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[praguepride]

Oh god. Just reading that made my head hurt and in the end I still think that the current system is far superior in both ease of use/understanding and in comprehension then your crazy subskill insanity.

It's well thought out, I'll give you that, but it's complexity for complexities sake. Except for the minority of people here clamoring for more skills, this seems to be a non issue.

Nobody questions how a dwarf can smash things into dust with a draw bridge, so why should we get bent out of shape over whether coopering should be it's own skill, a subskill, or a byproduct of a subskill of a new skill?

[G-Flex]

Nobody questions how a dwarf can smash things into dust with a draw bridge, so why should we get bent out of shape over whether coopering should be it's own skill, a subskill, or a byproduct of a subskill of a new skill?

• Yes, they do. Drawbridge atom-smashing is hardly the ideal way things should work. Toady would tell you as much himself; it's silly.
• The skill system will likely change in the future, partially in ways you're saying it won't. See these for reference, and probably some others:
  
  

  Req32, SKILL SYNERGY, (Future): Have some skills give bonuses to other skills.

  Bloat76, MONSTER FIGHTING SKILLS, (Future): Some skills for fighting unusual creatures, at least as a dwarf mode bonus from dungeon master, but possibly as general opponent knowledge system.

  Core73, COMBAT OVERHAUL, (Future): This one is a bit vague, mostly because the Combat Arc consists of so many small changes rather than a few sweeping additions. Aside from obvious changes to projectiles and the wrestling interface, skills could afford to overlap, attributes need to be associated to skills properly, skills could become rusty and ultimately degrade as in Armok 1, new general combat related skills can be added, styles/techniques for weapon/weaponless fighting roughly along the path Armok 1 had started, etc. As a dev item, this'll be done when combat more or less makes sense.

[Kilo24]

It's well thought out, I'll give you that, but it's complexity for complexities sake. Except for the minority of people here clamoring for more skills, this seems to be a non issue.

Nobody questions how a dwarf can smash things into dust with a draw bridge, so why should we get bent out of shape over whether coopering should be it's own skill, a subskill, or a byproduct of a subskill of a new skill?

It's more accurate to reality, leads to supporting both generic skills and specific skills, allows you to describe a dwarf's abilities by describing him generically, and can reduce the problems of the current skill system if implemented well.  It'll let dwarves be more varied in skill sets and to excel in smaller areas than a broad skill.

There are cases of useless complexity; splitting up skills to be more accurate in ways that make dwarves more diverse is not one of them.  Coopering itself might be one of them, especially in a poor skill system like the one we have now.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Skills based on the "shape" of the thing being made are a poor idea.  Metal and Wooden barrels have next to nothing in common in the manor they are actually made.  Metal vessels are generally made by beating a sheet over a form, a wooden barrel is made of many staves that are bent together and fastened with hoops.  Knowing the "general size and shape of a barrel" is not even remotely a skill, everyone would know that in this time period just as everyone knows the "size and shape of a Telephone" today but hasn't the foggiest idea how to make them. 

Crafting consists of applying a specific PROCESS to a specific material to create a set of similar products, the common characteristic of the product set being determined by the inherent nature of the process.  Different products require different processes even using the same material a different product will call for a different process.  On occasion a product can be created by more then one process such as carving a wooden bowl by hand or on a lathe, the bowl falls in the set of radially-symmetrical products that can be made on lathes as well as the wider set of carve-able shapes. 

A totally different materials ALWAYS require different processes to create items with the same ultimate shape or usage.  All the things made by a Blacksmith can be considered to fall under the same skill because the Blacksmith applies basically the same process to Iron (repeated heating and hammering) to create all the shapes, Iron can also be melted and cast, a very different process which can create an even wider variety of shapes/forms but because the process is different the skill is different and knowing how to hammer iron into a shape dose not tell you how to cast it in that same shape.

[NW_Kohaku]

Been watching this thread go by for a while, but figure I might as well weigh in...

I'm going to have to weigh in on the side of "not worth it" for many of the same reasons mentioned about it simply not being different enough to warrant an entirely seperate skill.

After all, are we going to split swimming into different kinds of swimming stroke?  Do they automatically do a different swimming technique when they have certain weight burdens, or when they are completely naked? 

What about combat, do we train backswings seperately from hitting with the overhead chop?

Yeah, we could probably get by with splitting coopers apart from other woodworking (and woodcrafting is already different), but as has been said, we don't need wood burner, potash maker, lye maker, and soap maker ALL as seperate skills - those skills don't even really DO anything when you train them!  It's not even a skill, you don't get wood that is burned better from having plenty of wood burning training - it just clogs the already too-long labors menu with more things to enable or disable.  (And means you get dwarves coming in with nothing but wood burner as a skill... seriously, a mother comes to my fort with two kids, and her only skill as a laborer is burning things?)

I don't want to come off like a broken record, but realism is nice, it helps make a game more intuitive if a game behaves the way real life would, but it should never be a GOAL simply for its own sake.  What matters is whether it makes the game more entertaining for the player.

Going through Silverionmox's suggestion, though, all I see that would affect the player is that you would just keep doing what you always do - making low-quality crap out of common materials to train yourself up, but now, you either train slower (because if you train on barrels, then your beds are only getting a fraction of the experience - just that for the wood material), or you just get plenty of "splash-over" experience in other things you probably won't let your dwarf work on.  (For example, if making a barrel out of wood will make them better at making a barrel out of metal, but you never make barrels out of metal, what have you accomplished?)

I also struggle to envision what kind of chart you would need to see all these different experiences you start accumulating all over the place in a way that you could quickly see how well you would be able to make a dwarf labor on, say, green glass terrariums if they have made a few dozen green glass blocks, and also some tin cages.

It is, as praguepride said, not worth adding complexity unless it can actually provably make the game more interesting or fun for the player.  This looks more likely to just make an already opaque and difficult interface even more opaque.

(And that doesn't even go into the topics that Impaler[WTG] goes into, which are all things I agree with.)

(And please don't say that this stuff doesn't matter because it will only be changed, anyway.  Anything and everything we talk about can be changed, so if talking about anything is pointless if it can be changed, then talking about everything is just as pointless.)

[Loyal]

I don't want to come off like a broken record, but realism is nice, it helps make a game more intuitive if a game behaves the way real life would, but it should never be a GOAL simply for its own sake.  What matters is whether it makes the game more entertaining for the player.

This, this, this, this, and THIS.

Realism is overrated. It adds something resembling familiarity and works from time to time, but the second realism starts to interfere with gameplay, or worse, fun (usually in the form of making the realism an active part of gameplay or the interface, such as MGS3's CURE system), any game designer worth his salt will put it down and find another way to solve whatever problem he's working with.

Coopering as an individual skill makes no sense in Dwarf Fortress context. Too much time and labor training up multiple different skills to achieve what could (and currently is) conceivably work(ing) with just one blanket skill, especially considering how expendable and/or easily killed your dwarves are.

----

Going on the Subskills line of thought, I could see, in the future, a new way of handling skills where you'd see a list of primary skills...


- Mining        [||||||||]
- Masonry       [||||||||]
- Carpentry     [||||||||]
- Metalsmithing [||||||||]
- Metalcasting  [||||||||]
(etc)

...where each primary skill could expand to a dropdown menu...



- Mining        [||||||||]
- Masonry       [||||||||]
+ Carpentry     [||||||||]

• Containers  [||||||||]
  Sleeping    [||||||||]
  Drawers     [||||||||]
  Decorative  [||||||||]
  

- Metalsmithing [||||||||]
- Metalcasting  [||||||||]
(etc)

...showing some amount of specialization in particular kinds of Carpentry. But it'd be a passive sort of thing. A skilled carpenter who got that way only making beds and barrels could still make a good cabinet, but the same skilled carpenter who instead focused on making drawers would, for instance, make a better cabinet but not-quite-as-good beds and barrels. Perhaps instead the specialized skills would reduce build times or offer a % chance to come with a free decoration. Perhaps created items have a limited number of possible decorations depending on the skill of the maker. The idea is to offer benefits to the specialized dwarf without punishing the player for failing to micromanage to this effect.

[NW_Kohaku]

Responding to Loyal...

I'm assuming "Sleeping" is bed-making... but why is making a chest really that different from making a cabinet?  They're both basically boxes with a hinge.  I don't even see a reason for sub-skills differentiating these two things.

What's more, the interface is, as I have already said, horribly opaque as it stands, requiring either manually going through multiple pages of multiple windows to specifically look for information (such as, say, happiness levels), and this is just adding new layers to the menus to the interface that most people probably aren't even going to bother looking at.

I mean, I have to ask, do you REALLY see yourself differentiating your carpenters between being "bed" carpenters and being "cabinet" carpenters, and "coopers", and "bin makers" and "decorators" and a dozen other things?  Or are you just going to assing them to a job once, set your workshops to produce, and only occasionally check back to make sure that none of the jobs got cancelled, or mess with which products get made more than others?

If you aren't going to train seperate dwarves specifically for making beds, completely seperate from being cabinet makers, then this isn't adding anything to your game, and we might as well keep blanket skills.

[Kilo24]

Responding to Loyal...

I'm assuming "Sleeping" is bed-making... but why is making a chest really that different from making a cabinet?  They're both basically boxes with a hinge.  I don't even see a reason for sub-skills differentiating these two things.

What's more, the interface is, as I have already said, horribly opaque as it stands, requiring either manually going through multiple pages of multiple windows to specifically look for information (such as, say, happiness levels), and this is just adding new layers to the menus to the interface that most people probably aren't even going to bother looking at.

I mean, I have to ask, do you REALLY see yourself differentiating your carpenters between being "bed" carpenters and being "cabinet" carpenters, and "coopers", and "bin makers" and "decorators" and a dozen other things?  Or are you just going to assing them to a job once, set your workshops to produce, and only occasionally check back to make sure that none of the jobs got cancelled, or mess with which products get made more than others?

If you aren't going to train seperate dwarves specifically for making beds, completely seperate from being cabinet makers, then this isn't adding anything to your game, and we might as well keep blanket skills.

What I could see is a craftsdwarf whose is renowned for his cabinets, but whose beds aren't that great.  That suggestion would allow for that.   That minor advantage is not worth the sheer amount of skills it would add IMO, especially not in this interface.

But you could do a similar breakdown for multi-skill to reduce the number of skills and synergize them, which I'd wholly support.  As an example for production, having a skill for the material being worked, the category of equipment being made, a value mod based on the dwarf's artistry skill, and using the mechanics skill for anything with moving parts might initially seem to be more complicated, but it would allow you fold the miscellaneous toys and such skills (Woodcrafting, Metalcrafting, and Stoneworking) into one skill + the production material skill, have Engraving, instead of being a separate skill, be Stonework + Artistry, and similar weapons of different materials would be produced with the same weapons skill but different material skills.

It's still not a hell of a lot simpler (harder game mechanics in exchange for simplifying the skill list), but would create skill synergy, make a distinction between artistic dwarves versus functionally minded ones, and reward some specialization if the skill requirements for tasks are weighted (a high mechanics would be gained from and further encourage mechanical toymaking, for example).  Because right now, a legendary weaponsmith is as incompetent as a 3-year old child if he ever wants to say, beat a sword into a plowshare.

[The Bismuth]

You could include specialisms quite simply by tying the skills in with preferences.

[Silverionmox]

Which skills are used for which jobs, products and with which materials ought to be moddable in any case, and cabinets and coffers could both very well end up using the "Furniture items" skill or something in the vanilla version. Using subskills would allow the players to give really simple job descriptions, eg. "anything that uses wood", but would also allow very specific orders, like eg. "carved oaken mugs".
Modding requires skills to be - potentially - split up and associated to every single task that's coded into the game. The interface requires very broad groupings as the standard, that branch out into more specific groups. Subskills would allow both of that, without needing to make arbitrary and inflexible simplifications of skills for the interface.

For example, there could be three colums. In the first, materials: stone, wood, metal, cloth, etc. In the second, processes or tools: kiln use, smoothing, engineering, hauling,... In the third, products: food, weapons, furniture, clothing, tools, ... The default: Material: any - Processes: hauling, cleaning - Products: Any. So they would haul and clean any products of any material. Even if there were only 10 categories in each column, that would amount to 1000 possible combinations! Minimal complexity with maximum usability. Those menu items would be expandable, like lists now are when eg. placing furniture or in the stocks screen, allowing very specific orders like forbidding the use of dragon bone. It should be possible to create a general standing rule like that in the manager screen (or Law screen in the future) and indicate exceptions per dwarf in the three skill/job colums.
Priority could be indicated there too. The items in the list could be marked in two ways: with a one-letter indicator to indicate the average quality of the output of the dwarf, and a colour to indicate the priority of the task (eg. red or grayed: forbidden, orange to yellow: lower priority, white: normal, cyan to blue: high priority, purple: matter of life and death).

[NW_Kohaku]

Except, Silverionmox, that IS very complex, given the interface we work with.  Without utilities like Dwarf Therapist, pretty much all you do is set someone to "carpenter", and leave them to build stuff from now until they die or you get tired of a fort.

The question always has to be not what makes the game more realistic or how complex it is, but what difference it will make to the player. 

Tracking "box-making skill" seperately from "carpentry" doesn't make sense, unless you honestly want to make people consider having box-makers who work with any material, just so long as it makes boxes, and focusing on end-product related specialization instead of materials or process related specializations (which, as was pointed out, is actually absurdly unrealistic).

I could kind-of get behind an idea like the "Tricks of the Trade" one that was floating around, where dwarves get some kind of minor specialization that doesn't deal directly with training multiple sub-skills.  You could still just set

This, however, I forsee working in one of two ways:  Either you have a fairly small population.  In very small populations, like your starting 7, you have plenty of job shifting.  This kind of data flood is manageable then, since you don't have many dwarves to look over, and few things have experience, but it's irrelevant - you're going to tell dwarves to work on things because you need them done, regardless of how specialized they are in doing them. 

In still small fortresses, you can have some specialization, so you can have dedicated carpenters or dedicated brewers or cooks or even a seperate armorsmith and weaponsmith, instead of just making one guy do "everything metal".  This still doesn't help, though, because you're still making just one guy be the town's only carpenter or bonecarver or whatever.  Specialization does nothing for you then, either, since it's still just one guy who now has to learn a whole mess of different skills.  Maybe you have a couple guys on one thing, though, let's say you have multiple masons, since you need to get rid of stone.  Does it really help you any to make block carving a seperate skill? 

I could see construction building as a seperate labor from the one where you sit in the shop, since that actually DOES matter to a player (you might want your mason in the shop making doors instead of running out to construct every little wall).  However, do you really want to sit there and look at whether you need to train up your

Then, there's the opposite end: A large fortress.  Let's say you have 150 dwarves.  Are you honestly suggesting you are going to tap "v", and look through 150 dwarves' stats on 30 different metrics to try to puzzle out which of 1000 different combined skills you are actually best suited to using with any one dwarf over any other dwarf? 

Let's say you want to make a wooden door, when all you've been making are stone doors and wooden barrels.  Are you really, seriously going to consider if this dwarf's masonry-related door making skill is more applicable to this one specific job than the carpenter's wood-working experience?  Are you going to do this for every possible combination of jobs, amongst your several dozen workshops?

Or are you going to just go to your carpenter's workshop, and hit "Make Wood Door" like someone who would rather play the game than worry about whose experience levels are most specialized in one given skill than another, because there's simply no way you can micromanage that much data?

This is why I am opposed to anything but blanket skills or maybe blanket skills with little specialization perks- the objective should be to move towards dwarves that can be more autonomous.  This kind of breaking down of skills intrinsically lends itself towards requiring micromanagement.  If it doesn't call for micromanagement, and players don't have to worry about making sure dwarves get training on every possible combination of products, then it is likely to be something that has no real net effect on the player whatsoever, in which case it is just pointless bloat.

You're trying to sell me on how little complexity it would add to the game, but that's missing the point.  It doesn't matter how little negative there is, because I'm not seeing any positive that would make me want to overlook the negatives.

[G-Flex]

Except, Silverionmox, that IS very complex, given the interface we work with.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the interface would need to change; of course it would. This applies to any sweeping change that introduces new complexity, like the military updates we're getting.

Saying "this would be annoying given the way the interface currently is" isn't a blow against the idea, it's just stating a requirement for the idea to work.


I'm personally fine with the idea of dwarves being better at more specific things than they are now, and Toady's development goals state some aspects of this already being planned (especially when it comes to combat). A dwarf being specifically renowned for making beds is more interesting and personal.

The key here is that it's done in a manner that doesn't prevent usability problems, which I think is easy enough. There's no reason why this sort of thing needs to prevent us from simply assigning dwarves as, say, general carpenters; they just might wind up slightly better at making one sort of thing than another.

[Loyal]

but why is making a chest really that different from making a cabinet?

It... isn't? "Drawers" in this case is referring to both chests and cabinets. "Containers" refers to barrels and bins, if that's what you were referring to.

What's more, the interface is, as I have already said, horribly opaque as it stands, requiring either manually going through multiple pages of multiple windows to specifically look for information (such as, say, happiness levels), and this is just adding new layers to the menus to the interface that most people probably aren't even going to bother looking at.

The interface I mentioned (or were you thinking that I was suggesting adding the subskill bit without an interface makeover?) gives a summary of skills with a bar indicating skill level next to it (combining the Labors and General tab), and the 'subskills' are collapsible menu extensions. How you could possibly see this as more opaque than what we have now is beyond me.

I mean, I have to ask, do you REALLY see yourself differentiating your carpenters between being "bed" carpenters and being "cabinet" carpenters, and "coopers", and "bin makers" and "decorators" and a dozen other things?  Or are you just going to assing them to a job once, set your workshops to produce, and only occasionally check back to make sure that none of the jobs got cancelled, or mess with which products get made more than others?

I have absolutely no intent to encourage that kind of behavior. Carpentry remains the carpet-skill for all wooden furniture -- an Adept-level carpenter is going to make Adept-level wooden furniture -- but the subskill bit would allow minor bonuses to those dwarves building to their 'specialty'. Indeed, the most likely scenario of this subskill suggestion is that the use of carpenter dwarves remain the same as ever, with one or two Legendary carpenters who just happen to be good at whatever your fort builds the most of. Or in short, nothing would change unless the player goes out of his way to make it so.

If you aren't going to train seperate dwarves specifically for making beds, completely seperate from being cabinet makers, then this isn't adding anything to your game, and we might as well keep blanket skills.

It's just an idea to add an option for those seeking a more in-depth experience.

[NW_Kohaku]

Except, Silverionmox, that IS very complex, given the interface we work with.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the interface would need to change; of course it would. This applies to any sweeping change that introduces new complexity, like the military updates we're getting.

Saying "this would be annoying given the way the interface currently is" isn't a blow against the idea, it's just stating a requirement for the idea to work.


I'm personally fine with the idea of dwarves being better at more specific things than they are now, and Toady's development goals state some aspects of this already being planned (especially when it comes to combat). A dwarf being specifically renowned for making beds is more interesting and personal.

The key here is that it's done in a manner that doesn't prevent usability problems, which I think is easy enough. There's no reason why this sort of thing needs to prevent us from simply assigning dwarves as, say, general carpenters; they just might wind up slightly better at making one sort of thing than another.

The thing is, I don't think interface or user friendliness are high priorities for Toady in the least.  I mean... just look at the game.  Hell, the "manual" pretty much is just a screen that says "Losing is Fun!" Current experience levels aren't even given as numbers... I mean, you have to go to the wiki and start memorizing whether "skilled" is more skilled than "proficient".

But that's why I was saying I could go for something like that "trick of the trade", where a special quirk could be added onto a dwarf where they have a specialty, but they are still basically just a carpenter with a +1 to bedmaking - you can still make legendary carpenters out of making bins and barrels from now to the end of time, occasionally punctuated by making beds or maybe a cabinet.

That is, however, different from having to go into spreadsheet mode to try to figure out what three experience point pools contribute to making any one given type of product, so that you can figure out the total experience you have to make any one given item.  Even WITH an intuitive and friendly interface, this would be too much work to bother with understanding the talents of all 200 of the dwarves you have after you've been playing a fort for 6 or 7 years.  In a completely text-based menu system where every line is only about 15 letters long, and you're trying to remember what each rank translates into, it's unfathomable.

[Impaler[WrG]]

The evolution of this thread is typical, the OP proposes some rather modest complexity incresse (Splitting a Cooper skill off of Carpentry) and people object or support it for legitimate reasons but quickly other people start throwing around additions that inflate the complexity.  Different additions inflate in different directions and are not in and of themselves that bad, but quickly they seem to all get mashed together into some giant Frankenstein of an idea with exponential complexity and people start running with a debate on the pro's and con's of this giant new system with the complexity lovers embellishing it along the way and the complexity hates doing the same for straw-man purposes.  Eventually the whole thread is derailed. I'm as much to blame as anyone else though