quote:
Originally posted by mickel:
<STRONG>How about this, new suggestion: The ability to set how much time someone will spend on a work? Let's say three settings - fast, normal, and slow.At the fast setting they'll cut corners and produce work faster, but below their average, and they'll get unhappy thoughts from the stress and lack of work satisfaction.</STRONG>
The idea of a happiness penalty has been kicked around before. First, it only works if happiness is fixed so that you can't get out of the penalty by just building a nice dining room. When you pull this kind of stunt, there ought to be a genuine risk that your master smith will go psycho.
I think certain unhappy thoughts (including this one) should set the dwarf's happiness to a fixed negative level, and start a timer that suspends any positive thoughts, so that the dwarf is required to feel the pain for a while. When the goblins kill your baby, it doesn't matter how good you were feeling before, or (at first) what's done to cheer you up.
Second, it ought to be clear that you're seriously messing up the order of things by doing this. It shouldn't just be a "quality setting" that can be flipped over to "fast" and left there; it should be a special order from the manager interface (you order ten steel axes and specify "Rush Job"), delivered by the manager, at whom the affected dwarf gets mad as hell. He'll still do the job, most likely, but if the morale hit turns him violent, the manager is likely to become a target.
Third, if the goal is to have a way to boost production in an emergency, maybe the special order should be "No Breaks". There has been a lot of discussion about a way to suspend breaks, and the morale penalty for that would need to be similar. If you order something made and specify "No Breaks", any dwarf who's able to do that job but is on break (or eating, drinking, or sleeping) would cancel his break and do the job. We could have both, and even allow a "Rush Job/No Breaks" order, but at that point the risk of a tantrum would be pretty dire.