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[Crioca]

A Small Approach To Managing Migrants & More Realistic Trade

I know there's been threads galore on these subjects previously, but I've had a look around and I think my ideas are novel enough to be worth submitting. I'd be grateful if you'd take a couple of minutes to give them some thought.

I'm not the first person to make the point that the current immigration scheme can be somewhat frustrating, nor the first to point out that the fortress endgame is reached rather quickly, or to point out that trade is for the most part, still largely optional. So what I'm going to do in this post is discuss these three issues, briefly explain why I think they're important, why they're related and then suggest a combination of solutions which I think would work together to enhance gameplay.

Firstly: Fortress endgame.
Experienced players know that once a fortress gets stabilized, there's often very little to do, except for mega projects. One of the reasons for this is that the levelling mechanics , one of the most foundational pacing mechanisms in found in games, can be maxed out too quickly for some professions. Where by their second or third year, most fortresses already have a legendary weaponsmith and armorsmith churning out masterworks, even in mineral scarce embarks.
If the levelling times were to be drastically increased and even capped at well below legendary, it would implement greater scarcity for high level items. To add more features to the process, dwarves with particular affinities for materials or items would be able to exceed their skill cap. Strange Moods would open up additional levels rather than propel dwarves instantly to legendary, making a high level craftsdwarf a rare prize and a boon to a fortress, rather than being the baseline.

But we still need to be able to obtain high level craftsdwarves for our fortress, so this is where immigration comes in: players are able to attract skilled dwarves by creating rooms and advertising them to specific professions. The higher the value of the room, the greater likelyhood of attracting a high level craftsdwarf or warrior to come and occupy it. This allows a limited degree of control over migration and gives a tangible motivation to produce high value items like furniture. I'm not suggesting the elimination of random waves, just that they be altered to produce mostly skill poor dwarves by default.

The third issue is trade: I know Toady is working on the caravan arc, but I think this is worth noting.
I don't believe it makes sense for the mountainhome that sired you to produce goods that are largely inferior to yours. Surely they'd have a larger pool of more experienced craftsdwarves which would produce better quality goods. With the previous suggestions dramatically reducing the average quality of the goods you produce, dwarven caravans would  be changed to carry more high quality goods and place a greater value on raw materials: metal bars, gems, lumber, livestock, especially metal bars, all the things that a frontier settlement would usually offer to trade.

If a minimum standard of quality for goods from the mountainhome were set, any goods under this quality level would be considered less valuable than their raw materials. This would make stockpiling and trading large amounts of raw materials the preferred way to trade with the mountainhome and combined with the other changes, give you a real incentive to trade in order to obtain high quality items.
Similarly, other settlements like humans and elves would have a lower minimum standard; making your goods much more valuable to them, which you could then trade for raw materials that are unavailable to you, effectively putting you in the position of a trading post.

If you put these changes together, something interesting happens; trade becomes an almost essential part of building a healthy fortress, as it is the only way to procure goods of sufficient value to attract high level dwarves.


Anyway, I know there's small chance that Toady or Threetoe will agree with, or even read my suggestions, but I really wanted to put this out there, just so I could get it off my chest. Anyway, thanks for reading, looking forward to feedback from the community.

[Stormcloudy]

I don't think the Mountainhome's crafts are inferior to ours, it's just that we're all insane. Take any random craft, it'll usually be finely crafted, finely encrusted, and maybe finely studded. With ONE THING. We put every jewel, metal, stone, and turkey piece onto our crafts because it's efficient, not pleasing to the in-game eye (who don't seem to mind their gaudy craftsdwarfship one bit). Also, why wouldn't they keep the best stuff for themselves?

Other than that, I think it's a good idea except for the capping of levels. I think that all dwarves should have a stat to go with their leveling called Potential, which essentially modifies the rate at which they gain skill. Thus, a dwarf with 3/100 Potential in Armoring came along, he likely would not make it very far in the business. However, with this stat hidden, it would make more valuable crafts scarce and... valuable.

The value of a masterwork is highly underrated in treatment. In price it seems about right, but players treat non-military masterworks as worthless, when they should be highly prized, even slightly magical items, beyond the scope of what the average can achieve. Also, it should take more time - there was a suggestion a while back about having two types of production in workshops, mass produce and craft quality, which would work well here, too - and maybe even having a decoration of the same material, like with Artifacts?

If you're not careful about these rooms for skilled dwarves, won't nobles get very, very upset? Or are they more like guild halls, or even factory districts? It would make much more sense to have no legendary cheese maker when my fortress has no milkable animals. It is also strange that I cannot raw materials to the Mountainhome with any use, since they have infinite supplies of it somewhere ("create" reaction in the smelter?).

I think I lost my point in there, but I liked this. Yes.

[dragondorker]

The general idea of your post is to raise the ceiling of quality in dwarf fortress. However, you're still ignoring the core problem which is that quality doesn't matter. With the exception of weapons (and even this is marginal), the majority of players can ignore quality since they have no discernible effect on the success of your fortress. Masterwork cabinets are great, but you can easily get a room to opulent with three or four fine ones. A masterwork bronze mace is better than normal bronze maces, but quality is superseded by metal type. A dabbling weaponmaker's iron mace will serve its purpose better.

So in tandem with your raising of the quality ceiling it'd be good to make quality mean something. There's no purpose to trading for high quality items with which you adorn your rooms with which you attract legendary crafters if those crafts would only serve to be recycled back into trade for more crafts. The way this would be done would be through a proportional increase in the effects of quality; namely, happiness. Happiness works because its so important to the success of a fortress. It would therefore lead to a better endgame if dwarves required higher degrees of stimuli to remain in a happy state. One legendary dining room (which is usually just a 10x20 engraved room) is enough to keep my fortress happy, so there's no need for legendary statues. Make dwarves respond badly to low quality items (who wants to live in a slum?) so that the goal of a fortress is to create high quality furnitures and items.

To summarize, your suggestion of raising the ceiling on crafts is good, and I was really intrigued by the attraction of high-level immigrants via rooms, but this has no meaning if crafts are simply a thing to sell for extra food. Make happiness more difficult to generate, so that a fortress cannot simply ignore quality for the sake of quantity.

[Peacemaker636]

This seems like an easy way to make quality over quantity matter:

Divide the total quality of a room by the number of furniture items in the room.  This way an uppity noble will not be satisfied by a room with 10 fine statues, but he will love one decked out with only masterwork furniture.  I'm sure there is a more advanced way to do this where you could take into account the size, engraving quality and quantity (a noble would hate seeing chicken-scratch scrawled all over the walls of their otherwise grand mausoleum), etc.