One of the game’s biggest problems is a complete lack of balance. Yes, I know this is more of a toy designed to be grounded in a simulation of a fantasy reality than a true game, but it’s still filled with arbitrary decisions that don’t seem to be driven either by game play or be the reality of the imagined world. If you can solve gameplay with more realism, to me that seems like an easy choice for DF. The biggest balance issue is the complete lack of equivalence between skills in terms of training costs. The skills that are most useful and desirable can be trained easily and quickly. But skills that are less useful are also more difficult to train, so that for the most part you rely entirely on immigration to fulfill those skills. Immigration is a separate problem, I’ll focus on in another post, but for now I’ll say that in a game that is functional as both a simulation and as a game, in the long run a mature fortress should rely more on its own educational system than on immigration in order to produce skilled labor. Or to put it another way, once the settlement grows to a certain size it’s logically more of an exporter of skilled labor than an importer of it.
For that to happen, there needs to be a major over haul of the educational system in place. Obviously, in an immature settlement, higher educational opportunities will be sparse and children will get minimal attention and will only learn the basics of survival if that. But by the time you are the Mountain Home, which can be accomplished in a half-dozen years or less even by a neophyte, dwarves that pass up through the various educational opportunities should be skilled enough that they can start backfilling critical jobs.
Problem #1: Military education is too effective. Right now, the only sure fire way to make a useless dwarf useful is toss them into the military - this is basically true regardless of the suitability of the dwarf for that role because the education system is so poorly balanced. You don’t even need to try hard to break the system with exploits like danger rooms or micromanaging squads. Put them in a squad with a dedicated barracks, assign the squad to training full time, with 9/10 dwarves on duty at all times. Within a year or two, you have an entire squad of legendary dwarf warriors, with weapon skills of 15+, fighting skill of 25+, a full range of secondary skills, and most attributes at 80 or higher unless the dwarf started in the single digits (in which case they'll be in the 40's or 50's). Moreover, because happiness depends greatly on both working and learning skills, they will be the happiest, most stable dwarves in the whole fortress. Indeed, so compelling is this regime that a mature fortress probably can convert over to 100% military, ensuring everyone is happy, healthy, armored, and invulnerable to all but a few threats. By keeping your craft dwarfs on only 50% active duty, you can keep the fortress functioning while training up everyone to Master combatant in only a few years.
This is strange, because military skills are one of the most useful skills in the fort, and among the most diverse, yet I can simultaneously advance 6-10 of them faster than any one skill in the fort and with lower cost in resources consumed than any other skill in the game (with the possible exception of mining) while also advancing scholarly skills like organization, student and teacher faster than any other means possible.
It’s distinctly NOT FUN, in that legendary dwarf combatants with medium grade armor and shields basically roll over anything in the game that lacks absolute powers like ‘dust’ or a steel body. Yet it’s no trouble at all to develop a horde of legendary fighters in just one or two years. This plays into one of the complaints I will make again and again, and that is the game is too easy. It doesn’t have enough FUN in it, and what FUN it does have is usually built around invulnerable monsters or simply the result of micromanagement oversights. Pretty much every creature in the game is either effectively invulnerable or else it goes down like a chump to something that is effectively invulnerable.
To correct this problem unique to military education, the XP generated by military education should be reduced to about 60% or so of what it is presently, and the danger room exploit should be at least mitigated so that it is useful but not broken.
The one exception to this is the cost of training marksdwarfs, which is compared to the cost of training melee dwarves and the limited utility of doing so against all but a few threats, just stupidly high. In particular, bolts fired at training targets should generally not break, and should stack for collection if they hit. It takes 1000’s of bolts to train dwarves, and the situation is so dysfunctional it’s a common practice to set up exploits that allow bolts to be fired without breaking. Indeed, the whole bolt breaking mechanic is pretty ugly as it is, as it appears to leave some sort of trash object that is maintained by can’t be interacted with.
Problem #2: Non-military education is presently ineffective. Instead of being too easy to train dwarves in, many skills are too hard.
First, the things that aren’t broken so that we have a standard to compare things by. There are skills like mining, stone detailing, plant collecting, and farming where dwarves can gain very good XP for doing chores that consume no resources except time. And all of these chores need to happen a lot, so dwarves performing them earn a steady stream of XP. If you have a dedicated dwarf in these roles, these skills race up to level 20 at nearly the same pace as military skills, which is largely fine, because we would like dwarves to be useful to the fortress and consequences of being legendary in skills like that are small. The great pace tends to be balanced out by the fact that you end up with many dwarves in these roles simply because quantity is largely quality for these skills, and many hands get the labor done quickly. And likewise there are skills like Mason and Carpenter where the fortress needs large quantities of buildings regardless of quality, and these also can be trained up quite quickly, and journeymen workers are still welcome to do unessential tasks while your masters churn out masterworks. So these skills are probably fine as is, and if anything like Military skills could survive a slight debuff in XP that they earn through use.
Gem carving is also quite easy to train up to a high level, as is Spinner, Weaving, Clothier, and Mechanic, because the base resources are abundant and masterwork items are nice but not essential. The same is mostly true of pottery and glass making, which like any fuel dependent industries are hard industries to ramp up, but if you have clay and sand on your map once you leverage magma, skill acquisition is then balanced because the resources are all renewable. However, in many cases, you’re still going to leverage immigrants because you’ll get an immigrant master before you train up your own apprentices, and most of the training will be ‘finishing’ the education of a master to get them legendary, rather than starting from scratch.
Skills like weapon and armor smithing where you never want less than a master to perform the work, and where you have a very high cost in materials are not only slow to train but ultimately are basically never trained into. Instead, you either wait for a master to immigrate or you wait for a strange mood to strike. You then have your master, but no training was involved. Setting up an educational system for smithing has to wait until you can set up magma forges and no longer have fuel constraints, and then doing something tedious like setting up cycles of forging and melting simple objects. But at least you can do something, and if you don’t have to dig down 200 levels to hit magma, it’s a reasonable approach you can start up reasonably early.
By comparison, skills related to animals are absurdly difficult to train. Butchering, tanning, shearing, milking and so forth give tiny amounts of XP for jobs that there is no good way to ramp up to production levels. This is made worse by the fact that you can’t strange mood these skills (and wouldn’t want to if you could). Getting a large base of animals takes years, and even then has completely questionable utility, since hides are plentiful and cheap when purchased from caravans and holding 500+ animals you need to drive a livestock industry eats frame rates in the fort unduly, while requiring excessive micromanagement to ensure things are properly caged or pastured. Yet for all this effort, the amount of XP earned is tiny, so that once again you will almost always be relying on immigrants for high skill labor in these jobs. Worse, many of these jobs are things you can do without, or jobs that don’t consume resources except time, so it’s not essential to have high skill, which means you typically make them ‘peasant jobs’ for a large number of dwarves, further slowing XP gain. There seems to be this dysfunctional idea that large amounts of XP should be learned per task in skills that are valuable and essential and difficult, and small amounts of XP should be learned per task in skills that are inessential and peasant work. The reverse is true. Unessential skills should earn large amounts of XP per task. For skills like shearing, milking, beekeeping, fish cleaner, animal handling (if implemented), butchering, and tanning, tripling the present XP award per task completed would not be unwarranted. For animal trainer, I’m ok with treating a legendary animal trainer as an end game goal, since it allows for prestige pets and war beasts (although, because military training is so powerful, these currently largely serve no real purpose, which is a different problem). Bone carver avoids this only because its raw materials are otherwise useless, so its sort of turning trash into value at no cost but time.
Many skills are absurdly slow to train because the fortress has very little need of them. Because these tasks rarely show up, in practice your immigrants will always be better than your own dwarves. These include tasks like architect, siege engineer, lye maker, potash maker, soap maker, cheese maker, presser, bookbinder, miller, wax worker and to a certain extent cook. Glazer is on the margin, as it is so far down the production tree that by the time you start training it, you’ve basically beaten the game. However, glazer could at least be important on a map without trees, without fire clay, but with large amounts of tin. Leatherworker is largely on this list, as it produces nothing that some other skill does not produce with higher quality, but at least is a little bit useful. Still, I would recommend that architect, lye maker, potash maker, soap maker, cheese maker, wax worker, presser, bookbinder, miller, cook, thresher, leatherworker, siege engineer, and glazer earn 50%-100% more XP per task performed as they do presently. If other suggestions on this list aren’t implemented, you could add all the health care jobs to this list as well, as again, it’s so impossibly slow to level up health care based on the current paucity of need, that all your doctors are invariably trained in the mysterious elsewhere that – if the rules on training are universal – cannot possibly exist.
Problem #3: Scholarly Training is ridiculously slow: If at present military training is ridiculously effective, building a library and trying to train scholars is ridiculously slow. In one year’s time you can have legendary dwarf warriors capable of holding their own against any monster in the game that isn’t basically immune to melee attacks. In the same amount of time, scholars will not level up even one skill to rank 1. It takes literally decades to get any return at all from training scholars, and even then mostly what they level up in has no practical benefit at all. In the real world 4-8 years of higher education tends to turn a student into a scholar of practical utility. We should see tangible improvement in a scholar’s skill in the same period of game time. Scholars having discussions in a well-stocked library with skilled colleagues should earn XP at 10-20 times the current rate, and should train student and teacher at a rate similar to or better than the adjusted rate military dwarves would train those skills. Additionally, this increased XP should be spread around more useful skills including diagnosis, surgeon, bone setting, animal handling, animal trainer, plant collecting, organization, appraisal, record keeping, mechanic, siege engineer, architect, and social skills like poet, as well as all the scholarly skills that currently have less utility like critical thinking, optics engineer, military tactics, chemist, astronomer, alchemy, and so forth. Scholars should naturally develop a focus as their skills increase, putting more and more of their gained skill points into study of a particular field that they are interested in.
Problem #4: There is no process of elementary education. In pre-modern times, by the time a human reached 10 years of age, they were expected to be able to begin adult labor. This was both because labor was absolutely needed, and because few children could expect to achieve adulthood without losing one or both parents. A child without a basic education in practical labor and the ability to hold a job would then starve to death. If wimpy anti-social humans expect their offspring to perform useful chores, I see no reason why dwarves would allow or would care to have children that spend the first 12 years doing nothing but daydream and play with toys.
As things exist, children are not only useless, but they don’t even occur in sufficient numbers to matter compared to migrants, nor do they earn sufficient skills to make them more desirable than migrants. That’s entirely backwards and hurtful for DF both as a simulation of a fantasy world and a game.
Children should gain XP through a variety of paths. Currently they have two. The vast majority of the XP a child earns is in social skills. This is blatantly absurd and clearly backwards. Children should not gain significant social skills. Social skills are the most difficult skills for a child to learn, because they require mature interaction. Interaction with their equally unskilled peers leads to only slow and often dysfunctional progress is social skills. Rare is a child with great social skills, yet in DF it’s not unheard of for a 13 year old to be elected mayor after having spent 12 years training nothing but social skills. That's like emergent anti-story, that breaks emersion and reminds you that this isn't a fantasy world but a very flawed game. The vast majority of social skills should be earned only after childhood is complete. Children should mostly earn XP elsewhere, with only some social skills being earned through interaction with parents and the few high empathy adults willing to give them time. Socializing with peers should earn very little social XP.
The other mechanism I’ve seen for children earning XP is occasionally a hungry child will pick a crop and haul it to the table for consumption, earning accidently a small amount of farming XP in the process. In a fort with inefficient farming and limited food production, this gains enough XP to occasionally get a child to 1 or even exceptionally 2 skill in farming by age 12. This is entirely realistic and interesting, and suggests what should be the primary method of children acquiring XP – volunteering to perform chores. Beginning at age 6, and increasingly thereafter, a child should be willing to perform chores particularly those with personality markers like ‘values hard work’. If a skill that doesn’t produce goods with a quality indicator and conceptually involves simple labor, such as milking, shearing, hauling, plant collecting, farming, and plant processing, has a queued up job that isn’t taken by an adult after a certain period of time, it may be taken by a willing child.
Play also should provide a minimal amount of XP, not necessarily enough to earn more than a rank or two over the course of 12 years but some. A child over age six that day dreams or plays pretend should earn 1 XP in critical thinking, poet, or what not. A child over age six that plays with a toy, should earn 1 XP in a relevant skill – such as 1 XP in axe dwarf for playing with a toy axe, or 1 XP in furnace operation for playing with a toy forge. This gives toys value and incentive to keep your fort well stocked.
Finally, an “Apprentice” system should be put in place. Whenever a child between age 6 and age 12 forms a friendly relationship with an adult, there is a chance that the child will be accepted as that dwarf’s apprentice.
To be accepted as an apprentice, the following conditions must be met:
a) The child must be between age 6 and age 12.
b) The adult must be above age 24 and must have at least one craft skill at rank 4 or higher.
c) The child must not be rank 3 or higher in that skill.
d) The child must meet a minimum 25% suitability for the craft based on role.
e) The child must not be an apprentice already.
f) The adult must have an available apprentice slot, based on their craft skill in which they have the highest rank at that time. For rank 4-8, the dwarf will take one apprentice. For rank 9-12, two apprentices; rank 13-16, three, and rank 17-20 four apprentices may be taken.
If all conditions are met, a random chance based on the child’s relationship to the adult, the adult’s personality, and the compatibility of personality is determined. If successful, the child becomes that adult’s apprentice and tends to seek him out and follow him around.
Adult dwarfs delegate hauling jobs to their apprentices. They not only will delegate one hauling job related to a task to the apprentice, such as bringing new raw material or hauling away finished goods, but if they have no task to delegate they’ll look ahead to the next job in a workshop’s scheduled tasks and delegate a hauling job for the raw materials of that job. They will also occasionally delegate the apprentice to haul food, drink, or water to the adult dwarf. Each time the master delegates a task to an apprentice, they train a small amount of Organization. While apprentices normally will try to perform the hauling job as rapidly as possible, if they take too long and leave the master waiting, the master may have an unhappy thought.
In exchange for this time saving labor, the adult dwarf in a workshop will occasionally between or after labor claim the workshop temporarily for a ‘teach apprentice’ job (no announcement of this should take place). The personality of the master determines how often this takes place, with some masters having greater care and concern for their apprentices and others caring only for their own interests. This short training session results in training the apprentice in a craft associated with the workshop, training the apprentice in Student, and training the master in Teacher.
Adult dwarfs will retain an apprentice until they either reach rank 3 in all craft skills that the adult has at least 4 ranks in, or until they reach age 24, whichever comes first. Rarely, tantrums or grudges by either party may cause a master/apprentice relationship to be severed, and highly stressed masters may even beat their apprentices. (Either may precipitate grudges and tantrum cascade among other dwarves.)
Problem #5: We need to be able to set up schools or guild hall. A school is a new sort of location, which can be designated from any meeting hall. A school should have a name just like other locations. Idle dwarves will occasionally go to a school just as any other meeting hall. A dwarf in a school may either “Give a Lecture” or “Attend a Lecture”. A dwarf will only “Give an Lecture” if:
a) The dwarf is not a child.
b) The dwarf has at least 4 ranks in a skill.
c) No lecture is currently taking place.
d) If the skill is a craft skill, an appropriate workshop exists on school grounds.
A dwarf that gives a lecture trains Teacher and a dwarf that attends a lecture trains Student and a small amount of whatever skill the lecturer is teaching with the exact amount depending on the amount of skill of the teacher. A dwarf that attempts to give a lecture will get an unhappy thought if no one attends, and a happy thought if attendance is good. A dwarf that attends a lecture will get a happy thought if the quality of the lecture is good, and an unhappy thought if it is not.
Similar to scholars and scribes in a library, dwarfs can also be given the profession Lecturer within a particular school and will treat it like a full time job. Dwarfs, even children, can also be assigned to be full time students of the school, and will again treat it like a full time job.
As previously mentioned, before a dwarf will give a lecture on any skill that is tied to a workshop, a workshop of the appropriate sort must be available. This workshop may be in use, and indeed any amount of things other than the lecture may be going on the school grounds. However, if anyone giving or attending the lecture gets near a dwarf that is not idle, they may get the unhappy thought, “Bothered while I was trying to X”. Thus, dedicated spaces off the beaten path are preferred.
A school’s value is based on the value of its room as a space, and all chairs, tables, bookshelves, and workshops within the room (exclusively, other furnishings do not add value to the space as a school), and is divided by the number of other rooms and locations which share that space. A school’s value limits the number of students which it may support, with the maximum being 20 students for 20000 value. The number of students is also limited by space, as you may only attend the lecture if you are within the school grounds. Thus, at minimum to accommodate a maximum number of students the school grounds must be at least 21 squares. Multiple small schools with their own specialties may be preferable to a single large school for some purposes. School zones may overlap, but not only does this diminish the value of each school, it may cause chaos when multiple dwarfs try to give lectures in the same space (resulting in everyone having unhappy thoughts, “Bothered while trying to learn”, “Bothered while trying to teach.”).
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Topic: The Education Pillar - Changes to Training and new look at Dwarf Education (Read 1153 times)