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Author Topic: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs  (Read 461 times)

Rollory

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Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« on: September 04, 2006, 09:11:00 am »

So, I have several craft shops set up: one with rock crafts, one with shell crafts, a glass furnace with glass crafts to make (and sand bags stockpiled), and a leatherworker's shop with some leather clothes queued up.  I have a legendary bonecrafter, a legendary stonecrafter, another with decent leatherworking skills, and a few others.  All have craftsworking, leatherworking, and glassmaking activated; the idea being that if the best dwarf for a job isn't available, one of the others can fill in.

Instead, what happens is that the legendary stonecrafter does the bone crafts, the bonecrafter does the glass, and so on and so forth.  If, by repeated suspension of tasks, I manage to shuffle them around so some of them are doing what they're best at, sooner or later one will skip from the queued-up jobs for their specialty to something they're no good at, at all.

This is stupid.  When choosing between multiple available tasks for a dwarf, it should check for the dwarf's highest skill and see if there's anything available in that regard; and if not, shift down to the next best, and so on; rather than simply handing things out on a first-come first-served basis, which is my guess of what it's doing right now.

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UncleSporky

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2006, 10:02:00 am »

I'm not entirely sure of how the game picks jobs, but from what I understand the workshop sends a shout out to any idle dwarves every once in a while; if it finds any with that job enabled, they come and do the task.

Naturally, if two dwarves are idle at the same time you'd want it to pick the one with higher skill, which it may or may not do currently.  However a lot of the time you don't have more than one dwarf idle at a time.  If the legendary guy is busy eating or placing furniture and the workshop asks for an idle dwarf, it's not going to reject one just because a legendary guy is out there somewhere.  Then when the legendary is no longer busy, his job is already filled so he does the next thing on the list.

It sounds like you'd want the suggestion that others have come up with: workshops built specifically for legendaries or just plain assigned to one guy.

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dav

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #2 on: September 04, 2006, 05:41:00 pm »

Alternately, there could be no "craftdwarf" job - only jobs that are more specific.  That is, you could enable bone crafting, but not stone crafting.  That makes sense because it's how the skills work out.
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Rollory

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #3 on: September 04, 2006, 07:57:00 pm »

Sporky: no, not really.

I am pausing the game, queueing up all the jobs at once, then unpausing.  I would expect at that point that the idling crafters would select the job they are best at.  They don't.

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Upthorn

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #4 on: September 04, 2006, 09:08:00 pm »

quote:
Originally posted by Rollory:
<STRONG>Sporky: no, not really.

I am pausing the game, queueing up all the jobs at once, then unpausing.  I would expect at that point that the idling crafters would select the job they are best at.  They don't.</STRONG>


 

quote:
<STRONG>Naturally, if two dwarves are idle at the same time you'd want it to pick the one with higher skill, which it may or may not do currently.</STRONG>

Relevant portions italicized.

Edit: Oh, no underline on this board
Edit2: Oh, quotes are already bolded
Edit3: And I hit submit too soon by mistake
Edit4: And I typoed one of my BBCode markups
[ September 04, 2006: Message edited by: Upthorn ]

[ September 04, 2006: Message edited by: Upthorn ]

[ September 04, 2006: Message edited by: Upthorn ]

[ September 04, 2006: Message edited by: Upthorn ]

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Rollory

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #5 on: September 04, 2006, 09:10:00 pm »

Um, no.

What I am saying is that that is precisely what it does NOT do.  There is no "might" about it.  It simply doesn't take skill into account at all.  It should.  That will be what the players will WANT the dwarves to be doing, and I will be far from the last person to complain about this

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Upthorn

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #6 on: September 04, 2006, 09:16:00 pm »

I was pointing out that he never said it does that. He said it would be nice for the player if it did, but he didn't know if it does.

IE, what's going on with you doesn't contradict Sporky's statement, just verifies which possibility.

(Mostly, this means that the "no" part of your reply makes no sense unless you misread the post, which is why I was trying to clarify

[ September 04, 2006: Message edited by: Upthorn ]

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Toady One

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Re: Dwarves ignore their own skills when picking jobs
« Reply #7 on: September 05, 2006, 09:45:00 pm »

It's actually handing the jobs out to the nearest qualified dwarf.  I'm sure people would also complain if a dwarf had to walk across the map to go to a job if there were another qualified dwarf nearby.  There are already a number of dev elements and a number of suggestions as well that should address all of this, eventually.
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