User:Squirrelloid/Optimizing Skills

This is meant to be an optimizers guide to organizing your dwarves tasks. When this looks more complete, if someone has a suggestion as to where this might better find a home, by all means feel free to move it there. It is certainly not intended as a beginners guide, but rather as a way for veterans to compare notes. All input is of course welcome - treat this as a normal page, not my page.

Optimizing Skills Overview

Play the game for awhile and you'll probably notice some fairly basic facts. Experience in some skills is harder to earn than others. Skills which cause moods aren't all equally valuable. And having legendary dwarves in some skills is more desirable than in others. The key is figuring out what the best way is to get the legendaries you want in a timely manner and with the least waste of valuable resources.

Which Skills are desirable

Table: Skill Ratings (As soon as I figure out tables - Skill name, leveling benefit, desirability, ease of leveling, mood?)

Leveling benefit: skills which produce items with quality or add decorations to items have a high benefit, because skill has a substantial impact on the quality of the produced items. Further, skills like mining have a strong level-dependent effect and are thus also 'high'. Some skills simply take a really long time at low experience levels, and so have a medium benefit. Some skills aren't especially time intensive and there is little real effect other than a little bit of time saving, if at all, and thus rate as 'low'.

Desirability: Some skills are highly prized to make the most of limited resources. Others, no matter how hard to attain legendary in, aren't likely to see much use, or aren't valuable because the inputs are so common.

Ease of Leveling: Some skills are trivially easy to level, generally because materials are plentiful and work is fast. Other skills must overcome the hurdle of resource scarcity or because they take so long to perform that xp is gained slowly. Moderate skills are generally at the end of long production processes with multiple processing steps, making the availability of inputs unsteady under most circumstances.

Mood: Some skills are mood skills - a dwarf entering a mood will use his highest mood skill and gain 20000xp in that skill. A dwarf with no such skill will use one of the craftsdwarf skills. Keeping in mind which skills are mood skills is important because moods are a source of a tremendous amount of xp.

Strategy: Starting Skill Selection

Because not all skills are equal, not all uses of your starting points are equal.

Principles:

1. Each use of a starting point in a skill for a dwarf is more valuable than the last such point. Going from Novice -> Normal is worth 600xp. From Normal to Competent is 700xp. And so on. Thus, you'll get the most xp/point spent if you only take proficient skills.
2. Some skills are absolutely essential and not easy to level. You'll need to start with some of these.
3. Some skills are essential but easy to level. You'll start with none of these.
4. Some skills are hard to level and highly valuable. You'll want to start with some of these.
5. Each dwarf can receive two skills at proficient, thus you'll need to use combinations which are either mutually beneficial or likely to not be needed simultaneously.
6. One dwarf will need some leader skills, and should be Proficient in one valuable skill and novice in 5 leader/broker related skills (generally including appraiser, judge of intent, and some method of persuasion).
7. Barring extreme presumed need, military skills other than marksdwarf and armor user are easy to train and should not be selected.

What exactly qualifies as essential or valuable will depend on what your fortress goals are and what you plan to do. Some skills will be more valuable if you plan on using them early. Others will be valuable regardless of when you plan on using so long as you do plan on using them.