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[Leonidas]

Right now, each dwarf has his own set of tasks, e.g. mining, plant gathering, farming (fields), etc.  I usually give groups of dwarves the same sets of tasks, so that all my farmers have the the same tasks, all my miners have the same tasks, etc.

But in a large fortress it's a total pain to change those tasks, because we can only change them one dwarf at a time.  It would be great to assign assign a task template to a group of dwarfs, and then change all their tasks at the same time by changing the template.

Farmers benefit from this the most.  They plant for three-quarters of the year, and then they need to do something else during the winter.  It's a real pain to go through farmer by farmer to give each a winter job, and then go back through each farmer at the end of winter to stop that work so that they'll get back to planting.

This would also be good for haulers: You could make different classes of haulers for different items, and then temporarily aim them all toward a specific type of item, such as food after a large caravan purchase, or refuse after a big battle.

[elipsis]

I'd love to be able to set seasonal jobs. so that during winter all farmers haul stone, then go back to farming come spring!

[mickel]

Indeed. I've suggested scheduling a couple of times before, but nobody seemed interested. Seasonal jobs would be covered under that, I think.

Edit: I completely forgot that I posted about job profiles too a while back. No response there either. I guess these subjects have been discussed a lot already.

[ October 22, 2007: Message edited by: mickel ]

[Seryntas]

What we really need is a system of job prioritization.  That way, when there is farm work to be done, you can set your farmers to do that first, but when there isn't any, they'll default to whatever is their next highest priority (hauling, maybe, or plant gathering).

[Sowelu]

I wouldn't mind seeing a more in-depth form of prioritization where you have primary, secondary, and tertiary jobs.  Multiple jobs allowed per class, but secondary and tertiary have a delay before starting work (so your guys wait around a little for a primary job to show up again).

You could set farming (fields) and farming (workshop) as primary jobs, so your farmer takes a farming job if it's available, then a workshop job if it's available, right away.

Then set hauling as a secondary job, so if there's no farming jobs open for three seconds, you go haul instead.

Finally, set masonry as a tertiary job: If there's not even any hauling jobs for ten seconds, your farmer can still go and make himself busy.

The reason for the delays is this:  Let's say you have Urist (an excellent mason, and middling carpenter, who prefers those jobs in order) and Unib (an excellent carpenter and middling mason, who prefers those jobs in order).  If Urist is taking a nap and some other dwarf is currently on the carpentry bench, Unib is going to go grab a masonry job.  Then when Urist wakes up, she might find only the carpentry bench available.  Without a delay after task completion, Urist and Unib may never notice that their preferred jobs are actually available, and will keep doing each others' work.

A delay wouldn't totally eliminate that behavior, but it makes it more likely that Urist will take her mason's bench back: Unib doesn't -really- like masonry that much, so he leaves it open for a little while after he's done with each job.

[mickel]

That seems like a good idea. Perhaps instead of an on/off toggle for jobs, dwarves might have a slider with, for example, four states - off, tertiary, secondary, and primary.

Add the ability to save presets of those settings into profiles that you can quickly assign to dwarves from a fast interface and I'm all set.  

[SirPenguin]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but it came up in a search I had for a very similar idea, and I just wanted to voice my support for it.

[Krash]

Sowelu's really on to something here.  Sounds far easier to me (not a programmer) to implement delays rather than different priorities/weighing.

One thing bothers me though: doesnt the job choose the dwarf, not the other way around?  If thats the case, would delays really work at all?

[Goblin Dragoon 085]

Hmm, It would be nice if we could have some ind of easy workforce managment.

A list of all jobs, and then we can punch in how many dwarves we want to do that job and if it is an exclusive job and how important that job is (just like the import menu) Set a job to 1 dwarf, exclusive and max importance then the highes skilled dwarv for that particular job will do nothing else besides that.(dwarves who take an exclusive job dont do anything else). The dwarves would then sort it according  to skill level, importance and number of set jobs vs total number of dwarves.
They would also automatically switch jobs, if a higher skilled dwarve arrives in a migrant wave.

And to do something for the atmosphere the fort manager needs to go to a dwarve and tell him his new job.