Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: Waparius on March 27, 2015, 05:57:52 am
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Currently, fort mode is too locked into what TVTropes calls the "Command and Conquer economy" - that is, players are responsible for ordering everything to be built, whether it's a bridge or a stew. Obviously this gets in the way of a realistic cooking system, but other people have talked through the cooking situation. A big part of that is having food cooked-to-order - that is, instead of having barrels and barrels of stacked +Plump Helmet Stew+ (however that's supposed to work), dwarven cooks will prepare food on-demand.
I suggest that this be extended to as much fortress industry as possible. Craftsdwarves, clothesmakers, jewellers, farmers, and other non-military, non-construction workers ought to spend most of their time in a prosperous fort labouring for themselves and each other rather than for the Crown.
To make this work, dwarves could follow a sort of heirarchy of needs in their decision-making - something like, safety -> security -> prosperity. A starving dwarf will work for plump helmets and a place in the dormitory, but as they get more comfortable they start buying nicer meals, renting a bedroom and stocking up on biscuits and preserved food in case of hard times. Eventually they should start buying (and wearing!) jewelery and expensive clothes, and getting their furniture decorated.
The thing is, though, these decisions are made by the dwarves themselves, paid for with their own money. This money would start with dwarves employed by the Crown - miners, soldiers, loggers, furnace operators, builders - most of the basic resource-extraction jobs. Additionally dwarves would be able to buy and sell of their own accord from the marketplace/trade depot. It may be possible for gifted traders to make a living buying and selling goods, as well. If work becomes scarce, a dwarf will slowly (unhappily) slide back down the ladder, selling their possessions to put food on the table - unless they become upset enough to just buy provisions and leave on the next caravan.
Alternately, a dwarf may take up a pick or otherwise try to get government work. Dwarves ought to be more autonomous in their choice of labours - though players should still be able to force a dwarf into a given line of work to make up for shortfalls. Dwarves could like and dislike particular work, meaning in the former they'd seek out that job if it's available, and in the latter get an unhappy thought if forced into that work.
In terms of getting things done at the player's beck and call, I'd take a leaf out of feudalism's book - if dwarves don't have the money to pay their rent, they perform labour for the Crown, whether through working the fields or just making trinkets for the nobility. This would also cover any player ordered crafts, such as uniforms for the militia. To simplify things, the player should be able to designate fields, workshops and stockpiles for private use.
Farming ought to be nerfed and mostly farmed out to hilldwarves - these along with caravans would provide an additional source of dwarven income and ease the burden on the player.
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We had similar to this back when the economy (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Dwarven_economy) was still active. Dwarves would earn money doing jobs and spend them in shops manned by other dwarves. They'd have to rent their rooms meaning you had to build varying quality levels including slums for the poor. You also had guilds making demands. It had many issues and was turned off until a new system is finished.
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...Already planned ?
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Waparius, your suggestion is good, and I agree with you in general about what needs to be done.
However, may I point you to some previous suggestions that you might find interesting? We could definitely use some more minds thinking about this stuff... and I am currently working on studying a few of these suggestions (in particular, counting's suggestions) and developing them further, as well as integrating them all together.
Here are the suggestion threads:
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85289.msg2296845#msg2296845 <- this one and the next are absolutely brilliant... Hell, all of counting's suggestions are. They just need some more concrete details about exactly how to plug in these things into the game and where and at what level of detail...
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=88258.msg2413199#msg2413199
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=74616.msg1875315#msg1875315
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69644.msg1721432#msg1721432
I linked to several things I have posted... but there are a lot of cool things in these threads posted by other people.
ALSO:
...Already planned ?
Already planned... but I am not sure if there is any information about what will be part of this system and how it will be implemented. This needs to be discussed by the community. I am sure that Toady would really appreciate some ideas! It is a very tough beast to slay.
Oh, and on a final note, allow me to re-emphasize that counting's suggestions are awesome. They allow for a non-arbitrary assignment of value (though it needs some more refinement... I think it is too abstract at the moment, though I have a LOT more to learn in order to understand it all... so this opinion might change), AND the emergence of currency without anything needing to be hard coded. It is BRILLIANT.
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Ah, thanks for the links. I did try to search for previous suggestions along these lines, but nothing turned up for me. And yeah, I remember the economy from both the 2d and 40d days. The main suggestion I was making was to mostly automate industries not directly related to construction, mining and the militia. I'll check the links now.
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I like the idea. +1 support.
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It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.
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Giving dwarves a little autonomy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the only way for an in-game economy to work is to let dwarves decide for themselves when and what to buy.
It'll give the player high-level control of the economy by making sure all dwarves have enough work to do (and thus get paid) to make a basic living, without swamping the player in the micromanagement of checking up on each and every dwarf and telling them they need to go buy new socks.
That doesn't mean that the game will turn into a "sit back and watch your dwarves build an awesome fort"-kinda thing, though.
But once fortresses grow to 100+ dwarves, high-level control over the economy through job-, and resource management will be preferential over micromanaging individuals.
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It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.
I think a good simulation game, and DF is more simulation than strategy, will involve some autonomy of the subjects. I don't want to control every action of my dwarves because the coolest thing about DF is that they are independent personalities. More autonomy would reinforce this in the gameplay.
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It sounds like your idea is to change it from the play telling dwarves what to do to dwarves doing whatever they want which to me sounds like a terrible idea and I strongly oppose it.
I think a good simulation game, and DF is more simulation than strategy, will involve some autonomy of the subjects. I don't want to control every action of my dwarves because the coolest thing about DF is that they are independent personalities. More autonomy would reinforce this in the gameplay.
In another word, not being able to control every thing is part of the fun.
Just to what extent.
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I enjoy setting up my metal and food industry, I would not like to see my dwarfs take control of that and leave it up to whim. I could see dwarfs earning a wage from public work they are assigned, then spending that on caravan goods or purchasing state goods. Then we have the issue of dwarves leaving coins everywhere. Could have a banker noble added that stores all the coinage in a vault and dwarfs purchase interfort goods like rent and socks on credit but they go to the bank to grab physical coins to make a purchase from a caravan. That should keep the dwarfs from dividing the money up into a 100 piles of coins since the only time the
idiots dwarfs deal with actual coins is when they are taken off the map.
That is similar to how the old economy worked though isn't?
What I wish we could do is create sets of jobs like say farmer and kitchen worker with associated jobs linked to buildings, separate from a dwarfs skills. Dwarfs assigned the farmer position for instance will preform food hauling in burrow FARMLAND, plant crops in fields 1 - 3, and work in stock piles "food" 1 - 2. Then when immigrants show up rather then selecting their active skills and assigning them to burrows you can just say your going to be a farmer, then they automatically know which skill set they should use and where they should work, but are not confined to live solely in that burrow.
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Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.
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Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.
I saw that on the wiki that's why I suggested the dwarfs only use credit for inter fortress goods like rent and food. The only time a dwarf should use coins is when they need to purchase something from the caravan, in which case the caravans will take the loose change off the map with them.
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While this is interesting and a good idea, I think it should be toggleable in the Noble screen, and only once you have a certain level. It reduces a lot of micromanagement later, but in the beginning it would literally eliminate almost everything to be done apart from designating tiles.
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Giving dwarves a little autonomy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the only way for an in-game economy to work is to let dwarves decide for themselves when and what to buy.
It'll give the player high-level control of the economy by making sure all dwarves have enough work to do (and thus get paid) to make a basic living, without swamping the player in the micromanagement of checking up on each and every dwarf and telling them they need to go buy new socks.
That doesn't mean that the game will turn into a "sit back and watch your dwarves build an awesome fort"-kinda thing, though.
But once fortresses grow to 100+ dwarves, high-level control over the economy through job-, and resource management will be preferential over micromanaging individuals.
This is where the whole thing breaks down. If we just have dwarves buying goods that we make by manager decree as at present then the whole thing is pointless and simply adds a whole dimension of complexity since we have to either set or figure out how to break the pricing system so everything costs so little that every dwarf can buy anything he or she wants, so things basically work as they do at the moment.
Having dwarves independantly make their own goods seems a tempting solution at first glance except that the resources they are using for manufacture are finite and presumably designated by us. A clash immediately appears between essential needs for the player's fortress plan and the essentially chaotic production going on about the place. The situation is akin to having a semi-automatic manager arbiterily assigning the production of a whole lot of random junk on top of all the stuff you actually want to make, whether for export to the caraven, or for building up your fortress etc.
Money some people might suggest would fix things but actually it simply makes the economy harder to manage. Instead of merely having to do some arithmatic to add up all the demands of all your dwarves, which remain consistant over time you now have to ruffle through everyone's bank accounts to determine how much money the 'average' dwarf has and then how much of everything you can feasibly produce, before getting to the buisiness of fixing all prices low enough that everybody can afford them but not so low that gets so much of it that there is a shortage. Of course if we do not fix the prices ourselves then we will have some mechanism do so for us, which means that we will end up having to do stupid inefficiant things in order to manipulate prices, generally down.
The way the economy should be developed is to keep the basic system for the time being but add a dynamic system of demand so that dwarves start off as at present but they pick up new demands as time goes on, based upon percieved available resources. If dwarves cannot find a non-forbidden, accessable item then they will go to the office of one of the nobles of your fort, so manager, bookkeeper, mayor, baron/duke/count or king and place a request for the item. All the demands that have been reported at the office can then be met by the player simply by buying them from the caravan or logging them into the manager, the latter should ideally be accomplished simply by pressing a button on the screen next to the demand in question.
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The thing is, this isn't age of empires or something. The goal isn't to give the player pawns they can move about at their will, it's to make a bunch of little people that the player directs in a sort of vague fashion. And those little people having the ability to make little decisions would be great. Not like "where should this wall go?" but definitely "What sort of room should I rent?" or "What clothes should I buy?"
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I think some people have sort of the wrong idea about my suggestion.
Basically, the idea is that the player is still in charge of designations, builds workshops and fields and stockpiles and so forth. They would also be able to order most things to be made as before (an exception for hot meals, since they would no longer last - instead maybe an order to have a feast or something).
The difference is that dwarves would also be able to autonomously perform gem-setting, craft, farm and kitchen work for themselves and each other; performing player- or noble-ordered labour would be a way for money (in the form of internal credit) to enter the system. Dwarves can buy and sell from each other via internal credit. They can also use money or barter to buy and sell from merchants, who are entering and leaving the marketplace on a much more regular basis than currently.
To keep things simpler, mining and smelting and similar resource-extraction is player-controlled and private labour can only use stockpiles designated for that purpose, or a dwarf's own possessions.
Dwarves prefer to do a small set of labours and dislike a small set of labours. A dwarf will always try to do their preferred job if it's available, but if they are unable to make a living they will volunteer for another task, generally either hauling or one that dwarves don't do on their own - mining, logging, the militia, etc, but if another type of work is doing well they may choose that instead, but almost never their disliked labour (depending on personality). They can also be assigned by the player, even to hated labour (the latter at the cost of an unhappy thought).
So it works like this - urist mcStonecrafter is commissioned by the Baroness to make her consort an amulet. He creates a masterwork, and makes a lot of money, in the form of credit. Urist would celebrate by buying his favourite -plump helmet roast-, but he's been getting a lot of work lately and isn't hungry, so he takes his +sheep wool coat+ to the gemsetter to get it decorated and feels very pleased with himself. The gemsetter uses the money to put food on the table but due to a gem shortage work has been slow lately; several months later, after selling some of his rings and puzzle boxes to make rent, the gemsetter takes up a pick and heads for the gold mines the player just designated under the second cavern.
If the player sets up a new militia squad and doesn't go through manually selecting new members, a bunch of dwarves who like being in the army join up right away, but so do some broke dwarves who would otherwise be pushing a minecart somewhere.
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That doesn't sound so bad, I do however think it would be better for the economy to separate jobs and skills from one another.
Currently a dwarf with a certain skill active will search for a job of the relevant type in his burrow.
Rather than an active skill choosing jobs, the player could create a Job which has associated task with it like farm this plot, haul food in this burrow and mill at this quern. Once the job is created the player can designate how many dwarfs they want working this job and the wage those dwarfs who get it are paid. Dwarfs could then pick jobs based off what skills they have and their work preferences to earn wages for rent and purchasing things.
This way dwarfs wont have active skills players have to turn on and off, the dwarfs picks a job and works it earning a wage and skill levels in what ever they happen to be doing.
This way the player still has a lot of control over their fort without having to micromanage and command every dwarf, they can set up their stockpiles, workshops and such then assign jobs that use those things, but the dwarfs decide what work they do.
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I saw that on the wiki that's why I suggested the dwarfs only use credit for inter fortress goods like rent and food. The only time a dwarf should use coins is when they need to purchase something from the caravan, in which case the caravans will take the loose change off the map with them.
I was just answering your question.
That is similar to how the old economy worked though isn't?
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The thing is, this isn't age of empires or something. The goal isn't to give the player pawns they can move about at their will, it's to make a bunch of little people that the player directs in a sort of vague fashion. And those little people having the ability to make little decisions would be great. Not like "where should this wall go?" but definitely "What sort of room should I rent?" or "What clothes should I buy?"
Indeed.
The "buying" part however in the equation and the "renting" part however are quite mechanically redundant.
They already make decisions as to which empty room to move into and which clothes to help themselves too.
I think some people have sort of the wrong idea about my suggestion.
Basically, the idea is that the player is still in charge of designations, builds workshops and fields and stockpiles and so forth. They would also be able to order most things to be made as before (an exception for hot meals, since they would no longer last - instead maybe an order to have a feast or something).
The difference is that dwarves would also be able to autonomously perform gem-setting, craft, farm and kitchen work for themselves and each other; performing player- or noble-ordered labour would be a way for money (in the form of internal credit) to enter the system. Dwarves can buy and sell from each other via internal credit. They can also use money or barter to buy and sell from merchants, who are entering and leaving the marketplace on a much more regular basis than currently.
To keep things simpler, mining and smelting and similar resource-extraction is player-controlled and private labour can only use stockpiles designated for that purpose, or a dwarf's own possessions.
Dwarves prefer to do a small set of labours and dislike a small set of labours. A dwarf will always try to do their preferred job if it's available, but if they are unable to make a living they will volunteer for another task, generally either hauling or one that dwarves don't do on their own - mining, logging, the militia, etc, but if another type of work is doing well they may choose that instead, but almost never their disliked labour (depending on personality). They can also be assigned by the player, even to hated labour (the latter at the cost of an unhappy thought).
So it works like this - urist mcStonecrafter is commissioned by the Baroness to make her consort an amulet. He creates a masterwork, and makes a lot of money, in the form of credit. Urist would celebrate by buying his favourite -plump helmet roast-, but he's been getting a lot of work lately and isn't hungry, so he takes his +sheep wool coat+ to the gemsetter to get it decorated and feels very pleased with himself. The gemsetter uses the money to put food on the table but due to a gem shortage work has been slow lately; several months later, after selling some of his rings and puzzle boxes to make rent, the gemsetter takes up a pick and heads for the gold mines the player just designated under the second cavern.
If the player sets up a new militia squad and doesn't go through manually selecting new members, a bunch of dwarves who like being in the army join up right away, but so do some broke dwarves who would otherwise be pushing a minecart somewhere.
Essentially this is what the player already does, he designates things to be done and the dwarves autonomously do those things. There is no need for money to be involved in any of it, money is basically a redundant irritant to the system since it adds a whole new question aside from 'can it be done by me?' and 'am I allowed to do it?', which is 'can I afford to do it?'.
Mechanically speaking 'am I allowed to it?' means the same as 'can I afford to do it?', except that while the former is rationally assigned by the player, the latter is assigned by a mechanical process that does not have consciousness at all and will in all probability clash with the rational plans of the player. That is until someone figures out how the mechanism works, posts it on the online tutorial and hey presto the player now simply has to carry out certain irrational mechanical tasks, wasting resources and 'can I afford to do it?' mean's nothing other than the player's 'am I allowed to it?' for everyone.
In your example you have identified an issue, which is VERY clunky way that decorating items works and then you have proposed commercialising the issue as a solution. Everything that is actually useful either to the player or to the individual dwarves about your example is actually going to work far better if money is kept out of the equation.
So it works like this - urist mcStonecrafter is commissioned by the Baroness to make her consort an amulet. He creates a masterwork, and makes a lot of money, in the form of credit. Urist would celebrate by buying his favourite -plump helmet roast-, but he's been getting a lot of work lately and isn't hungry, so he takes his +sheep wool coat+ to the gemsetter to get it decorated and feels very pleased with himself. The gemsetter uses the money to put food on the table but due to a gem shortage work has been slow lately; several months later, after selling some of his rings and puzzle boxes to make rent, the gemsetter takes up a pick and heads for the gold mines the player just designated under the second cavern.
The essential issues here are that individual dwarves cannot communicate with the fortress in order to produce specific items they personally want, that dwarves cannot give gifts to their intimates and that dwarves cannot have individual items they personally own decorated once they have taken them from the stockpile. These are all solvable within the present economic framework in the following manner.
1. Personal Wants: Dwarves that want something that they cannot presently acquire from the stockpiles logs their demands so that the player can arrange for them to be met by going to the office of a noble. Since Baroness has an office, she simply goes to her office and logs down her demands for the player to read. The player has the manager place an order for the total number of amulets of a given type that all the dwarves that could not get amulets want. Once the orders are placed then urist mcStonecrafter makes one or more amulets and the Baroness picks one up.
2. Gifts: The Baroness does not however want the amulet for herself but for her Consort. This is easily arranged, since Consort has a list of things he wants but not all these demands are activated. The Baroness checks through the list of things Consort likes and comes up with an amulet. Once she has acquired the item from the stockpile Baroness goes up to Consort and gives him the item, improving relations and making Consort happy.
3. Decorating personal items: urist mcStonecrafter wants to decorate his +sheep wool coat' with gemstones. In the same manner as 1, he logs his personal demand to have an item decorated in a noble's office. A new type of reaction is added into the game which is decorate personal item with gemstone, the manager puts in an order for the total of all dwarves that have logged such a demand and Gemsetter gets to work. Unlike with normal production the Gemsetter meets with urist mcStonecrafter in person, is given the +sheep woold coat+, hauls it to the jeweler's workshop, hauls a gemstone, decorates the item and urist mcStonecrafter picks the item up either from the workshop or the stockpile since it belongs to him.
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In the current system the player still has to order the dwarves to make every sock and stone craft. I'm suggesting instead that the player designate a few stockpiles (maybe workshops, depending on what's easiest) and then dwarves order other dwarves to make items/meals for them. Credit and money regulates how much most dwarves can order from one another. It should be possible for dwarves to feed and clothe and accessorise themselves. The only thing in my example directly done through player input is designating a gold mine.
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In regards to the very real issue of different price-level housing, using zoning similar to how RL cities do would probably be the easiest way to give Dwarves autonomy in digging/building. Just designate a large area and say, "This is for housing." Dwarves then on their own time carve/build houses/bedrooms there. There could be an option to decide what level of housing is built there. You could do the same for workshops, with the option to specify what kind of workshop is allowed in that zone. Other types of private dwarf-designed structures such as merchant shops might be allowed using their own zones. Zones would probably need to be able to overlap.
Raw resources could simply be set to "Public" or "Communal" or whatever so dwarves know they can use them as they like. Like forbidding or dumping.
Renting rooms has come up, and a logical follow up on that is buying rooms/land. I don't think, at first at least, the question of buying vs. renting land should be available. A fortress is basically a government structure; if dwarves want to buy land, they should have to go to the hillocks or mountain halls. In the fortress they can only rent rooms.
I could see dwarves that own a workshop in the hillocks and come to the fortress to set up a market stall in the market zone/place to hawk their wares. They may or may not have to pay rent for their spot in the market.
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In the current system the player still has to order the dwarves to make every sock and stone craft. I'm suggesting instead that the player designate a few stockpiles (maybe workshops, depending on what's easiest) and then dwarves order other dwarves to make items/meals for them. Credit and money regulates how much most dwarves can order from one another. It should be possible for dwarves to feed and clothe and accessorize themselves. The only thing in my example directly done through player input is designating a gold mine.
The size of your gold mine decides how much gold is available to your dwarves. The problem is that you cannot determine or regulate how much gold your dwarves are actually going to want to use, instead all you can presumably do is set the prices of the gold that you are selling to the dwarves. If the dwarf gold miners set their own prices, then it will be according to some mechanism that will be all over the wiki leading to us setting the prices by proxy through designating/forbidding gold.
Problem is that you do not know how much money your individual dwarves actually have on average nor the level of inequality between dwarves, so what your idea results in is not a simpler, less interventionist economic system but us having to constantly trawl through hundreds of bank accounts and then having to do complicated mathematics to determine how expensive gold really is.
It gets worse if we allow dwarves to privately engage in external trade, if we have our own sealed off little economy then we at least vaguely know how much currency is out there because we ultimately chucked all the currency into our sandbox economy in the first place. With external trade we can have a 'wonderful' outflow of currency causing everything to suddenly become un-affordable and mass starvation beckons, or we can have a 'wonderful' inflow of currency leading to us having to a demand-spike since everything is suddenly majorly cheap.
You claim that dwarves should be able to feed, clothe and accessorize themselves but there is simply no need to introduce internal commercial activity in order for this to happen. Dwarves already autonomously do things, so we can simply designate resources for dwarves to use autonomously without ever having to introduce commerce into the equation, resulting in all the problems above mentioned.
In regards to the very real issue of different price-level housing, using zoning similar to how RL cities do would probably be the easiest way to give Dwarves autonomy in digging/building. Just designate a large area and say, "This is for housing." Dwarves then on their own time carve/build houses/bedrooms there. There could be an option to decide what level of housing is built there. You could do the same for workshops, with the option to specify what kind of workshop is allowed in that zone. Other types of private dwarf-designed structures such as merchant shops might be allowed using their own zones. Zones would probably need to be able to overlap.
Raw resources could simply be set to "Public" or "Communal" or whatever so dwarves know they can use them as they like. Like forbidding or dumping.
Renting rooms has come up, and a logical follow up on that is buying rooms/land. I don't think, at first at least, the question of buying vs. renting land should be available. A fortress is basically a government structure; if dwarves want to buy land, they should have to go to the hillocks or mountain halls. In the fortress they can only rent rooms.
I could see dwarves that own a workshop in the hillocks and come to the fortress to set up a market stall in the market zone/place to hawk their wares. They may or may not have to pay rent for their spot in the market.
You seem to want to turn this game into SimCity, but there is a reason why that game does not have a realistic resource-based economy unlike Dwarf Fortress.
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You seem to want to turn this game into SimCity, but there is a reason why that game does not have a realistic resource-based economy unlike Dwarf Fortress.
I'd just like for it to be possible for dwarves to dig their own rooms out, albeit in some way we can reasonably control. Everyone who wanted to completely control the layout of their fort could safely ignore the feature.
I'll admit I was very ecstatic watching my dwarves mine out a vein of ore for the first time without my constant intervention.
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I'd have to agree with the sentiment that zoning and letting dwarfs build things themselves is taking it to far.
Adding a feature to set rent when you create a bedroom and maybe a way to connect other rooms to that rent-able unit would be all I'd add to housing. An example of connecting rooms would be creating a two-story unit, a dinning room on the bottom floor and a bedroom on the top floor, then when you go to set rent from the bed>create bedroom menu you could include the dinning room as part of that unit. The important thing for this is the ability for the player to set the rent price, rather than some formula based on furniture quality.
I also dont think giving dwarfs in a particular line of work autonomy from the state is a good idea just because they dont understand the resource situation nor do they understand your plans for the fort. Something more along the lines of them buying specific goods you ordered to be made and designated for the purpose of being sold to your dwarfs would be a better system. Such as ordering the construction of a variety of crafts like mugs and figurines, then putting them on sale for your dwarfs, and those who have enough money can go buy them. This way you dont have to worry about your stone crafters deciding to use up some of your rare magma proof or super dense rocks because you had not gotten around to organizing them yet.
The thing is, this isn't age of empires or something. The goal isn't to give the player pawns they can move about at their will, it's to make a bunch of little people that the player directs in a sort of vague fashion. And those little people having the ability to make little decisions would be great. Not like "where should this wall go?" but definitely "What sort of room should I rent?" or "What clothes should I buy?"
Indeed.
The "buying" part however in the equation and the "renting" part however are quite mechanically redundant.
They already make decisions as to which empty room to move into and which clothes to help themselves too.
I would not say the buying and renting part is redundant.
If dwarfs get happier thoughts from wearing ≡wool socks≡ then from wool socks and you have a limited supply of ≡wool socks≡, would you not want your mason to have ≡wool socks≡ and you hauler to have wool socks. Of course you could specifically order you mason to grab those ≡wool socks≡ and assign him the fancier room so that he is happier or you can let the tried and true method of supply and demand sort it out for you.
basically Urist McHauler buys the ≡wool socks≡ at the state price of 2☼ because the player was to lazy to give different prices to different quality levels. McMason whose job earns him significantly more than McHauler, sees that McHauler has these nice socks so he offers 5☼, which McHauler quickly accepts. Netting McHauler 5☼ to buy another pair of socks with and cover rent or food while McMason gets an additional happy thought from comfy socks. The player did not have to designate anything but the starting price in that scenario and that scenario would work for all goods, getting the most out of your supply of socks without any effort on the players part.
I imagine the Dwarven economy to look something like this:
Players create those job groupings I mentioned earlier so that than can easily control the amount of labor being done and what dwarves are being paid for that labor. This reduces micromanagment as the player no longer has to assign specific active skills and burrows, a dwarf arrives at the fort and sees that there is an opening in the player made farmer job, the dwarfs sees that many of the skills he has alligns with those used by the farming job so he signs up for that one.
The player sets rent right alongside making bedrooms so the additional hassle is significantly reduced, then newly arrived dwarfs will rent a room based on their jobs wage. This will quickly sort the dwarfs you value highly, like metalworkers whose job you probably gave a higher wage to and dwarfs who are expendable into nice housing and cheeping housing.
The player then can order crafts like socks and mugs to be made in the regular way, then they could designate a pile of those crafts to be sold to the general dwarven community with the rest going to the caravan. From there the market forces I mentioned earlier, which the player controls directly through wages and rent decides who gets what.
Since the player sets wage they would have a pretty good idea of how much money a given dwarf makes based off their job, there would be no need to check the bank balance of each dwarf. If you have some dwarfs without rooms, simply create more jobs or bump up the wage of the job they have now. Of course some way to look at the finances of your fort would be needed, but you should have a fairly accurate idea of how much each dwarf has kind of like your stocks. And like you stocks with it recordkeeper you could assign a banker noble to help manage the forts financial assets.
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I also dont think giving dwarfs in a particular line of work autonomy from the state is a good idea just because they dont understand the resource situation nor do they understand your plans for the fort. Something more along the lines of them buying specific goods you ordered to be made and designated for the purpose of being sold to your dwarfs would be a better system. Such as ordering the construction of a variety of crafts like mugs and figurines, then putting them on sale for your dwarfs, and those who have enough money can go buy them. This way you dont have to worry about your stone crafters deciding to use up some of your rare magma proof or super dense rocks because you had not gotten around to organizing them yet.
If dwarves only took materials for their own work from specifically-designated stockpiles (that is, you have as an option, "make available for private use" or something), then it would be easier to manage that sort of thing, the same way that linked stockpiles make it easier to control what items get encrusted with gems or built out of magma-safe rock. Stockpiles default to "unavailable for private use".
The size of your gold mine decides how much gold is available to your dwarves. The problem is that you cannot determine or regulate how much gold your dwarves are actually going to want to use, instead all you can presumably do is set the prices of the gold that you are selling to the dwarves.
Interesting point - I had vague ideas of a supply/demand system regulating prices of various things, but hadn't thought out all the details there. The biggest point was having dwarves prioritise things in a heirarchy-of-needs sort of way, meaning that if you have lots of gold but little food then dwarves would naturally spend their gold on food.
If the dwarf gold miners set their own prices, then it will be according to some mechanism that will be all over the wiki leading to us setting the prices by proxy through designating/forbidding gold.
But I don't see how people being able to use the wiki to hack around with gold prices would ruin the experience for those of us who don't want to hack around with gold prices. I mean, it's not like everyone uses danger rooms or trap corridors.
It gets worse if we allow dwarves to privately engage in external trade, if we have our own sealed off little economy then we at least vaguely know how much currency is out there because we ultimately chucked all the currency into our sandbox economy in the first place. With external trade we can have a 'wonderful' outflow of currency causing everything to suddenly become un-affordable and mass starvation beckons, or we can have a 'wonderful' inflow of currency leading to us having to a demand-spike since everything is suddenly majorly cheap.
Well...sort of? Again, dwarves would be going by their needs - if they have no food but lots of gold, then gold gets traded to hilldwarves and merchants for food. The hilldwarves may not value the gold so much, or they may not be able to afford it, meaning that dwarves look for other avenues of work - suddenly you find your goldsmiths learning how to be stonecrafters or clothiers instead, because at least they can afford food. If on the other hand the dwarves find themselves very wealthy indeed, well, they start spending their money on heaps of expensive crap and suddenly there's a fortress full of dwarves in embroidered <<*giant cave spider silk*>> clothes with two rings on each finger demanding more room in their quarters.
Additionally, concrete currency would be mostly for outside trade, and that mostly in the form of barter, since dwarves could handle everything inside their fort on credit, which was the way most medieval societies did everything anyway.
This ought to impact migration, too - if a dwarf is unhappy enough he ought to pack up his possessions and leave, whether for the hills or another fortress. If the fort's full of wealthy dwarves, more migrants ought to arrive to seek their fortune. (Personally I think migration needs a serious revamp - I hate the huge waves we get before we have a chance to really get established, and as others have often suggested, dwarves should be able to leave if they get too fed up with the fortress as well).
You claim that dwarves should be able to feed, clothe and accessorize themselves but there is simply no need to introduce internal commercial activity in order for this to happen. Dwarves already autonomously do things, so we can simply designate resources for dwarves to use autonomously without ever having to introduce commerce into the equation, resulting in all the problems above mentioned.
It would be a way to regulate things like dwarves working their preferred careers, purchasing items to display their wealth, selling said items in times of trouble (meaning that rich dwarves could keep working their preferred jobs at no profit till the money ran out) and market stuff. If dwarves can just do what they want without money, then there's less interesting situations like legendary metalcrafters being forced into hauling work due to lack of demand. Also it would help with migration being a thing.
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If the dwarf gold miners set their own prices, then it will be according to some mechanism that will be all over the wiki leading to us setting the prices by proxy through designating/forbidding gold.
But I don't see how people being able to use the wiki to hack around with gold prices would ruin the experience for those of us who don't want to hack around with gold prices. I mean, it's not like everyone uses danger rooms or trap corridors.
An Issue I see is when the dwarfs tank the economy because they are controlling their own prices and the player has to go to he wiki to find out why dwarfs are starving.
Hence with the exception of dwarfs buying things from other dwarfs all state goods should have their prices set by the player this way starving dwarfs will be able to find food and if they want better food leave that up to them buying it off dwarves who bought it off the state in the first place.
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I would not say the buying and renting part is redundant.
If dwarfs get happier thoughts from wearing ≡wool socks≡ then from wool socks and you have a limited supply of ≡wool socks≡, would you not want your mason to have ≡wool socks≡ and you hauler to have wool socks. Of course you could specifically order you mason to grab those ≡wool socks≡ and assign him the fancier room so that he is happier or you can let the tried and true method of supply and demand sort it out for you.
basically Urist McHauler buys the ≡wool socks≡ at the state price of 2☼ because the player was to lazy to give different prices to different quality levels. McMason whose job earns him significantly more than McHauler, sees that McHauler has these nice socks so he offers 5☼, which McHauler quickly accepts. Netting McHauler 5☼ to buy another pair of socks with and cover rent or food while McMason gets an additional happy thought from comfy socks. The player did not have to designate anything but the starting price in that scenario and that scenario would work for all goods, getting the most out of your supply of socks without any effort on the players part.
As There is no particular reason why you would care how the socks of various qualities are distributed among your dwarves, the present situation works rather well enough. Sock distribution all goes on largely autonomously and requires neither player input nor prices in order to work at the moment.
Automation of production has it's uses, prices however do not have a use and for every instance where the pricing system works out better than the present system there will be several instances of disasters arising as a result of problems in the pricing system; disasters that would never happen with the present system.
Interesting point - I had vague ideas of a supply/demand system regulating prices of various things, but hadn't thought out all the details there. The biggest point was having dwarves prioritise things in a heirarchy-of-needs sort of way, meaning that if you have lots of gold but little food then dwarves would naturally spend their gold on food.
The price of gold however is regardless of the situation in relation to the relative price of plump helmets, still going to be influenced by the available amount of gold that is surplus to demand. If set by the player we still run into the problem of the player having to determine the amount of coins the average dwarf has in order to determine how expensive while if it is set by a supply+demand mechanism we run into the problem that the player has to ensure that there is not too much gold designated or too little designated so the price will be optimal, while still having to determine the amount of money in each dwarf's pocket.
But I don't see how people being able to use the wiki to hack around with gold prices would ruin the experience for those of us who don't want to hack around with gold prices. I mean, it's not like everyone uses danger rooms or trap corridors.
Hacking the gold prices is not avoidable unlike danger rooms and trap corridors. You set the gold prices either directly or through designation. 'Hacking' is basically simply not playing the game to lose, you are making sure that you are setting a price that is correct. Correct in this context brings us to the redundancy of commerce, we are setting the price in order to ration the goods.
We want to make sure that no dwarf ends up with more than one unit worth of gold, so why not simply directly ration gold so that no dwarf ends up with more than one unit?
Well...sort of? Again, dwarves would be going by their needs - if they have no food but lots of gold, then gold gets traded to hilldwarves and merchants for food. The hilldwarves may not value the gold so much, or they may not be able to afford it, meaning that dwarves look for other avenues of work - suddenly you find your goldsmiths learning how to be stonecrafters or clothiers instead, because at least they can afford food. If on the other hand the dwarves find themselves very wealthy indeed, well, they start spending their money on heaps of expensive crap and suddenly there's a fortress full of dwarves in embroidered <<*giant cave spider silk*>> clothes with two rings on each finger demanding more room in their quarters.
Remember that I am talking about the need to set the prices based upon the available currency available to the average dwarf, not the general functioning of the economy and how it results in poverty for some but riches for others.
Additionally, concrete currency would be mostly for outside trade, and that mostly in the form of barter, since dwarves could handle everything inside their fort on credit, which was the way most medieval societies did everything anyway.
If credit is non-convertible then you have solved the money fluctuation problem in regard to credit but we still have to go through hundreds of accounts checking how much credit everyone has in order to determine prices.
This ought to impact migration, too - if a dwarf is unhappy enough he ought to pack up his possessions and leave, whether for the hills or another fortress. If the fort's full of wealthy dwarves, more migrants ought to arrive to seek their fortune. (Personally I think migration needs a serious revamp - I hate the huge waves we get before we have a chance to really get established, and as others have often suggested, dwarves should be able to leave if they get too fed up with the fortress as well).
Indeed but none of this has any relation to the thread topic. Dwarves could already theoretically emigrate without any need for any changes in the economy.
It would be a way to regulate things like dwarves working their preferred careers, purchasing items to display their wealth, selling said items in times of trouble (meaning that rich dwarves could keep working their preferred jobs at no profit till the money ran out) and market stuff. If dwarves can just do what they want without money, then there's less interesting situations like legendary metalcrafters being forced into hauling work due to lack of demand. Also it would help with migration being a thing.
Legendary metalcrafters are not forced into anything, the way things work at the moment is that everyone does every job that they are permitted to do and are able to do. Differences in status between the Legendary metalworker and the hauler peasant can easily be modeled without any need for currency by having everyone estimate their worth to the fortress and dynamically generate more demands which are processed by the centralized demand screen+manager screen.
Add emigration into the picture and things get better. The highly skilled worker estimates his value to the fortress as high and makes many extravagant demands. If those demands are not met then he becomes unhappy and emigrates away while the less skilled worker whose demands are less stays; all without ever introducing money into the equation.
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GoblinCookie, may I suggest you (and everyone else) take a look at counting's suggestions about the economy and proposed mechanisms for commodity valuation? The mechanisms proposed there would allow for procedural and non-arbitrary determination of value for commodities, as well as procedurally determining currencies (well, commodity monies)! No player input required! No messing with gold values, prices, or crap like that unless you want to! Here are two of them:
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85289.msg2296845#msg2296845
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=88258.msg2413199#msg2413199
And these kinds of models actually have been implemented in simulations developed by researchers as well as at least a few games. I do intend on expanding on counting's suggestions at some point when I have time to finish studying the papers he referenced... But, from what I have read so far, in principle, they could work in DF and it would be a beautiful thing. The thing that I can't quite get at right now is the initial determination of value... the language is dense in some of these. I have a feeling that this is a large part of where heirarchy-of-needs-based valuation might come to fore in particular.
I'd just like for it to be possible for dwarves to dig their own rooms out, albeit in some way we can reasonably control. Everyone who wanted to completely control the layout of their fort could safely ignore the feature.
I'll admit I was very ecstatic watching my dwarves mine out a vein of ore for the first time without my constant intervention.
I really like this idea, HartLord. And those who oppose it, it would obviously be an optional thing. Also, there are already mechanisms in place for NPCs to employ their own layouts for fotresses (look at the towns and stuff generated in world-gen). It wouldn't be a far leap at all to allow dwarves to do this autonomously, expanding upon an existing layout. Of course, this would be at the player's discretion. Also, this stuff could also pave the way for better non-player-run forts (including formerly player-run forts be allowed to be run by the computer), as well as having a way for different kinds of architecture as a knowledge to have a way to plug into the game.
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As There is no particular reason why you would care how the socks of various qualities are distributed among your dwarves, the present situation works rather well enough. Sock distribution all goes on largely autonomously and requires neither player input nor prices in order to work at the moment.
Automation of production has it's uses, prices however do not have a use and for every instance where the pricing system works out better than the present system there will be several instances of disasters arising as a result of problems in the pricing system; disasters that would never happen with the present system.
The socks thing was just an example, I dont even think dwarfs care about the quality level of their clothing right now, but I have no doubt they eventually will. In which case being able to ensure your metal-smiths are happier than some random group of haulers is important and since the current system basically hands things out randomly, this gives some a guarantee the wealthiest dwarfs have the best stuff.
The present system currently just randomly hands out clothing to the first dwarf to pick it up, that's not much of a system. Pricing and more importantly the setting of wages gives the player some control over it.
The example might work better with prepared meals though since dwarfs do currently care about what they eat, only gaining a happy thought if the meal contains something they like.
Do you have an example or some idea about what sort of disaster could arise from [Player creates job with wages, Player sets rent, player sets starting price for goods then lets dwarfs work it out for themselves]?
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GoblinCookie, may I suggest you (and everyone else) take a look at counting's suggestions about the economy and proposed mechanisms for commodity valuation? The mechanisms proposed there would allow for procedural and non-arbitrary determination of value for commodities, as well as procedurally determining currencies (well, commodity monies)! No player input required! No messing with gold values, prices, or crap like that unless you want to! Here are two of them:
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85289.msg2296845#msg2296845
- http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=88258.msg2413199#msg2413199
And these kinds of models actually have been implemented in simulations developed by researchers as well as at least a few games. I do intend on expanding on counting's suggestions at some point when I have time to finish studying the papers he referenced... But, from what I have read so far, in principle, they could work in DF and it would be a beautiful thing. The thing that I can't quite get at right now is the initial determination of value... the language is dense in some of these. I have a feeling that this is a large part of where heirarchy-of-needs-based valuation might come to fore in particular.
There is little purpose nor function for having internal commerce and every function that supposadly requires it, the commerce side of things turns out to be a redundant irritant. Largely what we want is dwarf behaviors and hardly any of them require that money be involved at all.
The person you link too just looks like the usual economist snake-oil salesman insisting that if only his own pet real-life economic ideas were implemented in the game then everything would work smoothly.
The socks thing was just an example, I dont even think dwarfs care about the quality level of their clothing right now, but I have no doubt they eventually will. In which case being able to ensure your metal-smiths are happier than some random group of haulers is important and since the current system basically hands things out randomly, this gives some a guarantee the wealthiest dwarfs have the best stuff.
The present system currently just randomly hands out clothing to the first dwarf to pick it up, that's not much of a system. Pricing and more importantly the setting of wages gives the player some control over it.
The example might work better with prepared meals though since dwarfs do currently care about what they eat, only gaining a happy thought if the meal contains something they like.
Do you have an example or some idea about what sort of disaster could arise from [Player creates job with wages, Player sets rent, player sets starting price for goods then lets dwarfs work it out for themselves]?
I have spent many, many posts pointing out the huge number of disasters that could arise using that system, I do not have the time to waste reposting it all over again.
What we fundamentally need is for individual dwarves to demand specific items from the player, which are then collected. Dwarves that estimate their value higher make more extravagant demands of the player. If we want to keep a specific dwarf happy then we could even fine-tune things ourselves by having his personal demands highlighted say a particular colour or highlighting those demands that specifically pertain to dwarves that meet the criteria.
The whole system can be automated with ease by the player setting demands for particular goods to be automatically sent off to the manager the moment they are reported. The production of goods that do not require scarce resources or labour would work well if automated, scarce resources goods would be better dealt with manually. Or we perhaps make it so only the demands of particular dwarves are automatically met.
This way we have exactly what we want, without having to fiddle around with prices and such.
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There is little purpose nor function for having internal commerce and every function that supposadly requires it, the commerce side of things turns out to be a redundant irritant. Largely what we want is dwarf behaviors and hardly any of them require that money be involved at all.
I respect your opinion. However, I am curious as to what game you have played that involves internal commerce. On what do you base your opinion? And of course none of the behaviors of dwarves, regardless of what we want, require money be involved at all. Keep in mind that nothing I have suggested requires money even exist. And value and price doesn't have to have anything to do with money.
Also, no dwarf behaviors, planned or existing, require money. But a lot, if not all, require some method of ascribing value to things in order to make believable, non-arbitrary judgements that have some degree of predictability and (more importantly) use. And right now, commodity value is not handled well at all. And hopefully by the end of this post I will make it somewhat clear as to why this will need to be addressed and why internal commerce (as opposed to just taking things as needed from communal stockpiles) is something that is often needed for effective resource management that maximizes happiness, productivity, etc. (in other words, avoids tantrum-spiral death).
The person you link too just looks like the usual economist snake-oil salesman insisting that if only his own pet real-life economic ideas were implemented in the game then everything would work smoothly.
What a sad and ignorant thing to say, especially without any meaningful evidence presented. :( Being dismissive of ideas without critical thinking helps nothing.
What we fundamentally need is for individual dwarves to demand specific items from the player, which are then collected. Dwarves that estimate their value higher make more extravagant demands of the player. If we want to keep a specific dwarf happy then we could even fine-tune things ourselves by having his personal demands highlighted say a particular colour or highlighting those demands that specifically pertain to dwarves that meet the criteria.
First off, for the following, I am only talking about stuff going on in the fort, and am not talking about anything relating to the outside of the fort, including visiting merchants, etc.
Indeed we do need a way for individual dwarves to make demands. And, guess what? We DO! :D Just take a look at the nobility in the game. However, these demands are really really basic, and the way these demands are communicated to the player leave something to be desired. As things are right now, other than subsistence demands universal to all dwarves and entities, the demands of the nobility are quite arbitrary. And the demands of all entities in so far as basic survival needs are not directly communicated to the player, though one could determine the consumption of this or that commodity by dwarves in a fort sort of easily (though it would could be time consuming) by looking at stockpiles and doing simple math. From there you can determine how much of this or that you need to make (well... have your dwarves make) for a given population and scale up as more people come to avoid tantrum spirals. Fine. This is pretty much how gameplay is right now (though we often do nicely without the math). From the demand you observe, you determine value (in a manner of speaking) and affect supply of whatever it is that is demanded.
So, from what I understand, all that you are suggesting is a way to make exactly what I just mention not an aspect of gameplay the player really needs to actively participate in. That is fine. And it would be fairly straightforward to have the computer do this to an extent (provided enough workshops and infrastructure and resources are available to assign appropriate jobs). And this works just dandy with dwarves and entities in the game as they currently are (other than nobles), since they have little to no personal goals, and little if any way to make value-based judgements on their own about what they are willing to give for something else to satisfy their goals (with the exception of pathing). They will pretty much work and do whatever you tell them to (with few exceptions) so long as they are not in a tantrum.
However, this system might not be robust if behavior of dwarves ever become more complex and realistic, particularly if they ever come to have any sort of personal goals. And, actually, in a way, the kind of stuff I mean is already really loosely present in nobles... Anyway, if all dwarves (and entities in general) become able to exercise a bit more autonomy, come to have a way of ascribing value to things (as in... I am willing to give this much of my time towards carpentry to receive X plump helmets) and have individual goals in mind (as in... I want to have a big domicile in a reputable fortress in which to raise my family), then I wonder what will happen... As things are now, if a (non-noble) dwarf meets all their hard-coded needs, they just sit around doing nothing. Otherwise, they either die or throw a tantrum. Now, don't get me wrong, DF does a pretty damned good simulation of individual behaviors, definitely qualitatively MUCH better than a vast majority of games and simulations out there. BUT you do not have you average dwarves acting as anything except mindless ants (that could blow up at any moment).
Nobles are another matter. They make demands that, if not met, lead them to become unhappy. This in principle is pretty realistic of not just nobles IRL. If I don't get to do or fail at what I want to do in life, I get depressed and/or angry. I'm sure the same goes for all of us forum-goers and any human being ever. Anyway, though the demands and mandates of nobles are arbitrary, even if they weren't... How many times would it take for you to wish that damned noble could just go do things by them self instead of you having to make it work (and ultimately interrupting your own goals for your awesome fort)? Now imagine if every dwarf in the fortress, as they would in real life, also had their own demands beyond immediate survival? This would be a rather tricky thing to manage centrally (possible, but tricky... just look at any centralized economy). If this happened right now, then individuals in your fort would have no way to meet their needs/wants other than waiting on you, the player, to micromanage their asses even more than now to make it all work (which, admittedly, might be a fun game for some in its own right). THIS IS EXACTLY WHERE INTERNAL COMMERCE WOULD BE A GOOD (not to mention, realistic) THING. It would give the tools for dwarves (and any entity in the game) to exercise their autonomy towards meeting their individual wants and needs instead of exclusively relying on a hive-mind or greater power (you) to do so and/or just taking things from communal stockpiles willy-nilly. How free this commerce is (or whether or not it exists legally in the first place) would be completely up to the player (so, you could easily do things the GoblinCookie way if you wanted to, and it would work beautifully in some circumstances!). And the role of the player in ensuring the success of whatever system of economy will lie not necessarily within micromanagement of individuals, but in management of the fortress as a whole, including infrastructure, economic policies, etc.
It sure as hell isn't an issue now, but look at the development pages with regard to the behaviors of individuals and groups in fortress mode. :)
I hope I am making sense... I will revisit this later.
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Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.
I saw that on the wiki that's why I suggested the dwarfs only use credit for inter fortress goods like rent and food. The only time a dwarf should use coins is when they need to purchase something from the caravan, in which case the caravans will take the loose change off the map with them.
I like this suggestion because it mirrors how most societies dealt with their economies before the 14th century cutoff date.
A lot of the time, monetary economies were only for people conducting large-scale trade, construction or military projects. Your average citizen would, de-facto, do business in barter, and pay their taxes in material goods rather than coinage. In fact, several nations were brought to financial ruin trying to force their citizens to pay tax in coins - China for example completely ran out of bronze and silver because all of it was tied up in coins.
Currency can be useful for trade because it's relatively cheap to transport for its value. It also serves as a good way for important institutions to measure their debts to one another - after all, those metals have no practical purpose to be put to, don't degrade over time and aren't as subject to fluctuations in market value as most other goods unless something extreme happens. But the vast, vast majority of the population might never handle more than a few coins in their life.
EDIT: Also, barter is not necessary. In many cases (for example in nearly all observed societies without money) a pure barter economy did not emerge. Instead, local communities kept track of individual debts without the use of a medium; thus running your economy but without coins like we did in previous versions is an entirely realistic way of doing it.
For the majority of the world for most of human history, credit has been the most common form of economic transaction; barter was reserved for dealing with strangers. And though we fail to recognize this in the public consciousness, this includes medieval europe.
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I respect your opinion. However, I am curious as to what game you have played that involves internal commerce. On what do you base your opinion? And of course none of the behaviors of dwarves, regardless of what we want, require money be involved at all. Keep in mind that nothing I have suggested requires money even exist. And value and price doesn't have to have anything to do with money.
Sorry, I am losing track of who is saying what about what.
Also, no dwarf behaviors, planned or existing, require money. But a lot, if not all, require some method of ascribing value to things in order to make believable, non-arbitrary judgements that have some degree of predictability and (more importantly) use. And right now, commodity value is not handled well at all. And hopefully by the end of this post I will make it somewhat clear as to why this will need to be addressed and why internal commerce (as opposed to just taking things as needed from communal stockpiles) is something that is often needed for effective resource management that maximizes happiness, productivity, etc. (in other words, avoids tantrum-spiral death).
Actually that is not true. Demands are inherantly seperate from eachother as opposed to being one huge bundle, it is only once you add personal wealth (not necceserily money) being traded away that the value of your demands actually has any real function in the system.
Really there are only two issues, abundance or scarcity. In the latter case a system of rationing would work far better than pricing because it does not introduce inequalities of wealth into the system nor require the player constantly to keep an eye on how expensive the item actually is relative to the total amount of value they have to sell.
Basically while prices do work as rudimentery form of rationing, actual rationing works better and is far simpler for the player to implement.
What a sad and ignorant thing to say, especially without any meaningful evidence presented. :( Being dismissive of ideas without critical thinking helps nothing.
It helps to save time and avoid derailment; thus meaning more time for more productive activity than debating complex economic theories.
First off, for the following, I am only talking about stuff going on in the fort, and am not talking about anything relating to the outside of the fort, including visiting merchants, etc.
Indeed we do need a way for individual dwarves to make demands. And, guess what? We DO! :D Just take a look at the nobility in the game. However, these demands are really really basic, and the way these demands are communicated to the player leave something to be desired. As things are right now, other than subsistence demands universal to all dwarves and entities, the demands of the nobility are quite arbitrary. And the demands of all entities in so far as basic survival needs are not directly communicated to the player, though one could determine the consumption of this or that commodity by dwarves in a fort sort of easily (though it would could be time consuming) by looking at stockpiles and doing simple math. From there you can determine how much of this or that you need to make (well... have your dwarves make) for a given population and scale up as more people come to avoid tantrum spirals. Fine. This is pretty much how gameplay is right now (though we often do nicely without the math). From the demand you observe, you determine value (in a manner of speaking) and affect supply of whatever it is that is demanded.
So, from what I understand, all that you are suggesting is a way to make exactly what I just mention not an aspect of gameplay the player really needs to actively participate in. That is fine. And it would be fairly straightforward to have the computer do this to an extent (provided enough workshops and infrastructure and resources are available to assign appropriate jobs). And this works just dandy with dwarves and entities in the game as they currently are (other than nobles), since they have little to no personal goals, and little if any way to make value-based judgements on their own about what they are willing to give for something else to satisfy their goals (with the exception of pathing). They will pretty much work and do whatever you tell them to (with few exceptions) so long as they are not in a tantrum.
Yes, the basic idea is to have all the dwarves actually go through a labour of travelling to the offices you have given the nobles and then adding their own unmet demands to the list, which can then be met by the player manually. Some types of demands can be set to automatic, meaning the manager is automatically set to put an order in for that item as soon as it is reported by a dwarf. Therefore dwarves can now autonomously produce things to meet their own desires without player intervention without any commerce being needed at all.
I intend to one day lay out the whole idea in detail but I am busy working hard on modding at present.
However, this system might not be robust if behavior of dwarves ever become more complex and realistic, particularly if they ever come to have any sort of personal goals. And, actually, in a way, the kind of stuff I mean is already really loosely present in nobles... Anyway, if all dwarves (and entities in general) become able to exercise a bit more autonomy, come to have a way of ascribing value to things (as in... I am willing to give this much of my time towards carpentry to receive X plump helmets) and have individual goals in mind (as in... I want to have a big domicile in a reputable fortress in which to raise my family), then I wonder what will happen... As things are now, if a (non-noble) dwarf meets all their hard-coded needs, they just sit around doing nothing. Otherwise, they either die or throw a tantrum. Now, don't get me wrong, DF does a pretty damned good simulation of individual behaviors, definitely qualitatively MUCH better than a vast majority of games and simulations out there. BUT you do not have you average dwarves acting as anything except mindless ants (that could blow up at any moment).
Basically all we need to do to move beyond the mindless survivalist ants stage is simply to universalize the fixed system nobles use now and make it dynamic. Dwarves develop specific demands based upon personality and biological needs, look at the hardcoded value of these demands, look at how valuable they personally are, look at how much of the item is in stock, etc. It then creates itself a set of demands and new demands are gradually added asall existing demands are met.
If the items are available the dwarf helps himself, if they are not available the dwarf logs in the demand as described above. All this will work perfectly at allowing dwarves to become more than ants and works based upon the present system without needing internal commerce at all.
Nobles are another matter. They make demands that, if not met, lead them to become unhappy. This in principle is pretty realistic of not just nobles IRL. If I don't get to do or fail at what I want to do in life, I get depressed and/or angry. I'm sure the same goes for all of us forum-goers and any human being ever. Anyway, though the demands and mandates of nobles are arbitrary, even if they weren't... How many times would it take for you to wish that damned noble could just go do things by them self instead of you having to make it work (and ultimately interrupting your own goals for your awesome fort)? Now imagine if every dwarf in the fortress, as they would in real life, also had their own demands beyond immediate survival? This would be a rather tricky thing to manage centrally (possible, but tricky... just look at any centralized economy). If this happened right now, then individuals in your fort would have no way to meet their needs/wants other than waiting on you, the player, to micromanage their asses even more than now to make it all work (which, admittedly, might be a fun game for some in its own right). THIS IS EXACTLY WHERE INTERNAL COMMERCE WOULD BE A GOOD (not to mention, realistic) THING. It would give the tools for dwarves (and any entity in the game) to exercise their autonomy towards meeting their individual wants and needs instead of exclusively relying on a hive-mind or greater power (you) to do so and/or just taking things from communal stockpiles willy-nilly. How free this commerce is (or whether or not it exists legally in the first place) would be completely up to the player (so, you could easily do things the GoblinCookie way if you wanted to, and it would work beautifully in some circumstances!). And the role of the player in ensuring the success of whatever system of economy will lie not necessarily within micromanagement of individuals, but in management of the fortress as a whole, including infrastructure, economic policies, etc.
It sure as hell isn't an issue now, but look at the development pages with regard to the behaviors of individuals and groups in fortress mode. :)
I hope I am making sense... I will revisit this later.
Internal commerce as an idea has a deceptive appeal because of the wearyness from having to centrally micromanage everything; however as mentioned the appeal is deceptive.
The reality however is that the system will still need managing and the hard part, which is the need to gather reliable information will be more difficult to arrange. In the present we only need to look at two sets of numbers (demand vs resources), internal commerce adds a whole set of additional numbers, such as the available amount of tradable valuables that a given dwarf would be willing to trade for said item and how much money each dwarf has in his pocket, how much credit is available. :-\ :-\
I am not actually against internal commerce as a concept however, despite popular belief. The best way to introduce it is when we look at the other side of things from demands, that is we require dwarves to be motivated to do (certain) work under (certain) conditions. It should be added an alternative form of labour motivation to the whip and the need to regulate the commercial economy is actually a price you pay. We need to put things up for sale so that the money that we pay our workers to do jobs whether they want to or not actually motivates them to do anything.
This would be done by setting certain item types as for sale and other item types for use as currency. If a dwarf demands items that are for sale then he demands whatever it is that we are using as currency but this is not automatically available either. He instead looks for work that we have set a per unit ration of payment first, does that work, then collects the currency items that he is owed as payment before going off to buy the item he really want. Alternatively we could rely on legal means of coercion (forced labour), ideological manipulation or simply allow dwarves to do things as they want.
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Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.
Is it possible to have a piece of clothing that acts as a coin container? That way, dwarves would always carry their money with them.
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Ops Fox: If you ever let your dwarves get their hands on coins they'd divide them up, shuffle them around, and it'd generally clog things up. Instead people would just never mint coins and it'd all be handled as if they were using debit cards.
Is it possible to have a piece of clothing that acts as a coin container? That way, dwarves would always carry their money with them.
That should be possible coffers and such act as containers now, but as I mentioned before it might be better to have a banker dwarf hold everyone's "money" and give the player an easy way to check up on the finances of their dwarf. The only time a dwarf should deal with money directly is if they are buying something from the caravan.
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A banker dwarf....
Sounds like it would be a task for the bookkeeper.
The thing with coffers and cabinets is that they aren't "worn" and so dwarves would have to travel back and forth in order to retrieve money. However, if dwarves carried their net worth around with them at all times, that wouldn't be a problem.
Book keepers already keep note of stocks, animals (and health?). It shouldn't be too much of a hassle to add another page for dwarf financial situations to keep a tab on each dwarf.
I'm against "credit" money in DF because it kills the atmosphere.
Second, if I retire my fort and create an adventurer, I should be able to kill all the dwarves in my former fortress and take their money. You know what's a letdown? To kill the Baron dwarf of my fortress only to discover that he has no money because it's all credit. Or to just slaughter the whole fortress only to discover the whole settlement ran on credit.
A proper banking system (if Toady is thinking about doing it) would be too far down the road. In the real world, the economy worked without banking for a very very long time.
Back to clothing that act as containers. First off, there are backpacks and waterskins. Both are containers but are only equipped for military.
I'd advocate using backpacks as containers for money but having every civilized entity walking around with a backpack makes DF sound like a large school campus. "I got my lunch and my money in my backpack, hurr hurr".
Personally I prefer something wearable like wallets but trousers in DF don't have pockets.
Basically what I'm asking for, to be specific, is a fanny pack(?). The only trouble I have is figuring out which slot of the body it could fit that would work for both military and civilian units.
Coins take up space yeah? But if a coin purse acted the same way as a backpack where only a certain item was allowed, a coin purse can act as a void where an entity stores all its coins. Unrealistic, but simple enough that it could work.
If you aim for realism, the coin purse can have a limit but the limit should be high enough that the dwarf should only refill his coin purse when he heads back to his room for sleeping, relaxation.
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When I said coffers store money I was not saying our dwarfs should keep their money in the coffers. I was responding to you question of whether or not it was possible.
Banking traces back to Italy in the 14th century, so it does fall within toady timeline.
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There's an item called a pouch. People store coins in them in adventure mode.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Container#Quick_Reference
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An interesting form of currency I've seen mentioned a few times in other threads are the Rai Stones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones).
While the monetary system of Yap appears to use these giant stones as tokens, in fact it relies on an oral history of ownership. Being too large to move, buying an item with these stones is as easy as saying it no longer belongs to you. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person you passed it on to—no physical movement of the stone is required.
The stones are a physical currency, but their value is traded orally, so I would say they are an ancient example of formalized credit. It's not unreasonable to think that dwarves might use a similar system for local trade.
While I understand why some people feel the word "credit" doesn't fit Dwarf Fortress (the pervasive use of it in sci-fi and modern economics is to blame), the word credit [creditum], meaning "a loan, thing entrusted to another", dates back to Latin. The concept has been around for a long, long time.
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Banking existed for the longest time but the form of banking where the banker holds the money and credit is used is not. And if we were to stick to the timeline, banking would be a lot different than modern banking you see today that deals in currency only.
Banking around the 14th century was based off of more ancient banking practices that involved grain. Lots and lots of grain. This would not work in DF for obvious reasons. DF, as it is now, would only present micro-banking that would have little impact on world generation as populations are too small to make grain movements significant.
Second, small populations in DF make the amount of grain small. Making the loans the banks make also small unless the bank were to charge exorbitant interest rates.
Third, DF is communist. All land is shared. Nobody owns any piece of land except a room. Farming is also communal. Economy can work in a communist state but is essentially retarded economy. Grain-based trading and interest would fail.
Banking in DF seems a bit arbitrary and it requires an extensive working economy in order for banking to work. So if banking does happen, I don't see it occurring in the first (second) economy release.
First, the way I see it, early basic economy was driven by the need to survive. What do we need to survive? Food.
However, food is never a problem in DF. If each civilization was self sustaining as it is now, there would be no need for trade and in essence, economy doesn't need to exist. Communal farming, communal workplaces and communal cafeterias essentially disrupt the the whole process. Entities need to own items, not just the clothing on their back.
As mentioned earlier, but rejected for complexity reasons, someone suggested a greater degree of entity autonomy. Which would be necessary for a working "capitalist" economy.
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Banking existed for the longest time but the form of banking where the banker holds the money and credit is used is not. And if we were to stick to the timeline, banking would be a lot different than modern banking you see today that deals in currency only.
Banking around the 14th century was based off of more ancient banking practices that involved grain. Lots and lots of grain. This would not work in DF for obvious reasons. DF, as it is now, would only present micro-banking that would have little impact on world generation as populations are too small to make grain movements significant.
Second, small populations in DF make the amount of grain small. Making the loans the banks make also small unless the bank were to charge exorbitant interest rates.
Third, DF is communist. All land is shared. Nobody owns any piece of land except a room. Farming is also communal. Economy can work in a communist state but is essentially retarded economy. Grain-based trading and interest would fail.
Banking in DF seems a bit arbitrary and it requires an extensive working economy in order for banking to work. So if banking does happen, I don't see it occurring in the first (second) economy release.
First, the way I see it, early basic economy was driven by the need to survive. What do we need to survive? Food.
However, food is never a problem in DF. If each civilization was self sustaining as it is now, there would be no need for trade and in essence, economy doesn't need to exist. Communal farming, communal workplaces and communal cafeterias essentially disrupt the the whole process. Entities need to own items, not just the clothing on their back.
As mentioned earlier, but rejected for complexity reasons, someone suggested a greater degree of entity autonomy. Which would be necessary for a working "capitalist" economy.
This is quite an enjoyable discussion.
Banking in 14th century Florence was based off of gold smiths offering as an additional service to their customers to hold their heavy gold in his vault and give them notes that he would redeem for the appropriate amount of gold. In its early evolution it was an additional feature of the gold smith to attract customers rather than a money making scheme, it really took off in 14th century when someone realized you could charge interest and hand out loans with that system.
Looking at the bases for our modern banking system though is primarily where I see its value, not in a modern interest/loan generating business venture. That additional service of holding the money and redeeming it whenever asked for would be exactly what our dwarfs need in all their zanny ways. So dont look at my suggestion for a Dwarven banker from the modern standpoint of someone whom holds money, gives interest and hands out loans, look at it as a service of the state to keep your gold safe from rampaging adventures and Kobolds.
In all honesty I like my little communist dwarfs and like managing them as is, but I see the value in a simple monetary system to easily divvy up what you produce and hand high quality items to important dwarfs. The system I outlined is specifically meant to maintain player control over our dwarfs while easing the micromanagement involved.
I'd rather not loose my control over my dwarfs because of some overly complex economical mush, what I suggest earlier is specifically meant to maintain player control but decrease the micromanagement through the most basic principles of economics. I'd rather aoid banker dwarfs charging interest and handing out loans, I'd rather avoid dwarfs suddenly deciding to waste my jet or mica/gabbro because of some arbitrary want of theirs. Loosing control over my dwarfs is the last thing I want in the game and would break the entire experience for me, if dwarfs suddenly started doing things I did not approve or started carving out what their little algorithmic brains decided was a nice room I would not be Able to play dwarf fortress.
My suggestion earlier is specifically meant to maintain player control over the entire fort, while decreasing micromanagement and increasing dwarven autonomy/personality.
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There is a pretty distinct divide over what different players want. Some want to maintain a communist state-run approach but allow dwarves to more vocal about desires. Others want automation.
I think any solution needs to offer the player the ability to control where the line between state-run and private sectors is. Zoning is an example. Ideally we would have a system where a player could make their fort nearly autonomous, with all of the perks and imminent failures that will bring, and where players can continue their communist regime unchallenged by capitalistic pressures. We don't need a system that draws a line to try and make everyone as happy as possible, we need a system that allows the player to do it themselves. And I have no idea what that system will look like, but I suspect the solution lies not in bickering over control vs simulation, or producing gamey compromises, but by thinking about what tools can we give the player to allocate resources for private sectors, keeping things state controlled by default.
Also, I'm all for the banking system. I agree in a fortress of only a few hundred dwarves there is no need for simulating the actual currency for day-to-day transactions. Let a bankers ledger do that job. Zoning, as a completely optional thing, could be a good system. And we need a system to allow the state to provide resources to the private sector for use in their businesses (if they're allowed to exist). Maybe commercial zoning, allowing dwarves with the money to purchase land zoned properly, and state-run markets (explicitly managed by the player, maybe some autonomy here for "junk" materials, etc.) sell materials for use by dwarves, allowing the player to control the supply of precious metals, while maybe allowing copper mining in a commercial zone. Lastly we need a labor that allows a dwarf to pursue private interests.
The complicated details, such as pricing, can largely be overlooked.
I suppose in the system I describe, the player has the option to set up a zone or workshop that can offer state owned resources as for sale to private entities. In addition there would be zoning to allow commercial exploit, and residential exploit (Any others applicable?). Dwarves with a labor allowing private work could purchase a small room, establish a workshop and produce goods (probably based on preferences of who sets up the workshop, although thats an awful way to run a business, maybe the "central demand authority" can provide dwarves with ideas?). The goods could be sold in a public marketplace, or maybe the workshop is also a store front. Other commercial enterprises could be started, such as mines, farms, etc, based on commercial zones. Sales would be done through credit to a central bank if available, otherwise dwarves would carry their coins.
I think that, with some more refinement, could work. It would have problems sure, but its primary advantage is that its up to the players. The players allow a central bank, they allow the "central demand authority," set up commercial or residential zoning, and allow resources to be sold to the public. We could easily just have the state-run market sell the player-queued crafts and maintain as much control as possible, or ignore it all together.
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Also, no dwarf behaviors, planned or existing, require money. But a lot, if not all, require some method of ascribing value to things in order to make believable, non-arbitrary judgements that have some degree of predictability and (more importantly) use.
Actually that is not true. Demands are inherantly seperate from eachother as opposed to being one huge bundle, it is only once you add personal wealth (not necceserily money) being traded away that the value of your demands actually has any real function in the system.
I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Allow me to clarify my previous statement with an example. If a dwarf decides to do X instead of Y, it has made a value judgement. X has priority over Y, which translates to X has a greater value than Y with respect to that individual dwarf. And it has made a trade of sorts. It trades the opportunity for doing Y for the opportunity to do X. No personal wealth, whatever that means, is required. If X and Y had no relative value ascribed to them, then either there would be no decision or if there was a decision, what is done next (X or Y) would essentially be a coin flip.
Really there are only two issues, abundance or scarcity. In the latter case a system of rationing would work far better than pricing because it does not introduce inequalities of wealth into the system nor require the player constantly to keep an eye on how expensive the item actually is relative to the total amount of value they have to sell.
These are the only two issues in situations of subsistence or where there is no real choice on the individual (dwarf) level. And I agree with you if we are talking about how the game is now.
Perhaps I have not been clear... and it seems I haven't, but I am not trying to argue that one economic system in a fortress is better than any other or what is ideal for what circumstance.
What a sad and ignorant thing to say, especially without any meaningful evidence presented. :( Being dismissive of ideas without critical thinking helps nothing.
It helps to save time and avoid derailment; thus meaning more time for more productive activity than debating complex economic theories.
It is really ironic that you say this when we are, in fact, debating complex economic stuff and that counting's suggestions actually relate very nicely to what you suggest... not to mention much about HOW it could be implemented. It most certainly allows for a system as you suggest to be possible and, not only possible, but the best possible solution (or one of multiple good solutions) in (likely) many instances. BUT it also serves as a foundation that allows for other economic strategies to be engineered by the player and, with regard to NPCs, arise emergently.
Internal commerce as an idea has a deceptive appeal because of the wearyness from having to centrally micromanage everything; however as mentioned the appeal is deceptive.
What is deceptive about internal commerce??? What I argue for is a robust system that can allow the player to engineer any economic system they want (including yours!!!) and for economic systems to arise as emergent phenomena in world gen without as few hard-coded structures as possible. Your system is fine, and I agree that it would work splendidly. BUT, what if in the future of the game there are situations where a centralized planned economy as you describe is not sustainable by the player? Should there not be mechanisms in place to allow different strategies to be tried?
The reality however is that the system will still need managing and the hard part, which is the need to gather reliable information will be more difficult to arrange. In the present we only need to look at two sets of numbers (demand vs resources), internal commerce adds a whole set of additional numbers, such as the available amount of tradable valuables that a given dwarf would be willing to trade for said item and how much money each dwarf has in his pocket, how much credit is available. :-\ :-\
And there exist many models (including those in suggestions that I linked to earlier) that can be borrowed from to serve as a starting point for representing this and interacting with this information in the game. And the management the player would have to do and what "sets of numbers" the player would interact with would depend on how these models are implemented and if there are mechanisms in place to allow the player to delegate certain tasks to individual entities. And it isn't internal commerce per se that would be introducing a whole set of additional numbers, but it is the mechanisms in the simulation that would need to be in place to allow for internal commerce to happen in the first place that would introduce these numbers. And these numbers and mechanisms could be useful for much more than just internal commerce, even if internal commerce were prohibited within the fortress, and in fact could allow for any variety of systems.
I am not actually against internal commerce as a concept however, despite popular belief. The best way to introduce it is when we look at the other side of things from demands, that is we require dwarves to be motivated to do (certain) work under (certain) conditions. It should be added an alternative form of labour motivation to the whip and the need to regulate the commercial economy is actually a price you pay. We need to put things up for sale so that the money that we pay our workers to do jobs whether they want to or not actually motivates them to do anything.
This would be done by setting certain item types as for sale and other item types for use as currency. If a dwarf demands items that are for sale then he demands whatever it is that we are using as currency but this is not automatically available either. He instead looks for work that we have set a per unit ration of payment first, does that work, then collects the currency items that he is owed as payment before going off to buy the item he really want. Alternatively we could rely on legal means of coercion (forced labour), ideological manipulation or simply allow dwarves to do things as they want.
In fact, the suggestions I linked to offer a LOT of relevant information about how to approach this and do so in a way that allows for not only what you suggest in the quote above, but a lot of other things one can think of to address the same problem.
Yes, the basic idea is to have all the dwarves actually go through a labour of travelling to the offices you have given the nobles and then adding their own unmet demands to the list, which can then be met by the player manually. Some types of demands can be set to automatic, meaning the manager is automatically set to put an order in for that item as soon as it is reported by a dwarf. Therefore dwarves can now autonomously produce things to meet their own desires without player intervention without any commerce being needed at all.
I intend to one day lay out the whole idea in detail but I am busy working hard on modding at present.
Basically all we need to do to move beyond the mindless survivalist ants stage is simply to universalize the fixed system nobles use now and make it dynamic. Dwarves develop specific demands based upon personality and biological needs, look at the hardcoded value of these demands, look at how valuable they personally are, look at how much of the item is in stock, etc. It then creates itself a set of demands and new demands are gradually added asall existing demands are met.
If the items are available the dwarf helps himself, if they are not available the dwarf logs in the demand as described above. All this will work perfectly at allowing dwarves to become more than ants and works based upon the present system without needing internal commerce at all.
That is a fine system. Though this is simply an extension of the current system. Dwarves already take things from stockpiles based on their demands and do what they are told. Right now, they just do not explicitly convey the information that a demand has not been met to you or anyone else, and their demands are extremely simple. The only fundamental, qualitative difference here between your suggestion and the way things work now is that there is a way to directly communicate to the player as well as NPCs the aggregate demands of dwarves within a fortress. The "universalization" of demands and ascribing value to individual things is an extension of the current "likes/dislikes" system and whatever governs when a dwarf decides it needs to get something. This in an of itself is a worthwhile suggestion, though, and I am all for it! And the "manager" is what is autonomous here more so than the dwarves; the manager just does the same thing the player does, which is tell the dwarves what to do, and the dwarves do it mindlessly as normal.
The dwarves are still rather mindless even with more complex modifiers determining what they want: there are no underlying mechanisms in place that gives the dwarf the ability determine how and if to get what they want... for example, what if the fortress stockpiles never have what the dwarf wants (or not in time), despite making their demands known to you? What if the dwarf realizes that someone else in the fort or outside of it has what they want? It would be nice if individuals within the fort could decide things like "oh, I'm starving... perhaps I could steal this rationed plump helmet from the other person..." or "I want a microcline table, but the fortress stores are out and I broke my last one in a tantrum. That person has a microcline table... Maybe I could trade for it!". Even if it was deemed illegal to barter with others individually in the fort by player decree, it would be fantastic to have the ability for dwarves to engage in such activities should it be allowed... plus it could plug into adventure mode quite nicely.
Nor are there really mechanisms in place where the player can plug-in in a believable way to alter the economic system to affect how dwarves get what they want. What I advocate is for the game to have mechanisms in place that allow not just your proposed strategy of managing resources in the fort (which is essentially not much different from how things are now) but any other strategy possible. I would suggest the default state of things be that everyone can trade with anyone (decentralized market economy) and that the player (and NPC entities) can set policies that modify this to make it into whatever economy they want. What would serve as the default model would be very much related what counting suggests in one of his suggestions (essentially this paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268199000876) with a few added things) which would form the necessary foundation for everything. With this model in place, it would allow for the player to mold the economy to what they want by using realistic mechanisms to do so, and would give dwarves much richer behavior which has ramifications well beyond the subject matter of this thread, not to mention tools to influence the economy outside of the fortress as well.
For example, to get to what you suggest (a planned centralized economy), you as the player could say that no shops are allowed other than one that is run by you and a designated dwarf shopkeeper. Make available a central stockpile available for storage of all goods, decree that all things freshly produced by the fortress or obtained through trade with the outside belong to the fortress, and set a dwarf as the shopkeeper of the Fortress store which would "trade" whatever is in the central stockpile to dwarves coming to acquire goods. Define everything traded by the Fortress store to have no price (and that this price is not to be changed) so that people can just take what they want (using the shopkeeper as an intermediary). Also, decree that dwarf-to-dwarf bartering is prohibited, and define how much of what each dwarf can own (which the shopkeeper could help enforce... depending on how good of a bookkeeper she is). If we are following the model proposed in the linked paper, there would be mechanisms in place for the shopkeeper to record the number of different commodities traded, as well as commodities that people wanted to trade for but couldn't. The accuracy of this information could be determined by bookkeeping skill and other things. Anyway, also decree that this information be available to you as well as a designated manager dwarf (or some intangible mechanism in the game). The manager dwarf (or whatever) would manage assigning dwarves to appropriate jobs to keep supply meeting demand the way you suggest. And you can do as you please in response to the information. There you have it.
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I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Allow me to clarify my previous statement with an example. If a dwarf decides to do X instead of Y, it has made a value judgement. X has priority over Y, which translates to X has a greater value than Y with respect to that individual dwarf. And it has made a trade of sorts. It trades the opportunity for doing Y for the opportunity to do X. No personal wealth, whatever that means, is required. If X and Y had no relative value ascribed to them, then either there would be no decision or if there was a decision, what is done next (X or Y) would essentially be a coin flip.
At the moment there is no choice as to whether to X or Y in your example. A dwarf does not have to decide whether it wants to eat goat meat or get itself a new *pig tail cloak*. Provided that both items are in stock it can have both since both items are freely available and not commercialised, there is no need to evaluate whether it would rather have one or the other.
If both items are for sale then the dwarf has to make the kind of decision you mention, because it cannot afford to have both items. Unless both items are very cheap or it is very rich, in which case things essentially work as they do at the moment, the dwarf can have everything without having to care about the relative value of particular item.
These are the only two issues in situations of subsistence or where there is no real choice on the individual (dwarf) level. And I agree with you if we are talking about how the game is now.
Perhaps I have not been clear... and it seems I haven't, but I am not trying to argue that one economic system in a fortress is better than any other or what is ideal for what circumstance.
I cannot think of a situation where pricing will work better than direct rationing.
It is really ironic that you say this when we are, in fact, debating complex economic stuff and that counting's suggestions actually relate very nicely to what you suggest... not to mention much about HOW it could be implemented. It most certainly allows for a system as you suggest to be possible and, not only possible, but the best possible solution (or one of multiple good solutions) in (likely) many instances. BUT it also serves as a foundation that allows for other economic strategies to be engineered by the player and, with regard to NPCs, arise emergently.
Yes, we are in a roundabout way talking about economic theories. This is what makes derailing the thread from a discussion about specific suggestions as to how the game should be developed to a discussion of my economist is better than your economist so much of a threat.
Ultimately there is a whole legion of factors that apply in a real-life economy that do not apply in Dwarf Fortress and unless Toady One turns into an elf and lives for centuries this will always be the case. For one the population of a player settlement is capped by default at 200 people and the largest AI settlements only ever have 10,000 people.
Real world cities however can have millions of people.
What is deceptive about internal commerce??? What I argue for is a robust system that can allow the player to engineer any economic system they want (including yours!!!) and for economic systems to arise as emergent phenomena in world gen without as few hard-coded structures as possible. Your system is fine, and I agree that it would work splendidly. BUT, what if in the future of the game there are situations where a centralized planned economy as you describe is not sustainable by the player? Should there not be mechanisms in place to allow different strategies to be tried?
The deceptive part is the assumption that it will make the game easier to manage. The truth is that it merely adds a whole legion of additional values to keep track of.
And there exist many models (including those in suggestions that I linked to earlier) that can be borrowed from to serve as a starting point for representing this and interacting with this information in the game. And the management the player would have to do and what "sets of numbers" the player would interact with would depend on how these models are implemented and if there are mechanisms in place to allow the player to delegate certain tasks to individual entities. And it isn't internal commerce per se that would be introducing a whole set of additional numbers, but it is the mechanisms in the simulation that would need to be in place to allow for internal commerce to happen in the first place that would introduce these numbers. And these numbers and mechanisms could be useful for much more than just internal commerce, even if internal commerce were prohibited within the fortress, and in fact could allow for any variety of systems.
It is certainly possible to have the computer track down all the values for the player I admit. But that comes to a question of realism, the game could tell you how much money is in every dwarf's pocket. But how on earth do we actually know that information, magic?
In my system I have at least modelled the labour required in running the system and transmitting the information. The player is only informed as to the current unmet demands as a result of the labour of the dwarf reporting the demand at an office and (perhaps) the labour of the noble collecting the information.
Internal commerce requires us to keep track of all the existing values (supply+demand) AND a whole set of existing values, in order to make far more complicated maths about prices basically. All of this however adds no additional functionality into the game at present.
That is a fine system. Though this is simply an extension of the current system. Dwarves already take things from stockpiles based on their demands and do what they are told. Right now, they just do not explicitly convey the information that a demand has not been met to you or anyone else, and their demands are extremely simple. The only fundamental, qualitative difference here between your suggestion and the way things work now is that there is a way to directly communicate to the player as well as NPCs the aggregate demands of dwarves within a fortress. The "universalization" of demands and ascribing value to individual things is an extension of the current "likes/dislikes" system and whatever governs when a dwarf decides it needs to get something. This in an of itself is a worthwhile suggestion, though, and I am all for it! And the "manager" is what is autonomous here more so than the dwarves; the manager just does the same thing the player does, which is tell the dwarves what to do, and the dwarves do it mindlessly as normal.
The manager is more than just the player. The manager represents the fact that things do not run themselves and that there is labour involved in administrating a centrally planned system. However the 'Player's Labour' is too much of a factor at present, I would like to make it for instance so that in order for the player to do anything it must be 'done' by a suitable noble, so essentially the only thing the player does is control nobles.
The dwarves are still rather mindless even with more complex modifiers determining what they want: there are no underlying mechanisms in place that gives the dwarf the ability determine how and if to get what they want... for example, what if the fortress stockpiles never have what the dwarf wants (or not in time), despite making their demands known to you? What if the dwarf realizes that someone else in the fort or outside of it has what they want? It would be nice if individuals within the fort could decide things like "oh, I'm starving... perhaps I could steal this rationed plump helmet from the other person..." or "I want a microcline table, but the fortress stores are out and I broke my last one in a tantrum. That person has a microcline table... Maybe I could trade for it!". Even if it was deemed illegal to barter with others individually in the fort by player decree, it would be fantastic to have the ability for dwarves to engage in such activities should it be allowed... plus it could plug into adventure mode quite nicely.
Stealing works nicely, if one dwarf owns an item that another dwarf demands and that dwarf has not been able to acquire that item then the first dwarf should, if cruel or selfish enough simply take the item. The same applies to disobeying fortress rationing and taking from forbidden stockpiles, though in case it is more a case of being direspectful of authority in more general sense. In all gives the law enforcement dwarf something to do (at the moment I do not even bother to even appoint a captain of the guard).
Trade however is unlikely to happen. This is because the other dwarf has nothing to give the dwarf in return for the microline table, since everything he has was taken from the stockpile for free. If the dwarf comes along with something that he does not want but he knows the microline table dwarf wants then the microline table dwarf will refuse the trade because he can simply take the item from the stockpile once the other dwarf gives up and stockpiles the item.
The only kind of trade that is actually possible is where one dwarf only wants a table in general and the second dwarf wants specifically a microline one; agreeing to share items that are sharable also makes sense (items having multiple owners).
Nor are there really mechanisms in place where the player can plug-in in a believable way to alter the economic system to affect how dwarves get what they want. What I advocate is for the game to have mechanisms in place that allow not just your proposed strategy of managing resources in the fort (which is essentially not much different from how things are now) but any other strategy possible. I would suggest the default state of things be that everyone can trade with anyone (decentralized market economy) and that the player (and NPC entities) can set policies that modify this to make it into whatever economy they want. What would serve as the default model would be very much related what counting suggests in one of his suggestions (essentially this paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268199000876) with a few added things) which would form the necessary foundation for everything. With this model in place, it would allow for the player to mold the economy to what they want by using realistic mechanisms to do so, and would give dwarves much richer behavior which has ramifications well beyond the subject matter of this thread, not to mention tools to influence the economy outside of the fortress as well.
No, most of the things that you and presumably the overpriced paper you are linked too take for granted as somehow natural are anything but.
People's very thinking is determined by the basic social order they live in and this determines their economic behavior+logics. The basic social order is POLITICAL act not an economic one, so to use an analogy economics is simply the smoke rising from the political fire.
It is an foundational political decision that things are for sale and that people have only limited wealth to use to buy things. This is enforced by a state with laws backed up with police and armies. As a result we end up with a particular psychological setup by which we have to rank all our desires and this leads to all the supposadly spontaneous economic behaviours described by economists.
For example, to get to what you suggest (a planned centralized economy), you as the player could say that no shops are allowed other than one that is run by you and a designated dwarf shopkeeper. Make available a central stockpile available for storage of all goods, decree that all things freshly produced by the fortress or obtained through trade with the outside belong to the fortress, and set a dwarf as the shopkeeper of the Fortress store which would "trade" whatever is in the central stockpile to dwarves coming to acquire goods. Define everything traded by the Fortress store to have no price (and that this price is not to be changed) so that people can just take what they want (using the shopkeeper as an intermediary). Also, decree that dwarf-to-dwarf bartering is prohibited, and define how much of what each dwarf can own (which the shopkeeper could help enforce... depending on how good of a bookkeeper she is). If we are following the model proposed in the linked paper, there would be mechanisms in place for the shopkeeper to record the number of different commodities traded, as well as commodities that people wanted to trade for but couldn't. The accuracy of this information could be determined by bookkeeping skill and other things. Anyway, also decree that this information be available to you as well as a designated manager dwarf (or some intangible mechanism in the game). The manager dwarf (or whatever) would manage assigning dwarves to appropriate jobs to keep supply meeting demand the way you suggest. And you can do as you please in response to the information. There you have it.
There is no need to prohibit most of those behaviors because they do not make sense for individual dwarves to engage in to start off with. In order to have a market economy emerge items must first be coercively restricted from general availability, which is their natural state when you think about it.
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Real world cities however can have millions of people.
Cities of the 1300-1400s most certainly did not have millions of people. Most modern cities don't have millions of people.
A quick glance around Wikipedia found me this listing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history) that shows the absolute largest city in the world in 1400, Hangzhou, had at most 1.5 million people. It is much more likely it did not even have 1 million people, and the city actually lost population by the 1500s.
Most cities of the time period would fall in the 50 thousand to 200 thousand population range at max.
Going further back in time cities have even less people.
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At the moment there is no choice as to whether to X or Y in your example. A dwarf does not have to decide whether it wants to eat goat meat or get itself a new *pig tail cloak*. Provided that both items are in stock it can have both since both items are freely available and not commercialised, there is no need to evaluate whether it would rather have one or the other.
Except in cases where one or both items are not available to take freely. This is where being able to steal, barter/trade, beg, or receive a gift would be really nice to have (from the dwarf’s point of view).
I cannot think of a situation where pricing will work better than direct rationing.
The dwarves might if we give them the behaviors necessary. ;) Or maybe they will agree with you.
Ultimately there is a whole legion of factors that apply in a real-life economy that do not apply in Dwarf Fortress and unless Toady One turns into an elf and lives for centuries this will always be the case. For one the population of a player settlement is capped by default at 200 people and the largest AI settlements only ever have 10,000 people.
Real world cities however can have millions of people.
So? Why not try and implement as good a model as possible for the game’s purposes? And who is to say that this model couldn’t work for smaller populations (actually… the model and others I have come across deal with much less than a million people... more around hundreds... and recapitulate macroeconomic phenomena quite nicely)? :3 Regardless, none of us here can make the ultimate judgment as to whether it is worth Toady doing.
Also, for what it is worth, bartering and trade between peoples and individuals predated the first urban settlements by many millenia.
The deceptive part is the assumption that it will make the game easier to manage.
I never said it would be easier to manage, at least not likely easier than managing a central planned economy for a population of 200.
The truth is that it merely adds a whole legion of additional values to keep track of.
A truth I gladly embrace.
It is certainly possible to have the computer track down all the values for the player I admit. But that comes to a question of realism, the game could tell you how much money is in every dwarf's pocket. But how on earth do we actually know that information, magic?
Hmmm… perhaps I am not being clear. The agent based economic models I am talking about model individuals as having access to information as you and I would in real life. For example, with the paper I linked, the only information handled and learned by a shopkeeper are things they would realistically come to know, such as the amount of goods traded through the shop, initial start-up costs for the shop, overhead costs, etc.
As for what information the player could access and how, they would only have access to information that individuals in the fort could (not saying that all individuals would have access to all information!!!)... sort of similar to what you suggest with the manager. For example, I would only be able to know how much of a good was traded through a given shop as accurately as it was recorded by the shopkeeper and if the shopkeeper and/or the document recording the information was still accessible.
I should really formally write out this suggestion and organize it… synthesizing the stuff I’ve learned here…
In my system I have at least modelled the labour required in running the system and transmitting the information. The player is only informed as to the current unmet demands as a result of the labour of the dwarf reporting the demand at an office and (perhaps) the labour of the noble collecting the information.
This is fantastic and I am all for it!
Internal commerce requires us to keep track of all the existing values (supply+demand) AND a whole set of existing values, in order to make far more complicated maths about prices basically. All of this however adds no additional functionality into the game at present.
At present, I agree with you, no. But as behaviors get more complex as planned… it might and, I think, likely will. We really can’t know until we try.
The manager is more than just the player. The manager represents the fact that things do not run themselves and that there is labour involved in administrating a centrally planned system. However the 'Player's Labour' is too much of a factor at present, I would like to make it for instance so that in order for the player to do anything it must be 'done' by a suitable noble, so essentially the only thing the player does is control nobles.
Ok. I understand now. I actually like this.
Trade however is unlikely to happen. This is because the other dwarf has nothing to give the dwarf in return for the microline table, since everything he has was taken from the stockpile for free. If the dwarf comes along with something that he does not want but he knows the microline table dwarf wants then the microline table dwarf will refuse the trade because he can simply take the item from the stockpile once the other dwarf gives up and stockpiles the item.
This assumes that the dwarf is willing to part with the thing the table-owning-dwarf wants without something in return. What if it is useful to the dwarf? Useful enough to not want to give it up for free back to the fort, but not so useful that she wouldn’t be willing to give it up for a microcline table. ;)
The only kind of trade that is actually possible is where one dwarf only wants a table in general and the second dwarf wants specifically a microline one; agreeing to share items that are sharable also makes sense (items having multiple owners).
An agreement to share is another solution to a demand in addition to trading or stealing or what-have-you. This should also be something allowed in the game. And the models I suggest in no way exclude this.
No, most of the things that you and presumably the overpriced paper you are linked too take for granted as somehow natural are anything but.
First off, sorry about the pay wall. Here is a free version should you care to read it: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Peter_Howitt/publication/horg.pdf
Second off, what am I taking for granted as natural? What do you even mean by natural? And what does it matter?
Anyway… it did get me thinking… I should have said that the default situation would be that every individual has the option to either steal, barter, or ask for what they want, as well as to give stuff freely to other individuals. Essentially, the individual determines and enforces property rights until other structures are in place to do so (i.e. government institutions). This would lead to a decentralized economy of some sort on its own. All of these still must take into account value of not just commodities but also the intangibles (fears, hopes, etc.), and actually these intangibles would be what determine the values of commodities, at least largely at first. Gotta think this through a bit more...
People's very thinking is determined by the basic social order they live in and this determines their economic behavior+logics. The basic social order is POLITICAL act not an economic one, so to use an analogy economics is simply the smoke rising from the political fire.
It is an foundational political decision that things are for sale and that people have only limited wealth to use to buy things. This is enforced by a state with laws backed up with police and armies. As a result we end up with a particular psychological setup by which we have to rank all our desires and this leads to all the supposadly spontaneous economic behaviours described by economists.
What do you mean by political vs. economic?
Regardless of semantics, I fail to see how anything I say necessarily refutes this or is in conflict with this concept at a fundamental level with the exception that a decision that something is for sale (and its enforcement) can be an individual one.
And even the most simple of decisions involves a ranking of desires. For example; if I have the choice between getting eaten by a lion I just encountered or running away, I obviously would rank running away from the lion above being eaten. Even the fruit flies I work with for a living make calculated decisions, with certain choices being ranked above others measurably!
As another perhaps more relevant example… let’s say in proto-human times, I find a rock and pick it up and want to make something with it, but someone else wants to make something else with it. Regardless of any formally recognized “ownership”, I, as the person in closest interaction with the rock, have to make the choice whether or not to go ahead and do what I want to do with the rock, or accommodate the wishes of the other, which in this case would be exclusive of my wishes. If I end up doing what I want with the rock (essentially declaring that I have the rights over this rock… in other words I own it), I will have to back it up myself in the absence of any other institution. If I end up giving the rock to the other person, I will likewise have to deal with the consequences; I will have given up not only the rights over the rock, but the opportunity to do something I wanted with it which might have been important for my survival or happiness (not to mention any other social ramifications). However, as a third option… Instead of just giving it to the other person, I could also ask for something in return now (barter) or at a later time (credit of sorts) to compensate for my lost opportunity to ensure my survival or happiness, in which case everyone gets what they want (or something close to it).
This last option is a decision (I guess that “political” decision you talk about) that determines the rock is for sale. What determines that people have limited wealth in this case is the fact that there was only one rock in that place and time appropriate for the things me and the other proto-human wanted to make, that I was closest to it and picked it up first, and that making it into one thing precludes making it into another. Enforcement of my decision would depend on how much the other person respected me, or how much stronger or persuasive I was compared to the other proto-human, unless I had buddies to back me up.
If this is in keeping with what you meant by a “foundational political decision”, then we are in agreement.
There is no need to prohibit most of those behaviors because they do not make sense for individual dwarves to engage in to start off with.
How so? Please elaborate.
In order to have a market economy emerge items must first be coercively restricted from general availability, which is their natural state when you think about it.
Of course! I agree entirely. However, what happens when a person decides to "own" something as in the proto-human example I detailed above? Is picking up the rock not coercive restriction of availability, taking it away from its “natural” generally available state?
This actually gets me thinking, though, if there shouldn’t be a more nuanced definition of ownership in the game and these models for the purposes of the game. Property isn’t a thing, but a status of rights over an object… hmmmm…
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So? Why not try and implement as good a model as possible for the game’s purposes? And who is to say that this model couldn’t work for smaller populations (actually… the model and others I have come across deal with much less than a million people... more around hundreds... and recapitulate macroeconomic phenomena quite nicely)? :3 Regardless, none of us here can make the ultimate judgment as to whether it is worth Toady doing.
Also, for what it is worth, bartering and trade between peoples and individuals predated the first urban settlements by many millenia.
Because the problem with models is that they are typically disputable in real-life and even if they are correct in real-life this is not real-life.
I do not know how anyone can know that trading proceeded the first urban settlements by millenia. All they can presumably tell is that items are moving between settlements, it is an assumption that they were traded. They could equally have been stolen, given or simply folks took stuff freely from eachother's stockpiles.
Hmmm… perhaps I am not being clear. The agent based economic models I am talking about model individuals as having access to information as you and I would in real life. For example, with the paper I linked, the only information handled and learned by a shopkeeper are things they would realistically come to know, such as the amount of goods traded through the shop, initial start-up costs for the shop, overhead costs, etc.
As for what information the player could access and how, they would only have access to information that individuals in the fort could (not saying that all individuals would have access to all information!!!)... sort of similar to what you suggest with the manager. For example, I would only be able to know how much of a good was traded through a given shop as accurately as it was recorded by the shopkeeper and if the shopkeeper and/or the document recording the information was still accessible.
I should really formally write out this suggestion and organize it… synthesizing the stuff I’ve learned here…
I was pointing out that creating a system to inform the player automatically of all the relevant information that is needed to properly calculate the effect of their own actions on the economy aas a whole requires the player to magically have access to information that realistically they should not simply have automatically.
This assumes that the dwarf is willing to part with the thing the table-owning-dwarf wants without something in return. What if it is useful to the dwarf? Useful enough to not want to give it up for free back to the fort, but not so useful that she wouldn’t be willing to give it up for a microcline table. ;)
Something in return is the problem here. If you take everything freely from the stockpiles then your "ownership" of the item depends upon you presently having the item or demonstrating that you personally care about the item enough that losing it will actually hurt you.
By demonstrating your willingness to hand over the item to others, you are demonstrating that the item does not really belong to you. You hand the item over and it is not you handing over the item to the other dwarf, it is you handing the item back to the fortress.
It is only when items are first rationed or sold that private possession becomes the kind of solid fact that allows for commerce between individuals; otherwise the item belongs to the one who holds it and thus the one who shows himself willing to give the item away simply loses legal possession of the item.
The only kind of trade that is actually possible is where one dwarf only wants a table in general and the second dwarf wants specifically a microline one; agreeing to share items that are sharable also makes sense (items having multiple owners).
An agreement to share is another solution to a demand in addition to trading or stealing or what-have-you. This should also be something allowed in the game. And the models I suggest in no way exclude this.
First off, sorry about the pay wall. Here is a free version should you care to read it: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Peter_Howitt/publication/horg.pdf
Second off, what am I taking for granted as natural? What do you even mean by natural? And what does it matter?
Anyway… it did get me thinking… I should have said that the default situation would be that every individual has the option to either steal, barter, or ask for what they want, as well as to give stuff freely to other individuals. Essentially, the individual determines and enforces property rights until other structures are in place to do so (i.e. government institutions). This would lead to a decentralized economy of some sort on its own. All of these still must take into account value of not just commodities but also the intangibles (fears, hopes, etc.), and actually these intangibles would be what determine the values of commodities, at least largely at first. Gotta think this through a bit more...
What I mean by natural is that the situation initially works out a certain way prior to anything consciously being done by political power. I believe by contrast that the emergent economic system is a consequence (often an unintended one granted) of particular policies that are initially implemented by the political powers.
For instance in your example the individual 'enforces' property rights, actually the individual is acting as a 1-man political power that is creating the property rights. This however is irrelevant because we do not play with individuals unaffiliated from political structures.
What do you mean by political vs. economic?
Regardless of semantics, I fail to see how anything I say necessarily refutes this or is in conflict with this concept at a fundamental level with the exception that a decision that something is for sale (and its enforcement) can be an individual one.
And even the most simple of decisions involves a ranking of desires. For example; if I have the choice between getting eaten by a lion I just encountered or running away, I obviously would rank running away from the lion above being eaten. Even the fruit flies I work with for a living make calculated decisions, with certain choices being ranked above others measurably!
By political I mean established by social power, by economic I mean the system by which the society produces and consumes wealth.
Yes that is the foundation of the house for certain is the kind of decision making you talk about. Having to make a decision between two values is however, while based upon the foundation not actually a naturally occurring growth.
Putting things up for sale 'builds' the house, both economically and at a psychological level. If things are being done on the present DF model there is no need to sacrifice some economic demands to meet others, all demands are separately met or unmet. That means that there is also not going to arise a whole set of psychological developments also, which I will get to later.
As another perhaps more relevant example… let’s say in proto-human times, I find a rock and pick it up and want to make something with it, but someone else wants to make something else with it. Regardless of any formally recognized “ownership”, I, as the person in closest interaction with the rock, have to make the choice whether or not to go ahead and do what I want to do with the rock, or accommodate the wishes of the other, which in this case would be exclusive of my wishes. If I end up doing what I want with the rock (essentially declaring that I have the rights over this rock… in other words I own it), I will have to back it up myself in the absence of any other institution. If I end up giving the rock to the other person, I will likewise have to deal with the consequences; I will have given up not only the rights over the rock, but the opportunity to do something I wanted with it which might have been important for my survival or happiness (not to mention any other social ramifications). However, as a third option… Instead of just giving it to the other person, I could also ask for something in return now (barter) or at a later time (credit of sorts) to compensate for my lost opportunity to ensure my survival or happiness, in which case everyone gets what they want (or something close to it).
This last option is a decision (I guess that “political” decision you talk about) that determines the rock is for sale. What determines that people have limited wealth in this case is the fact that there was only one rock in that place and time appropriate for the things me and the other proto-human wanted to make, that I was closest to it and picked it up first, and that making it into one thing precludes making it into another. Enforcement of my decision would depend on how much the other person respected me, or how much stronger or persuasive I was compared to the other proto-human, unless I had buddies to back me up.
If this is in keeping with what you meant by a “foundational political decision”, then we are in agreement.
In your example what either of you think and indeed whether either of you pick up the rock matters not one bit. What matters is what the other say half-dozen members of your proto-human group think should happen. Neither of you can contend with the other half-dozen members, so the matter is a political one.
The only way that you can make the decisions you speak of is if the half-dozen others decide that you have the right to do those things and they will either enforce that right, or allow you to engage in violence against others to enforce them. What matters most therefore is not the facts of who did what to the rock, but who has the greatest amount of political power, or influence over those with political power in the group.
That is why I call economics smoke rising from the political fire. Once both my ownership over rocks and my right to do various things with that ownership, including transfer it to others is established by the political power of the group (the fire) then all manner of complex situations of barter, trade, giving, sharing etc emerge (the smoke).
The analogy is apt because like smoke the economy drift further and further out of the control of it's original source, political power (fire). Also like smoke it works to obscure it's own basis in political power, becoming seemingly naturally emergent.
How so? Please elaborate.
It all comes down to the psychological effects of having to constantly decide between demands. In a commercialized system the aim is to become a rich person and therefore free yourself from having to make that decision. The poorer you are the more you have to decide between demands and therefore everyone is trying to get rich.
The people of the DF universe as it stands at present have never had to make a decision as to whether to have one thing they want or another. They have already 'won the game' (they are where rich people are), there is no point in trying to increase their own personal wealth above their own demands. If you do not have something it is because the site does not have it, this solely means you work hard to make more wealth for your site.
Of course! I agree entirely. However, what happens when a person decides to "own" something as in the proto-human example I detailed above? Is picking up the rock not coercive restriction of availability, taking it away from its “natural” generally available state?
This actually gets me thinking, though, if there shouldn’t be a more nuanced definition of ownership in the game and these models for the purposes of the game. Property isn’t a thing, but a status of rights over an object… hmmmm…
Picking up the rock is not a coercive restriction of availability. A person can simply snatch the rock from your hand and nothing inherently about the fact you picked up the rock given you any right not to have the rock snatched from your hand. It is only when you have a political power backing up your legal ownership, or in a pinch decide to set yourself up as such a power, that the fact you picked up a rock becomes a property claim.
At the moment the property rights in the game do not make much sense. Dwarves freely privatize items from the stockpile which they do not pay for nor are they rationed. Why does nobody evil just privatize the whole fortress supply of wealth and then take over? It is obvious that some customary system is in place by which nobody takes seriously anyone's claim to actually own any excessive amount of wealth taken from the stockpile, making said evil plan futile.
We would probably do well to explicitly model the present economic system so that dwarves do not own objects as such but only items that are linked to one of their demands. They could also own items that are assigned to them by the player, for instance the furniture in their assigned rooms.
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Also, for what it is worth, bartering and trade between peoples and individuals predated the first urban settlements by many millenia.
I do not know how anyone can know that trading proceeded the first urban settlements by millenia. All they can presumably tell is that items are moving between settlements, it is an assumption that they were traded. They could equally have been stolen, given or simply folks took stuff freely from eachother's stockpiles.
Thank you for pointing this out. I have other responses to the rest of your post, but this one is exceptionally important here for reasons I hope I can cogently elaborate upon when I am done researching the matter. It appears you are correct and I myself was operating on an assumption here! Hmmm... the "default state" should most definitely include more than just bartering as we both have come to agree upon. In fact, I am starting to feel that bartering in the strict sense of the word (I give you this much of X for that much of Y or no deal) might not have at all been the major method of transactions before "money" of any sort... and it makes sense, since it requires a coincidence of wants in a very narrow time frame, and that is exceptionally rare!!! Not to mention... I think the historical record supports this, at least indirectly. And I am starting to see some of your concerns and statements a different way...
So, now I have a question that I think GoblinCookie might have started thinking about...
How might we model the basic behaviors (what are these behaviors?) that dictate distribution of goods amongst individuals and from this get the behaviors that dictate distribution of goods amongst small groups... then to bigger groups... all the way up to settlements...? And along the way, how do shops emerge? And money? I know perhaps (I COULD VERY WELL BE WRONG) the earliest documentable currency was in Mesopotamia... how was this thought to come about? And why?
Also, perhaps the current system mimics real life a little better than I thought...
Also... I was wrong in my operational definition of barter. I included exchange of commodity for credit in my definition.
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What I mean by natural is that the situation initially works out a certain way prior to anything consciously being done by political power. I believe by contrast that the emergent economic system is a consequence (often an unintended one granted) of particular policies that are initially implemented by the political powers.
For instance in your example the individual 'enforces' property rights, actually the individual is acting as a 1-man political power that is creating the property rights. This however is irrelevant because we do not play with individuals unaffiliated from political structures.
As far as I know, it's true that money isn't "natural", just a way to keep track of an individual's contribution to larger groups than the 150-or-so relationships that humans can manage without social organisation. The reason I suggest giving dwarves debit accounts for internal payments and requiring money or other valuable barter for trade with outsiders is that it seems like an easy enough way for the program to abstract the natural fuzzy-logic process of "I'll make Urist some *plump helmet stew* because she works hard and deserves it. Rigoth might be good with an axe but she's lazy so she only gets -cat meat biscuits-".
This makes it easier to give dwarves more choices in their labouring. Give dwarves the ability to give one another gifts or steal and it becomes possible to get things like rich successful dwarves supporting their spouses, desperate poverty-stricken dwarves turning to theft, rich, indolent guildmasters living on their apprentices' labour and so on and so forth.
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Thank you for pointing this out. I have other responses to the rest of your post, but this one is exceptionally important here for reasons I hope I can cogently elaborate upon when I am done researching the matter. It appears you are correct and I myself was operating on an assumption here! Hmmm... the "default state" should most definitely include more than just bartering as we both have come to agree upon. In fact, I am starting to feel that bartering in the strict sense of the word (I give you this much of X for that much of Y or no deal) might not have at all been the major method of transactions before "money" of any sort... and it makes sense, since it requires a coincidence of wants in a very narrow time frame, and that is exceptionally rare!!! Not to mention... I think the historical record supports this, at least indirectly. And I am starting to see some of your concerns and statements a different way...
So, now I have a question that I think GoblinCookie might have started thinking about...
How might we model the basic behaviors (what are these behaviors?) that dictate distribution of goods amongst individuals and from this get the behaviors that dictate distribution of goods amongst small groups... then to bigger groups... all the way up to settlements...? And along the way, how do shops emerge? And money? I know perhaps (I COULD VERY WELL BE WRONG) the earliest documentable currency was in Mesopotamia... how was this thought to come about? And why?
Also, perhaps the current system mimics real life a little better than I thought...
Also... I was wrong in my operational definition of barter. I included exchange of commodity for credit in my definition.
There should be three basic means of distribution ultimately, which have different systems of property associated with them. Items seperately have a form of distribution assigned to them at a fortress level, similarly to how items are dumped or forbidden and the general type of item has a default.
The first form of distribution is the default system and works as things do at the moment essentially. The dwarves take what they think they need from the stockpiles. Personal property in this system is uncertain and only exists in so far as a dwarf actually wants an item and the other dwarves find his wanting credible. As a result dwarves do not directly own items, they own their demands which are linked to the items. The dubious basis for personal property rights and the free availability of items means that individual commerce is unlikely to arise in this system.
The second form of distribution is rationing. This means that an individual dwarf is allowed to claim a given amount of an item, either per a period of time or is allowed to possess only a certain amount of an item. This creates a more solid basis for personal property rights than the previous system, since each dwarf is entitled to a definite amount of an item. Provided that rationing does not meet their demands completely then individuals will naturally attempt to get around rationing by getting other individuals to claim items they do not personally demand in order to give to them, whether for free or in return for them doing the same. This kind of behavior can either be allowed or banned by the site government; banned because it increases consumption or allowed because it keeps minorities with an abnormally high demand for certain items happy.
The third form of distrubution is commerce. This means that in order to get an item a dwarf must hand over another item which is their personal property and of equivilant value in exchange. The act of doing so automatically renders the item a commercial item, even if it was not a commercial item before (even a stolen forbidden item) and therefore one must be careful not to accept payment in items that are freely available. Commercial items are legally freely tradable to others in return for other commercial items (illegally other items may be traded as well), a dwarf first seeks to meet their personal demands and then seeks to acquire wealth, preferring currency over unperishable goods and unperishable goods over perishable ones.
The brilliance of this system is that at core all we are doing is adding two more kinds of item designation, on top of dump and forbidden. Shops as such do not have to emerge because we do not ever have a population that is ever big enough that the nobles cannot directly deal with demands, making the whole fortress itself a shop. As mentioned before, money cannot really originate as a system of rationing for scarce resources since directly rationing items will always work better, instead money should originate in a "devil's bargain" by which we try to motivate dwarves to work harder or more reliably by paying them.
The trouble is that commercialised items cannot coexist with identical freely available items. Either the freely available items are quickly gathered up and commercialised, legally or otherwise; or the law succeeds in keeping this from happening in which case the commercialised items become valueless. The thing is that for money to efficiantly work as motivation the largest number of dwarves must have demands that can only be met by buying things, which means that not having money will have the greatest destructive potential.
This is why I call it a "devil's bargain", it's utility rises directly in proportion to it's destructive potential; the player in introducing internal commerce is betting that they can manage the destructive potential.
As far as I know, it's true that money isn't "natural", just a way to keep track of an individual's contribution to larger groups than the 150-or-so relationships that humans can manage without social organisation. The reason I suggest giving dwarves debit accounts for internal payments and requiring money or other valuable barter for trade with outsiders is that it seems like an easy enough way for the program to abstract the natural fuzzy-logic process of "I'll make Urist some *plump helmet stew* because she works hard and deserves it. Rigoth might be good with an axe but she's lazy so she only gets -cat meat biscuits-".
This makes it easier to give dwarves more choices in their labouring. Give dwarves the ability to give one another gifts or steal and it becomes possible to get things like rich successful dwarves supporting their spouses, desperate poverty-stricken dwarves turning to theft, rich, indolent guildmasters living on their apprentices' labour and so on and so forth.
The thing is that very few of your 'natural' fuzzy-logic processes are actually operative in the society of the dwarves at present. There is no direct productive relationships between individual dwarves, only between individual dwarves and the fortress a whole; so there is no basis to evaluate individual merit or otherwise for particular items.
As a result none of the behaviors you mention will logically ever happen, save stealing personal items from other dwarves in periods of prolonged general scarcity. The 'problem' at core is that all dwarves are happy to work for the fortress pretty hard for free but that is where things get interesting.
We know that in real-life that plenty of actual work is done for free, including the making of Dwarf Fortress itself.
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The thing is that very few of your 'natural' fuzzy-logic processes are actually operative in the society of the dwarves at present. There is no direct productive relationships between individual dwarves, only between individual dwarves and the fortress a whole; so there is no basis to evaluate individual merit or otherwise for particular items.
As a result none of the behaviors you mention will logically ever happen, save stealing personal items from other dwarves in periods of prolonged general scarcity. The 'problem' at core is that all dwarves are happy to work for the fortress pretty hard for free but that is where things get interesting.
We know that in real-life that plenty of actual work is done for free, including the making of Dwarf Fortress itself.
Well sure, the dwarves don't think this way now, but they're pretty boring right now. If they get more personality there's going to need to be room for various motivations, especially to get dwarves to do unpleasant tasks like refuse hauling. A lot of my suggestion hinges on the idea that dwarves become able to assign their own labours according to their wants and needs. Which saves a lot of time (or rather, makes micromanagement a lot more optional, since players would be able to overrule the dwarves' choices) and leads to a more interesting fort.
As for the fact that there are many people who will do particular jobs for free, that should be a personality trait. And people tend to only like particular kinds of jobs that much - there should probably be a similar kind of bias in the fortress; few dwarves will volunteer to haul rocks for free, but some will happily do it to pay for their metalcrafting hobby.
(That makes me think there's room for racial preferences as some kind of editable trait, too - something that makes a given labour more preferred in a given species. After all, dwarves are "fond of drink and industry." Maybe dwarves love homebrewing as much as humans love sports, and so the vast majority of dwarves will occasionally try to brew something, regardless of the eventual quality?)
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Well sure, the dwarves don't think this way now, but they're pretty boring right now. If they get more personality there's going to need to be room for various motivations, especially to get dwarves to do unpleasant tasks like refuse hauling. A lot of my suggestion hinges on the idea that dwarves become able to assign their own labours according to their wants and needs. Which saves a lot of time (or rather, makes micromanagement a lot more optional, since players would be able to overrule the dwarves' choices) and leads to a more interesting fort.
As for the fact that there are many people who will do particular jobs for free, that should be a personality trait. And people tend to only like particular kinds of jobs that much - there should probably be a similar kind of bias in the fortress; few dwarves will volunteer to haul rocks for free, but some will happily do it to pay for their metalcrafting hobby.
(That makes me think there's room for racial preferences as some kind of editable trait, too - something that makes a given labour more preferred in a given species. After all, dwarves are "fond of drink and industry." Maybe dwarves love homebrewing as much as humans love sports, and so the vast majority of dwarves will occasionally try to brew something, regardless of the eventual quality?)
Yes, that is how it works essentially. Different dwarves depending upon their personalities are inherantly more or less motivated to work. Some dwarves need no motivating, they work hard regardless, while others work very little unless motivated. However there should be various forms of motivation, not solely money.
All dwarves if yelled at enough would eventually work, there could be a labour for that. However yelling at lazy dwarves is itself a labour and it would obviously be more efficiant obviously to have those dwarves doing some productive labour. I can think of another means of motivation other than money and that is punishments. Basically this is already in the game in a way with mandates, if the task does not get done by the deadline someone gets punished.
It is a good idea to go beyond individual personalities however and look at the social/economic situation. Dwarves are less motivated to work themselves if they have seen other dwarves slacking. Dwarves are less motivated to produce items that are in abundance than they are to produce items that are scarce (this is taking in consideration population), they are less motivated if there are other people who are more skilled than they are at a given task.
Dwarves own autonomous production is best handled in exactly the same way that we deal with consumer demands in general. Rather than demanding a finished item the dwarf instead demands the raw materials and the neccessary building in the normal manner. Autonomous production is not exactly efficient and clashes rather badly with the regular production, since it uses the same materials and we cannot ensure that the most skilled workers end up with those materials. That is why it is best to model it as demand, as a cost as it were.
The items produced would have the default status of the item kind. Only if the item kind is set to commercial status does it end up personal property automatically. Otherwise the item must be seperately claimed as meeting a demand of the dwarf that made it in order to be owned by that dwarf, but it should do so automatically without having to take it to the stockpile and then back again.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, GolbinCookie, but I get the impression that you don't like this idea because it introduces the potential for chaos? But there are already so many things outside of our control in the game: sieges, forgotten beasts, and other features. Me personally, I don't think there is enough chaos in the game: none of my fortresses die unless I want them too or I mod the game, which makes for a very boring way of life. I think that anything that increases the chaos of the game is a good thing as long as that chaos is manageable. Sure, it will be buggy early on, kind of like how morale is still sort of buggy, but Toady will smooth out the game-breaking bugs that occur.
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I've said a few times before that private labours would only take from designated stockpiles. If you don't want dwarves to waste your steel making toys, make the private bar/block stockpiles not allow steel (and to be safe, forbid iron and pig iron from them as well). Stockpiles don't need to be open to private use by default, either. It's similar to using linked stockpiles to control what kinds of goods and furniture get decorated.
The step-up in complexity of stockpile management would be offset by no longer needing to cook, brew and make clothing for your dwarves, among other things.
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Real world cities however can have millions of people.
Cities of the 1300-1400s most certainly did not have millions of people. Most modern cities don't have millions of people.
A quick glance around Wikipedia found me this listing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throughout_history) that shows the absolute largest city in the world in 1400, Hangzhou, had at most 1.5 million people. It is much more likely it did not even have 1 million people, and the city actually lost population by the 1500s.
Most cities of the time period would fall in the 50 thousand to 200 thousand population range at max.
Going further back in time cities have even less people.
At the start of the 14th century, the entire population of Sweden was around half a million people. Historical populations were low. Very low. Add that to there being a smaller percentage of the population living in urban centers as opposed to a rural existence and this makes for very small cities.
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At the start of the 14th century, the entire population of Sweden was around half a million people. Historical populations were low. Very low. Add that to there being a smaller percentage of the population living in urban centers as opposed to a rural existence and this makes for very small cities.
Yes, that does seem more accurate. I suppose most cities would fall in the range suggested by the D&D 5E DM Guide: 6,000 to 25,000 people.
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I've said a few times before that private labours would only take from designated stockpiles. If you don't want dwarves to waste your steel making toys, make the private bar/block stockpiles not allow steel (and to be safe, forbid iron and pig iron from them as well). Stockpiles don't need to be open to private use by default, either. It's similar to using linked stockpiles to control what kinds of goods and furniture get decorated.
The step-up in complexity of stockpile management would be offset by no longer needing to cook, brew and make clothing for your dwarves, among other things.
In that respect both our ideas have certain similarities since we both agree that items economic status should be decided by designation.
As I have pointed out however there is no need to introduce privatised economies in order to introduce automation of production. Automating certain types of production (already in the game by default for cloth) is quite possible without having to introduce privatised economies into the game. Not only is it possible but it also does not add the whole set of complications that a private economy using some kind of money introduces.
It is quite possible to automate the whole productive process from demand to production as I have pointed out without having to have any buying or selling involved at all. That is why you cannot really argue for internal commerce based upon the desire to reduce micromanagement.
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"farming ought to be nerfed" - has anyone writing this run a fort strictly on eatable seeds (and no cheating with input-free husbandry)? yields are surely significantly closer to realistic in them. please try and tell us, whether you think it is more fun.
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"farming ought to be nerfed" - has anyone writing this run a fort strictly on eatable seeds (and no cheating with input-free husbandry)? yields are surely significantly closer to realistic in them. please try and tell us, whether you think it is more fun.
I'm not entirely sure who's comment you are referencing here or how that's relevant to the thread. Take that over to the "improved farming" threads.
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Hi, everybody! This topic is one of my favorite things to read. Personally, I think that the best model for them would be a blend of capitalism and socialism, with... No, wait, that's my own personal opinion about real life! :D I mean a blend of capitalism and government industry. Well, as I was about to say, it's really kind of up to Toady One. That is, whatever type of economy he thinks the dwarves should have.
If he goes along the "Capitalism" route, I think that he should simply include some sort of stack-combining thing, as suggested in the thread about having literal "piles" of wood per tile. That would allow dwarves to simply carry about a stack of coins, recombining it back into their coffin when it got too full and so on. Also, if there are issues with "too many coins needed," well, then, perhaps we need to tweak the values. Looking at how this sort of thing is dealt with/naturally solves itself in real life would be useful. Economist, anyone?
If he goes down a sort of "Capitalism Combined with Central Gov't Industry" route, then I think that the solution for "don't make steel toys" is: They'd have to buy the steel! Just adjust the price of steel to be rather high, then buy steel from the traders. We are talking about economy and trading, right? When a siege is coming... Well, that's not a usual situation. Obviously, make a temporary ban on using steel for anything but weapons or armor! That's what would really happen.
I think that accurately modeling fourteenth-century economies would be the goal, perhaps changed somewhat to account for them being AWESOME DWARVES. That's what would motivate dwarves, what would naturally evolve from what would happen in the earlier years... It would be totally awesome to have economies actually "evolve" over time, but Toady One, as previously stated, is a human. He doesn't have a thousand years to code.
Also, the above "Capitalism" idea would apply to "Capitalism Combined with Central Gov't Industry."
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I think the solution to the "Dwarves using all my wood stockpile to make their wives earrings" problem would be to have an option in the stockpile menu to allow dwarves to use the materials in it for their own stuff or for player stuff.