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[Magua]

Oh, I agree that the numbers will go above 20.  DC shows that just fine.

I disagree that their effectiveness (for skills, not stats) goes up beyond 20.  Certainly nowhere near 99.9% masterpiece. 

Personally, I think Kel's 38% was a statistical aberration upwards. 

But you know what?  Let's assume it's not.

Let's make some assumptions:
1) Skill above 20 does help
2) Kel's 38% masterpiece rate is statistically average for a 100 skill dwarf

To get to skill 100, you need (500 + 100 * 0) + (500 + 100 * 1) + (500 + 100 * 2) + (500 + 100 * 3) .... (500 + 100 * 99) xp.  That works out to... (500 * 100) + (100 * (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 ... + 99)).

That works out to 545,000 xp.  Let's say you started proficient (-3,500 xp), and, hell, let's say you get a fey mood (-15,000 xp).  So that's 526,500 xp to get to level 100.

At 10 xp per smoothing/engraving, that is only 52,650 to do.  Eminently possible, although if anyone had ever done this thing, I suspect it'd be on the forums somewhere.

But, sadly, that only gets us to level 100.  We want 99.9% engravings!

And now we have a function that returns data points like this:
Level 0: 0.0% of masterpiece
Level 5: 0.3% of masterpiece
Level 10: 4.4% of masterpiece
Level 15: 15% of masterpiece
Level 20: 26.7% of masterpiece
....
Level 100: 38% of masterpiece

Obviously, if this function were to be true, there's a sharply decreasing benefit (5 to 10 is almost a 1500% increase in masterpiece success, 10 to 15 is less than 400%, 15 to 20 is less than 200%, and 20 to 100 would be about 50%.

Extrapolating from this, even to get a 50% chance of masterpiece you would be talking level 250 or so (and even that would be doubtful), or some 3.26 million xp.  Morul is perhaps the world's most coddled xp-hound, and he has less than two million xp after 50 years of non-stop training in a fort built around him, IIRC.

In short, no, even if everything is assumed to be correct, the math does not work.  I continue to not believe you will ever have a dwarf in 40d that engraves at above a 50% masterpiece rate.  I personally believe that you will not have a dwarf who engraves a large sampling at above 30%, but I'm too lazy to do a truly large sampling when there's no evidence that I should do so.

[Neruz]

The difference with Morul is that he's having to start again each time he reaches Ledgendary.

Engravers Engrave faster with each levelup, so the higher level the Engraver, the faster he reaches his next levelup. I've had Engravers who engraved almost as fast as they walked down a hallway, which was pretty cool.

[Magua]

Speed of engraving has no effect on what % of masterpieces are engraved.

[Dante`]

Fact is. Room is too big. Wtf. No one needs that big of a room, Turn caveins on and walk away slowly.

[Albedo]

Finn, Kael- you're missing the point - does the game recognize the difference?

No one argues that experience accrues, and experience feeds into attributes, and attributes get larger past "superdwarvenly" (or whatever).  We all know that, that's basic.

But no one can demonstrate that a million experience in a skill is any "better" than 29,000, which gives L+5.

You might be able to stuff 1000 coins in a parking meter - but you still only get 90 minutes max.


(And, yeah, the room is way too big.  That too.) 

And there's something... inelegant about having a block of beds, 15x15, and saying "here's where my 225 dwarfs sleep".  Blech. 

[Dante`]

I could understand a need for that if say, you expected them all to die regularly and get rooms switched about, But it just seems unusefull, Even fcktarded african villages people have a house per family ^^

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I always do a single huge bedroom. I honestly don't care that it looks funky, I don't want to micromanage 200 little bedrooms, waste all that space and time digging and hauling and engraving, making ten times as many cabinets and coffers, only to have them each end up with a modest room.

Also I've noticed that my engravers refuse to smooth or engrave under an already-placed table or chair. Beds seem fine, and I noticed he engraved under a cage. So consider placing half your big dining room while the other side is engraved, then deconstructing and moving everything over so you can engrave the firts half. Be wary of placing statues that block walls you want engraved.

[smjjames]

Just re-designate the area for smoothing/engraving. Placing new furniture removes the designation if the designation is already there.

I've never had a problem with my engravers not wanting to smooth/engrave under furniture that was there before I did the designation. Even tables and chairs are not a problem as I have fully engraved dining rooms.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yup you described my problem, now that I think about it. I had a practicing engraver smoothing a swath through my dining room and bedroom but I was placing furniture as he went. And now that I think about it, that is how I did it for all my forts so far. Thanks!

[Neruz]

Speed of engraving has no effect on what % of masterpieces are engraved.

But it does have an effect on how fast you gain experience.

[Kanddak]

Just to add to the math a little, suppose you did an 8*8 embark, which is pretty big, in a region totally made of stone (so every tile in engravable).

48*48 tiles in a region tile * 8*8 embark = 147,456 tiles per z-level

Now let's say you have one of those giant freakish elevation changes that gives you a site with 100 z-levels, and you actually have it on only one tile in the corner of the map, so every z-level is full of walls. You are going to have to dig a stairwell to each of the bottom 15 levels to get to any of the walls there, so in combination with the insane elevation change, each level has 147,455 walls, so the whole map has 14,745,500 walls, plus 147,455 floors at the top level.
Let's say you engrave each tile twice, once as a wall before mining it out and reengraving it as a floor, cheating to avoid engraver tantrums due to art defacement. We'll neglect the horrible amount of time taken for the player to do the designations for that kind of insanity and say they have a script doing it automatically. That means the walls count as 29,491,000 engravable tiles altogether.
That gives a grand total of 29,491,000 + 147,455 = 29,638,455 engravable tiles on this site, or 296,384,550 possible experience points gained from engraving the whole map.
Since the total experience required to reach level x is 50x(x + 9), 296,384,550 experience points would put a dwarf all the way up to... something like level 2430.

So, would a level 2430 engraver have a 99.99% rate of masterpieces? Keep in mind that would be engraving 10000 tiles and getting 9999 masterpieces.
The formula for item quality based on level is... oh, damn! Look at that, 0x517A5D disassembled the game and figured out the exact formula, up to date as of 40d9, and put it up at http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Quality. He actually put the relevant part of code up, annotated, hidden in a comment.

I guess Kael was just making shit up. "Lost the save" indeed.

[Alexei403]

Fact is. Room is too big. Wtf. No one needs that big of a room, Turn caveins on and walk away slowly.

If caveins were enabled (are they, or has Toady still not put them back in yet?) that would very well be the plan, except that I would assign the freakishly giant room to all the nobles.

[Neruz]

Caveins are in, but they're not very realistic. In order for something to cave in it has to be completely disconnected from the world; you can support an entire mountain range on a single pillar of chalk if you want.

[Alexei403]

Ah, so that's how that works! Thanks, always wondered about that.

[kefkakrazy]

There is no "past" Legendary +5. 

Uhh yes there is.

Stats scale infinitely in DF,

Go read Headshoots. Near the end, they use Dwarf Companion to peek at the skills of the two megachampions, and one of them has an 83 in sword skill. A fifteen or sixteen is legendary. This bastard was something like Legendary+68.

Stat != skill.

Stats do continue to increase.  Skill does not. 

If you have an engraver who engraves masterpieces 99.99% of the time, please post save.