soldiers be an elite class that never has to do any work.  Two would be to have everyone train as a soldier and divide everyone into squads that are normally activated in rotation but might all be activated in times of emergency.

[Skizelo]

Most of my dwarves can ONLY haul. Well, only get to haul really.

[Glacies]

1) Most people do this. It tends to occur naturally, too.
2) Been suggested several times.

[KoE]

The first one is mostly a challenge during the first year. You'd have to give a little more thought to starting builds, in particular since you can only take one skill. The exception, I suppose, would be your Trader/leader/whatever, who could probably fudged in as 'administrator', keeping the books, trading, and otherwise hauling stuff.

It would also prohibit your customary Legendary Miner/Legendary Pump Operator/Legendary Istabthingsinthefacedwarf. I assume military dwarves would get the job of being military and be allowed to use the four relevant skills (Wrestler/Armor User/Shield User/(weapon of choice), but they'd still suffer from a lack of attributes gained from non-military skills. And depending just how strict you make the rules, all those immigrant Cheesemakers could just be useless extra weight. Presumably strange moods wouldn't really affect anything since they take the highest leveled skill anyway.

The challenge does resemble how most people play, but taking the concept to the extreme could produce some challenge or at least restrict some normal playstyles.

The second challenge seems to be quite popular, as has been mentioned.