Job Specialisation: A Step Towards Society Sim

[returner]

(excuse my English-UK spelling of 'specialisation )

After my 'new ways to die' thread, I revisited some of my ideas and I'm really excited/enthusiastic for some of them.

Please hear me out, this is probably one of my favourite suggestions to date, and I hope you'll like it.

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I think there needs to be more consequences for those who aren't good enough at what they do.
Right now in Cantr, everyone can do any job, and the only consequence for being awkward is a slower output. This doesn't stop some towns paying the same Days of Work, and they can hire absolutely aaanybody to do the job.

Basically, it's just creating 'Professionals' in any field of work. (every character will be a professional at one thing or another)

Some implementations I suggest to create or encourage job specialisation are as follows:

Drilling
If someone is both awkward and weak, there should be a chance that they can injure themselves. As I said in another thread;

Someone who is awkward at drilling and weak, would 1) not be able to handle the drill properly, and 2) not be strong enough to handle the force of it. Thus, they are likely to injure themselves on it.. Which creates a need for 'expert miners'. Towns could literally 'look' for these expert miners/drillers in other towns, or advertise for them. They would pay handsomely, and would create a NEED for job specialisation.

Of course, you can still use the drill! It doesn't stop you. The chance of being injured is moderate, and the injury would be substantial enough to deter weak, awkward workers away from it. The stronger and more skilled are less likely to be injured (almost no chance) and if they are, it would be very minimal damage. If people wanted, I'd even be against injury occuring to expert drillers.

Harvesting
This part came from the same thread where I suggested that food should go rotten. However, it's a little different here. I'm suggesting that awkward harvesters of food should find it even HARDER than they do now to gather food, and 10% to 15%, with a random variation above and below, may turn out to be 'rotten' or 'poor quality' after each harvest.
This encourages the need for legitimate, skillful farmers to do the job. And the rewards of being skilled are exaggerated even further; meaning a BONUS of 10% to 15% output could randomly occur. (so you could be harvesting 100 grams of potatoes, on 5 repeats. On the second and fourth repeat, you get a bonus of 10 or 15 potatoes, as you are expert and know where to look / how to pull potatoes out of the ground).


Preferentially, I'd like to see this tested on high-level technology first. What I mean is, I don't want to see this implemented for basic low-level harvesting, and see small towns die out or players quit in frustration. So I'd prefer to see this only for drills and other high-level equipment first, and see if it creates a need for job specialisation.
Of course, if implemented correctly, low-level projects may not impact the survivability of small towns.


This suggestion goes hand-in-hand with the Skills system rewrite thread, and would preferably be implemented AFTER skills re-write is complete.

Thoughts? Comments? Other projects it could apply to? (ie smelting.. very dangerous occupation in real life, I'd imagine)

[EchoMan]

There is already the extra time to do something your bad at. There is already the +/- 20% of output on gathering. What's will this suggestion add to the game? Except that the +/- 20% will be more based on skill than random.

[returner]

The fear of bad food in harvesting, and severe injury in drilling, are massive deterrents which will almost force towns to find specialised trades.

[EchoMan]

Ok, so it will be an annoyance to some towns with limited number of people, but how does it improve the game?

[Piscator]

I agree that skills should have an effect besides (or instead of) increasing speed as soon as skills aren't poured over the chars with the watering can anymore, but I don't think this is the way.

- Getting a few extra potatoes is no different from working a little faster. You could probably get the same effect from non-linearizing the formula that calculates gathering speed.

- Different food qualities are only very hard to support with the current system. You would have to add "rotten xy" as a seperate resource, which seems like a huge effort for something basically unusable.

I also don't like injuring the driller very much. I think it might be better to "injure" the drill instead, in other words, have a higher use-based decay. This would of course require drills to be repairable and ideally also consume resources in the process, but I guess this will come sooner or later anyway.

[trojo]

The possibility of random, somewhat rare workplace accidents (damaging machines, injuring users and maybe bystanders, the likelihood and severity of which based on character skill) would be a cool thing to add to encourage greater skill specialization.

Also, random potato famines would be cool. It would give town leaders something to plan for and deal with (and stay awake for) other than spawnthieves and pirates.

[returner]

I also don't like injuring the driller very much. I think it might be better to "injure" the drill instead, in other words, have a higher use-based decay. This would of course require drills to be repairable and ideally also consume resources in the process, but I guess this will come sooner or later anyway.

Perhaps that will work, but even still... it is more encouraging if the injury is to the self.

[Arenti]

If towns had all at least 20 people in it, this might be a good idea, but as most towns are small this would suck.

[returner]

If towns had all at least 20 people in it, this might be a good idea, but as most towns are small this would suck.

True true.. That's partly the reason I suggested it can only apply to high-level technology, thus high-volume towns, who have the power to look around..

With the new implementation for skills rewrite, it might work.

I think the idea should work on positive reinforcement rather than negative; that way it is less annoying.

[YugoStrikesBack]

-- Tangent suggestion alert --

I know it's been suggested before, but I think the best idea to balance out skills is to allow people to learn skills from other people. For example, have everyone spawn off as awkward in almost everything except one or two skills and then allow a person to "teach" another person a skill (not including strength which I will address at the end of this post).

Have "teaching" take 10 days overall or so to bring a person to the skill level (for one skill) of the teacher.

It will encourage newspawns to act more in line so they can learn skills, and will cause people to congregate more together to learn collectively.

It could also start an information exchange where people trade their skills with other people for resources (almost a cantrian form of trading technology for goods). Will that eventually lead to a society where everyone is an expert at everything? Possibly, but at the same time, would someone who is really an expert at everything really want to take the time to teach everyone in the town their various skills? Or would that person instead be like, "ok, you are going to be a blacksmith and I will teach you", and then to another person "ok, you are going to be a farmer and I will teach you".

I think the latter, and this will subsequently cause people to become specialized in different areas.

We could also talk about the effect that this would have creating warrior societies or a world where everyone is an expert fighter, but is that really a bad thing? Conflict makes this game interesting.

--2nd tangent suggestion alert --

There has to be a way to stop a person from becoming an ultimate warrior with little effort though, and I think that could come in the form of requiring people to continuously weight train to become strong and stay strong. Can a society really afford to have a bunch of their population simply weight train endlessly? Doubtful, you need a civilian population to bring economic benefits to support a military and this would cause society's to become naturally more passive due to the heavy demand that comes with maintaining a military.

[returner]

Yugo.. you surprise me. I find myself agreeing with your suggestions. The 'teaching' idea is just brilliant. Really good.

You should be able to learn by yourself, and be taught at a higher rate. Teaching should require the activity being available (ie, must be outside near potatoes to learn harvesting, or near a smelter to learn to smelt, etc) and should be a project.

[Rumaan]

Yugo's suggestions seem awesome. The characters can continue to have the current gene system. But the genes a character has is only reflective of his/her potential rather than actual skill. Each character on spawning should be awkward at everything. They have to learn any skill and actually find out what they'll be good at. With enough training the max potential can increase. Similarly, if a character doesn't use a skill for a long enough time, his actual skill and for very long times, his potential decay.

I like the second suggestion too. Warriors have to spend a considerable amount of their time training to be fit and skillful to fight.

[viktor]

the way i see the current system, some people are absolutly great at something, and some people are absolutly horrific at something, in an organised society, people can do the jobs they are best at , or take the extra time to putz around on something they suck at horribly to develope skill which takes a long time. if you work for someone who gives you payout depending on the job volume, then you make less cash per day if you uck and are slow but get kind of a bonus if you are expert.
a contracting compny can evaluate thier employees based on skills so if the company gets hired to say build a hall, you got some expert builders so you can do more jobs in a year than if you had crappy builders.
personally i find the current system fine