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[profit]

I have thought about the time scales and here are the ideas I came up with. I know these changes may not be universally popular but I really think they would add to the game.

#1.  Cut the number of days in a month to 7.  *dont go crazy yet, let me finish

#2 Expand the length of a day by 3x. * so months would be aproximatly 21 of their current days long

#3 Keep dwarf movement speed the same as it is, but make most tasks 3x slower except eating and drinking.

#4 Slightly reduce food, drink and sleep requirements

#5 reduce a year by 4 months removing one from every season

I know this probably has a couple minor flaws in it but it starts to adress some of the timing issues inside of a fortress.

This addresses the speed at which craftsmen gain levels.  With their work slowed they will take 3x longer to reach legendary, yet material costs remain unchanged.

This addresses the fact children often have ZERO bearing on a fortress other than  they get in the way,  With year length reduced, some children may actually reach adulthood.

This addresses the parties going on through the year problem.   Parties will now take comparatively 1/3rd the amount of manufacturing time away (Because the manufacturing is slowed down), and will last hopefully only a couple days.

This addresses the hauling takes too much time comparatively issue.   Hauling will now be significantly less of a crafsmans time, and will be much more realistic.

This addresses the efficiency means everything problem.  With Dwarves comparatively walking much faster now, fortress can be a little less efficient and be more designed ascetically and still function.  You don't need to stack bedrooms on the dining hall on the booze stockpile.  They now have time to walk to each without it killing productivity so bad.

This addresses the extreme tunneling speed of miners problem.  Miners will now not be able to mine quite so much, so hauling blocks and such away will be a little more in balance.

This addresses a single craftsman can turn out bucketfuls of anything.  Well he still can but he will only be able to do 1/3rd as much.. Maybe you just might need two stone carvers to make stone trinkets to buy out a caravan... probably not but it would be a little closer to requiring 2.

This addresses the fact it takes days for a dwarf/caravan/siege to move across the map.  Should help make the game a little more realistic.

Surprisingly I believe this may even also address the lag issue.   With more dwarves inside their jobs and less pathing around it should make the game run better.. maybe up to 3x faster.


Thank you for taking the time to read this.

[Eduren]

Well your welcome.

[profit]

Well your welcome.

LOL had to add that part since it became such a long post =)

[tsen]

Seems reasonable, if currently unrefined. 8"} 

Definitely merits further discussion!

[Felblood]

So, basically, you want the length of the calendar day to sync with the actions of the units on the map, as opposed to the length of the year.

I suppose we can't have both, without the year getting ridiculous long, and this does seem like a pretty well reasoned compromise, with dwarves sleeping once a day, etc.

We manage to cope with the current system when it has many serious breaks from reality. This proposal seems to have fewer.

There are some balance tweaks that would need to be made, for this to work, possibly a lot of them.

Liaisons might need to stay longer, in case your broker or mayor was in the middle of one of the longer jobs, when they arrived. It can already be a pain, getting them to put down what they're doing. --or we could just have dwarves cancel jobs, if they conflict with a meeting. It's sloppy, but it would work.

Weapons production would become a lot more important, in the early game, as you'd need to start as soon as possible, to have a hope of getting any done, before you needed them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and gives some weight to wooden shields, and other military gear that doesn't require a strong industrial base.

The production rate bonus for skilled workers will mean a lot more, and there will be an incintive to assign multiple dwarves to a single labor. Currently, you quickly reach a point where anyone other than your furniture and weapons industries can be manned by a single dwarf, in a fort of almost arbitrary size.

[Silverionmox]

Timing issues need to be addressed, but I think it's simpler by creating two new raws: one that has a list of tasks and defines how much frames it takes to do something, and another one for the calendar: how much frames in an hour, hours in a day, ...

Because people will want to tweak the balance.

[Pilsu]

Years already pass quickly and you want to make them even shorter? Well, I guess putting it in the raws would let me have my realism

I'd just let the player deal with multiple civs of the same species at the same time. There's no shortage of enemies and traders even with longer years if they'd just show up. As for kids, basic labor and apprenticeship would make them useful in the long term

[Granite26]

Read Me

[Rowanas]

Yes, yes, let's waste so much precious time creating everything in our fort. Making things take forever is not a solution. All I would really be in favour of is a lengthened year, as things wouldn't be tedious, but siegers and ambushes wouldn't arrive on top of each other all the time.

[lucusLoC]

I never pay attention to dates at all, just trade/siege and freze/thaw cycles, so day/month timings dont realy mean anything to me. With that said i doubt this will have any effect on lag. Even if dorfs spend mor time in their workshops there will stull be a majority of the fort pop pathing at one time (dont forget to count animals and other units. They path too.) Changing the length a day takes will not suddenly mean that my game will run better than 30 fps. Player time to complete a given task will not change, just the in game date will. By all means change the date system, but if you want to reduce player time taken to complete a task you have to up the distance a dorf travels in a given frame. I think you can do that in the raws, but it also affects the job speed as well? Is there a raw that affects movement speed and not job speed? That may be what we need. The date issues are just flavor.

[LegoLord]

Personally, this would not make the game better for me.  At all.  As it is now, getting things done takes what seems like a stupidly large amount of time to me.  Reducing the length of a year does not solve this, as job speed would be 3 times longer.  As it has been mentioned in other threads, there are better ways of preventing every dwarf from becoming legendary than slowing everything down; one such thing is the requirement of teaching (which I believe is due to be implemented in version 41a).

As for mining, that is also slow enough.  I don't think I could bear to wait 3 times as long as I have to now just to get enough bedrooms, farms, and workshop areas carved out to get things started, unable to occupy myself with anything else because I would need so many dwarves focused on one type of job.  I'd get bored with a fort before it really started.  There are also probably ways to make those initial necessities more challenging.  Longer time requirements just makes it more tedious to wait for something to happen.

In short, longer does not make it more challenging, and probably only removes from the game.  There is no realistic time scale for a game; a game year made to scale with a real year is either too fast to see what's happening or too long to make any progress.

[Grendus]

While the idea has some merit, I don't like it. From what I get, you're suggesting that

1. Days are longer and
2. Years are shorter

This addresses some of the time scale issues with how long it takes dwarves to do anything (a hauling task that took three days now only takes one) without effecting the length of the year, but it's basically relabeling the problem. Most players don't think in terms of days, just cycles (sleep cycle, food cycle, how-can-I-get-more-tasks-to-this-starving-dwarf cycle). While it might be worth looking into for clarity sake, I don't think it would really effect the game as much as you think.

The suggestion about slowing down crafting speed also has merit, though I think a flat 300% increase doesn't really do justice to the craft. The problems I see are a little more complex -

1. Most craftsmen make low to medium grade constructions for their bread and butter. They make swords that will withstand a battle, armor that will see a man through until luck favors his enemy, and other crafts that seek the balance between cheap and strong. When pressed, they can make higher quality goods, but there's rarely enough call for them to do so except on consignment. The current system assumes the dwarf is always trying to make his best and he gets a random quality based on his skill level, when in reality there should be a "Make cheap iron sword" and "Make good iron sword" and "Make great iron sword", for example.

2. Speed scales out of control. While it should taper off after a while - you can only heat metal so fast, the forge takes time to get to blisteringly hot coals, it takes a certain number of folds and hammer blows - a legendary dwarf can do the work of 20 dabbling craftsdwarves, and still make much higher quality gear. As skill increases the dwarf should get faster, obviously, a master doesn't have to consider the next step as often as a novice, but there needs to be a finite threshold and it should be much lower than it is.

[Granite26]

1. Most craftsmen make low to medium grade constructions for their bread and butter. They make swords that will withstand a battle, armor that will see a man through until luck favors his enemy, and other crafts that seek the balance between cheap and strong. When pressed, they can make higher quality goods, but there's rarely enough call for them to do so except on consignment. The current system assumes the dwarf is always trying to make his best and he gets a random quality based on his skill level, when in reality there should be a "Make cheap iron sword" and "Make good iron sword" and "Make great iron sword", for example.

It's the old 'there's no reason not to give your dwarves masterwork everything' problem.

I'll bet wear and tear solves a lot of that... (What do you mean 1 armorsmith can't keep up with 10 dwarves armor needs?)

[Rowanas]

If fixing up gear ends up taking fuel then a lot of forts just could not happen. You'd need 10 armourers just to keep up with a fair sized fort, and each of them would require fuel (for each bit of armour?) etc etc. The fuel consumption will be stupid, or EVERY fortress will be forced towards magma.

[LegoLord]

Armor doesn't break that often, does it?