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[G-Flex]

Currently, it's way too easy for dwarves to go from no skill at all to legendary in a given field.

This is kind of silly and creates problems, I think. Why is everyone in the world "Legendary" at their profession within the span of a few years tops?

This makes long-term forts kind of odd. Children become master socialites by the time they reach adulthood, and your fortress is full of "legendaries" who aren't really legendaries at all, since they're commonplace.


My thoughts on how to improve this:

• Dwarves should gain skill much, much more slowly at high levels. By changing the way the scale works, dwarves could still become "novice" or "competent" in a REASONABLE amount of time, but it would take many, many years to become a grand master.
• Perhaps attributes, personality, or other inherent traits should affect a dwarf's natural ability to do something. This way, some dwarves find it easier to become extremely high-skilled than others - some form of natural aptitude.
• To counteract the resulting lack of highly-skilled dwarves, a fortress should be able to attract (and for a price, potentially start with) higher-skilled dwarves. If your fortress is the metalworking capital of The Invisible Clamps, you should be able to attract some Master Metalsmiths sometimes, and if you're extremely damn lucky, a legendary one, whereas if you're just some podunk farming community, you might get mostly (no label) dwarves, with maybe some good farmers, but nothing too great. After all, a fortress should be able to attract migrants reasonably; highly-skilled dwarves should be attracted to fortresses when it makes sense for them to.
  This all would counteract the potential problems posed by post #1, would make individual dwarves worth more (which is GREAT for both gameplay and character attachment), and makes more sense anyway than having every immigrant have some default, minor level of skill like they currently do.
• Artifacts shouldn't necessarily bring dwarves to legendary status right away, even if they become less common. A substantial skill bonus would be enough. It's weird enough having legendary dwarves so common, never mind when you have a handful of dwarves becoming Legendary Whatevers automatically from making an artifact using a skill they hardly knew beforehand. Also, if points #1 and #2 are in play, it would still be worth a lot to have a dwarf go from, say, Competent to Adept due to a strange mood, without being absurd.

[Pilsu]

Why would a highly skilled artisan with a solid place in his society just pack up his bags and leave for your fort? The people you get now are their apprentices. Personally I'd prefer to get nothing but peasants and specialize them myself

One could simply cap skills at Grand Master (maybe lower for social skills and other miscellaneous skills for appearances' sake) and make only dwarves that make an artifact rise to legendary status. I don't really see why a dabbler in an art would suddenly get the requisite skills to make his perfect idea come true. Legendaries wouldn't really even need to have production bonuses, it's just a status symbol. That would facilitate human forts that presumably can't make artifacts in Toady's vision

[G-Flex]

Why would a highly skilled artisan with a solid place in his society just pack up his bags and leave for your fort?

People move sometimes. Maybe he has personal reasons.
Also, if your fortress becomes established as THE place for dwarves with a given profession to work, someone might actually be drawn there if he has high skill. If you're a metalworker who is extremely highly skilled, and there's a place which demands that level of skill and has better conditions for it than the place you're in now, of course you might want to move there. That's how it works in real life too; you go where your skills are needed and applicable. Maybe you got really good at metalworking or clothesmaking where you are, but there's some other place with just the right conditions to need your skills, but without many people there to do it; you might want to move there because you're in demand there more than you are where you're currently staying.

And even if you cap skills at Grand Master, eventually every single dwarf is a Grand Master within a few years of practice. And if you lower skill gains to prevent that, but DON'T let highly-skilled dwarves move in to your fortress, you barely get particularly high skills at all.

[Jack_Bread]

I agree, I usually get my first legendary miner before the first migration wave even occurs...

[G-Flex]

Yeah. Once I started with no mining skill whatsoever and a bunch of picks, and people were still becoming adept miners before I even had workshops in.

[Pilsu]

Few years of doing nothing but working with wood would make you into a grand master too

Construction speed diminishes with skill, maybe that needs tweaking for the results you want

[G-Flex]

No, it wouldn't. Becoming one of the best in your trade takes more than working the job for three years, or else every single professional in the real world would be a "grand master" capable of producing masterpiece work on a daily basis.

[Pilsu]

Depends on your definition of masterpiece I guess. There's only so much room for improvement in a wooden table

It's really an issue with construction speed more than anything. Real world professionals don't churn out a table in less than a day. Then again, DF days are really short by anyone's standards and it'd be exceedingly irritating to wait long times just to make artisans feel artificially rare


Being one of the best in your trade would be legendary and it'd require an artifact in my vision, only available for masters of the trade. None of this child prodigy nonsense with kids making wooden rings and becoming masters. Anything less just makes it more grindy and annoying to reach. Make 600 tables instead of 300, oh yeah, that soapmaker feels much more special now that he wasted a bit more time and materials reaching it

[G-Flex]

Depends on your definition of masterpiece I guess. There's only so much room for improvement in a wooden table

That's easy to think when you're used to the modern world, where things are mass-produced like crazy and little actual artisanship goes into those things.

A nice, hand-made wooden table can be exquisitely detailed and EXTREMELY well and solidly built. My dad (who has some experience in carpentry/built our house and that sort of thing) made a solid wooden desk as a home project once, and it took months of (obviously not full-time) work and a lot of detail and work was put into it. It came out pretty good, but if he had been doing that exact type of work for a really long time and had better skills in that particular field, it certainly could have been better.

For instance, imagine the work it would take to create things like these with hand tools: http://www.indofur.com/furniture/bed/ig/rococco_bed_wooden_footboard.jpg
http://common.csnstores.com/common/products/PW/PW3225_l.jpg

Someone creating furniture (and other things) mostly by hand is a highly detailed and skilled process, and a hell of a lot of artistry and design goes into it. A masterpiece table isn't just one that stays up after two years; it implies a certain level of sturdiness *and* artistic value.

I think one reason why you (and a lot of people) consider DF "grand masters" and "masterpieces" so devalued is because of the issues I'm talking about; they're just way too common.

[Pilsu]

Only 15% of a legendary dwarf's products will be masterpieces. That's for a true master of a trade with a widespread reputation. You need to crank out 537 beds to reach even grand master status

Also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_craftsman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece

I think you vastly overestimate the skills of a "master" of a trade


Increasing the xp requirement just makes it more grindy and material consuming. The construction time is what you want tweaked if you think spending 3-5 years making beds somehow makes your dwarves feel special

[perilisk]

Why would a highly skilled artisan with a solid place in his society just pack up his bags and leave for your fort?

Why would a high ranking noble with a solid place in his society (in a fortress presumably lacking special Noble levers) just pack up his bags and leave for your fort. If yours the only fortress in a civ with access to the materials a dwarf wants to use, it should be attractive. If world-gen type stuff eventually happens in fortress mode, then some of the migrants might be fleeing from a destroyed town, so they would need a new society. Plus, hopefully your starting seven and migrants will be world-gen characters, so they'll have pre-existing relationships. Dwarves would probably be more likely to move to forts where they already have friends or kinsmen.

At any rate, I don't necessarily think slow skill gain needs to turn the game into a grind. It isn't an MMO, where you have no chance of survival if your skills are low. It's more important for arms and soldiers, but you can always substitute with traps and so on. The more important thing is internal consistency -- it doesn't make a ton of sense that kids become ridiculously skilled at socializing in your fort, but your starting seven have no social skill whatsoever (unless bought). Were they spawned ex-nihilo? Were they raised by wolves?

[Savok]

Only 15% of a legendary dwarf's products will be masterpieces.

...no. Yes. Sorta. That's true for Legendary+0, but the highest rank, Legendary+5, gives masterpieces 25% of the time.

[Pilsu]

You need to make 966 beds to get to that point. I doubt that many players ever have anything but +5 farmers and the like

An artifact isn't enough to elevate you that high either. Just gives you regular legendary status, as evidenced by the continued *Item* production


As for perilisk, try leveling up an armorsmith to legendary by hand. It's tedious at best. Or a siege engineer, those parts are worthless and huge so they clutter very fast

[Draco18s]

You need to make 966 beds to get to that point. I doubt that many players ever have anything but +5 farmers and the like

483 plants planted and harvested per farmer for +5 Growing.
2898 tiles mined per miner.
966 trees chopped per woodcutter.
966 meals, 966 barrels of brew, 966 levers, traps, pressure plates, and links.
1 year of conversation (estimated, most of my immigrants are legendary chatters before I find a use for them).

[G-Flex]

Increasing the xp requirement just makes it more grindy and material consuming.

No, it doesn't, because the entire point of the changes I'm talking about is to revamp the way people HANDLE that stuff. It wouldn't be grindy because you wouldn't be trying to make legendary dwarves all the time in the first place; you'd be relying on the current skills of your dwarves more often. The entire point is that instead of trying to grind your dwarves to legendary status, you try to attract ones who actually have a decent level of skill in the first place, so each dwarf is actually worth something INSTEAD of being an opportunity to grind him to high skill. And in long-term forts, skill gains would still be substantial, as opposed to being completely absurdly high as they are right now. A dwarf would still become a legendary metalsmith; it would just take a respectable amount of time to do it, and the player wouldn't actually mind because you'd be able to attract highly-skilled dwarves in the first place if you should.