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[Squirrelloid]

So, it's been 4 in-fortress years since I tried to get some of my dwarves to get hitched.  It's not working so well.

-Went through and created a relationship map of my fortress.  Identified all the dwarves who were friends, found only 3 possible male-female pairs.  (Okay, 4 possible, but 2 involved the same dwarf).
-Built 2 honeymoon suites as per the wiki suggestion, assigned 2 friend-pairs to them (and de-assigned their other bedrooms).
-Waited and watched 6 months.  Noticed they weren't actually idling in their shared royal bedrooms.
-Created a custom burrow that for them that included their primary workshops, the honeymoon suites, and the food stockpiles. 
-Waited and watched another 6 months, still not idling in the bedrooms.  They went and hung out in the *food stockpile*...

It's not that they were working all the time.  Most of the dwarves were limited work time because I didn't need their jobs all the time (metalsmith, weaponsmith (of three), leatherworker.  The only heavy-work dwarf was the mechanic - but with the burrow limit he could only work the workshop, which traded off with two other mechanics, and it wasn't in continuous use because I have hundreds of masterwork mechanisms!)

-Restricted the custom burrow to the honeymoon suites and a new small table-chair-food/drink stockpile room.

Now the pairs actually became lovers after like a year of having nothing to do but wander to each others rooms, look at the statues, and wander into their tiny dining hall.  But two years later, they're still lovers! (Both pairs!)

I'm about ready to write them off as bisexual and thus not willing to marry, and trying another 4 dwarves.  But this whole process feels horribly inefficient and frustrating.  (Most of the friend relations are the original seven dwarves.)  Honestly, dwarf socialization feels broken.  Even with a tiny meeting area/dining hall and no tavern, outside my starting seven dwarves I have a full 4 friendship relationships, and they aren't even reciprocal!  (I don't even know how that works).

[PatrikLundell]

Bi-sexual means going for either gender. This is completely different from not willing to commit to marriage, as heterosexuals can be unwilling to marry, and bi-sexuals can be unwilling to marry one gender but not the other, both, or neither (and homosuexuals can likewise be willing to marry or not).

The DFHack tool "gaydar" can tell you what the dorfs' sexual preferences and marriage willingness are.

The main problem you have is that the least bad way to get dorfs to improve their social relationship with each other is to socialize, which, since 0.42.01, is done in a tavern. Thus, the way I do it is to burrow the test subjects in a suite with their beds, food, and booze, paint a tavern zone over it, and lock the door when both of them are in there and nobody else is (to have them socializing with each other, rather than the blasted visitors). You're doing it correctly in selecting dorfs that already recognize each other, though, as I've completely failed to get dorfs to increase their social relations at all when starting from zero.

I don't know if non reciprocal relationships is a bug or not. (A salesman who knows everyone he's met by name, but they don't remember him more than someone they might have met at some time or other). Regardless, when you have one of those, the one that recognize the other will increase the relation level without any indication for the other party until they hit the "lover" stage, at which it appears in both of them.

Also note that some dorfs have traits that make them very slow or impossible to get to marry, despite not technically unwilling to. Crippling shyness is probably not a good trait, nor is finding the thought of marriage abhorrent.
Most of the time I manage to get my test subject married and with a bun in the oven within half a year (assuming they've been suitably screened for negative traits and sexual preferences).

Note that once your test subjects are married, you should remove the tavern zone from their room, as dancing, singing, reciting poetry, etc. get in the way of procreation (assuming you want kids to be produced).

[Shonai_Dweller]

Yeah, the friendship reading isn't 'these two dorfs hang out together, they're friends' it's a reading of actually how each dorf feels about the other.

An important distinction come the next release with spies, secret identities and using people for their info.

[mikekchar]

OK, I know I'm generally an apologist for this kind of thing, but honestly this kind of stuff makes me scratch my head.  Dwarfs live for 160 years and mate for life.  They can also bear children right up until their last breath.  Why is it strange that it takes many years for them to decide to get married?  I get the idea that people want to breed dwarfs in a time frame that makes it fun in the game.  That sounds like a lack of a feature rather than being "broken".  If I play a game for 20 years or so and in that time only a few percent get married, that seems totally reasonable to me.  IRL humans generally need to have children before 40, but even then they usually wait 10 or 20 years after sexual maturity to do so.  A 100 year old dwarf *still* has 2-3x more time to have children than a 20 year old human.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Agree with above. An exploit of the systems to force something to work the way the player wants it doesn't work as well as it used to. Tough. That's not 'broken' in any way. Find other systems to mess with.

[PatrikLundell]

well, I agree dorfs could technically wait a lot longer to hook up, and, given their single shot at it, make very sure to get it right.
However, we also have fortresses that plunge into FPS death if a sufficient number of dorfs is added to it to give some reasonably chance to get any marriages before the FPS drops to single digits.

In addition to that, I like the idea of reviving the dwarven race from the brink of extinction, but that's obviously a game play desire disconnected from world consistency considerations.

However, if we're talking game world consistency, the world should be a place with a rather high mortality, as (marrying) dorfs get hordes of kids, and it's even worse with goblins and elves who can keep on popping out kids for millennia. Instead, populations rise to their max level and just artificially hover there (wars and beasts can decimate populations, of course).

And regardless, I think the relationship logic is off currently, with most fortress inhabitants having more relations to random visiting bards and merchants than to other inhabitants they've spent decades with (I'm referring to the relation levels below lover here).

[Squirrelloid]

OK, I know I'm generally an apologist for this kind of thing, but honestly this kind of stuff makes me scratch my head.  Dwarfs live for 160 years and mate for life.  They can also bear children right up until their last breath.  Why is it strange that it takes many years for them to decide to get married?  I get the idea that people want to breed dwarfs in a time frame that makes it fun in the game.  That sounds like a lack of a feature rather than being "broken".  If I play a game for 20 years or so and in that time only a few percent get married, that seems totally reasonable to me.  IRL humans generally need to have children before 40, but even then they usually wait 10 or 20 years after sexual maturity to do so.  A 100 year old dwarf *still* has 2-3x more time to have children than a 20 year old human.

Dwarves *can* live to 160 years.  Their actual life expectancy is generally a lot shorter than that.  (Killed running to get dropped socks when a Giant Spider sneaks in through the water tube, or in booze explosions when their acquaintance runs into the booze stockpile while on !!fire!!, or by rampaging elephants, or etc...).  And since they mate for life, if one of a married pair dies, the other is out of the breeding pool permanently.

And I have a fortress that's been running 15 years.  I have a circle of 7 dwarves in reciprocal friendships (starting 7) and a grand total of 4 non-reciprocal friendships after 15 years!  And no romantic relationships until I started forcing them to socialize.  (Not counting the 2 married pairs that arrived).  That's out of 60 dwarves (not counting the few children the pre-arrival married pairs produced) with reasonable idle time for most of them.  That's obviously broken, because dwarves simply won't socialize.

I don't think Taverns help them socialize.  I think they actively wreck relationship-formation by encouraging the wrong kinds of socializing.  Listening to stories, singing, dancing, etc... doesn't seem to do anything to their relationship status.  Next fortress I'm going without any meeting zones entirely and will just designate a small statue garden somewhere, see how that works out.

well, I agree dorfs could technically wait a lot longer to hook up, and, given their single shot at it, make very sure to get it right.

The problem is that they don't socialize a lot and wait longer to make sure they have the right match.  They don't socialize at all.  If I could just let the fortress run and they'd socialize and make friends and start romances on their own, then sure, I wouldn't mind them spending 20-30 years doing it.  But they don't. 

It's not that I want to micromanage my dwarf relationships.  It's that I have to or they simply won't happen at all.

Yeah, the friendship reading isn't 'these two dorfs hang out together, they're friends' it's a reading of actually how each dorf feels about the other.

An important distinction come the next release with spies, secret identities and using people for their info.

Those sorts of relationships seem adequately covered by the acquaintance and friendly categories.  "Friends" implies a reciprocal relationship.

It's especially weird when one dwarf is "Friends" with a dwarf that doesn't even know he exists.  (Not even passing acquaintances).

[Shonai_Dweller]

As I said one-way relationships are vital for when people start pretending to be your friend. It's just the choice of vocabulary that's confusing you. I'm not a 'passing aquanitence' of someone I believe to be my friend. I believe he is my friend and will tantrum if he's attacked (even though he won't do the same for me because he's really a spy).

[Skorpion]

Are they related?

[mikekchar]

And I have a fortress that's been running 15 years.  I have a circle of 7 dwarves in reciprocal friendships (starting 7) and a grand total of 4 non-reciprocal friendships after 15 years!

OK.  I went back to all of my fortresses and checked every dwarf.  It *does* seem to get stalled moving from "On friendly terms" to "friends".  One thing that is pretty obvious, though, is that dwarfs at the beginning have a much higher chance of becoming friends than dwarfs later on.  And as alluded to, this is probably because they have no opportunity to socialise exclusively.

To test this, I'm going to burrow 7 dwarfs in a completely separate part of the fortress and see what happens.  It takes about 1 year for the starting 7 to become friends (if they are not already friends), so I'll expect them all to be chummy-chummy after that time.

[Gigaz]

There are two factors which may contribute.

Some dwarfs aren't interested in marriage. If one of them in the relationship doesn't want to get married, the couple will never marry. Check for example in dfhack gaydar -citizens to find out.

If this isn't the problem, I think dwarfs need a statue garden to get married, but I'm not sure about that.

[PatrikLundell]

A statue garden is not needed for marriage. I've never had one and I have a reasonable success rate at engineering marriages between suitable candidates. Squirrelloid, however, doesn't believe that works, so I'm looking forward to the report of what the results of the alternative experiments are. It would be nice if that worked too.

My comment about dorfs taking their time to get married was intended to say that it would be reasonable for them to take their time if it actually worked. I fully agree that they currently are rather inept at getting anywhere at all on their own, regardless of how much time they're given.

I'm looking forward to mikekchar's experiment results as well. I have a nasty feeling there are some thresholds and windows involved, so the fact that the 7 burrowed dorfs have had prior exposure to other dorfs may ruin their ability to become friends, but I hope to be proven wrong.

[Mostali]

(I'm probably biased in all this because I've played every Sims version.  Each version has had their relationship pros and cons, but I think all of them are superior to the current DF system.  So this is just my two cents - maybe 2.50.)

I think what's desperately missing is an attraction system.  Every dwarf has a need to spend time with both friends and family.  But assuming either is present, dwarves make no effort to actually spend the time together.  Very rarely I see a "fondness talking with a child" or "blissful after spending time with a friend".  But for the most part I think these are accidents.  It feels like there is an intent to seek out either or both as the need grows, just as they do with reading or socializing in general, but the mechanic is not programed yet.  The same should apply to relationships.  No matter a dwarf's preferences, there should likely be some other dwarf they're attracted to and seek out their company to improve their relationship.

But here's my take on what we have now and how to utilize it.  The original seven dwarves start with a pretty high initial friendship - you can see it on day one of the embark.  But during that first year, they also spend a whole lot of time with "no job" hanging out near the wagon.  The wagon is a tiny meeting zone, and so they are always in very close proximity.  I believe dwarves with "no job" build relationships with adjacent dwarves faster than any other activity as a relic from pre-tavern/socializing days.  Without fail, in all of my forts in recent memory, some pair of dwarves have been lovers by the end of the first year.

As a fortress grows, and a larger meeting zone gets built, maybe a tavern goes in, and dwarves are assigned much more busy work, their chance of randomly being next to another particular dwarf becomes less and less likely.  Hence less recognition and even lower chances of building anything higher than acquaintance.  By the time there are 40 dwarves, and no special effort is made to engineer relationships, I believe the probability of a relationship forming naturally are near zero.

In recent forts, and my current fort in particular, I have increasingly incorporated more engineering into my designs, with some success.  I tend to grow populations slowly, and allow nearly half the available time for leisure (meaning a completely clear job list).  Most dwarves in these forts acknowledge most other dwarves at least - I'd estimate about half of them know at least half the other dwarves.  There are extremes on both ends, a few know most everybody and are "friends" with about half, while some only know a handful with no friends.  In my current fort, I got the single lover pair in the first year that I've come to expect.  It was an FF pair, which wasn't too surprising with 5F/2M initial split.  But what was surprising is that sometime in years 2 or 3, two more lover pairs formed from the initial seven - an FF and FM.

Anyway, I'm sleepy and getting long-winded, so let me get to the point.  I believe that if you can replicate those first year conditions, in what you might call micro-communities, you would have what would appear to be a much more natural progression of relationships.  Let's say you could keep eight dwarves of a similar age all working and taking breaks in close proximity, then eventually you should see them all be friends, all getting happy thoughts from spending time with a friend, and hopefully eventually getting some more advanced relationships going.  By reducing the number involved, you would significantly increase the encounters with any other particular dwarf.  While I haven't actually done this in my current fort, the design is set.  Each z-level is a block of rooms and workspace for eight dwarves.  Eventually, as I get groups of eight eligible singles, I'll set up a burrow ala honeymoon suite, just big enough and with enough commodities for them to all live the remainder of their lives.  Then I'll let them go and see how well it works.  I'll keep ya posted.

[PatrikLundell]

I agree with Mostali that dorfs OUGHT to seek to fulfill social needs, but currently do so only via brownian motion.
The initial 7 have relations to most of the others right at embark. In my case I work them to the bone, but I very rarely see them improve any relations either (a spontaneous lover pair has appeared once in a blue moon, but it's a lot rarer than actual blue moons).

My fortresses are generally from dead civs, which means less than 20 adults for over a decade (and a number of them haven't had a single visitor, not counting caravans). Once I get off the ground, I try to have two seasons of work, one season of wrapping up (hauling stuff that hasn't been hauled due to work), and one season of nothing but maintenance jobs (collecting an occasional batch of eggs, retraining animals, etc), with the rest of the time for social activities, reading, and praying (and, further on, a month of militia training during the second half of the year to satisfy needs for martial training). After a decade or two I may slowly get dorfs beyond the initial 7 to recognize someone who can become an eligible partner, and thus allow me to send them off for marriage processing.

I'm eagerly waiting for any methods that can improve the dorfs' abilities both to recognize each other and to hook up without direct overseer "encouragement".

[Mostali]

Just wanted to add a snapshot of my current fort relations.  For context, I allowed four migrants each year for four years after the first (23 dwarfs total).

The first seven dwarfs average 16.7 "friendly terms" or better, and 8.1 "friends" or better.
The year two dwarfs average 16.5 "friendly terms" or better, and 6.3 "friends".
The year three dwarfs average 18.5 "friendly terms" or better, and 2.3 "friends".
The year four dwarfs average 16.3 "friendly terms", with no "friends".
The year five dwarfs average 8.3 "friendly terms".

The year four and five waves have one negative outlier each, so they're either busier or don't like making friends, but even they had about half of what most everyone else had.  Almost everyone in the fort is "friendly terms" with the outpost liaison, but that is not included in the above stats.  All of the dwarfs are "first of their kind", so other than one married couple in year five, there are no family relations to skew any counts.  I did include the "lover" relation as "friends or better", since it developed during play, but I did not include the married couple's relation as "friendly terms" since they walked onto the map with it.  Somewhat weirdly, there were almost no "passing acquaintance" relations.  This is consistent with other observations that only if dwarfs recognize each other will their relations improve.

I don't think these numbers are near enough to draw real conclusions.  But they're my little contribution to !relationship science!.  Some interesting points:
- When you consider that the initial seven started off with six friends each, that means they have only made 1-4 friends since the year two migrants arrived.
- Contrast that with a year two migrant with 9 friends.
- With 23 dwarves total, the maximum possible relations is 22.  No dwarf had 22, but three of them had 20.
- The lone scholar is comically (to me) the most popular dwarf, with 1 lover and 9 friends.  He doesn't visit the tavern much, but when he does he goes in in purple!  So I picture him as that wild and crazy dwarf that everyone knows.