(please don't hurt me for this idea) okies, i played and LOVED a game called "cultures 2". its where you control a group of vikings and build up an economy and blehblehbleh.. anyway, they have a simple way of doing the assigning and i rather liked it, but i know this is your game so you will do it differently.. anyway.. what it did was each little character had a skill, or you could asign a base skill, like collecting clay, or stone, or wood, then they would learn to make things with said materials, so you would build a pottery for clay, and assign them there then assign another person to collect clay, and so on through all the different food and material collections.. each viking only doing one job at a time each. you could also set them as haulers, working non stop to haul materials and finished goods for the building you attach them to.. just useless ideas that worked well for that.. okies i'll go away now.
ADDON: so the point being, in addition to giving general jobs that they do on their own, maybe let us assign a dwarf to a workshop or to a pile or something else, thus making them work that job all the time rather then bouncing from one thing to another to another.
ADDON2: actually that would be quite nice, make say.. example, first dwarf i assign becomes the worker at a workshop, the second becomes a hauler, who works to keep them stocked of materials needed to build and emptied of waste and finished products, as well maybe have an inventory for workshops? thus you can load a mason up on stone, or carpenter up on wood, etc etc.. as i'm sure you have never met a workshop irl where they have to go to the store or warehouse for each little part they need.
ADDON3: and from reading the waterskin thread, why not set each item, or item type a size number, then set the dwarfs, based on strength or equipment (like bags or backpacks) a number of how much they can hold, so they could carry multi items at once as long as those items did not exceed their current carry weight.
[ December 02, 2006: Message edited by: nicholasneko ]