I've read quite a few suggestions on dealing with management of labor. I have also read the dev log and seen a view from 30,000 feet on how Toady plans to deal with this in future development arcs. I agree that burrows will significantly improve organization and management of workshops, stockpiles, labors, hauling, and even social and knowledge handling in the game. I just want to share my personal viewpoint of these aspects of dwarven society.
First, you have your original 7 dwarves. These guys can easily get tricked out on the embark configuration however you want, but this one point remains. These guys are going to be legendary in a short time unless one of them gets mauled by vicious carp, but these guys are basically dwarves with their B.S. or B.A. degrees in their trades and have to work up to Legendary dwarf, PhD. What these guys do do is provide structure and organization and leadership within the fortress until higher importance nobles show up, and they tell all new migrants what's what unless someone else gets up higher on the totem poll.
Ok, that aside. All labors are classified as related to one another on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0. Armorsmithing and weaponsmithing and metalcrafting have a very high relation variable, say something like .75 or .85. Fighting skills are very closely related to one another, something like swords and axes and hammers are .95 to each other. Now, this is the trick, the higher a related skill you have to a skill you do have provides a bonus to speed of a related skill, but not to the quality. This means that if you are a profiecent mason, you can definitely cut stone crafts faster, but they will be the quality level described by your real skill value.
As far as the most basic organization of work that exists, you have a team. Perhaps the same system of organization and handling of teams could translate to military operations, perhaps not. Teams are groups of dwarves that work together for a small and minute task. Say your team builds and hauls doors, and hauls the stone to make the doors. Your highest ranking dwarf in the particular skill category of the labor is the boss/manager, and you cannot promote a regular dwarf with little to no skill in a category to a higher level above a higher level dwarf; this is very similar in thought to the military ranking system.
Workshops, rooms, various furniture and areas can specifically be provided to a team. Teams can have their own barracks (for when they work an extremely arduous shift and just have to find the closest bed to crash in), their own mess hall, their own various other ametities and decorations as needed. You can also choose to share a specific room or area with other teams for a larger organization structure composed of smaller subparts.
Also, teams would have settings similar to the military telling them that they can sleep in their own rooms or not. If they're off duty (this could ease stress and unhappy thoughts on the dwarves), on duty (no gain or loss from working unless they havent had any time off in a very long time), overtime (this could cause stress and unhappiness and even illness and injury if left on for too long), or doing a bulk haul job (this would turn on everyone's hauling and then restore it to the previous job state after it's turned off). You could even mix in some related military skills with the teams to allow them to take off the weekend and go sparring together or something so they can all be activated at once for military action.
Now, your team boss plays a few roles: he is almost always the most profiecient dwarf of your team. You will almost never want him to enable hauling labors whenever on duty, just constantly bashing away at his craft or trade. Also, teams can have their own task management queue, and the boss's time spent organizing tasks to be dispatched amongst his team would improve any related nobles skills. He could also spend some time on inventory management, thus reducing the time the record keeper would need to tally up his team's ares for total fortress counts. Eventually, he will wind up with enough experience at both his trade and noble skills to a lower extent. This could be a mechanism to train up dark horse nobles for fortress political positions.
Teams would provide a system of apprenticeship that would allow your peasant haulers to gain trade experience at a much slower pace than those that are operating their trades, but it would give them enough so they wouldn't totally suck serious lemons the first few rounds they try their hand at something. You could integrate this with any systems of knowledge or history or written communication, such that very experience bosses in larger teams could better pass on instruction to their apprentices. Perhaps you could event delegate a hauler as a gopher or some other position to the boss and have that one gaining trade experience at a rate of 1.1 or 1.2 times the rate of generic haulers/apprentices along with a very, very small rate of experience in the bosses related noble skills and just ever so slighty speed up the boss's noble tasks when not hauling.
Burrows (I like to think of them as guilds or departments) could be a larger grouping of teams under a hierachy of management. This would represent much larger labor units that could cohabitate and interact on a larger scale. these guys could be given a huge queue of tasks and pass them down to the teams most experienced in that particular trade operation. You could have a team of smelters, a team of armorsmiths, a team of weaponsmiths, a team of glassmakers, and a team of craftsdwarves populate a burrow, with each team more specialized than the entire burrow. You could either have the burrow management dispatch tasks down, or they could pick out tasks from the entire fortress managements' queue for tasks that they are profiecient at.
Eventually, all burrows would be under the stewardship of the highest level nobles. Your fortress manager would dispatch jobs amongst the different burrows, the record keeper would keep all fortress counts, the broker would organize everyone to haul all their stuff to the depot and then talk the elves out of those leafy tunics they have in that bin over there.
Now, in my eyes, dwarven society is very much hierarchical, and beaucracy and military and trade and craft skills are all things that easily mingle and blend together. It couldn't be better if you spent your dwarfy days smelting ore, hammering steel, hauling stone, drinking and eating and hanging out with are the same fellows you would put your work gloves down for a pair of chain gauntlets and an axe for.
Libraries and studies and laboratories would be the havens of your team leaders and burrow leaders and nobles. These sacred halls of knowledge and planning would be the central cornerstone of what separates the dwarfs from the creatures of the dark. Very high ranking dwarfs of a profession or talent could leisurely relax and pen down their experiences in the world, perhaps instilling their works with some pearl of knowledge for a young child to read and go forth to forever be obsessed and fascinated with that particular trade.
Various teams and burrows could have specific libraries dedicated to their specific trades. The fortress as a whole could have libraries of history and tales, providing some source of entertainment or value to some idlers looking for a place of rest. Reading a good book could even instill a dwarf with obscure knowledge of a trade unrelated to his own, it could increase an intellgience attribute, it could just give them a very happy thought. A library would be built from shelves and tables and chairs, the bookshelves could be stocked very large numbers of books. This could provide public works libraries for the masses, and specific and high quality engineering/trade libraries for your workers. Workers could even take a break in their assigned library to study.
Toady, you have a very good idea for burrows, and I just would like to expand upon your idea in ways that I could think of. As always, just a suggestion, but I hope it help you out in your development. Happy hacking, man!
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Topic: Burrows, teams, organizations, wings, libraries, labarotories, studies, etc. (Read 525 times)