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[Derakon]

I think it'd be neat to have varying levels of workshop quality, e.g. "shack", "shop", "factory", and so on. Unlike product qualities, these would not be generated randomly; rather, they would be explicitly built. Quality would determine:

* Physical size (poor shops are smaller)
* Amount of materials needed to construct (larger shops need more)
* Special inputs needed to construct (poor shops need only the revelant skill and raw materials; better ones would need input from e.g. glassmakers when bottles or tubes are needed (stills, alchemists), metalsmiths when metal tools are needed (carpenters, forges), and so on).
* Inherent storage space (better shops would take longer to be cluttered; additionally, some raw materials could be stored directly in the shop ahead of time as an abstracted stockpile)
* Happiness of working in the shop (skilled dwarves demand good workshops, while dabblers are happy pretty much anywhere)
* Efficiency of production (when relevant, better shops use fewer consumable inputs, e.g. fuel)
* Quality ceiling on goods produced (bad tools and cramped space will prevent dwarves from working to their full potential, but the inverse is true for the better shops if you have the skill)

That last one is the kicker, since otherwise you'd pretty much just make more of the same type of shop. The goal is that early on, you'd only have the resources to make the cruddy shops, and they'd serve you adequately, but as time goes on you'd want to create better shops for your skilled artisans.

The motivation for this change is mainly in that I think it's kinda odd that there's no bootstrapping of workshops in DF. All you need for a fully-functional magma forge is an anvil (which you must import) and some rock. I think it'd be neat, and give players more goals to aim for, to have more of a progression in shop creation. It also creates more relations between different shops, thereby giving dwarves more to do. Something like this:

* Metalwork shack
** Requires one stone or wood to produce
** Enables metalcrafting but not weapon/armor forging
** Enables creation of basic metal tools
** Not magma-capable

* Metalwork shop
** Requires anvil, three stone, metal tools, and a bellows (leathershop output)
** Enables all metalcraft and forging with high quality ceiling
** Magma-capable

* Metalwork factory
** Requires anvil, three stone, three metal bars, metal tools, bellows, mechanisms
** Enables all metalcraft and forging with no quality ceiling
** Magma-capable

The basic idea is that the first shop allows you to, with crude handmade tools and a lot of fuel, make the anvil and tools you need to start making actually effective equipment. Then, once you've managed to get things going well, you could make a later upgrade to the mega-shop to keep your artisan happy and churning out those high-quality goods.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

I recall somebody once suggested a scalable\upgradeable workshop design before, though not so well laid out. Wasn't a bad idea then, sounds good now too.

Another perk to such an idea would be to have the larger workshops capable of supporting more than one dwarf, so rather than having to build 4 workshops side by side and manage the queues separately, you could build a single factory.

One thing that I don't like in your example is that space = quality. And I imagine I'd want a separate, small but quality workshop for special orders. (For a real life example, regarding guitars, there are factories and then custom shops for special high-quality orders.)

[Drakale]

Interesting, but the difference in effort between making the shop and the factory seems trivial. Almost everybody will just skip the shop part i think... Maybe if a  very skilled architect was needed to build it would make it harder to obtain... I guess it would have to wait for a better architect mecanic though.

[Derakon]

Sorry, I should have used something other than "three metal bars" as one of the requirements for the factory. The goal was to say:

* You can make a shack with just raw materials
* You can make a shop with the tools you can make in a shack
* You can make a factory with the tools you can make in a shop

So maybe instead of "metal bars" it's "furnace" (or, in the case of a magma forge, the containers needed to hold and manipulate the magma). Or you could just require a "large anvil" which the shack isn't capable of making. Naturally, you can always just import the goods you need to make the larger shops.

And yes, I'd meant to suggest allowing multiple dwarves to work in the larger shops, but somehow it slipped my mind.

There's no reason why you couldn't have both small and large high-quality shops (or, for that matter, why you couldn't have a large low-quality shop), but that's added complexity - "bloat", if you will - that seemed largely extraneous to the overall idea.

[winner]

I support this idea
would a strange mooded dwarf claim an entire factory?

[Lyrax]

I'm not sure whether to support this idea.

On the one hand, it allows for more growth once you've got a half-dozen of all your workshops.  'cause you have to upgrade them.  Would also help explain why not everyone has high-quality goods.

On the other hand, it makes the game even more complex.  It's already complex.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Lyrax:
<STRONG>On the other hand, it makes the game even more complex.  It's already complex.</STRONG>

Complex?  COMPLEX?!?

DF is staggeringly immense!

There are only a few games I know of that have whole wikis devoted to understanding it:

D&D
ShadowRun
World of Darkness

The latter two because of all the history and the first due to the fact that there are no less 50 published rule books.

[PTTG??]

I definitely think that this would be a significant addition to the game; in fact, I'm pretty sure that some elements of this are in the bloats or something, though perhaps not as developed as this. this has my Seal of Approval.

[Cosmonot]

quote:Originally posted by Draco18s:
<STRONG>

Complex?  COMPLEX?!?

DF is staggeringly immense!

There are only a few games I know of that have whole wikis devoted to understanding it:

D&D
ShadowRun
World of Darkness

The latter two because of all the history and the first due to the fact that there are no less 50 published rule books.</STRONG>

There are many more games with wikis than your examples, including Doom and Guitar Hero. Not all of them are as simple as those two, but many of them are, and most of them aren't nearly as compliated as your examples.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Cosmonot:
<STRONG>There are many more games with wikis than your examples, including Doom and Guitar Hero. Not all of them are as simple as those two, but many of them are, and most of them aren't nearly as compliated as your examples.</STRONG>

*Hits up the Doom Wiki*
Only 1/4 or so "game play" content (including cheats, multiplayer, and easter eggs)...and contains information on all Doom games instead of just one.

I will however conceed the point.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

quote:

The latter two because of all the history and the first due to the fact that there are no less 50 published rule books.

have you ever heard about Rifts (the RPG)?

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by Derakon:
* Quality ceiling on goods produced (bad tools and cramped space will prevent dwarves from working to their full potential, but the inverse is true for the better shops if you have the skill)

The only really bad part about the suggestion.
Having shitty tools doesn't mean the crafter wont be able to produce good things. It needs to be more like the material system for weapons and armor. A copper sword can kill a enemy just as much as a iron sword can, but the iron sword gets the job done better and faster. If killing a enemy is the equal to producing a masterpeice item, then copper tools would only make the crafting process take longer then if you'd been using iron tools; but masterpeices can still be made.

But the rest is fine, because it's already in the game to some degree; Querns and Mills. The player can use a dwarf-powered Quern or a water-powered Mill, the only real differences being size and the item requirements. Of course it's currently unballanced, because the Quern doesn't tire the dwarf as it's used and doesn't influence production quality, which makes it the superior choice to mill items with.

It'd also be best to ballance each of the 3 shop types towards a specific goal. The factory/shop is easy:
The factory produces more items faster, but at a average quality to the dwarves' skills who work there.
The shop produces more higher quality items at a slower rate, because only one dwarf works there.

But the shack is more difficult to ballance, since once the initial items are made, they can simply be re-made at the other production facilities (and it wouldn't make sense to restrict specific items to only a shack)
So, to ballance the "shack" it should instead allow an ability that other production buildings don't:
BASE QUALITY improvement on 'simple' items like tools and crafts. IMO, with this new purpose, the "shack" should be re-named a "Finishing shop" since it can 'finish' small items by improving them. (but obviously only a limited number of times)

That way your legendary dwarves can be tucked away and work towards turning the factory-produced generic -Nickle Idol- into a exceptional or even masterpeice, at the item's basic quality level and not it's decorative quality level... though the finishing shop can and should work in decorations, too; possibly even specific ones the player wants (finally, uniforms that all have the same embroiderd shape!) and multiples/combos there-of.

... Each finishing shop would have it's own specialized abilities, too:
Jewlery finishing shops could intentionally produce gem crafts, but take multiple cut gems.
Stone finishing shops could actually allow you to stud items with stone.
Any craft-finishing shop would let you choose the specific item, and the specifics of that detail work (Circles, *dimple dyed cloth* or better, hanging rings of cow leather, menacing with spikes of gold, etc)

Basically a "designer artifact" workshop ability, minus the artifact bonus.

[Derakon]

While you have some interesting ideas, I think you've missed my point, which is that there should be a progression of shops, with some shops being clearly better than others. It doesn't make sense that you can make a fully-functional forge when you've never done any metalsmithing, just because you have an anvil and some stone blocks. Good forges need a lot more than that. However, it's a lot more plausible that you could contrive to make a few handmade tools, with which you could make the good tools that you need to make the forge.

This isn't about copper vs. iron here; this is about "what can you make with your hands" vs. "what can you make with tools". I think you'd agree that a skilled craftsman would be severely hampered in his forging if he had to use a hammer that would shatter if he struck with it too hard; however, he could then use that hammer to make a better hammer - a hammer that he wouldn't be able to make with no tools at all - and that better hammer could then be used to make better goods.

So there's no need to have shacks once you can make shops, except that the shacks are cheaper to make, and thus more suitable for training up your unskilled workers. Everything you can do in a shack, you can do in a shop, but better. The quality ceiling is there precisely so that you're encouraged to upgrade (as is the unhappy thoughts caused by a skilled dwarf working in cramped conditions with bad tools). While I fully support the idea of having a wide variety of different shops with different balance levels - small, medium, large, good, bad, multi-dwarf vs. single-dwarf, et cetera, the idea as stated in the original post is to have a progression from bad shops to good shops.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I still say my custom workshops are superior.

Coupled with a way to define prerequisites for tasks, they will provide any degree of complexity you can wish for.

If you want, the concept of a custom workshop is this:

A workshop is a basic room, either extended from a basic element (the current method) or designated as a zone (the hardly-probable distant-future method).
The workshop can do what it does from this moment on. Presuming task prerequisites are implemented, things can go on different tangents from here.

The basic item for a workshop is something that makes the whole workshop possible - an anvil for a smithy, a furnace for a smelter, a stone slab for a mason. The workshop can then master other buildings. It can master a tool chest, where tools relevant to the workshop (or rather, to the tasks the workshop performs) will be stored. It can master tables, cabinets, machine components, furnaces - anything that may or may not be relevant to the workshop. The worker in the shop will always first look for items, tools, and buildings in the shop's mastered zone (including any stockpiles in it). Whether or no those are available in the shop (fairly easy to track I think) defines which tasks are possible to carry out at the workshop.

The system's fairly flexible (like allowing several workshops sharing buildings) and intuitive enough so that the player won't get lost. The help system would be required to show the player what items/buildings he needs for certain tasks.
It's not very well detailed at the moment though, I agree. It's hard to theoretize about stuff you're not really proficient in (like metalcrafting, brewing, and so forth).

[Drakale]

I really like that idea Sean, if only because it permit you to design your own workshops instead of the generic ones at the moment. It's a pretty big change to the current game logic however.

But just thinking of building a custom small shack as a carpenter workshop, adding the necessary elements and stockpiles to it(so you can control what type of wood will be used if it is restricted to that internal stockpile), lots of possibilities...

The original idea is good too, but this would be perfect