But isn't mashing millions of buttons what we do already in DF when we make bedrooms and other rooms?
Which is why I see people asking around for utilities that let you put doors and beds and such into every bedroom automatically the way that quickfort designates digging. They see it as boring, repetitive micromanagement to have to place each piece of furniture for each dwarf.
This is just adding to the need to micromanage placing pieces of furniture.
The idea is not that you have "levels" but that instead, setting up a workshop requires more effort that just 1 stone and a worker. If dwarves were to require better objects as the fortress moves on (better quality of life, Maslow's Hierarchy of needs etc.), then that would also give incentive for the player to make better things.
You're not seeing this really as a player right now. To a player, anything less than maximum efficiency is a penalty. The player is being penalized any time they have not micromanaged adding in every single one of the workshop upgrades. In order to avoid that penalty, they have to do something boring and repetitive they otherwise would not want to do.
That's why you go talking about "incentives" to do something, because they have to be forced to do it, or they wouldn't want to. Good game mechanics are ones that players want to experience for their own sake, not because they just want to get through this game mechanic to get to the mechanics they actually enjoy.
If you want to have a mechanic for getting the player to design machines, make them potentially fun to design - the multi-tile trap pieces that are coming up in the devpages can potentially be quite fun and allow for a great deal of creatitivity in trap design, and I really look forward to "dwarven marble madness". Just mashing a button to add a workshop upgrade of a "lathe" to a carpentry workshop isn't really anything more than a chore I have to complete to get to maximum upgrade Carpenter's Workshop Lv3.
Again, it's not terrible to have better workshops per se, but it's a major problem to ask players to micromanage 75 new different building types that they have to find, remember what they do (or look up the exploding number of wiki pages on them), order constructed, and keep track of what they still need.
Having a way of automating dwarves being able to upgrade their tools on their own gives you the ability to have shiney little toys in your workshops if you care enough to look at what upgrades they have built for themselves, without having to force the player to build a few hundred new buildings every single fort.
The only tools a dwarf needed were his ax and some means of making fire. That'd eventually get him a forge, and with that he could make simple tools, and with those he could make complex tools, and with complex tools a dwarf could more or less make anything.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Truth
I'm generally not much for basing Dwarf Fortress on something so overtly meant to be absurd as Terry Pratchett, but that's something fairly reasonable. Some monkeys are capable of finding a nice, hard type of stone cliff face and loose rocks to bash open nuts.
Some sort of crude basic necessities workshop could be introduced that just serves to fashion improvised materials, including a rock pick. They'd need to break very frequently, though, just to make players want to avoid relying upon them.
You could possibly try to forge an ad-hoc anvil by creating a cast out of soil, heating some sort of metal like copper, and pouring that into the cast. It'd be a crappy ad-hoc anvil, but you could start your industry on that.
If you had sand or ceramics, you could probably make a much better cast and mold for your anvil, though...
They're not "upgrades". They're options. You want to do simple metalwork, so you put in an anvil. Then you want to make axes, which have wooden handles, so you put in a wood lathe to make those. Then you want to make precision parts so you put in a grinding wheel. It's very much like what you have to think about in running an actual workshop: What tools do we need to make the things we want to make? Now, what will they cost? Do we have space for them? Are we trained to operate them?
I want those limits to be interesting. The most interesting limit, since you're in a fortress out in the boonies full of clever dwarves who can make simple tools out of rocks, is infrastructure: what stuff you need to make the parts to make the stuff you want.
What option? What decision? Those upgrades cost nothing because you have no money, and most of them are made out of stone, which you have in such abundance you're just looking for an excuse to get rid of it most of the time, anyway, no decision there. You're going to want to make at least some of everything in the game, so you're going to want to build every upgrade, no decision there. If you don't have enough space for them, just dig out another wall and expand, no decision there (other than maybe which wall to knock out). Dwarves are trained to operate all machinery in the game innately, even if they may not be skilled in their use (and the way to solve that being unskilled is to purposefully give them plenty of junk tasks just to build up that skill), so there's no decision there, either.
As I said earlier, anything less than maximum is a penalty to a player, so there's only one thing that a player will really be able to guage his/her decision upon - how much utility you get from the upgrades versus how much of a nuisance it is to build the upgrades. Then, it's only a decision based upon how annoyed the player has become, and making the player just barely above the point of frustration where they quit playing the game isn't the sort of place where we want players to be making decisions.
That said, I also think item quality should matter for tools, and in that case there really is a one-dimensional "upgrade path" from -anvil- to +anvil+ to *anvil* and so on. But that's not just "mashing the upgrade button"--if you want to upgrade your anvil you have to make or buy a better one, which means gathering material and training up a really good smith.
This could be a good way to go, but only if it can happen with some degree of automation so that you don't force the player to upgrade it manually.
Having to get a better
smith to make a better set of tools is much more meaningful, since you can't just throw vast wads of resources at the problem, it actually takes building up your dwarves.
The problem is, however, how often do you really produce a new anvil? You only build anvils to make more forges. If it's something like telling your weaponsmith or blacksmith to build a couple new sets of steel knives every now and then, you can probably let your cooks and surgeons and craftsdwarves upgrade fairly well, but some things like anvils aren't something you typically order.
Otherwise, it's what you just talked about, where players are just creating about 75 new tools or buildings where you just have to go down the checklist and make three of everything for a couple stones apiece. Really, I used the lathe as an example of something we shouldn't be forcing players to care about. Why are you using that as something you want to make players do? It's just making a hideously long list of random crap that the player needs to micromanage without really adding anything to the game for their trouble.
Didn't you just post that giant thread about soil chemistry?
I'm not opposed to soil chemistry. I think soil chemistry can be made fun and interesting, and that it's mostly a matter of presentation: making sure the player has enough information to make decisions and can see the effects of those decisions. And I think building an industrial base can be made fun and interesting.
Yes, and believe me, we had this same back-and-forth about what is a meaningful decision or not a hundred times worse in that thread. Because of it, I wound up radically changing the idea enough that I started an entire new thread.
Among those changes was a drive to automate the process wherever possible, and make the player only have to confront real decisions about land management. The proposal is now more about making a simulated ecosystem that is only vaguely controlled by the player, while he/she basically only gives orders to zone fields for farming, and permission for how much labor and how many fertilizers and other resources the farmers can choose to apply to any given field, as well as what order and mix of selection of crops are actually planted and what animal life you try to keep in the same area to interact with your fields.
Because a system that complex would be micromanagement hell to order each fertilization of the field to be done manually, you just have the ability to say, "Yes, you can apply compost to this field, but don't use more than 20 units in this one growing season." And even that's just because fertilizers should be a limited and semi-precious resource, so that players would want to triage them. I expect that things like water will just be something that gets automatically added to the list of permitted tasks, set at permission to use infinite times by default, and never touched by the player, letting that one go entirely to the dwarven AI decision making. A player never has to do any more to worry about watering the fields than making sure that either water is available near the fields, or that an irrigation pipe and pump are built.
(... OK, so maybe the having to push a button to order the irrigation piping and pump built are a bit of micromanagement of the sort I've been arguing against in this thread, but at least there's the need to do something tricky to channel the water there in the first place. The task of pushing a button to order the pump built is something I wouldn't want in there if I could avoid it, but that's not the sort of thing you can trust to AI, wheras something like just picking up the best set of knives or upgrading a workshop automatically whenever the materials to do so are available is something you can leave the AI to do.)
I think "teleporting" is the wrong way to think about it (as it implies instant movement, and items in a shared workshop inventory don't move anywhere; they're just delocalized). I understand your concern about exploits, but that can be addressed--a simple time delay when moving any object in or out of the workshop inventory, based on the size of the shop, would take care of most of those. But I'd like
You kind of stopped mid-sentence, there.
But anyway, even if the materials move themselves slowly, they're still moving themselves. Toady has been moving towards more abstract and macromanagement gameplay recently, but I still don't think that he will ever go to the point of trying to eliminate hauling alltogether. Hauling just needs to be fixed to be more rational.
Honestly, one of the things I suggested from the Improved Mechanics thread, though, was a conveyor belt that could just be attached to the workshops themselves for some real assembly line action. Tie up a machine that automatically takes the items on an "output tile" of a workshop to the "input tile" of the next workshop on the assembly line. That's something that eliminates at least one hauling task without having the materials exist in the ether until someone grabs them from hyperspace.
While I'm on it, the need to micromanage intermediate item construction processes can also be handled fairly well with the "Standing Orders" ESV item. Just set "Make more steel if you have less than 100 steel bars", and you will pretty much be assured that you're going to have at least one furnace running on constant steel smelting for as long as they have the materials.
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Topic: Furniture , workshops and tools (Read 6378 times)