Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[galmud]

The brains were pretending to be on the outside?  Well I suppose they were thinking outside the box?

They want to go out and see the world?

Maybe the brain was just an alien brain creature slowly eating the dwarf from the head?

First sign of DF AI becoming self-aware..?

[AbuDhabi]

It doesn't matter imo, since it's quite easy to "level up" the dwarves in a given profession. 

It might not matter from a gameplay perspective, but it might make people CARE. Maybe not cold-hearted people like you, Tormy, but I would care about them more.
End the immigrants' torment!
Silence the sounds of "Drafted. Drafted. Official Death-trap Tester. Drafted."

Bah. I don't do that to my immigrants... I draft all my dwarves. They cross-train at being Wrestlers until they are Proficient or better, whereupon they are released back to the community, with a few attribute increases on their backs. Afterwards, they're loads of fun to goblin ambushes - I had a situation when a lone ambushed woodcutter managed to fend off the entire squad of goblins long enough for reinforcements to get to him and get rid of the menace.

[LordNagash]

Just thought of a question -

How is health care going to relate to adventure mode? Will you be able to perform basic medical care on yourself and others? Will there be doctors (or whatever is appropriate to the race in question) in town for more serious procedures, like removing the crossbow bolt lodged in your skull?

[Mel_Vixen]

How big are the chances that the scared and peglegged drunk i talked into joining me is was a elite swordfighter which slowly derusts his skills?

[Areyar]

@Todays Toady1 report: Bodies turned inside out: :lol: Been experimenting with transportation-rays? (ie "the Fly")

From AbovePost:
Is "skill-rusting" like losing XP and thus skill [corrosion] or is it like an additional layer that applies a negative modifier to the skill [(c)rust] and that needs to be removed by training [polishing]?
 
The final effect is identical and practicallity of either approach depends mostly on the underlying skill/xp mechanisms.
(I'd say rewind the skill-bar is more elegant in simplicity, not requiring a rust-removal method, but the second is a good alternative if causality and character history is to be preserved at all cost)

[Warlord255]

How big are the chances that the scared and peglegged drunk i talked into joining me is was a elite swordfighter which slowly derusts his skills?

Now THAT sounds awesome.

That said, an important question is this; is skill rust going to come off at a faster rate than regular leveling-up of the skill? One would assume yes, but you never know.

[Demonic Gophers]

I think Toady has said that rust can be removed relatively quickly, as long as this is done before the skill starts to actually disappear.  Which is why there are two methods, even though that's more complicated.

[PTTG??]

I just love the bugs that pop up- such as the fact that skulls where, for some time, protected by a nice layer of brains.

It's a Zombie's dream come true!

[Tormy]

I think Toady has said that rust can be removed relatively quickly, as long as this is done before the skill starts to actually disappear. 

Yeah.

02/22/2009:
"Made skills get rusty over time (this was done for attributes previously) and eventually degrade. It's a very slow process, so it's not something to worry about unless you completely reassign a dwarf for a number of years or change their weapon for a long while, etc."

Since skill degrading is an extremely low procedure, and "leveling up" the various skills is easy [as it is now at least..], we don't have to worry I guess. 

[Warlord255]

I think Toady has said that rust can be removed relatively quickly, as long as this is done before the skill starts to actually disappear. 

Yeah.

02/22/2009:
"Made skills get rusty over time (this was done for attributes previously) and eventually degrade. It's a very slow process, so it's not something to worry about unless you completely reassign a dwarf for a number of years or change their weapon for a long while, etc."

Since skill degrading is an extremely low procedure, and "leveling up" the various skills is easy [as it is now at least..], we don't have to worry I guess. 

Well, yea, but one worries about whether or not un-rusting involves getting the same amount of EXP as before; for example, the slip from Legendary to Grand Master (or whichever is the next highest, I forget) is hard to get back; if that's mitigated by it being equally or more difficult to rust, then we'd be alright.

[Martin]

Regarding skill gain, and forgive me if I missed it mentioned, is that the better one gets at a skill, the more able they are to choose between efficiency and quality. That is, an expert could make 100 of something in a given time frame, or one very good thing in the same time frame - but they can choose.

One way to handle skill gains would be to request quality as part of the task, and the skill gain only goes up when the task is successful. Right now, the game already attaches percentages to the likelihood of creating something of a given quality from a given skill level.

Imagine then only having as many skill levels as there are quality levels (7). So a dwarf of skill level equivalent to making superior items (level 4) couldn't increase in level until they made an exceptional or masterwork item (these should be low percentages of success to go from level to level, and should get smaller as you go up, so from masterwork to exceptional would be no higher than 1% and probably less).

You can then choose to task the dwarf to make superior items, which they will make at normal speed for that quality, or faster the greater the difference from the skill level to the quality level, modified by experience. None of these actions increase skill (they could maintain it if skill can fall off), however they would have some contribution to experience.

Or you can choose to task the dwarf to make an exceptional item, and he'll try and try until he succeeds given the success rate. Any failures are either complete wastes of resources or produce items of lowest possible quality - so there is a significant cost to gaining skill. This would nerf the ability to make masterwork statues by making 600 qualityless stone blocks. It would, however, require quality on things like booze or else you'd never be able to skill that up.

Items at each quality level naturally take longer to produce, so a masterwork dwarf isn't turning out masterwork items at top speed. Masterwork dwarf making masterwork items would be slower than an exceptional dwarf making exceptional items but a masterwork dwarf making exceptional items would make them faster. This is then modified by experience - the more experience you have, the more of a speed boost you could get, but skill should still dominate.

Legendary would require a masterwork dwarf and a fey mood to bump them up. This would be quite hard to achieve (combination of work and luck) but the dwarf would have a small % chance of having any masterwork item they produce trigger a mood from there on out.

This could achieve a few things:

1) more realistic skill gains
2) control over whether you want a lot of something (bolts) or really high quality of something (armor)
3) failure puts a cost on increasing skills, making it something you need to choose, vs something you get automatically. How many of us have forts full of dwarves all legendary in something? How many of us have made 600 buckets as an effort to skill up a blacksmith and turn a profit in the process by selling all of those? If you did a pure skill effort on a blacksmith, you'd get all of 6 buckets for your effort - one of each quality, but you'd burn hundreds of bars of metal to do it. That's not an idle decision to make.

I'd also vote to see random skill levels on immigrants. Some (most) should just suck, but there should be some mid-high level immigrants now and then.

[Random832]

If you did a pure skill effort on a blacksmith, you'd get all of 6 buckets for your effort - one of each quality, but you'd burn hundreds of bars of metalfuel to do it.

Metal loss is already unreasonable as it is. The trade-off ought to be time and energy.

[Martin]

No, it really isn't. I can get a legendary blacksmith for about 2 years of gobbo ambushes, or about 5 years of trading by choosing items that recover well with melting. That's not so bad, really.

And without melting, you get a substantial value of goods for the effort - far, far more than it costs to buy the metal that you use.

[Demonic Gophers]

Yes, goods generally are worth a lot more than raw materials.  Making things should give you far more value than the cost of the metal, especially when you've got skilled workers.

[Martin]

Yes, goods generally are worth a lot more than raw materials.  Making things should give you far more value than the cost of the metal, especially when you've got skilled workers.

You miss the point - making things would - learning would not necessarily. When people learn how to do things that require greater skill, they don't get there by successfully making things of lesser skill. They typically get there by repeatedly failing to try to make things of greater skill until they succeed.

Learning costs. It costs in time and/or materials. You certainly don't learn while being both faster and more successful. In real life there is a tradeoff between learning and production.

Given the game economics, my guess is that the 6 buckets would come pretty close to the total metal cost to skill up to make them, given how much of a premium that masterwork items commands.