Just my ideas, lets hear yours!EXP GAIN, FLAWS AND FIXES
So this entire idea revolves around Ihow fast a dorf becomes legendary, this needs fixing so a better XP system is needed. Not an overhaul, rather some changes.
I’ll start with the flaws of the current system,
1) Is incredibly imbalanced, a dwarf could sit in a danger room for a month to become legendary.
2) The better a dwarf gets, the faster he gets better. While in reality a person who constantly works can fall into a routine and never learn anything.
3) Skill has a lack of uniqueness, in reality everyone works differently, but I have no idea how this would be implemented.
4) I have always thought that an exponential amount of exp should be required for a game
So after about 7 years in a fort I was playing, I saw that I have this.
And this
so my thought was, why doesn’t their Exp gain slow after they pass a certain point. After all, after a point a human will just decide that they have reached perfection in their art and just give up the chance that they will ever be better than they already are. So my first idea to slow the rate of Exp gain is that some dwarves will just quit trying to learn or improve their skills. second, dwarves should have to do more to go from master to grand master than a dwarf to go from dabbling to novice. At the moment master to grandmaster is 3 times as hard to accomplish as novice to adequate. offten that dosn't matter as the dorf just works so fast that he gains 5 times the EXP.
BRUTE FORCE ,
is my first (and probably the best) idea where the amount of EXP for another level is greater, the only thing that would be required would be doubling or quadrupling the amount of EXP required to get from level to level, I would think that this idea is the simplest and would work well with negative EXP.
NEGETIVE EXP
I first had this idea in when reading the montages thread, and was told that this was a different idea altogether, so...
XP would have a chance to be counted as a negative value. This chance would be greater as the level increases. This would hopefully slow down the amount of elite dwarves that come to occupy the fort.
At each level the chance for negative EXP would go up per level.
So the list
Dabbling 1/30
Novice 2/30
Adequate 3/30
Competent 4/30
Skilled 5/30
Proficient 6/30
Talented 7/30
Adept 8/30
Expert 9/30
Professional 10/30
Accomplished 11/30
Great 12/30
Master 13/30
High Master 14/30
Grand Master 15/30
Legendary 1 16/30
Legendary 2 17/30
Legendary 3 18/30
Legendary 4 19/30
Legendary 5 20/30
So if this seems a little unclear don’t worry I will explain.
A peasant dwarf is given the job of engraving, so he begins engraving and gains 10 EXP per picture of cheese on the wall. So it takes 50 engravings before he should reach the next skill level. But because dabbling has a 1/30 chance that his EXP counts as a negative, the likelihood is that one or two of his engravings will be counted as negative progress. This would change his 50 engravings to 52 or 54 engravings thus increasing the amount of time required to reach the next skill level. Now at a greater level like professional where 1400 is needed for a level, there would need to be 140 engravings and at the rate of 1 out of 3 being a negative value, there are about 47 times that the dwarf receives negative experience. Causing about 94 more jobs, which may or may not bring negative EXP.
I figured that to get past the level of professional the engraver would need to preform about 420 jobs. this is about three times as long as the norm.
This entire idea would is based on how rare legendary should be.
My worries are that I am trying to preform surgery with a sledge hammer. This idea seems complex to me, I believe that brute force is probably much easier to implement and just as effective as this.
DWARVES DON’T WANT TO IMPROVE
This would be based on the dwaven personality qualities like “Excellence,” “perseverance,” etc.
Those without the above trait and perhaps some of the others, like “Possesses great willpower” or “Appreciates art and natural beauty” (perseverance and artistic, there would) would be un able to gain experience at a normal after reaching a certain level of skill, say… accomplished so my example would be.
you may notice that he has none of the aforementioned skills and therefor doesn’t attempt to learn after reaching this level.
Notice how this dwarf strives for excellence and therefore has a chance to become a legendary.
You may have noticed that the legendary dwarf has a high score in only one of the traits that would let him learn more. My hope is that he would also need high scores in one of the other traits (perseverance or artistic) to become a legendary, and all three to become a +5 legendary.
Don’t say that only a certain number of the dwarves in your fort can become legends. All that happens when a dwarf quits trying to learn and because of this, his chance of receiving EXP is as follows.
Dabbling 1/30
Novice 2/30
Adequate 3/30
Competent 4/30
Skilled 5/30
Proficient 6/30
Talented 7/30
Adept 8/30
Expert 9/30
Professional 10/30
Accomplished 11/30
Great 12/30
Master 13/30
High Master 14/30
Grand Master 15/30
Legendary 1 16/30
Legendary 2 17/30
Legendary 3 18/30
Legendary 4 19/30
Legendary 5 20/30
do you remember this?
If course the dorf in question should also be susceptible to negative EXP
There are probably many other traits that would allow dwarves to become legends (or cause them to struggle to get past novice) I just can’t think of any off the top of my head.
My worries about bout this idea are that there would be a ton of problems when we finally get the personality overhaul.
This XP "gain" would be affect all ways to gain XP, hopefully making only a select few of your dwarves in fortress mode become legendary as well as preventing (lengthening) XP grinding in adventure mode.
[edit] I had made errors in grammer.