Apologies for the derail: anyone interested in the OP should skip this.
Answer to Thisfox' question:
- Firstly, specifying details in workshops has been a thing for quite s few years now (at the latest it was introduced with Visitors, as that required the ability to specify "clothing" size, but it might be older still).
- I use workshop orders on repeat for most things, but I use a rather convoluted DFHack script for booze cooking/preferences ingredients cooking. To some extent I use (soon to be removed) workshop allocation lists to make "clothing" so I don't have to specify size (humies to one clothier's shop, dorfs to the other [any gobbo and elven clothiers would end up here as well, should there have been any petitioners from those races]). In the few cases where I've set up "recreational" craft shops I've allocated the therapy subjects to those for the duration of the sessions.
-I've found that for anything that's sufficiently complex that you'd want to use a Manager to deal with it the Manager fails to provide the required detailed control. Things it can't do in a reasonable manner: Brew booze until there's a sufficient stock of that particular kind (you can brew booze until general conditions are met, but not ones tied to the product: I think you can set up 70 orders to control each kind of booze individually, but it might even fail at that. You can't even have the Manager shear animals, as it spews cancellation spam all the time (manually setting it up once annually results in one spam report each year). The Manager doesn't respect workshop uses (show when auto collect webs is used, where the orders are placed in all looms, rather than the one close to the webs), and can't count (use auto loom, and you get cancellation spam when you have multiple looms, as the Manager places one job in each loom for every single thread produced, unless there's a job there already). The Manager also spreads all different qualification jobs over all workshops of the same type, so if the bone crafter goes on a prayer bender all craftdwarf shops soon stall because the top job in all of them is bone crafting ones.
Also, I try to run my fortresses on a seasonal cycle, so different kinds of jobs are done during different seasons, with winter being reserved for R&R, which means all jobs are suspended in the workshops, to be unsuspended when spring comes along. This goes hand in hand with the handling of the broken military training schedule, where I manually set squads to off duty and removes them from their barracks (to get them to perform R&R rather than individual training), and then reverse the process when it's time to go on duty (and I mostly have military training as a month long session during the R&R winter season, rotating 3 groups of squads, unless I'm preparing throwaway invasion squads (since you typically can reclaim only about 1 militia member from each squad sent on conquest).
I've probably missed a number of additional reasons I don't use the Manager in this rant...
I believe someone did point out a case where the Manager could actually be useful, but I've forgotten what it was (as it was too long before I picked up DF to actually play it again).
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Topic: Trying to press olives… (Read 1163 times)