March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
News: February 3, 2024: The February '24 Report is up.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
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While it is true that the game needs to make creating legendaries more difficult, this is wholly beside the point - the time it takes to train up a legendary is largely irrelevant, since the rest of the world basically doesn't get to make every single civilian in their city a legendary the way that we do almost automatically if we just keep a fort running long enough.This is really a question of learning rates versus life expectancy. Legendary dwarves should be pretty damn old - the current artifact situation has resulted in child prodigies out-producing dwarves with decades on them. Setting learning rates at a level where the majority of the population will probably be killed in a range of amusing and unexpected ways before getting anywhere near legendary would be a useful start.
Additional micromanagement is just trying to add more problems to solve a problem - it's only going backwards.Agreed.
Part of the problem is that Unfortunate Accidents are too common as it is... by making nobles MORE demanding, you're only begging for players to set up magma-safe noble's rooms with indoor heating.This really depends on the context in which the carrot is provided - a carrot that enables further activity such as an expanded military is more attractive than some form of badge for the fortress, whatever the likes of Schumpeter might think. We could stray very quickly towards some form of Sim City-style 'civic building' model if we're not careful. Additional social complexity, guilds etc., is interesting but needs to be considered carefully - ideally you'd want a situation where you have the option to have a guild or not, the latter option allowing any dwarf to take part in that activity for their personal economic benefit, the former requiring any new mason, say, to seek admittance and only sell products at guild prices. The former produces a cadre of loyal dwarves who'll be less likely to tantrum, the latter more and better products. Tantrum spirals are the biggest killer of mature forts now, and they're effectively a facile representation of civil unrest that we'd want to retain. You'd move from a construction phase to a political phase in terms of where player intervention is focused. Nobles, hated as they are, would form a key part of that.
Players reject that portion of the game as it stands - it needs to be presented to them in a better way. This is a large part of why I was going on about the Class Warfare suggestion, since that would make the entire fortress start making demands as a natural extension of gameplay.
They view nobles as an unecessary burden placed upon them for no benefit they can see, but if they see the increasing demands that are placed upon them as an escalation of challenge, originating from doing well in the game, and with the reward of advancing their own creation further upwards from "dank hole" to "shining, triumphant Mountainhome", it becomes something they would more actively seek to accomplish.
In other words, use the carrot, not the stick.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)This is interesting. There is scope to develop an entire underground ecosystem that agriculture will slot into, requiring the dwarven equivalent of the three-field-system and scarecrows and so on. However, agriculture itself could be summarised as busy work without effort to improve the land upon which it's based - eventually you'd need some way of automating the process after crafting a sustainable mechanism for farming.
Oh boy, opening up with Krugman. I can see the Neo-Classicists who try to paint all Keynesian thought of every worthwhile economist in the past half century as a delusion spread by the "evil" Krugman getting ready to swarm already.To be fair, it's difficult to for neo-classicists to complains about Ricardo, given that he's pretty 'classic'. They may as well complain about Mr Smith.
OK, first, it's probably worth bringing up a basic link to Comparative Advantage itself, because Krugman isn't talking about what Comparative Advantage itself, but the reaction to it.Thank you for this link, which I should've given. Almost all of your post is along lines with which I would agree, so I'll just focus on a couple of particular points.
For comparative advantage to work, you need goods to cost more for a given culture to produce them. Until we have the internal mechanics of having to pay dwarves for their work again, this can only make sense in terms of how much labor it takes to make a good. Elves must somehow produce a good with less labor than a dwarf does... but there is nothing in the game that does this. Every good takes the same amount of labor to produce - one harvested raw material, and one step in a workshop. In fact, the act of using the trade depot is more work than any other single industry. The "cost" (in the only currently meaningful definition of the term - effort and time on the part of the player) of trading itself is greater than the "cost" of just making it yourself.There's at least two options here: simply lowering skill acquisition rates and hence the length of time the workshop step takes, or adding in additional player input through multiple steps for a particular type of labour. The latter would add to micromanagement, which isn't necessarily bad - this is DF, after all - but may prove annoying. The former would slow down the early game considerably, but could push the player into focusing on a stronger division of labour, which can only help to personalise the dwarves. It's important to recognise that the biggest cost to the player - at least in the early game - is that of opportunity, and imposing additional opportunity costs makes decisions more difficult, and hence more interesting.
The problem is that Fortress Mode never lacks for productivity. There are no goods to distribute out to your dwarves, there is no consumerism, there is only having enough to survive, and then just sitting on your fort and trying to see how long you last. Maybe building a big monument or fighting something more difficult, but basically, all you need is to not starve and have clothing and weapons. Everything else is just a waste of time and effort and FPS to produce or import anything.This is literally true - but to be fair, everything in a sandbox game is a 'waste of time and effort'. Dwarf Fortress is effectively a toy for grown-ups, and it would be unfair to understate the value of play when it comes to big monuments or similar. Of course, this is value to the player, rather than within the game itself.
Basically, the work that has to be done to make any of this make any sense is more monumental than most people realize.This is true. But getting it right would provide a free-of-charge economic simulator to everyone, which is worthwhile even outwith a fun game.
"and mine and produce metal goods as well as anyone else" - it was changed with revamp of minerals to encourage trade. It is quite rare to have access to sand and clay. So, after Caravan Arc we may see introduction of even bigger diversity between sites.Indeed, this is a step in the right direction. There is a difficulty around volumes of goods, though - traders appear to insist on bringing the same types of goods regardless of whether they've been bought in the past and regardless of comparative advantage. Eventually I'd hope the elf trying to sell me his wooden kneecap protectors would realise that the dwarf completely encased in steel probably won't be interested.
