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[PoodleIncident]

This is an awesome game. But as it stands right now, there are several fortress-mode skills that don't make the game any more fun, and make players hate migrants with them. I figure, with Toady busy with minecart physics, we should brainstorm some simple ways to make skills more useful and fun.

As this game stands, there are two things affected by skill; time taken and item quality. Time taken works wonderfully for mining, but many intermittent tasks can be done as well by a peasant as by anyone skilled, since you don't much care how quickly that kitten is butchered. Item quality, in contrast, is uniformly overpowered. Even the lowest-skill immigrant can triple the value of anything in the fortress, by crafting it into something. The most visible symptom of this is the way that one workshop with rock mugs on repeat can finance a fortress.

This game could use some more interesting applications of skill points. So, here's a few I've come up with, and then post your own.

Skill as ability, not quality.

Some things just shouldn't be possible for a no-skill worker. I don't advocate the runescape skill curves, in which you MUST smelt bronze before you smelt steel, but there are some situations where it could make the game better. For example:

Butchery and fish dissection:
Fast processing is rarely important. Have different products require skill to extract, as a tissue tag in the raws. A no-skill butcher should waste a lot of the intestines, brain, and some of the meat and bones, giving you a reason to train him up. The parts not cut off of the corpse stay, like the already-extant mutilated corpses.

Negative item quality:

As it stands, crafting raw material is always possible, and always increases the value. The lowest skill levels need to decrease the base value of what they are made of. Training a peasant to legendary should always be possible, but should require an investment in form of piles of worthless items you have to donate to traders.

Corollary--Armor quality:
Armor is weird. Anyone can make it out of any material, and only the material (AFAIK) affects its effectiveness. If a peasant makes bad armor, it should fail in a !!FUN!! way. This will probably come about when item damage in genaral comes in, though.

Teaching:
Right now, teaching is weird and hard to train, but turbocharges the military if you buy it on embark. It might work better as a calculated product of conversational skills, rather than the stand-alone stat it is now.

Usesless-migrant-skills:
Potash, cheese-making, lye-making... all of those stats that overseers hate to see in a migrant? Make them more like the secrets used for necromancy, so that they're required to start up the various industries, and an unskilled dwarf can't just jump in and get working. Also, teaching could be tied in to these skills as well.

Alright, that's all I've got. Toady doesn't have a dev team to spot this stuff for him; it's up to us to rebalance this stuff, so that he can work on the fun stuff.

[IT 000]

Potash, cheese-making, lye-making... all of those stats that overseers hate to see in a migrant? Make them more like the secrets used for necromancy, so that they're required to start up the various industries, and an unskilled dwarf can't just jump in and get working. Also, teaching could be tied in to these skills as well.

Not a fan, we should try to make these jobs more useful, or their products more useful, instead of restricting them for no reason.

And you dare call a cheese maker useless. Have you no shame? (or cows?)

[NW_Kohaku]

Cheesemaker is useless because cows are useless because they produce something like 1/60th as much food as egg-laying creatures do, and egg-layers generally don't even graze. 

As I have said in a half-dozen other threads, proportionate to the quantities of food dwarves get from other sources, cows should be giving thirty-three times the milk they currently give.