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[forsaken1111]

Engraving should be trained by actually engraving pictures onto things such as stone mugs and of course, walls and floors. Smoothing shouldn't grant XP for it

I disagree with this. Smoothing stone out to an aesthetically pleasing flat plane isn't all that easy, as stone tends to flake and chip and shatter. It would take some skill to make honestly smooth walls from natural stone, and a lot of time.

Do you think smoothing and engraving uses the same skill set?

Well no, but honestly I think a lot of the skills overlap. I think masonry would apply to smoothing walls, and engraving would apply to making stone cups... but my brain works funny so feel free to ignore me if you disagree.

[Grendus]

The specifics aren't important, it's just one way of adding synergy between carpentry and carving. The first post plainly states I'd get rid of bowyers entirely, it's a pointless skill

The problem I have with stone swords is the fact that they're so out of place. Doesn't help other stone weapons aren't featured for some inexplicable reason. That and you don't actually need to work the stone well for them to match steel, any retarded mongrel can make a steel-grade sword out of some obsidian pebbles without any practice. That's just wrong

Armor made of cow bone falls flat on it's face when it comes to the rule of cool. Bone theme certainly works but the bones themselves are rather useless as armor and look silly for the most part. The new materials will make some bones useful however, meaning kitten bone armor is worthless whereas troll bone might actually do something

To expand on the bone theme, there was another thread that discussed this. Bones are too heavy and too brittle for armor. Leather is tough and light, steel is heavier but much tougher, and both bend when hit. Bones have very little give to them, apply enough force and they shatter, especially when dried out. Imagine walking into battle with 2000 fish bones strapped to a shirt. One good hammer blow and you'd be in danger of being impaled by your own armor.

The only place where bone armor might not fall down would be with the magic arc. Carapace armor like what insects use might be arguably decent protection. However, bones should really be reserved for ammo and crafts, they're just not armor potential.

Obsidian short swords are just too good. Compare the material cost: steel takes two iron, two charcoal, and two flux plus two more fuel if you don't have magma. That's expensive. Obsidian takes one obsidian rock and one wood log and bases the item quality off of an incredibly easy to train skill. There is no logical reason why anyone with access to obsidian would use steel for weapons.

As a side note, there needs to be more non-metal weaponry available to dwarves. Axes, spears, and knives tipped with flint/obsidian and maces tipped with stone should be available for early armaments, there's no real logical reason why they shouldn't. With wear implemented, they would be ideal for dealing with early attacks or attacks by wild animals but not so useful against, say, an armed goblin assault.

[Granite26]

Engraving should be trained by actually engraving pictures onto things such as stone mugs and of course, walls and floors. Smoothing shouldn't grant XP for it

I disagree with this. Smoothing stone out to an aesthetically pleasing flat plane isn't all that easy, as stone tends to flake and chip and shatter. It would take some skill to make honestly smooth walls from natural stone, and a lot of time.

Do you think smoothing and engraving uses the same skill set?

Well no, but honestly I think a lot of the skills overlap. I think masonry would apply to smoothing walls, and engraving would apply to making stone cups... but my brain works funny so feel free to ignore me if you disagree.

I don't have a strong opinion, I'm just familiar with Pilsu's and figured I'd point you in the direction of what he's trying to fix

[LegoLord]

Labor should be much slower, requiring larger scale production to buy out caravans. Best way to slow it down would be to apply diminishing returns to speed bonuses conferred by skill

While yes, it is a bit too easy to buy out caravans, I might also remind you that it is done largely with stacks of food; that industry is planned on being fleshed out and nerfed.  I might also remind you that in the time scale of the game, making an item at a forge already takes a couple days of non-stop labor, unless skill is high enough.  But even then, all the materials must be hauled to the workshop, which can also take time, if only because the stockpile ran out of supplies from lack of room.

All that said I agree that bone armor sounds like magic arc stuff, or at least the kind of thing you would need to use strong creatures' bones for.  For example, dragon bone armor being roughly equivalent to iron armor, or perhaps some other lower-grade metal (just as a point of reference).

[forsaken1111]

To expand on the bone theme, there was another thread that discussed this. Bones are too heavy and too brittle for armor. Leather is tough and light, steel is heavier but much tougher, and both bend when hit. Bones have very little give to them, apply enough force and they shatter, especially when dried out. Imagine walking into battle with 2000 fish bones strapped to a shirt. One good hammer blow and you'd be in danger of being impaled by your own armor.

Now imagine you go into battle with a dragon's skull artfully crafted onto your pauldron and its ribs reinforcing a suit of leather armor across your midsection. Sure it's a fantasy creature, but I'd tend to assume a dragon's bones might well make better armor than a fish's. I agree that, while it is viable, it probably isn't terribly effective to use most creature's bones for armor.

[Granite26]

Labor should be much slower, requiring larger scale production to buy out caravans. Best way to slow it down would be to apply diminishing returns to speed bonuses conferred by skill

While yes, it is a bit too easy to buy out caravans, I might also remind you that it is done largely with stacks of food;

Funny, I just have 5 craftsdwarves busy trouncing my excess stone into bins.  Enough wealth to buy out caravans every time.

[forsaken1111]

Labor should be much slower, requiring larger scale production to buy out caravans. Best way to slow it down would be to apply diminishing returns to speed bonuses conferred by skill

While yes, it is a bit too easy to buy out caravans, I might also remind you that it is done largely with stacks of food;

Funny, I just have 5 craftsdwarves busy trouncing my excess stone into bins.  Enough wealth to buy out caravans every time.

Yeah marble + skilled stonecrafter making stone mugs = I buy EVERYTHING

[LegoLord]

And I have one or two cooks produce enough meal stacks to do the same thing, and they aren't even particularly skilled.

[forsaken1111]

And I have one or two cooks produce enough meal stacks to do the same thing, and they aren't even particularly skilled.

Yes well, obviously the prepared food value modifiers need to be looked at but I think the point was the industry/wealth issue as a whole is a bit too easy I think.

Maybe we just need some intelligence on the part of the traders, which will likely come in the caravan arc, to take demand into account. If you've traded them 6 bins of stone mugs for the last 3 years there probably isn't a lot of demand for them and you've flooded the market.

[Rowanas]

Anyone who wants to buy out a caravan will make it happen, punishing those of us who don't want to work non-stp 24 hours a day making stone mugs and totems and cut gems won't help.

[LegoLord]

Anyone who wants to buy out a caravan will make it happen, punishing those of us who don't want to work non-stp 24 hours a day making stone mugs and totems and cut gems won't help.

Exactly.  Trader intelligence is a far better way of dealing with it; if they've been drowned in mugs already they shouldn't want to pay a good price for them, or perhaps even buy them at all.

[Rowanas]

I heavily concur. People that don't want to saturate them with mugs will make less money in total, but get more per product, so it's still viable, but full-on mug makers can still buy out that caravan of anvils at reduced efficiency.

[Granite26]

If crafting takes more time, crafters spend more time crafting and less pathfinding.  Overall, the game speeds up and allows more time for interesting things, like sieges and whatnot.

[Grendus]

I think a few things need to be implemented for caravans, which may be done when Toady fleshes out the caravan arc.

1. Caravans should base value on demand. If you bring them 50,000 limestone mugs, odds are nobody has that much of a demand. Those mugs will have to be distributed to multiple civilizations, possibly some (probably many) will need to be stored until the demand rises again, some will break, etc. They may only give you a small fraction of each mug's value to cover the hassle of finding a market for all the goods. If you bring them a mix of clothing, crafts, armors, weapons, furniture, food, booze, etc, they'll give you closer to face value for the goods. Each good will be less likely to overflow the demand, creating more profits for the caravan at the next stop. I believe this is on the list of things Toady intends to do.

There should also be items with no or limited demand. A 15,000 dwarfbuck statue would have very little value to anyone but a noble, no trader in his right mind would spend such a large amount of valuable trade goods on a single item unless they could guarantee a market for it.

2. Item values will have to be revisited. Plants are too valuable for how little difficulty there is in making them - I've seen stacks of Dwarven Syrup Roast break 13,000 (though to be fair, Sweet Pods are a crazy crop as is, a food with a value of 20 is absurd). Even Quarry Bush Leaves, at a value of 7, are worth more than a bar of bronze. If plants are going to remain as valuable as they are now, farming difficulty must be amped up. If the difficulty remains the same, prices need to drop staggeringly.

Obsidian is absurdly priced as well. The stone can be mass produced, the supply is high yet the demand is hard-coded to be high as well. It's like goblins and their GCS silk clothing, the value is just absurd for the availability.



Buying out a caravan should require work. If you'd rather focus on a megaproject, that's fine, but becoming an economic superpower should be slightly more difficult than plant Sweet Pods, make obsidian mugs, profit. Taking control of the markets should almost be a megaproject in itself.



But we've moved away from the original post. Pilsu's suggestions are, for the most part, very good.

[Felblood]

But we've moved away from the original post. Pilsu's suggestions are, for the most part, very good.

Both True. The majority of these suggestions are actually, quite good, and I should have said so, before I started attacking the weaker points.

In the vast majority of these cases, I agree that there is a problem, I just feel that the proposed solution will create more problems than it solves, and that a deeper level approach will be required.

For example, it is weird to max out engraving, just by smoothing, to the degree that this is the only situation where I might advocate a skill cap, but simply splitting the skills fails to address the root of the problem. --namely that the distinctions between the stone related skills are arbitrary and confusing. Adding another one will only make this problem worse.

Likewise, obsidian swords are too easy to make, and shouldn't compete with iron, let alone steel, for base price. Simply removing them, instead of actually fixing them, would be unacceptable at this stage. Once we have mat properties, I don't think the other issues will be a problem, and those other problems could be fixed (or at least mitigated) by lowering the price, and requiring separate handle manufacturing.

Proper bedding would be nice to have (as the current system is painfully abstract), but I'm concerned with the effects it could have on the early game, especially if bedding requires stuffing of some sort. Rather than starting with feathers, I would recommend bringing in sheep and shearing (along with milkable cows), as a feather industry would take too long to set up cheaply (as butchering destroys the chicken, whereas sheep are renewable), and thus feather beds are a better grade of bedding, reserved for more developed fortresses. Additionally, it should be possible to manufacture a simple sleeping mat, from a single bolt of cloth, to allow players the freedom to embark with neither chickens nor sheep. Monster feathers would have to be inferior to chicken feathers, to give chickens a reason to exist, on chasm maps (Think goblin armor).

All this creates a lot of extra items and item types. What measures can we take to prevent these from becoming a nuisance, akin to stone?

If wool and feathers require bags to store, the cloth demand of a bedding industry could be very considerable, for a small fort (--Enough to make growing enough for both food and cloth an actual challenge? --Probably not, but we can dream.)

Perhaps, the bad and the stuffing are simply merged into the mattress, at the tailors shop. This gives us a simple progression of bag->bag of stuffing -> mattress.

I'm still not sure how to deal with animals that require a bag to butcher. Perhaps a "Butcher to bag" and a "Butcher without bag" command should be added to the butcher's menu, as it's one of the few menus that doesn't get flooded, it wouldn't hurt anything, for now.