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[h27kim]

Some time player, first time poster.

There have been a few others who have posted on this topic before, but after having played the new version (v.42x) after a year or so playing the older version (v.40x), a few things that I wanted other posters' input on.

It strikes me that the needs/focus system is severely unbalanced. 

First, meeting the "decent meal" need seems to require feeding dwarfs food items that in many cases simply cannot be found either in the area or by trade, not by having high quality meal prepared by cooks (which seems to have been the case in v.40).  So I keep getting fortresses full of unfocused dwarves who haven't had decent meals so long despite being fed legendary chefs churning out masterpiece meals.

Second, the social aspects of the game seems to be set up rather wrong for v.42.  Compared to v. 40, dwarves make friends very slowly but are constantly distracted by being away from friends/family--in a fairly newly created world (how many friends/family have they got elsewhere if they are among the first of their kind!?)  I suspect that this is because what used to be just part of what "idle" dwarves did is now explicitly incorporated as "socialize" and other functions.  I have not seen dwarves explicitly "socializing" so much, even if they sing, play instruments, and worship a lot.  Perhaps they need to socialize more so they can make more friends locally.  Now, this occasionally gets conjoined with some weird family/social dynamics that I had seen in v.40 also:  sexuality of married dwarves can be, eh, "wrong."  I've had occasions where married dwarves have wrong sexualities:  asexual or homosexual dwarves in a "conventional" marriage.  Odder still is that they have aspirations for raising a family (except the dwarf with this aspiration is the asexual one).  In the current version, I've seen an asexual dwarf who is distracted by lack of romance!  In another instance, a married but asexual dwarf with a child was distracted b/c of lack of contact with family--except his family is right in the fortress! 

Third, the lack of fighting/martial arts distraction might also be a bit wonky:  b/c so many of my dwarves were distracted by lack of martial arts, I created enough squads to put every dwarf in the militia, and lo and behold, at any given time, 70-80% of dwarves seem to be training individually even when they are inactive.  Either I have a fortress full of fitness buffs or the need for martial arts is so great that they need to spend a lot of time training.  They are not purple training so they will do jobs when they are told...but while they are training, they are not worshipping or socializing, and in so (not) doing, they are getting further distracted because they are lonely or because they haven't worshipped yet.

Since I play DF like Sim Dwarf, with a lot of effort going towards meeting my dwarves' needs, I think the needs-focus dimension is a great new feature, but, as it stands, I can't seem to find a balance where any decent chunk of dwarves are not unfocused due to some unmet needs somewhere.  Satisfying each need just seems to take too much (if at all possible).  I was wondering how others have been dealing with keeping their dwarves "focused."

[NW_Kohaku]

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress's wild see-sawing of game "balance" between patches as features are added in and then "balanced" with extreme ham-handedness.

So far as food needs go, I suggest reading this suggestion thread. 

The part about asexual dwarves complaining about a lack of romance may actually warrant a bug report outright.  Try to upload a save to DFFD, and put it on Mantis unless you can find a report for it, already.

With regards to military, it's a little easier to handle, since you actually can just assign dwarves to military, but it's also influenced by their outlook on the value of military service/violence/etc., which dwarven personalities give them a propensity to enjoy, and therefore make more prevalent than should be "normal".

[PatrikLundell]

It seems there sexual orientations are randomly assigned without any correlation with preferences regarding family, relations, and romance, nor any correlation between any of these two parts with the goal one (e.g. raising a family), or any of THESE with the strength of (theoretically) related needs (friends & family).
Thus, I suspect there are 4 different independent randomly rolled sets.
In addition to this, I believe dorfs are currently completely ignorant of the connection between activities and outcomes, except for extremely straight ones (need to pray - go pray [unless something else catches their fancy]). Thus, socializing as a means to make friends, engage in romance, and make a family are completely unknown. Likewise, socializing is probably completely random, i.e. they socialize with those they happen to bump into, rather than avoiding those they have grudges against and seeking out friends and family instead.
It also seems social relations decay over time if not strengthened by random socializing with the same individual again, which might explain why the initial 7 usually manage to get to know each other quickly, while later migrants take an eternity to get any friends (the random socializing just gets spread too thinly to build up the steps to friendship when eroded by decay).

When it comes to fulfilling martial arts needs, I put everyone (except miners, wood cutters, and those who don't like martial arts [and thus frequently are assigned as wood cutters], and in theory, hunters [which I never have]) into civilian squads. I set these squads to train one month a year (not the same one for all of them), and manually assign/deassign the training facility to the squad when training is due to avoid the severe lack of work caused by individual training. That's a bit of annoying micro management, but might work out fine for "Sim Dorf" players.

[Mostali]

"Socialize" is a gateway to other activities, none of which have to do with making friends.  I imagine "socialize" as a queue, and once several dwarves are in the queue they will start an activity such as "tell/listen to story", "recite/listen to poetry", "play/simulate instrument", et al.  Currently I'm giving my dwarves so much time off that they are satisfying all their needs and eventually returning to idler status - which is where they will finally make friendships with other idlers in their immediate vicinity.

I handle my military in a similar way PatrikLundell has described.  Squads rotate training and I manually assign the barracks each month.

[PatrikLundell]

I'm not convinced Mostali is correct regarding Socialize. When I lock two dorfs up in a pre maritial suite they make no relation progress at all without a tavern. With a tavern they'll spend most of their time in the Socialize state, and they eventually progress to marriage, if that's possible (I've had some rather stubborn cases where they just want to progress to Lover, but those cases all had negative thoughts about relations in various forms; however, all were eligible for marriage to the opposite gender, within age, etc.). Locking two well matched dorfs that don't have any relation to each other in a suite results in nothing: when let out a year later they still don't recognize the beard of the one they've been socializing with for the last year, so there's something outside of Socialize that promotes the first hint of recognition. Likewise, No Job is required for pregnancy once you've gotten the buggers to marry.

[h27kim]

Thanks for sharing your observations.

I see what you (NW_Kohaku) mean about the see-sawing of the balance.  The new social-religious dimension of the game are so neat that I don't want to give them up, but they've caused enough frustration that I'm tempted to return to v.40.24. 

I suspect, like PatrikLundell, that the social aspects of the game are not really well-mapped out.  I've been noticing that the only dwarves with actual "friends" in the fort are the old timers, either the initial 7 or at least those among the initial waves.  While this was true even in v.40 up to a point, having other activities interfere with "socialize" (I am fairly sure of this:  some dwarves seem to sing and worpship together often, but they are not even passing acquaintances!)  But properly drawing linkages between aspirations, preferences, and social activities will have to present an altogether new (and seemingly understudied) realm of dwarven social sciences....

[Mostali]

I'm not convinced Mostali is correct regarding Socialize.

I'm only basing this off occasional observation and generalized "this works/this doesn't" plans, which of course leaves a lot of room for error.  In support of your claim, it sure seems like every passing bard becomes acquainted with every dwarf in the fortress.  However, it also seems like left to tavern activities alone, dwarves as a population make almost no connections above "passing acquaintance".  Contrast this with first year dwarves that build friendships very quickly while idling in close proximity around the wagon with no tavern, temple, library or barracks to distract them.

My current fortress is basically an experiment in dwarven socializing - providing them with basic needs and plenty of time off.  They all craft exactly one thing each and I assign 2-4 of that thing to them per month to satisfy their need for crafting and skills.  I harvest only enough resources to provide needed space and crafting materials.  Dwarves rotate military training to satisfy the martial need, and they have a library, temple and tavern of course.  But they're also assigned rooms as if pre-honeymoon suites, just not locked in.

My first obvious result is babies - I'm getting several a year which wasn't happening in my last few forts.

My second result is I am getting those initial meetings between dwarves assigned to the same room, and quite a few dwarves are building a lot of "friendly terms" relationships, plus two third year immigrants forming a "friend" pair (currently in year six).

There are a lot of factors involved:  All that time off is probably the most influential.  The fact that almost everyone is "somewhat focused with satisfied needs" almost all of the time is probably another.  All of my attractions are "citizen only" so there are no visitors.  Reading material has been pretty scarce up until the last year, which has probably kept them away from the library.  But also, no visitors and idling in rooms has resulted in far fewer tavern activities - leading me to the conclusion that "socialize" and its resulting activities don't contribute to building relationships. 

I'll concede I'm probably wrong in saying that.  Obviously it's a factor, as evidenced by becoming acquainted with visitor bards.  I just don't think it's a very big factor, since I've had forts with a great deal of tavern activity and no friendships forming.  In any case, I don't know exactly what is causing the current progress, but I'm considering this a "this works" plan.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, we're still a fair bit in the dark regarding how things actually work.

It took me 20 years for the first couple to form in a dead civ fortress with 17 dorfs, and another 10 for the second one. I though I was providing a fairly good environment after the first few years with half a year of full on work, one season of winding down, and one season of maintenance work only (planting, harvesting, animal retraining, basically), leaving plenty of time to socialize, pray, and visit the library (stocked with just over one book a year bought from the human caravan). Martial arts training took place in parallel with winding down (basically taking care of built up hauling needs).
After the 30 years it took another 10 to form two dud couples (lovers that would never marry), and thereafter I started to pair them up with a pre honeymoon suite (I'd used the same basic technique for assisted baby production from the first two couples, and several of the pairs were offspring from the first two couples).
During the first quite a few years after the initial setup I tried the overlapping bedroom technique without any visible effect.

During my first few years there is very little idling, as there's always a lot of things to do and too few hands to do it, but the starting 7 nevertheless seem to build relations quickly (although they're quite frequently friends/grudges with everyone else immediately on embark, but not always).

[Elanorea]

I had quite a bit of success getting dwarves to marry by assigning them beds in a 2x2 room, disabling all their labors, and disabling all meeting areas. Usually they would marry within two seasons or so. I got 6 successful couples out of it in my last fort, with only 1 failed attempt - pretty sure that one was because their ages were just a tad too far apart.

[Pirate Santa]

So I keep getting fortresses full of unfocused dwarves who haven't had decent meals so long despite being fed legendary chefs churning out masterpiece meals.

It is terrifying.
But now I want to build a fort centered around producing legendary chefs to feed to the resident vampire.

[NW_Kohaku]

I have looked on mantis, and I can't find any bug reports that match the "needs marriage, but refuses to marry" issue.  Could someone please upload a save and put it on mantis? These problems will never be resolved without actually bringing them to Toady's attention.

[PatrikLundell]

I have looked on mantis, and I can't find any bug reports that match the "needs marriage, but refuses to marry" issue.  Could someone please upload a save and put it on mantis? These problems will never be resolved without actually bringing them to Toady's attention.

It greatly depends on what level of bugginess is required. Finding dorfs pining (distracted) for nonexistent family is easy. Finding a dorf who's not willing to commit to marriage that dreams of raising a family should be easy as well.  Proving that a dorf who is put off by the thought of marriage but dreams of raising a family can't be pushed into marriage is obviously harder.

I had quite a bit of success getting dwarves to marry by assigning them beds in a 2x2 room, disabling all their labors, and disabling all meeting areas. Usually they would marry within two seasons or so. I got 6 successful couples out of it in my last fort, with only 1 failed attempt - pretty sure that one was because their ages were just a tad too far apart.

I've just tried locking two dorfs into a 3*3 room with beds for each as well as food and drink for just short of two seasons (and no zone facilities inside), and they still did not recognize each other, so locking them up together doesn't work for that initial recognition step, as neither a tavern, nor nothing helps. I can't really disable the zones, since the fortress is full of visitors, so I think I'll have to resign myself to the two couples I've gotten out of the starting 7 (out of my 14 dorfs, 7 are male, 3 of those are dud, and the last one didn't have any functioning female within the age range). I've seen thoughts in the past that recognition is/might be increased by encountering each other, and a small room might be too small to get out or range, in which case having the food and booze outside of the room would be crucial to get them in and out of each others' sight. I might try a burrowing arrangement that excludes the zones as well as the stockpiles inside the room.

[Mostali]

I may have discovered why my dwarves are meeting, and it wasn't what I expected.  On inspection I noticed a lot of dwarves with the "crowded table" thought.  Many of them were passing acquaintance with someone else that also had the thought.  In particular, the first child with a passing acquaintance I've seen in months had the crowded table thought.

I'm going to rearrange my tavern with checkered tables and chairs to see if I can't amplify the effect.

[NW_Kohaku]

It greatly depends on what level of bugginess is required. Finding dorfs pining (distracted) for nonexistent family is easy. Finding a dorf who's not willing to commit to marriage that dreams of raising a family should be easy as well.  Proving that a dorf who is put off by the thought of marriage but dreams of raising a family can't be pushed into marriage is obviously harder.

It should be pretty easy.  DF Hack will tell you when a dwarf won't marry.

[PatrikLundell]

It greatly depends on what level of bugginess is required. Finding dorfs pining (distracted) for nonexistent family is easy. Finding a dorf who's not willing to commit to marriage that dreams of raising a family should be easy as well.  Proving that a dorf who is put off by the thought of marriage but dreams of raising a family can't be pushed into marriage is obviously harder.

It should be pretty easy.  DF Hack will tell you when a dwarf won't marry.

Yes. We're apparently talking past each other. The first example doesn't require anything at all, while the second one can easily be checked via DFHack. The third one, however, is hard because proving something doesn't happen even if you push it for an eternity takes, well, an eternity.
This save http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=11983 (posted for a vampire bug) has "Glassmaker" dreaming about raising a family, while refusing to marry, i.e. my second case.