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[Dark Archon]

One suggestion that will make dwarf managment a lot simplier: job priority. May come in in two types: for dwarf and for the job. For dwarf I want to be able to select prime, second and third priority. If dwarf have a pending order, which requires job, which is in prime, and currently doing something in second or third, he cancel his current job and run to do prime. This will allow to "say" to dwarf: "You may haul, clean and do other useless things, but when I require a blue diamond door, you will make it immediately".
 

[Random Spark]

I feel like this defeats some of the "liquid AI" of dwarf fortress. Every dwarf is entitled to its own desires, opinions and work ethic. Being able to immediately define their work ethics seems a little out-of-scope for my interpretation of dwarf fortress, but then again i could avoid the system if i wanted.

in theory.

[Dark Archon]

Well, this can be made more difficult. For example, likeness to do a certain job will depend on character of dwarf, his mood, money paid for job (if economy will be added again), fear of punishment and so on. What I want is one more instrument of indirect control.
Also, this suggestion was already made, my bad 

[NW_Kohaku]

I feel like this defeats some of the "liquid AI" of dwarf fortress. Every dwarf is entitled to its own desires, opinions and work ethic. Being able to immediately define their work ethics seems a little out-of-scope for my interpretation of dwarf fortress, but then again i could avoid the system if i wanted.

in theory.

I wholly endorse the idea that dwarves have preferences for what jobs they want to do, and would at some point, rather than having the player have to manually tell each dwarf what their job is, allow players to simply set some sort of quota for dwarves set to each profession, and allow dwarves to choose the jobs they most want to take. 

That said, we, as players, are supposed to be the embodiment of the "will of the fortress" and act through the government/dwarves of authority/nobles in the fortress, and as such, what we are capable of commanding of our dwarves Toady has generally stated as being something that could reasonably come from a fortress authority figure.  (Like, "I'm hiring 2 more woodcutters, who volunteers?")

Having the king/baron/mayor/expedition leader say, "We need those walls built NOW, or we won't survive the next siege!" is a reasonable command to give.  Yes, it's also reasonable that not everything be possible for a player to change (I wouldn't expect any dwarf to actually listen if a king says that eating should be a lower priority than working) but at the same time, having an authority figure say that such-and-such is a higher priority than that-other-thing.

[forsaken1111]

You can quite easily focus labor on a single task in emergency situations. I don't see what the difficulty is here. You need walls built? Take some dwarves and disable every labor not involving wall building. If they are still filling mason jobs, cancel those jobs. Its not terribly hard really.

[NW_Kohaku]

You can quite easily focus labor on a single task in emergency situations. I don't see what the difficulty is here. You need walls built? Take some dwarves and disable every labor not involving wall building. If they are still filling mason jobs, cancel those jobs. Its not terribly hard really.

Two things are wrong with that.

First, that "solution" is a micromanagement-intensive workaround for the lack of a feature, the same way that the old way to control where a dwarf stood when building walls was to order walls to be built, and then suspend construction everywhere but where you stood... until Toady just built the actual feature that the dwarves stand on the side of the wall that they approached the wall from. 

Again, if the objective is to give players all reasonable commands that an authority figure should have, then having the ability to set priorities is a fully reasonable power that an authority figure should possess.

Secondly, that still doesn't solve problems like not being able to order cleaning except by the even more micromanagement-heavy workaround of having to designate break areas on top of the cleaning, because dwarves won't even try to clean up anything they aren't standing on top of. 

As I said in that thread, if contaminants are going to potentially have infectious diseases or curses or worse tied to them, cleaning is a vital task, but there is no way to actually tell your dwarves that it's important for the hazmat team to actually clean up that puddle of FB blood and then run to quarantine.   

[forsaken1111]

I was offering a workaround for this suggestion which has been suggested approximately 1000 times and will probably go into the game at some point in some form.

And its not even all that micromanagement intensive if you're using dwarftherapist. just a few clicks once you have set up templates

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, this quote,

You can quite easily focus labor on a single task in emergency situations. I don't see what the difficulty is here. You need walls built? Take some dwarves and disable every labor not involving wall building. If they are still filling mason jobs, cancel those jobs. Its not terribly hard really.

sounds an awful lot more like a reason not to fix the problem at all than offering it up as a temporary band-aid for a problem that will be fixed.

Besides which, relying upon not just memory hacks, but also highly annoying-to-set-up templates that mean having to keep track of who was set to what job is not exactly an easy solution, in and of itself. 

What's really annoying about it is that this isn't actually something difficult to code, either - just the same as the wall-building pathfinding fix.  (Which, I think, took Toady literally just an hour to fix, and had been a bug since the game had first been introduced...) The priorities code is already just a sorted list, so all it really would take is making up some basic interface to handle the sorting. 

[forsaken1111]

Sorry I wasn't clear. My response was more to your "We need those walls up now!" example. I was showing how it is possible with the game as it is, just a bit annoying. You do have full control over your labor, even if its not the most user friendly control schema. Toady has already acknowledged this and said things like the UI will be fixed in time. iirc he doesn't want to keep slapping bandaids on the places people whine about the most but prefers to do a single overhaul of the whole UI system once he is ready to do so.

I'm neither defending nor endorsing his behavior, just stating what I know and offering a way to do what you want to do quite easily with DwarfTherapist. The templates are not annoying to set up, its actually pretty easy to use. I couldn't imagine playing without it really.

[Dark Archon]

You can quite easily focus labor on a single task in emergency situations. I don't see what the difficulty is here. You need walls built? Take some dwarves and disable every labor not involving wall building. If they are still filling mason jobs, cancel those jobs. Its not terribly hard really.

This only looks like solution. First: in large fortress, disabling and enabling all labors and works are going to take time and destroy immersion. Second: constant adding/readding (and life-or-death situations are pretty common, if you aren't playing it on "easy") lead to mistakes. Third: if DF supposed to be indirect control game, then it should contain instruments of indirect control. If it isn't, then just turn it in RTS and be done with it.

You do have full control over your labor, even if its not the most user friendly control schema.

Well, this is request for user friendly control. Of course, I can perform surgery on glands by going through backyard and intestines, but this isn't much interesting, and patients are likely to die in process.

[Pootis]

Going with the "indirect control" theme, I think it's best to be able to designate which specific jobs have the highest priority instead of setting individual dwarf-level preferences.

[falconne]

I feel like this defeats some of the "liquid AI" of dwarf fortress. Every dwarf is entitled to its own desires, opinions and work ethic. Being able to immediately define their work ethics seems a little out-of-scope for my interpretation of dwarf fortress, but then again i could avoid the system if i wanted.

If the game AI made Dwarves "choose" what they wanted to do then that would be a much better game mechanic... one that makes the game feel much more alive and forces the player to think about each dwarf's preferences and attitudes before assigning them jobs.

However that's not how the game currently works... a free dwarf is assigned the closest applicable job. Designing the above system would take a lot of work for Toady, but in the meantime a priority system would reduce a lot of unnecessary micromanagement.

[Tsumi]

A priority system would make micromanagement SOOOOO much easier. It would be great to set primary and secondary labors for each dwarf, but I must say even a simple tier system would do wonders.

Ex: Workshop orders take top priority, followed by constructions and designations, and lastly by hauling and cleaning jobs.

^^^^^ That alone would be amazing. It wouldn't be such a bad thing to have useful dwarfs as haulers then because they would take care of what needed to be done before spending a season or two hauling stones and ores back from the entire layer you just had the miners clear out...

Hah, any type of priority system would be great at this point just to ease up on the micromanagement of jobs.

[Gargomaxthalus]

     This is a big issue with Toady's stubborn insistence on doing everything himself, and on a "when I feel like it" basis. A priorities system is an ABSOLUTE necessity for a game like this. Just look at Towns. Without the ability to set priorities as necessary, that game would be nearly impossible to get anywhere with for the simple reason that Townies are complete idiots. As things stand with DF, Dwarves are no smarter than Townies and the game functions at a much faster pace where as soon as you complete one task you need to start 4 or five more.  This is made more problematic by the fact that we also don't of Towns' standing orders feature yet, so we need to keep giving the same orders over, and over, and over again.

     This is really an unacceptable situation. The "bite-size" DF clones have essential features that we are being told will be added eventually, which makes it so that gamers who could be taking interest in the DF development process are off playing Gnomoria, and Towns, badmouthing DF all the way. Hell the Steam community hubs for those games tend to have brutal arguments going on between DF players and those who avoid DF because it's "learning curve" is more like trying to climb a mountain that is standing on it's peak.

     I realize that I've probably come to close to the event horizon with this post, but DF is supposed to be a playable alpha. This means that playability needs to have a bit more of a priority than it does at this time. If certain things like "leader given priorities", standing orders, and proper medical and child care were added to the game, then it would be MUCH more playable, and enjoyable. The simple fact that female Dwarfs give birth where ever they happen to be when the counter hits zero, and then keep working with the baby in tow, makes things quite awkward and makes snatchers more dangerous than they need to be. The "birth and child rearing" system also makes it so that you end up with a military gender barrier that Toady never intended to have.

     Now I'm no programmer, but if Toady had someone to dump the small stuff that he can't be bothered to deal with on, then progress with development would be much smoother and we would have a much more accessible game that more people would want to support. Hell, a lot of the sorts of assets that Toady would like to eventually add, already exist in player created mods. This shows that Toady has a large, competent pool of potential helpers who would work simply for the honor of helping The Great Armok Toady and to have a better vanilla DF. Whether or not Toady decides to accept aid, he does need to rethink his priorities somewhat.     

     Alright, I've already said enough to possibly get myself caught in a flame war or some other undesirable situation. This wasn't meant to be a rant and I do apologize for it, but I don't want to see this project's potential go to waste.
 

[forsaken1111]

The game is entirely playable, as evidenced by people with forts which have lasted 50-100 ingame years through multiple generations, sieges, etc. You're free to disagree with how Toady chooses to develop his game, but that is entirely his prerogative. I recognize that its not the most user friendly game, but I've never had problems with getting done what I needed done.