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[Sowelu]

Two things up front:

- I'm talking about 'This dwarf can only get up to Adept at masonry.  That one can get up to High Master at masonry.  That guy over there has the potential to get Legendary'.  The term 'skill caps' can mean a lot of things, I'm only talking about this one.
- I don't know how to make this not annoying and not suck.  It might not be possible.  Seeking ideas is the point!

...Okay.  So legendary skills are a little too common.  You get them in, like, a couple years.  Oh, man, if only I could be a legendary programmer in two years of normal work, or even five or ten.  Obviously SOME of us can.  But for most people, even if they have the potential to do anything they put some effort into...they just don't have the potential to be mind-bogglingly amazing at everything.  I mean, if I really put in the effort and twelve hour days, I could be a really great coder in a handful more years.  Not legendary but great.  But I will NEVER be a great artist.  The potential just isn't there.

I think it'd be kind of cool if you had to match dwarves to their ideal professions.  Not HAD to match them up, I mean, that's too much micromanagement...but if you really want to push someone to the limits of their ability, you should have to do it in a field they can excel in.  Either that, or they need to take a lot more time.  Sure, they're dwarves, a hundred years can make them a legend in almost anything.  But a kid who grows up and spends five years in a profession and gets amazing?  Not everyone can do that, and not everyone can do that in any specific field.

I think that...after most people advance to a certain point in a given skill, they ought to drop to 1/2 experience gain, then 1/4.  The caps should be high enough that a smoothly running fortress should be FINE if everyone is capped.  It's just, if you wanna be incredible, you either need to put more work into it, or find dwarves that aren't capped.

Here's what I'm not sure of.  When a soapmaker wanders into your fortress, should you already know "This guy has caps at 'Adept' and 'Accomplished' for stonecrafting"?  Or should you have to stick him on stonecrafting, and wait until he hits Adept to see "Hmm, he's not going to get much better than this at this job, I should try him in another career"?

Should there be special events that raise caps?  I mean surely, awesome things could lift a cap entirely, but should caps start out pretty low, and raise automagically with age, or with combat experience, etc?  The latter would mess with game balance, surely, but would encourage a bigger militia...

Hmm.  Ideas?

[Silverionmox]

A way to adress that is to count experience in time spent on practicing a skill, instead of output. That way, a highly skilled dwarf could work faster than a normal one, but still only advance as fast in experience.
Experience should also count for less and less as levels advance: it's not that difficult to become a novice mason, 5-10 years makes you a professional, another 10-20 years makes you a master etc. XP requirements should probably double for each level, or just put the function in the raws.

If dwarves have particular talents and likings, I think it should be reflected in their preferences (those can stand to be more extreme and outspoken anyway). A dwarf with talent for cooking would like a lot of foods, and no stone for instance. A dwarf with preferences for stone will likely make a good mason. A dwarf that likes dogs could be good at training either all animals or dogs in specific, a dwarf that likes cats is could be good at animal dissection :p

And very importantly: as soon as we'll have a gradually and slowly increasing skill pool, we'll need some way to replace our equipment with new and better versions gradually and slowly.

[Sowelu]

I think of the preferences window as something that exists solely for flavor, or when something really unusual is going on where you need full information (ie, a strange mood, or needing to make a noble really happy).  You really shouldn't have to look at it for all dwarves, and you really really shouldn't have to keep referring to it.  At the very least, I'd expect that skill caps would show up next to a dwarf's relevant skills when it was currently capped, kind of like the *CLT* warning on workshops...

[Silverionmox]

Wanting to have super-skilled dwarves is a worthy occasion to look at their preferences, no? I look at the pref screen quite often, because I don't want to play with dwarf#26 etc. Peasant who like picks? Straight to the mines. A dwarf who likes making lists? Welcom, hoardmaster. etc. People who treat their dwarves as generic should get just that: generic, ordinary dwarves.

(The preferences are pretty bland and inconsequential for now, but now and then you get a dwarf who likes, for example, whips, chains, boots and leather. *chuckle*)

[Pilsu]

Liking a material or object supposedly provides a skill bonus. Should be very pronounced early on if one likes both the material and the object made so should be easy enough to test

[Warlord255]

Modding forum, [SLOW_LEARNER] tag on dwarves. Go try it.

Toady will figure something out in time.

[Draco18s]

*Cough*