Foreman allows job management based on profession name. Thus, once I get new migrants, I can customize their profession names in DF, then in Foreman I can mass-assign tasks. Also, this lets me accomplish large-scale tasks quickly. Say I want to smooth a ton of stone, and can handle pausing my production lines to do it. I just open up Foreman, and give all my crafting professions that job and remove their others. Thus, being able to mass-apply jobs to groups is quite handy, and allows me to finish large-scale tasks rather rapid, with little time spent micro-managing jobs.
Also, it is a really good visualize to see how I've got my classes broken down, and to see if I'm missing any jobs. ie: Why aren't my iron floodgates being made? *glance to Foreman* Oh, my smiths were assigned to haul stone for a while, and I forgot to turn their smithing back on. *fix*
Quoted for truth. That's exactly how Dwarf Foreman helps me.
When working on Mountain-Banners, this program allowed me to "surge" a massive group of haulers from task to task as desired. Want another 30 warm bodies to help place stone, furnish rooms, place tapestries, haul rock, clear scaffolding? One click and done!
When managing any fortress, I want to see no idlers. Everyone contributes all the time,to my latest mad-cap plan. If a craftsdwarf has run out of materials, I want to see him helping with haulage, placing stone, practicing his wrestling moves, boosting production of the missing inputs, or whatever.
Fort mode is perfectly fine without mods and utilities, I have no idea why you are all so dependent upon them ...
Dwarf Foreman is an important reason I continue to enjoy this game so much. I just don't have enough patience to get more than about 30 dwarves to do what I want them to in the native interface.
In the native interface, every new dwarf is an additional management burden. With Dwarf Foreman, you assign the dwarf to a labour category and manage him along with everyone else in that category. Instead of navigating around in menu-after-menu, you see everything laid out before you, on a grand canvas on which you manage the fortress labour as a whole.
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If Dwarf Fortress made it possible to assign a dwarf (or group of dwarves) a priority-ordered list of tasks, then fortress management would become a lot easier.
Ideally, I want my haulers to ensure that nothing creates miasma, then that food is put where it belongs, and only then work on other haulage stuff. At present, whenever I task them to rock-dumping, vermin rot unattended and food haulage can easily jam up.
I have a colored clothes-making production line at pretty much every fort I make. Managing such a lengthy chain of inputs requires a great deal of micromanagement, as dwarves currently don't know that what you *really* want is for the weaver and dyer to, respectively, primarily weave cloth and dye it, and in their spare time help with milling or threshing. Same story for glassware, ironmongery, and leather goods.