I'd like to pick up on what a couple of people have said, which is entirely wrong.
Money used to be worth what it was, but nowadays coins can be worth less than the value of the metals they are made from. Take the penny for example. 1p is worth 1p, but turn it into scrap and sell it, and you'll make yourself 1.3 pence.
I'm not sure what YOUR pennies are made of. US pennies are mostly Zinc. (~97%)
Values Used:
Total Face Value: $0.01
Coin Type: 1982-2010 Lincoln Zinc Cent
Zinc Price: $0.9564 / pound
Copper Price: $3.7172 / pound
Answer:
Total melt value is $0.01.
(exact value is $0.0056516603175)
From: http://www.coinflation.com (http://www.coinflation.com)
I think something like this would be a good idea. As it is, the level of micromanagement required to run the fortress decreases pretty smoothly as your population expands, as it should. It's like zooming out from The Sims level to maybe Pharaoh or Caesar level. But it doesn't go far enough.
One of the things that does really bug me mid/late game is labour assignments. We shouldn't have to download third party programs just to manage who does what in the fortress. It gets tedious when you have around 80+ people, especially if their primary skill (their icon) is different from what you have them assigned to.
So I suggest a similar process to the noticeboard: once you get a guild, jobs from that profession become privatised. You designate them to be done, and then the guild (if they have a guild office designated or something) employs someone to do them for you, probably someone with high skill.
Maybe this ties in with the dwarven economy when it returns; instead of being assigned labours, everyone becomes available for employment in any field. When there are lots of one profession's jobs to do, lots of dwarfs have opportunity for employment in that field. Maybe you don't have enough skilled workers to fill them all, so base salaries increase with demand. If you have hardly any jobs queued up from a profession, then all but the highest skilled get laid off and have to look elsewhere, maybe becoming haulers, maybe getting jobs filling in vacancies in a trade with lots of job openings (but getting paid less because they'd be Dabbling).
Maybe each guild should charge interested dwarfs a bit of cash in return for some basic training in that trade.
Then your large fortress always has exactly as many workers in each trade as required, without you having to micromanage each dwarf's labours. Provided you have the population to supply all the work, of course. The manager should give you an idea of the unemployment rate too.
Obviously the player should get to dictate a minimum skill level for guilds to hire, again through the manager. And just to give completeness, the option to manually change labours on a dwarf has to stay in as well.
I think something like this would make managing larger fortresses much more bearable and fun. Time freed up to focus on ruling, not on frankly tedious labour micromanagement.
Some earlier posts talked about dwarfs dabbling in their spare time in other trades and producing their own goods independently, which is partly related to that ^. And this:
The economy could start with: at the trade depot, you are free to toggle "Dwarfs can barter/dwarfs can't barter" wherein an idle Dwarf can independently go up and trade their own belongings for caravan goods. Different caravan levels would be good for this, like a traveling tinker who sells rubbish trinkets right up to a full wagon train under steel plate guard trading exotic luxuries. This level of personal economic interaction can occur right from the getgo. At this level your fort is still an 'expedition', like an exploratory mining camp (or whatever motivation you happen to have) and the current communal activity is maintained.
Then, when you achieve a mayor, next phase: they request/require the establishment of the bureaucracy if not already set up. The fortress is now in 'company-owned mining town' phase and all property belongs to the 'expedition' entity (bar what currently belongs to individuals, such as clothes and room contents etc). Each dwarf gets company credit from doing jobs to spend as they like on food and other consumables. Flat rate on everything? Dwarfs who are unhappy/poor from no scheduled jobs must make a meeting appointment as currently happens. Nobody is getting rich, but hey, they're here to work. No physical coin present yet.
Next phase: from barony+. What happens here? The 'fortress' entity takes on less and less of a direct ownership of property and more of an administrative role. We can have a 'patchy' development here as guilds are established (requiring large fortresses to be able to attain most, if not all, of the guilds). Like the above spoilered comment, each guild hires its workers independently.
- Admin manager manages work orders. Order goes out from admin to guild.
- Guild buys material from other guilds or fortress admin. Job is done, guild pays worker the going rate (see spoiler above) from its own coffers. Workers without representative guild paid from fortress admin.
- Finished product belongs to guild, unless we're talking walls or other masonry, or the dwarf is privately contracted (no guild). Then the project has been paid for from admin coffers and belongs to the fortress admin. Bear with me on that one.
- Guild onsells finished product. Can be to other guild seeking products, or any cashed up dwarf looking for pimpin' stuff.
- Worker dwarf now spends his money buying food and other consumables, or saving if they're thrifty. i.e, food money does not go to farmers, but into the farmers' guild's coffers, or the fortress coffers if there is no guild (state-run industry; horrible, I know, but probably the easiest way).
- Admin coffers replenished by tax/rent combination, as well as from selling fortress admin-owned goods.
- TRADING UNDER THIS SYSTEM: Some ways:
1. Dwarf-by-dwarf personal commerce. Both bartering and money transactions allowed. Unrelated to you. You don't even have to care about it.
2. When a random trade caravan arrives, your broker is given a decent-sized loan of coin. You then have a look at what the traders are offering, and mark what you want to trade for. Your broker will then wander around your guilds and buy from them a selection of fortress goods. They are hauled to the depot and your broker barters with the traders himself. The better his skill in the relevant areas, the greater return he can pull from the deal. The goods then belong to the admin by virtue of the loan, and they are hopefully worth more than what you gave the broker, who also takes a commission. More frequent and varied caravans in the upcoming arc would aid this.
3. Local resource centres do trade deals with your admin. This is one of the original ideas of this thread in that you will have specific trade good abundances. You strike a deal, say x steel bars for y food and booze every season. On your behalf, your broker buys the bars from the metalworkers' guild with from the treasury. He then does the deal and the food an booze now belongs to admin, sold on to dwarfs for probably a profit. (((Profit from this generated in 2 ways, either the game forces you to get more dwarfbux worth of food and booze than you sold in metal, or local prices are scaled by commodity rarity. The first is easier to produce but less realistic/flexible, the latter vica versa)))
Because the game already has a set basic item quality and worth calculator, coin value (and more importantly coin worth) can be set. Actually, there's a subtle difference; the worth of items is actually calculated from the value of a dwarfbuk. With price scaling: the game looks at your total wealth with a static worth for each item. Then for each type of item the game calculates what percentage of total static worth that item represents, and then the actual in-game price is scaled accordingly.
Coin? Minting of coin only occurs when your bookkeeper has done the numbers and found that you don't have enough coin to represent the wealth you've created - however that is represented (exact, or some other way like in dwarf-hours of labour. I don't offer a solution to that). In which case you are made aware of this fact - or not; minting can be automated?
Sorry for the massive spoilered (possibly incoherent?) text, but it's late where I am.
forgive me if I necro'd the wrong thread...I *think* this is the most recent of the economy threads...
OK...
tl:dr: real money is not tied directly to one good. it is loosely tied to several goods simultaneously.
a bit of thought dumping: Money is "worth" something when it can be used to pay taxes, and/or when people accept it, and/or when people can trade it for gold..
oh. right. gold is worthless if your'e starving. Truth be told, an economy that ties money to food would actually make more sense...aside from the fact that food spoils and there are so many varieties of food. gold was used simply because it had been previously used in gold coins. [extreme speculation]previously, basksets of pebbles could have been used as a way to keep track of how many chicken eggs were promised in exchange for the sheep; people switched to prettier rocks when they got suspicious, and eventually people switched to the prettiest rocks around to make it impossible to lie about how many chicken eggs they'd been promised...and then forgot it was originally about chicken eggs. [/extreme speculation]
ok. Real life "money" is not tied down to any ONE item; it is loosely tied to a bajillion items at once, many of which have substitues. This means supply and demand may kick in for any object; the value of any one currency may then drift over time...
lets say it takes 6 apples, or 3 corn, or 2 bread, to get you through the day. there is enough food production that any two of these will be enough, and if there is excess it can be fed to livestock.
lets say the government says an apple is worth 1 dollar.
* a pest eats all the corn; the economy is fine
* a pest eats all the apples instead; the economy becomes a distorted mess once you include supply and demand.
so lets switch to a different option: 6 dollars buys you enough food to get you through the day.
*a pest comes around and eats all the corn; the other two items retain their value because there's still enough supply to meet the demand. we can then include what little corn was stored away to make corn worth 50 dollars or so, simply because some people really, really like corn; this doesn't cause the economy to cease making sense.
*the same thing happens with any particular crop eaten; it takes eliminating two crops at once to cause this economy to crash.
Another option, perhaps, is saying that 6 dollars buys you an hour's worth of human labor-aka, a minimum wage law. If we assume that 1/24th of the available labor is all that's needed to produce the food in the previous scenarious, this could be introduced with, essentially, no distortion.
*distortion: a term i will not bother to define here. I can only hope that it is sufficiently self-evident.
Now, dwarf fortress already has a system of value, the dwarfbuck. Each item is assigned a value that is completely static, with NO room for supply and demand...and either a caravan can bring you something or it can't. furthermore, the ONLY place you could get supply and demand was with liason requests, and even that was pretty broken when a few meals can buy out the entire caravan. extending it to individual dwarves...
SO. Why NOT use the existing system?...oh. right. Because in the old system, the dwarves got no credit for items produced prior to economy kick-in, and they suddenly couldn't afford the royal bedroom your engravers painstakingly created. furthermore, money used for rent...vanished. Money came in whenever ANY dwarf pulled a lever. even if the lever wasn't connected to anything.
SO.
To seriously introduce an economy...you need taxes. And they need to be balanced somehow.
the room-rent was a property tax, but it was horribly broken.
The current model includes only a very limited supply/demand; mostly, the player may increase the caravan supply of iron anvils by paying more for them. Everything is still based around the dwarfbuck, though...and the individual-dwarf economy is horribly broken...unlike with humans, dwarves seem to do incredibly well with communism...it's as if they were in a hive-mind controlled by the player.
now
the original individual economy was a disaster. I propose the following modifications:
1. "room rent" fix: 1x1 rooms are free or super cheap.
2. raw food is free.
3. Dwarves should be permitted to automatically expand or contract their room. (I EXPECT the king to grow his room to cover an entire, only to find himself selling his clothes, getting laughed at, and experiencing fun first hand when he runs into magma to escape the shame. )
4. Dormitories should give mild happy thoughts if they are of throne-room quality, and prevent grumbling about sleeping quarters at modest or decent quality.
5. coin fix; dwarves need to restack their coins over time.
6. the player (aka the king/hive mind) can controll fortress goods without causing grumbling, and can decide which of these are sold. Forcibly purchasing a dwarf's ownded shirt will frequently cause an unhappy thought.
7. that which is produced is a fortress good by default
8. Dwarves receive a fraction of the value added by their labor...modified by existing supply-demand factors...PLUS a value dictated artificially by the player. Dwarves will grumble a bit if they think someone is being payed ridiculous sums for lever pulling, regardless of how important that lever is to the safety of the fort. They will not grumble much about the king being payed.
9. The player controlls which types of fort goods are purchaseable by dwarves; the military seriously needs those wooden bolts after all.
10. The player may dictate whether the price of a good is pinned to a specific value, or allowed to change based on supply and demand.
11. Dwarves prefer coins and will grumble more and more about not having them over time. But the player says when there are enough coins minted to make the switch.
12. dwarves who want something will occasionally grumble if its not to be found. They will grumble even more if they want something that's in the fortress stocks but have not been able to purchase it for some time. may be allieviated in the short run by letting them admire the object if it is a placeable object.