(Edit: Holy wall of text! Consider this original part as the tl;dr version.)
Inspired by*
Dolohov, we should have a yearly report. It could show such things as wealth produced that year, the number of each type of job that was completed, change in food/drinks, etc. It could have the numbers modified by the bookkeeper's settings, just like on the status and stocks screens. It would also, as in his comment, allow time for 1 year of world gen history stuff to occur. There could also be either an init option or (preferably) an in game toggle on the (o)rders screen for those who don't want to see it.
* Inspired by = Stolen from
Update:
Now that it's not 1 in the morning and I'm a bit more... awake, let's try a more organized list of what I personally would like to see:
+/- Change in:
- Food - could have a sub list of the different types listed on the status screen: meat, fish, plant, and other
- Drink
- Wealth
- Population - could also have a sub list for children and adults, or profession, or both (profession as a sub of adults?)
The +/-'s would be pretty easy to do: just remember what the numbers were last year (using zero for everything on the first year, of course) and subtract that from the current count.
This is meant to be a broad list to get a general idea of how your fortress is doing. Did that one legendary brewer crank out a lot more excess booze than those two professionals did last year, or did my overall booze stocks go down while he was running the show? I lost a lot of food this year, even though my population only went up 5. I'll have to see why that happened. Etc., etc.
Yearly Totals:
- Exports
- Imports
- Migrants
- Enemies killed - sub list of siegers, ambushers, thieves, kidnappers, and others? Could be combined with the ones below instead of it's own category
- Ambushes (that are discovered and/or resolved; I don't think I've had one of these yet...)
- Sieges (that are resolved, so a siege that's still going on at the end of the year doesn't count; it will count towards the next year's list, assuming it's solved then)
- Jobs completed, especially:
- Animals slaughtered
- Corpses butchered
- Completed hunts - huge discrepancies in these numbers can point out a large inefficiency with your butcher shops that you may not have noticed
- Tanned hides - ditto with the tanner
- Fish caught
- Fish cleaned - for same reasons as above
- Trees cut
- How much food rotted
Those are the ones I'd like to see, though you could also include other fun totals like:
- Tiles mined - channeled, dug, ramps, stairs, removed up ramps/stairs, etc.
- Items created - probably best to stick with broad categories
That's a lot to fit on one screen, so it might be best to pick and choose important ones, though it wouldn't hurt to have multiple pages or have the screen scrollable like the help windows. If a year of history were to be run during this time (as in that other suggestion thread, obviously an idea that I support) it should probably mention that input may not respond while the history is running.
Maybe it would be best to have some kind of RAW file to define it? Then it could be laid out however you want!
[COLUMN1]
[POPULATION] (change in population, no break down)
[FOOD] (change in food, no break down)
[DRINKS_BY_TYPE] (change in drinks with a sub list for each
type: sunshine, sewer brew, dwarven ale, etc.)
[COLUMN2]
[MIGRANTS] (total migrants, no break down)
[JOBS_COMPLETED] (total of each type of job that was completed)
[+JOBS_COMPLETED] (change in jobs completed compared to last year;
should display all that occurred in either year)
I think Toady's going to hate me now