Not to be nit-picky or derail a thread but I just read through the topic you started and saying they "despise the idea" "for no apparent reason" seems to imply you didn't make much effort reading any of the several other posts in that thread. You shouldn't take people's disagreement with your idea of an external scripting program[/b] as some sort of mindless rage towards the idea of making brewing more important then engraving.
Oh hey, look, someone who didn't read a thing I wrote is complaining that I don't read what people write. I'd say I'm surprised, but this defines everyone who was doing this: You are making up strawman positions to fight against, ignoring anything I am actually saying.
Still don't like having so much control over what the dwarves do. They should chose jobs themselves depending upon what they think is most important to do right now. That way, Toady has a framework to add more influence of personal preferences, law and order and Nobel commands. It's bad enough that we have to queue every job ourselves already.
I actually am fairly conflicted on the subject of how much of a leash we put on the dwarves. On the one hand, DF is a game with so little forgivness for error, and which creates so much frustration when dwarves take actions contrary to our intent that it is hard to argue
for making dwarves more responsible for their own actions. On the other hand,
dwarves that are a little more self-centered and individual, based on personality traits, would make the dwarves more than simple units of "happy face" markers.
As a sort of bridge between the two, I previously suggested the ability to put in how soon a dwarf will take a break for food or even personal time as a priority on their script. I also would prefer dwarves obviously have a lower limit on how much straight productive time they will take based on their own personalities. While it would seem strange to make dwarves more independent by directly telling them when to take their "me time", if you can set when they take their breaks as a priority, so that some priorities will take greater precedent (up to the limit where they have to quit because they are starving or dehydrating), you can schedule in more dwarf time... unless you like being a harsh task master, but then, you could let happiness elements degrade performance at that point.
A problem is, though, that players would need some sort of interface signal that says when and why a dwarf is taking the actions they are. Otherwise it's just dwarves being contrarian to some players.
Author
Topic: Job Priority's (Read 1208 times)