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[Greep]

While it's certainly entertaining that a person can eat their friend to survive and still be ECSTATIC, it's a bit silly really.  After a certain point, the amount of things that make a dwarf happy should have a limit, as certain amounts of disaster will overcome even the greatest amounts of happiness. 

It should be pretty high, e.g. +200 mood from happy thoughts, so newbies and budding fortresses should be unaffected.  However, a well run fort should still have the lingering possibility of some poor dwarf breaking under the pressure and throwing a tantrum during a drastic event.

[Kilo24]

I agree with the need to rework the happiness system, but I'm not sure a flat maximum is a good way to go.  If that happens, then a player could simply max their dwarves to +200 happiness with a good setup and neglect anything else that makes dwarves happier (it wouldn't be quite that easy in larger forts with more dwarves to keep track of, but getting them to +250 or so should still be enough.)

I'd prefer to see a more gradual system.  Maybe one that separates thoughts into categories like personal social relationships, environment aesthetics, work achievements, and politics each with a both a max and min value for the total of all those thoughts; dwarves who cared about each category would have lower minimums and higher maximums than other dwarves (your loner doesn't care that much about having or not having friends, so his happiness wouldn't change much either way.)

Another one would be some measure of diminishing returns, like having the 2 most dramatic happy thoughts having full value, the next 2 having half, and the rest having one quarter value; negative thoughts would be handled similarly but separately.  That way, you'd still get benefits from making dwarves happier, but they'd be slight past a certain point.  Should be easier to manage and balance than my previous suggestion, but less influenced by each dwarf's personality.

[Greep]

yeah flat max is not the best, but it's incredibly easy to implement, that's why I suggested it.  Diminishing returns is probably best, starting with +50 for +50, then +100 needed for the next +50, then +200 for the next +50 etc.

[Kilo24]

Actually, the reason which I didn't suggest doing diminishing returns by total value was because I wanted to also erode the power of stacking loads of little modifiers to wash out the big ones.  Being forced to eat your friend should be a lot more traumatizing than hitting a patch of miasma, going out into the sun with cave adaptation, suffering a minor wound, and eating a crappy meal.  Weighting each individual thought also reflects the dwarf having a lot of things on their mind, and only being able to pay attention to a few at one time.  And at a gameplay level, it means that powerful positive and negative thoughts will always be important to a dwarf, regardless of the amount of legendary meals they've had in legendary dining rooms by a beautiful waterfall.

You can make the relative values for important thoughts (getting married, having a friend die, becoming permanently paralyzed) much higher than the other values to also cause a similar effect, but I think that would lead to many instant tantrums from new migrants who get unlucky quickly.

[Greep]

Ah that makes a lot of sense.  Although, in a large fortress with said method, getting taxed (a meager -2) would be reduced to about -.1 or less pretty quick.  Perhaps it is a good method, just the rate of reduction needs to be fiddled with.  Like instead of being 50% off only taking 25% off the value.

[Hyperturtle]

let's see you eat the flesh of plump helmets and NOT get ecstatic... come on.

You can eat them raw, cook them, and brew them into booze.  And grow them on a farm!  Or pick them wild!  And there are Plump Helmet PEOPLE!

I have to admit that after an unfortunate noble incident, the children, despite witnessing death, were quite content.  I would have expected a down arrow.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

Perhaps these category maximums should be based on the dwarf's outlook on life. Their optimism, maybe?

[Pilsu]

I wager it's the optimist that cracks when shit hits the fan sufficiently hard.

[Greep]

Heh, sorta like...

Optimist: Higher happiness cap, no sadness cap
Pessimist: Lower happiness cap, sadness cap

Thus, optimist cracks under high pressure but is generally happy.  Pessimist is generally never content but never miserable.  So pessimists may tantrum a lot but will never, or very rarely go insane.

Edit: And I may be using rather weird terminology, sorry.  When I mean happiness cap, I don't mean how high their mood can go, I mean the sum total of positive affecting changes.