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[DJ]

How's this: only dabblers fail?

[Draco18s]

isn't a broken mug still a mug?

You've never dropped dishes on the floor have you?

Two halves of a mug are not the same as one mug.

[Granite26]

isn't a broken mug still a mug?

You've never dropped dishes on the floor have you?

Two halves of a mug are not the same as one mug.

Reading comprehension fail...

It's still a mug, just not useful as one.  Ergo : Ruined Mug and Unusable Mug as 'useless' categories that are still mugs, just not ones that can be used.  Like I said...

[Shades]

No matter how inept a dwarf is he always manages to successfully build a bridge, carve gems, craft armor or tunnel through sand.

Rather than making you fail it would make more sense for it to just end up using more resource. People don't fail at doing a task unless they give up, you can just keep trying. But queuing the same task again and again would be painful.

Of course the game isn't geared to needing extra resources for things. Taking longer is a good compromise.

Unless you had decent controls such as 'only allow good gemcutters to use non-green-glass' it would be too annoyingly random.

[Felblood]

Outright failure has a lot of tricky ramifications, particularly for starting fortresses with limited supplies of wood (like, dismantle the cart to built the trade depot, beach fortresses).

I propose that more quality levels are added to the bottom like this:

Flawed: A significant aesthetic flaw mars the piece. Works just as well as normal quality, but sells for half price
Inferior/poor: Your mug comes out looking more like a bowl or even a saucer. Not only is it completely worthless, if it's quality matters, it is half as good as a normal quality item.

This gives frontier colonies a rough hewn texture, without depriving the player of the ability to manufacture the goods he needs to survive.

Alternatively, or additionally, I could stand to see extremely poor craftsmen damage their goods as they are produced, allowing mugs to shatter or lose handles before they ever leave the workshop.

Suddenly, fine glassware would be more appreciated.

[Footkerchief]

In case anyone cares what we all thought about this topic two months ago.

[Neonivek]

If you guys look at the Devs (I believe it is a REQ but it could be a Bloat) you will see that Toady supports having less then average quality.

Though I see nothing on... lets say... A dwarf messing up building a bridge and killing a whole carrivan.

[Felblood]

(I'm just going to keep posting here, since this thread links to that one, but not vice- versa, if this is a problem for you feel free to bite my head off. I'm assuming at this point that you have read both threads.)

How about, structural degradation for Poor quality bridges? The caravan camels are the straw that broke the camel's back. When they step out on the listing, creaking wooden bridge, a support beam snaps, and the entire thing crumbles into bits.

You fish the elven goods out of the dry canyon, and build another bridge that won't really last through winter.

I don't feel that any dwarf, no matter how unskilled should fail to make a table that can be eaten off of. The thing should be ugly, wobbly and hard to clean, but you can theoretically balance a plate on top of an unshaped rock.

A lot of the quibbling in this issue seems to grow out of different ideas about how much stone is in a unit of usable stone. The answer is: enough to make one table, one piccolo, one wall, one ring or three mugs.

Any unit of anything you can build a table out of is worth more than one ring, by volume, so some amount of material waste must be abstracted.

I'd like to see waste have more to do with skill than what you are producing, so that better craftsdwarves got more rings out of a unit of rock, instead of mugs just being better than everything else.

Even having never done it before, I bet I could get more than one toy boat out of a whole tree. They might even float right side up.

I would take forever, and I'd spatter the entire vicinity with powdered wood, but I'd do it.

I'd probably get a boat out of every log in a unit of "wood logs", if the definition of boat is sufficiently loose.

[tsen]

I personally look forward to having the units of material get smaller so one piccolo doesn't take the same amount of stone as a throne. Though, on the annoying side that will make it a bit harder to clean the spare stone out of my fortresses.

[Felblood]

I'm personally hoping that dwarves just start subdividing the stone after it reaches the workshop, so as to prevent them from making separate trips to the mines for every little rock, and dumping stone doesn't get any harder.

Once you can have enough stone to create a ring, but not a table, you're not too far away from a competent mason needing fewer cartloads of stone to make the same goods, which is what these failure suggestions always boil down to anyway.

Some of the wasted stone could be spattered into rock powder, or whatever.

[Sagabal]

There might be a switch you could turn on in the Raws, if you wanted to make failure an option for certain difficult processes, like when dwarfs are working with say patterned steel, or whatever.

Code: [Select]

[TEMPERATURE:YES]
[WEATHER:YES]
[ECONOMY:YES]
[INVADERS:YES]
[CAVEINS:YES]
[ARTIFACTS:YES]
[ZERO_RENT:NO]
[FAILURE:NOT_AN_OPTION]

[SirHoneyBadger]

[FAILURE:NOT_AN_OPTION]

No failures, ever. As it is now.

or
[FAILURE:TIME_CONSUMING]

Failed projects just take double to triple the normal timeframe, and although injuries can (rarely) happen, they're never life-threatening, in and of themselves

or
[FAILURE:CATASTROPHIC]

for all the hard-asses out there:

"CATASTROPHIC" setting would mean that yes, your dwarfs could utterly fail to perform a task, and can be severely injured or even (rarely) killed in the process.

[Neonivek]

There is a certain point where the Raw suggestions get rediculous...

How much gameplay should the players be allowed to bypass? We are going to hit the "Cheater boredom" problem.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Well, if you're cheating (by whatever definition), and you get bored, that's kindof *your* problem.

I like to be able to set my own "challenge rating" (which is usually ridiculously stringent, to the point where I lose a lot of games), and I think Sagabal-whether it was intentional or just sarcastic-has hit on something I'd like to see in the Raws.

Nobody's forcing anyone to cheat. And it's not like it's a multiplayer. I think of DF as a game where you can challenge yourself, in the ways you want to be challenged.

[Sowelu]

Failure leading to material waste means more micromanagement, period.  Right now it's possible to be okay with having a dabbling mason and a legendary one both working at the same buildings on the same tasks, if you're not worried about value of the output.  But if you can lose material, then suddenly planning ahead becomes much harder.  You have to make sure only certain dwarves use your more precious materials.  If you know you need seven beds, you might need more wood than seven logs.  How much more? Who knows?  Better keep checking.

And let's say you have two pieces of wood, and you say "Make a bed.  Make a bucket."  Your carpenter fails to make a bed and ruins the wood.  Either he automatically tries to make a bed again, thus rendering you bucketless (so you have to assign tasks in order of importance)...or he gives up on the bed, rendering you mysteriously bedless and not quite sure why.  Oh, sure, it can generate a message on failure like it does on masterpieces, but that sounds like it'd get annoying fast.

Injuries on failure...Oh, that's just great.  If I send my legendary engraver, legendary woodcutter, to start learning how to carpent, he could cut his leg off.  That sounds REALLY fun (sarcasm).  Or you take a powerful soldier off duty for a while and he bashes his head trying to engrave a wall, giving him nervous system damage.

You have to be able to plan ahead at least a little bit, and things like this seem like they'd take a lot away from that, making the game more micromanagey, which we really don't need.  "Hey I have ten orthoclase so I can make a yellow wall ten squares long" is fun.  "Hmm, I'd better use my best masons just in case they fail and ruin a piece of stone, or only make a wall eight squares long" is NOT fun.  Failure isn't the same as losing.

I'm all in favor of lower-quality items that suck, but are still functional (even if giving an unhappy thought).  Those aren't game breaking.  Things like walls though, they should never fail.