I don't understand why you bring post industrialization, modern economists in a discussion about iron age / early middle age era society where the economy is mostly informal anyway.
There are no proletariat in a gaelic village....
...and (litteral) debauchery is illegal in most countries.
I feel like this would fit better in the suggestions subforum, orDwarven economy is simpler to add. Just by code that used for bolts in quivers, but for coins in pouches.I highly doubt the economy would be implemented in a similar fashion to was came before. It's complete absence results in many strange and highly unrealistic situations, however it's implementation would also (likely) result in many strange and highly unrealistic situations.Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I kind of believe the economy isn't necessary if only the farming was balanced. The return of a starvation threat would be so very enjoyable, and bring more meaning to the incessant manufacturing of goods most players seem to engage in.
Okay I laughed.Quote...and (litteral) debauchery is illegal in most countries.
It's spelled littoral and I have no idea what brown-water maritime law has to do with anything DF related.
QuoteThere are no proletariat in a gaelic village....
I'm bringing up economics, not politics.
I'm not putting time into pretending that the DF fantasy world reflects historical realities of social, economic, and political organization. For a start, the nobles would move away every summer because the mines would stink so badly. Ah...but we can only dream.
QuoteThere are no proletariat in a gaelic village....
I'm bringing up economics, not politics.
You can't really separate these two, but whatever.
Yeah, alright. Read your response and it's really inane. You haven't read any of the authors you namedropped and probably never played a game of DF. Good luck for your college degree tho.
It's spelled littoral and I have no idea what brown-water maritime law has to do with anything DF related.
I agree with your points. I only have one quibble: Inter means between two different things, intRA means within one's self. I think you keep using the word inter-fort when you mean intra-fort.
May as well throw in my 5c because I think DF economy is one of the biggest challenges for DF.
I dont see a way how a Fortress economy could work without a working world economy. It will either be highly scripted or fail because it cant be sufficently sripted.
In a world where the production of soap is as complicated as the production of high end weaponry, cleaning fish is on a level with melting ore, and where the player can build within a few years an industry that can flood the world with whatever he chooses to produce no realistic in the sense of immersive economy is possible within the fort.
I would love a working economy but prefer the current centralized slave economy to anything necessarily scripted and/ or flawed. A centralized slave economy is dwarfy after all.
Well, in the current system, weapons aren't given a higher value than anything else, anyway. The most valuable items in the game are masterwork roasts, which have greater value than whole castles.
In real life, weapons and armor had higher value than other goods mostly because more effort was put into them. A simple hatchet would still be cheap, but a high-quality battleaxe would be so expensive nobles would pass them down from generation to generation.
If you wanted to simulate that kind of situation, what you'd really want to do is make a system of upgrades that work like decorations do currently, where you can put incredible amounts of labor and wealth into diminishing returns in terms of a tiny increase in attack speed or damage, but where the value of the weapon just keeps ballooning with every upgrade. There are also mods out there which make the whole process of making just about everything involve vastly more detail. (I.E. making plate armor takes a dozen different tasks spread out over half a dozen workshops.)
Also, it's a common mistake in games to think that you're simulating "Supply and Demand" when you just model supply. If you make the world's only throne made entirely of earwax, there shouldn't be that much of a market for such things, and even if it's the only one, there shouldn't be a huge... well, DEMAND for one, so it wouldn't have value. Meanwhile, crossbow bolts can probably be stockpiled in stupidly huge quantities without massively depleting demand, since they never spoil, store easily, and you can go through tons of them rapidly.
And finally, Dwarf Fortress isn't slavery, it's communism. It's outright anarchy until there's a mayor nominally in charge. Remember, you're not supposed to be Armok like people try to say occasionally, you're supposed to be the collective consciousness of the dwarves, themselves. They're working for their own communal wellbeing, and hypothetically, you should be, too.
Communism is slavery. Thats why they had to build a wall in the end.The Soviet-era command-economy was more bureaucratic totalitarianism than actual slavery. Not any more actual slavery as enterprises that used Company Scrip, which was a clearly capitalist situation.
Communism is slavery.
It's been said before (maybe in this thread, I'm not scrolling up to check) but the one additional tweak to the current system of trade demands might be to deprecate oft-traded items[1]. Just to keep the player on their toes.
What I don't think would be a good idea is any sort of walrasian modeling of fortress mode. To put it simply, that's kind of the game, isn't it? To me fortress mode has always been throwing down the gauntlet to all those who claim that the 'benevolent dictator' is a reasonable way to run a society. It's clearly not, and DF makes this case in spades.That’s so true, isn’t it? The way the player walls in the vampire so he can become their never-sleeping manager or walls out the last two dwarves to die by goblin because they’ll get there too late and they’re too slow and they’re nothing more than useless Legendary Stonecrafters anyway or walls in the three people who got bitten by the werelizard, gives them no food and water because they’ll regenerate every month anyway, and then releases them on the invading goblins to die when the time is right, for the good of the Mountainhomes and the Crying Melons, just destroys the idea of a benevolent dictator. It would be even worse if the player was physically a dwarf who could die, because they’d do anything at all to save themselves.
The best that it is already (somewhat) in the game.It's been said before (maybe in this thread, I'm not scrolling up to check) but the one additional tweak to the current system of trade demands might be to deprecate oft-traded items[1]. Just to keep the player on their toes.
That's not how trade works. Traders go somewhere in the pre-telegraph era because they expect to be able to buy more of the stuff that they bought last time because they have markets for it. Some will show up speculatively at exotic places looking to see what exotic goods they can find new markets for, but the regular traders want more of the same. They might have buy caps for some items based on what they think they can sell, but they're not going to change their demands just to troll you. That's just bad business.
If it's something temporary like "The Halls of Soaking need giant corscrews and tubes" that would be different next year, but if "The Mountainhome has a market for mugs" the traders are more likely to turn their nose up at you switching from rock to clay than to want a change. The rock ones they knew would sell. The clay ones might not.
I've never experienced the dwarven economy, but I did look through the 40d description of it, and it's bad.What even is this wall of text? Do you not realize we have to get well beyond the phase where for some reason spiked wooden balls are an economy-breaking commodity that are on the level of tulip bulbs in the 17th Century as to their sheer level of ridiculousness?