Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shawarma]

I have a game from a custom made world with lots of good, no evil, many many volcanoes, and high savagery.  None of my migrants wave have anything but level 1 or 2 skills.
It is awful.
I rolled a quick "Start Playing" world to see if it was bugged. Its not. My migrants have been fine (level 12 hunter in the first wave).

So how did I screw up the migrants in the custom world? What parameters affect migrant skill? Or are all the good dwarves dying young?

I no I don't provide a lot of specifics, but maybe someone has already seen this and educed the issue.

[Tharwen]

Or are all the good dwarves dying young?

Probably that. How is the general survival rate in your world?

EDIT: Or maybe your civ just lost a generation of dwarves in some terrible war or something and now you're getting the unskilled offspring.

[Shawarma]

That's what I'm thinking. I did remove vampire curses, but may have upped the mega creature slightly.

[Niyazov]

I rolled a quick "Start Playing" world to see if it was bugged. Its not. My migrants have been fine (level 12 hunter in the first wave).

First wave of migrants is not necessarily indicative of the general population; I believe that the first wave is always selected/generated using a different method than subsequent waves (correct me if I'm wrong here guys; I'm almost positive this was the case in DF2010 but things may have changed since then.)

That says, it really does sound like your civ may be dying/dead. A world that's high-good, high-savagery will not have a lot of good site spots for dwarves to establish sites in worldgen.

[thegoatgod_pan]

how old is the world? younger worlds have less history for skills to build up

[nightwhips]

There is a lot we don't understand about migrants yet. I suspect it varies from world history to world history, and possibly from civ to civ. Try the same world but at a different age, and see if that changes anything. And try different civs within the same world.

[masquerine]

I usually have lots of peasants with no labor skills at all (or very little) but I don't mind. I generally use worlds with a history around 100 years, so I kind of expect them to be mostly unskilled if they are not some of the first dwarves of the world. A longer history will produce more skilled dwarves as the population rises, provided your mountainhome is thriving. A mountainhome with 1-3 spots on the map won't send the same quality dwarves as one with 20+ spots on the map. I tend to use the smallest mountainhome, as it's usually the only one already at war with something.

What I do with unskilled dwarves is set them as drones/haulers, who have around 40 labors enabled. Any workshops that they would otherwise have access to (like mason) will have a minimum skill setting so they can't use it being unskilled. This will let me have a mass army of wall and floor makers without ruining the workflow with crappy goods. They also get any and everything else done that the skilled workers won't have time to do. Works nicely. It's also extremely easy to manage everyone.

These haulers are also my expendable military. I don't rely on any of them for quality jobs, so it's no loss if they die defending the fort from early invaders. Later on they will train off and on if they are intended to be melee. Crossbows train by massing invaders with bolts. In a longer battle, they will take shifts once some of them get hungry. That way there's always dwarves firing bolts into enemies. Even as unskilled masses they can stop early sieges in it's tracks just by the sheer number of bolts they put out. If they don't get a lucky strike they'll injure enemies so bad that they can't do anything and bleed to death. The only real threat to them is goblin archers, who usually end up killing some of them before fleeing.

[ChairmanPoo]

Meh, I don't really mind unskilledness. I don't even invest on starting skills barring medical ones (and that's more for flavor than anything else). You can do perfectly with wholly unskilled dwarves.