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[zwei]

I would love to be able to easily match labors for dwarves by their personality. Some ability to ask game who is best Fisherdwarf that will take all the details into account (dwarf with preferences to fish, liking outdoors, procastrinating/lazy so that he wont overfish too fast and ideally with some skill ranks...).

In a simulation, "all the details" are highly context-dependent: if you breach a cavern full of water then "likes the outdoors" is suddenly a much less important qualification for a fisherdwarf. The only way to tell how the simulation is going to play out is by...running the simulation.

The upshot is that the HR idea makes a lot of sense, because any kind of heuristics or rules of thumb along these lines are inevitably going to fail, in which case it'll be important to have someone to blame. (Just like real life.)

Well, part of the idea is that player can define "worker profile" by himself and edit it later, with game providing only basic templates, if anything. Heuristics of choosing/reassigning dwarves would be challenging enough...

[mendonca]

there was suggestion with "HR" dorf

He he he. I can imagine the carnage that would cause.

We just need them to sit in a room formulating working time directives, employers rights policy notes etc.

The 37.5 hour week will play havoc with the output of most fortresses, and what about maternity leave?

[Jiri Petru]

There was suggestion with "HR" dorf that manages labor assigments to which you give worker template and amount of workers for it which you desire, template that would not only contain labor assigments, but also prefered presonalities and likes.

Isn't this "too much control"? It feels like the player has absolute power over the dwarves and can also influence their personal lives and dictate their careers, bordering with social-engineering. IIRC, Toady repeatedly stated his goal is quite the opposite and that he wants the dwarves to retain some free will.

[G-Flex]

We already have all that power, though, just not in such an automated fashion. Assigning dwarves certain labors based on their personalities isn't so far out of line with the game's design philosophy, since that amounts to an official decision by the fortress rather than direct control over dwarves' actions.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

In fact, A HR dwarf fits perfectly with Toady's plan to remove the omnipotent god thing, which I believe is his intention.

[NW_Kohaku]

I have to admit I'm not too fond of a archetype system. Sure, it may convey information more quickly, but I just don't feel like having a fort filled with moe-moe dwarves. (You know that somewhere there's an RNG who would roll that)

Heh, the idea of moe-moe dwarves is just difficult to really wrap my head around.  I'm sort of imagining some sort of Happy Tree Friends, where fuzzy little beards with big googly eyes scream "THERE CAN BEEEEE ONLY ONE!" before going into a martial trance and killing fifty people with a sock.

Well, caring about personality traits is possible if you have 7 dwarves, but once you get closer to tripple digits than single... there is just no way i am going to familiarize myself with dwarf beyond basic labor assigment when they immigrate.

I would love to be able to easily match labors for dwarves by their personality. Some ability to ask game who is best Fisherdwarf that will take all the details into account (dwarf with preferences to fish, liking outdoors, procastrinating/lazy so that he wont overfish too fast and ideally with some skill ranks...).

There was suggestion with "HR" dorf that manages labor assigments to which you give worker template and amount of workers for it which you desire, template that would not only contain labor assigments, but also prefered presonalities and likes.

I remember having a conversation about something similar to this a few months ago in this thread.  I went into a bit about "Dwarven Autonomy" in this thread, here, where I was talking about how we could have more autonomous dwarves that chose their own jobs according to their own personality traits and having the player simply adjust the wages of different jobs to incentivize one job over another. 

I have a quote here from back then:

Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.  I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system.  Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.

EDIT: (Part of why I am intending to go back to Class Warfare, and rewrite some of it to make it clearer when dwarves start becoming more autonomous.  Based off of population alone - they start demanding better lives when you hit pop 20, and only vaguely so at that, but below 20, it's assumed that survival is the only priority.)

[zwei]

There was suggestion with "HR" dorf that manages labor assigments to which you give worker template and amount of workers for it which you desire, template that would not only contain labor assigments, but also prefered presonalities and likes.

Isn't this "too much control"? It feels like the player has absolute power over the dwarves and can also influence their personal lives and dictate their careers, bordering with social-engineering. IIRC, Toady repeatedly stated his goal is quite the opposite and that he wants the dwarves to retain some free will.

Well, since goal of this is to be able to say “i want 5 carpenters“, and leave labor assigments to dwarves, I would say it would help with players excercising less controll a you would let dwarves decide what they will do ...

[Untelligent]

I certainly wouldn't want my dwarves to choose their own jobs, that sounds like a really bad idea. Then it would be difficult to, say, make 90% of my dwarves masons, or give everyone every job.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, essentially, 90% masons would work by letting you drop the salary of every other job until almost nothing else is worth doing, or making the salary of masonry several times higher than normal.

And making everyone do everything is pretty much what having only a "bounty system" would wind up making of the fort.

*sigh* I need to go back to refining this idea more seriously, though.  I kind of have to finish writing up the Farming proposal, and do the rewrites to Imperial Dwarves, first, though.

[Rose]

I've played a high fantasy strategy game that used a system like that once. you'd set bounties on enemies, and people would to and fight them, and you'd get money back from shop taxes, unless you got elves, in which case the'd build gambling halls that don't pay taxes and all your fighters would spend all their money there. bastard elves.

[metime00]

heh, majesty. That game is quite bad but I still love it. I did like the indirectness of that game but I think not being able to assign jobs in Dwarf Fortress wouldn't be as enjoyable.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, that was sort of the point of the dwarfbot thread.  To ask people how much automation they would want or could handle.  The "Majesty system" is merely at or near the extreme form of autonomy. 

Basically, see it as a spectrum where on one end, we have factory-produced identical dwarves who can perform no action without direct micromanagement telling them that they are hungry, and that they need to go to this stockpile and eat this piece of food now, and on the other end, there are a bunch of special little snowflakes that can only be vaguely coaxed into doing the sorts of things they need to do to survive.  How far do you want to slide along that axis?

[tps12]

*sigh* I need to go back to refining this idea more seriously, though.  I kind of have to finish writing up the Farming proposal, and do the rewrites to Imperial Dwarves, first, though.

Have you ever tried working on a game of your own? You have so many ideas, it might be fun.

[TolyK]

*sigh* I need to go back to refining this idea more seriously, though.  I kind of have to finish writing up the Farming proposal, and do the rewrites to Imperial Dwarves, first, though.

Have you ever tried working on a game of your own? You have so many ideas, it might be fun.

hmmm I could help program when i finish some projects.

[SalmonGod]

Not following this too closely lately, but I've seen a couple mentions of how one cares less about their dwarves as they get into the triple digits.  I think this is a kind of neat dynamic as it is.  Things are really rough starting out, and the first couple waves of settlers have really interesting lives.  You build a bond with those, and they're typically a large enough cast of characters to keep you drawn in for many years.  After the 50+ dwarf point, you're only vaguely familiar with most of them, and occassionally one dwarf will do something noteworthy and join in with the original core cast of important characters.

At least, this is what it feels like when I play, and I actually really like it.  In my current fort, there's less than two dozen dwarves I actually care about out of 10 or so.  Occassionally one dies, and occassionally I find reasons to care about another one who was previously just a face in the crowd.  The cast and plot never seems to stagnate.  It's awesome.