Player specialization

[ArPharazon]

Just wondering, is more player specialization planned for the near future?

For example, basing off the new road thread, suppose we had top-tier paved roads which were way better than everything else. But the road is complex, so it needs an architect (yeah I'm stealing from DF here) to come over and survey/design. Actually doing it is easy (maybe 100 tiles take 2 minutes), but the Architecture skill is very expensive (on par with murder and such, maybe 100k LP?). As a result, the game has maybe 5-10 people who bothered to take the skill, and those few people do nothing but travel from town to town, surveying and designing when buildings/roads are to be built. They mine/farm/cook/hunt very little, their main source of LP is road building (which is respectable) and their main iron/good income is whatever their contractors pay.

This could be extended to very infrequent field fertilization, all the different "complex" buildings like mines, smelters, wells and brick walls, and maybe thing such as determining metal purity if it gets implemented. The idea is to have niche skills, which are prohibitively expensive, and needed disproportionately rarely, but are often crucial. (You can't have a town without a mine). Those who decide to invest in these skills have to sell their expertise to make do, as opposed to being primary-ish producers of raw material and goods.

So will independence be encouraged or discouraged any time soon or is it not a priority now?

[kholhaus]

No, Just no. Personal Beliefs takes that position.

If you do implement this, many a solo-people who live in the woods alone for the challenge will be mad.

[Laremere]

Specialization will occur when skills are harder to get. As for players being alone, they have stated that they will balancing benefits for people who aren't in villages.