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[JujuBubu]

Savescumming is Fun

And the restrictions are coming ..
I foresee more realistic ways to farm and actual logistic and economic challenges with the army arc and the caravan arc.

Remember the game is still alpha. And the power goals and arcs will give you pretty hefty restrictions and harder challenges if I read most of them right.

And the last and final restriction is your own definition of fun and how much effort you are willing to
put into your projects ..

how about something really restrictive
DF without prospector, foreman and companion

and since we are really of topic now to something completely different

restricting possible technologies through some obscure gameplay techniques is as stupid as
unskippable cinematics and restricted savepoints, preferable before a very hard boss and very long and unskippable video sequence

never liked it, never saw the sense in that .. with all the possibilities to come, you will be happy,
if you have any dwarfs left to do all the possible labor.



with 200 possible dwarfs .. you will have about 50 for military, another 30-50 are haulers,
from the 100 left, 10-20 would be babys and children, about 10 would be nobles who wont do squat.
from the 70 left 5 are needed to feed the lot, another 5-10 are miners and engravers.
For now I don't know much about dwarfen economy, but the few times I got that far it gave my fortress a pretty knee to the groin. For that you need another 10 dwarves.
leaves you with 45 dwarves to do masonry, smelting, crafting, woodcutting, glass, constructing,
tending to your traps .. ..

if you have a limitless game the restrictions come from the sheer amount of things you can't do at once

[Omega2]

Whereas completely unrestricted gameplay offers millions of ways to play, all of them equally effective and therefore equally boring. Bad decisions should be punished. That's part of the reward for making good decisions.

If unrestricted gameplay offers mostly boring options, then that's a problem with the gameplay itself. And it's also the reason players make up their own restrictions: to get shape the game into something more fun. I stand by my point that the restrictions being proposed here (only being able to do something if you're at least novice at it) would not add to more interesting and challenging gameplay, instead making players get frustrated because they can't replace their miners, masons or whatnots. Even worse, you'd have to wait until a military dwarf came in to teach yours how to do everything, even though trying to hit someone with the heavy end of a stick (dabbling macedwarf level) is nearly instinctive.

Oh, come on. The "steep learning curve" is mostly intimidation by the interface. This complaint might have had some truth back (1) before the wiki documented pretty much everything and (2) when setting up initial farming was tricky.

Nope, it's not "intimidation". DF's interface is extremely clunky. The wiki helps, but it is an external source not every player (especially newbies) knows of, so it cannot be used as an excuse.

Well then, don't start with only one mason. For Armok's sake, it's an expedition to the frontier. Do you want anyone in the group to be irreplaceable? If the skill point cost is prohibitive, you can start with one mason, and then immediately train someone else up to Novice to be your backup mason--a little riskier, but not much. And if you lose your mason, you can still build workshops out of wood. See? You have restrictions, you work around them.

And in what is that solution better than just allowing an unskilled dwarf who otherwise wouldn't be doing much try his hand at masonry? Sure, needing someone to teach is a limitation, but in my eyes it's both artificial, counterproducent and out of character.

Most people have no knowledge of carpentry besides banging a nail with a hammer (and most fail at it). However, most of those people would be able to build a table out of a few pieces of wood and some perseverance. It wouldn't be the prettiest or the most stable piece of furniture ever, but at least it'd be functional. And those are modern people, unused to that sort of work. A medieval person would have a much easier time doing it simply because they're not used to having everything given to them.

The vast majority of the objects/actions in Dwarf Fortress can be built/executed just by knowing how should look. The dwarves you bring and those that imigrate aren't blank slates, they have seen those things back at the mountainhomes and possibly even seen those things being built. Considering they're quite literally fighting for their own survival, I doubt they'd all sit down twiddling their thumbs and starving to death if their planter ended up as fish food. No, they'd pick up those mushroom spawns and try to make the best out of them.

The only elements in DF that can't really be figured out quickly are mechanics and bowmaking, simply because of the complexity and finesse involved in most of those. Yet dwarves can't even make stone maces or clubs, something even the most primitive civilizations could do.

While I do believe it should be less profitable and efficient to use unskilled workers to do a task, putting a hard limit on it would be silly. Have the mason-wannabee waste piles and piles of rocks trying to create a functional table, or make the recently-appointed blacksmith create armour so bad and uncomfortable everybody gets bad thoughts from wearing it, but not giving a chance to improvise (whoops, lost my only mechanic to a carp!) detracts from the fun of the game.

[JujuBubu]

now you are my hero to, irmo
you are right, and wrote some things i wanted to say, but could not think of.

except for bowmaking .. everyone could attach a string to a stick of wood,
crossing this elven weapon with another stick and a trigger is a bit more trickier but still possible.
( and I quite don't get, why dwarves should not use at least short bows .. longbows I get, but
shortbows ? why not, the huns weren't that tall .. and they were at least great bowmen )

real mechanics in the meaning of wooden gears, axles, triggers and whatnot are hard thats true, that is maybe the only job that can't be learned by just trying out.

the thing about stone weapons confused me to

Now I like the way a dwarf learns a job by himself if he has to.
Still having a teacher around would speed up the process a lot.
But the dabbling dwarf should still waste ressources and only produce subquality items.
( hmm .. this is still that what irmo said

So technically speaking,

I think there should be a teacher job, in which no experience would be gained, as in hauling or health care.It would allow dwarfs with at least expert level in a skill to teach lower skilled dwarfs up to competent or skilled, while spending time with them.
In game it would work like this : the teacher needs to have a job enabled he is at least expert in ( a high master mason ) and the teaching job, which is higher priority than actual working. He then looks for a dwarf who is doing the jobs he has activated and is worse than skilled ( a no label mason ).
he then trails him like a liason, which results in a higher exp gain for the student and a bonus of one level while working. so our no label mason with a teacher on his back counts as competent mason and received double skill points, which results in better output and less waste.

For the quality output I think there should be about three levels below no label
bad, shoddy and something else ( english is not my native language, and i can't think of something fitting right now ) which would have the value and armor/to hit ..  modifiers of 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8.

[Qmarx]

I don't like the idea of losing materials upon crafting failures.  I've found it really annoying every time I've played a game with that.

It's right up there with "you can't make a journeyman's mug with a master's hammer".

[Draco18s]

It's right up there with "you can't make a journeyman's mug with a master's hammer".

What game/etc. is that from?

[Qmarx]

It's right up there with "you can't make a journeyman's mug with a master's hammer".

What game/etc. is that from?

Minions of Mirth.  It's a fairly typical grind as far as MMOs go.  Only reason I got a paid account was that the unlimited accounts are really cheap, and I occasionally want to play a MMO (but refuse to play anything with a monthly fee).

Anyway, to give an example, the apprentice's bone dagger can only be made if you have an apprentice's hammer.  A journeyman's or master's hammer can't be used. 

Instantly shatters the suspension of disbelief. 

Just like how in Wurm online you can fail to attach a hammerhead to a handle in such a way that it destroys both hammerhead and handle.  This happens eighty percent of the time, last I checked.


Putting some wear on the raw material seems like a better idea than destruction, and damaged raw materials could have a negative probability modifier to the final quality.  A legendarily talented dwarf might be able to make a masterpiece chair out of leftover scrap xXwoodXx, but not as consistently as with normal wood.

[Draco18s]

It's right up there with "you can't make a journeyman's mug with a master's hammer".

What game/etc. is that from?

Minions of Mirth.

Played, never did the crafting.  Mostly because I was running around as a giant f*ing crocodile.

BTW, the light's side starting area guards can hit for 23000 damage twice before the game registers that I, with my 800 hp, am dead.