Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Abyssal Squid]

Problem: it's easy to get a room to top quality just by making a huge cavern and filling it to the brim with garbage produced by novice masons.  Exotic materials and quality construction are unnecessary.

Solution: soft caps on room value if the room doesn't meet certain conditions.  
Soft caps as in, "Y% of room value above X is ignored," cumulative with each other.

Some ideas for conditions and their effects:
All floors and walls smoothed: 10% above 249
At least 2, 5, 10 pieces of furniture: 20% above 499, 999, 1499
At least 2, 5, 10 decorated pieces of furniture: 20% above 999, 1499, 2499
At least 1, 3, 5 statues/windows: 20% above 999, 1499, 2499
Median quality level good, fine, superior: 50, 30, 10% above 249, 499, 999
Most valuable furniture material worth 2, 4, 7, 10: 20% above 249, 499, 999, 1499

So in order to get a royal dining room, you'll need to either smooth all the floors and place 10 superior decorated silver statues, or have an unmodified  room value of something like 30,000, or something in between.

[Solara]

I don't know about this exact method, but yeah, something really needs to be done about room quality. Right now I've got a medium-sized hole in the sand with a few -wooden chairs- and all my dwarves are just ecstatic about their fine dining room, when I'd couldn't call it more than meager.

In addition to any other criteria, IMO a royal room should require either an artifact or a certain number of masterworks.

And hanging out in one for a few minutes probably shouldn't instantly make a dwarf totally cool about the death of their child...

[ June 10, 2008: Message edited by: Solara ]

[ShadowDragon8685]

Dwarves are naturally materialistic weasels.

They don't care if it's a single artifact of a bonehorde of legendary proportions filled to the brim with carved bones.

They only worship the almighty Dwarfbuck value.  

[Neonivek]

"Right now I've got a medium-sized hole in the sand with a few -wooden chairs- and all my dwarves are just ecstatic about their fine dining room"

Ordinary dwarves have low standards. You will notice that Nobles who use said dining room will have a much lower oppinion of it.

[Abyssal Squid]

Dwarves or not, it hurts my suspension of disbelief that the current human keeps are just shy of Royal status.  Plus, it's more fun to build exotic furniture (like turquoise-encrusted brass tables) than it is to just crank out yet more layer rock chairs and statues from your once-fey mason.

I'm not particularly attached to the system in my first post, either, except that the caps should mostly be soft, and that most citeria should have multiple levels.

[Puzzlemaker]

Should be a divisor in there.

Quality = dwarfBucks / ((size + numFurniture) * .9);

with dwarfbucks being the total raw quality of the room, size being the total size of the room, and numFurniture being the total amount of furniture in the room.

This averages out the total value of the room, with size and the number of furniture having the same weight.  The .9 allows very large rooms with lots of furniture to have more value, even if the workmanship is shoddy, then a smaller room with the same ratio of size, furniture, and value.

[Granite26]

I agree with the theory, a huge room full of junk feels like an exploit, especially when it's a dinning room serving hundreds of dwarves at once.

Perhaps this could be resolved by dividing a room's value by the expected number of users (AKA a dining room's value would be divided by the number of chairs in it)

I think one of the accepted methods of dealing with this sort of thing IRL is to square the values of everything while adding it up.  (I.E. a value 1 chair would only add 1, a value 10 table would add 100 and a value 100 statue would add 10,000)

Additionally, a cheap way to lower the cost of rooms that have more than one square would be airport zoning.  AKA charge less for rooms subject to noise pollution.

(edit for grammer)

[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: Granite26 ]

[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: Granite26 ]

[Dadamh]

I think a valid way of determining how nice something is would be to have it affected by the relative wealth of the fort.

People, and likely dwarves, have different expectations.  A nice apartment in the slum is a miserable hole in the wealthy district.  What seems nice in Harlem is completely unrentable in Manhattan.

Thus, sure, your legendary miners don't mind a wooden cot in a sandy pit of a room when your fort doesn't have the means to provide otherwise, but if your dwarves are all up to their arses in adamantium (Dwarven arses are lower), then why would they settle for anything less than a palace paved in gold?

[PTTG??]

Also, consider this: I designed some rooms assuming that a square is 2.3-2.7 feet on each side. A 1300 sq. ft. home should be comfortable but not exactly nobility- middle-class. These end up being HUGE in comparison to a regular dwarf hole with a door and a bed. Farms, megabeasts, and rooms break the tile size system. When it takes 25 squares to get five units of plump helmets, Bronze Collossii can't chase your dwarves down a 2-foot wide corridor, and humans have more than a 50 sq. foot hut, DF will be almost perfectly consistent.

[LumenPlacidum]

quote:Originally posted by Puzzlemaker:
Quality = dwarfBucks / ((size + numFurniture) * .9)

Dining Room 1: 1 artifact mudstone table with no special decorations in size 1 room with no chairs - value: 2000 dwarfbucks { 3600 / (1+1) / .9 }

Dining Room 2: 14x36 hall, the long walls lined completely with masterwork stone statues of 72 dwarven kings overlooking three 2x30 dining *tables* flanked by *chairs* - value: 129.87 dwarfbucks { 108000 / (504+420) / .9 }

I think that might need to be refigured.

[Puzzlemaker]

Yeah, you are right.  How about this.

((tileValueAverage * furnitureAverage) + totalValue)/2;

[Derakon]

One other thing to keep in mind right now is that the division you get for overlapping rooms only applies once. So for example, I have a single huge bedroom with over 70 beds in it, and it's Royal because I've engraved the entire place (some of the walls and floors are silver), stuck a few very nice statues in, and installed a screw pump with a glass tube so heavily-encrusted with gems that it's worth over 20k alone. Every single dwarf has his/her own bed, each bed has a room designation, and the room designations all overlap.

Mind you, this makes making nice bedrooms much easier, and I was never very interested in that aspect of the game anyway. And I think there's a certain amount of realism in dwarves appreciating communally-owned rooms that are very nicely put-together. I don't think that the current .25x modifier should be stacked; it should be possible to make a set of barracks-style bedding that dwarves are happy with. Just...not royal.

[Draco18s]

Yeah, you are right.  How about this.

((tileValueAverage * furnitureAverage) + totalValue)/2;

All rooms include a door in the furniture calculation.

Small bedroom (1x4):
15 tiles (average value: 15, smoothed light rock)
4 pieces of furniture (superior quality, wooden: 40 each)
Formula: 492

Large dining room (10x6):
96 tiles (average value: 4.5, smoothed grey rock)
40 pieces of furniture (well crafted, rock: 20 each)
Formula: 661

Attempt to break the formula:
Tiny noble's dining room (1x2):
12 tiles (smoothed obsidian: 25)
3 furniture (masterwork, obsidian: 360)
Formula: 5190

So I'm a little iffy on this one.  No artifacts needed, no engraving, no expensive materials, and a noble's private (and rather cramped, its barely a hole in the wall) its almost 8 times more valuable.  You could start housing the king in a 2x4 room as long as everything was made out of platinum or aluminum (estimated value: 19680--and that's from simple multiplication on the 1x4 room above, forgoing aditional space and furniture).

[Erk]

Maybe I've not played exhaustively enough but I don't see too much flaw in the current system. The main issue seems to me to be that large public rooms gain value too quickly. Easy solution: rooms that have no owner have their value divided by 5 (or some other number). After all, public rooms tend to be much larger than private, and a dwarf is more likely to be impressed by a fancily decorated private room than by seeing hte same decorations in a main hall.

After that, well, I have to say that decorations notwithstanding, a "private office" in a 7x7 space is already pretty impressive on its own merits and should be pretty valuable. That's bigger than four workshops, after all.

[Derakon]

Erk: if you take that approach, then I'll just put 70 tables and chairs into my royal dining room, along with a few extra gewgaws, and then every dwarf will have a private royal dining room, despite the fact that they aren't private in the slightest.

The system will always be gamable to some extent, but we can fix the more blatant abuses.