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[duckInferno]

Intro

I'm one of those kind of people that gets disheartened easily.  If my favourite miner decides that he should collapse a cavern on himself, or my mason decides to construct a wall between him and freedom, or a dwarf succesfuly runs away from a goblin only to instantly resume pathing and attract its interest again, I start to lose interest. 

In my last fortress, a dwarf died to an ambush, immediately triggering a macabre gold-rush of dwarves surging out of the safety of a recently finished elaborate pit trap in favour of collecting the fallen dorf's tasty, valuable flesh.  The emergency burrow recall didn't happen fast enough and panicing dwarves scattered, preferring to try their luck in the woods rather than go back the way they came.  A massive number of dwarves died.

"Screw it," I said to myself, as I disabled the burrow recall.  Surely some of them would figure out which way was home and live to procreate.

The goblins eventually retreated when their weaponry was whittled to the hilt by the might of many dwarven foreheads and I immediately recieved 24 migrants, who really didn't mind climbing over the bodies and wiping the blood off of their boots as they descended down the bowel-lined stairs, onto along my pristine-clean trap corridor which still had that new car smell. 


Suggestion

I assume that dwarven children inherit some traits already from their parents.  Why not take it a step further; have dwarves handle fear to varying degrees, as well as the ability to process information under pressure, and have that pass on to their children as well.


Conclusion

Implement and I'd be justified in letting the goblins have some target practice, knowing that my ruthless style of rule would prevail as subsequent generations of dwarves will actually run to the freaking entrance of my fort.

[noodle0117]

Hmm...
so you mean something like selective breeding for optimal dwarf traits?

[nbonaparte]

the problem is that things like the pathfinding idiocy you mentioned is the same for all dwarves (sentients?). If there were a better algorithm available, it would be used for all the dwarves.

[NW_Kohaku]

Sometimes, the best solution is to simply have plenty of doors in the hallways leading to the exit.  Doors you can lock in the faces of dwarves who are dead-set on rushing to their doom.