Bay 12 Games Forum

"Dwarven axemen" works, but it's the equivalent of "Axedwarves," in which -men or -dwarves refers to someone who does something (or however you want to phrase it). In something like Lord of the Rings, though, Men is pretty clearly a way of saying humans.

Quote from: dresdor on April 10, 2010, 02:31:12 pm

Quote from: LordShotGun on April 10, 2010, 01:53:09 pm

Not only that but I belive its detrimental. When my miners are hungry or thirsty they seem to have a lower success rate at leaving stone, gems, and ore.

I think you're just paranoid :-p


And I've found that my dwarves are less happy because every time they continue working past thirst and hunger they get a bad thought. 

From my experience this is actually true. They also work much slower when they're hungry, thirsty, or tired.

I've noticed the lower success rate, too. My legendary miners go from leaving stones in every tile they dig out to destroying about half of them when they're hungry/thirsty/tired. It's not unreasonable that a tired worker would be a clumsy one, I guess. But it gets awfully tedious trying to shepherd them all so that they don't waste valuable materials when they'd rather be drinking.

I tried using a seasonal autosave with a missing arsenal dwarf and 41 population. No amount of saving and reloading made the AD show up. On the other hand, no amount of editing the population requirement in the raws did anything either. So my earlier assumption seems to have been wrong.

Still, I can't make the AD show up in the nobles list just by saving and quitting.

I think I must have missed the trigger for it somehow. I tried setting the population requirement up to 42, thinking that maybe it would re-trigger when I got some more immigrants, but then there was that handy suggestion about the barracks. So I set the requirement back down to 20, loaded my game, and checked one last time before setting up a barracks. And now I do have the arsenal dwarf position, with 20+ dwarves and no barracks. Thrilling!

Thats a good one

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Isn't the flu a virus though?

So... A viral force of darkness, then?

(this is of course assuming the transactions occur at approximately the same time.  Obviously supply and demand change over time, and thus price changes over time.  But that has nothing to do with distance travelled).

The transactions in DF don't occur at the same time, though. They occur, at most, three times a year, each time with a different set of merchants. Merchants traveling different distances would, reasonably, incur different costs for transporting their goods. The only way for them to make a profit from something bulky and low-value like logs would be to raise their prices accordingly. There are never any rival merchants who can afford to sell their logs for less because their transportation costs were lower. But there are lots of cases in which, reasonably, it's impractical to carry logs halfway across the world and sell them for 3-6 dwarfbucks.

Historical relative prices depend on a lot of economic data, like demand, supply, monetary policy, money supply, etc...  Comparing DF to Rome is sort of missing the boat - Rome didn't grow enough food on its own and had a population vastly in excess of the maximum population of your typical DF world.  How can you conclude *anything* relevant for DF from that?

I think you might have missed my point when I brought up my earlier examples. I really wasn't interested in the conversion rate of denarii to Dwarfbucks. I was, however, interested in providing examples in which a) price increases with distance, and b) transporting bulk (or presumably bulky) cargo over long distances is prohibitively expensive.

It really shouldn't matter what a prickleberry is in real life, because, as Honsoku pointed out, merchants can carry an awful lot of them in place of just one log, and (if people actually buy them) make far more money doing so. But since they do carry logs around with them, they should either stop or charge more.

I can only speak for myself, but I can honestly say that I spend about 50,000 dwarfbucks a year on gems. I'd gladly spend more, but there's no Buy All option, and my patience is limited. Also, my workers are lazy and indolent.

I'd hate to start rambling off in the wrong direction, so forgive me if I'm missing something, but transporting goods by land tended to be exorbitantly expensive for most of history (at least as far as my understanding goes). I can understand that applying this to Dwarf Fortress as it currently stands would be a bit odd. Merchants just show up on the edge of the map, after all, and there are no real transportation costs to speak of.

If there were transportation costs, however, I'm having trouble seeing why bulk wouldn't be a factor. Daily life in the Roman city: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia certainly seems to suggest that, with "Transportation of bulk goods by land was prohibitively expensive and slow." (p.198) ...After previewing my post, I'm not entirely sure that the link works... It goes on to say, though, that hauling a wagon-load of wheat was something of an exercise in futility, as the animals required to haul it would rapidly eat a wagon-load of food themselves. I realize bulk cargo isn't quite the same as bulky cargo, but I think the point remains, especially for something so cheap as to be effectively free, like logs in DF.

Trade, transport, and society in the ancient world: a sourcebok [sic], meanwhile, discusses the increase in price as a function of distance. Page 134 includes a convenient excerpt from the Edict on Maximum Prices, allowing you to calculate your shipping costs in wagon-, camel-, and ass-loads per mile.

If I've missed the point completely, or if this has already been covered, feel free to disregard all this, of course. In summary (bulleted for your convenience):

• I buy too many gems.
• In the 4th century Roman empire, it apparently cost 4 denarii to transport an ass-load of freight 1 mile.
• Either my linking abilities suck, or I fail at Google Books.

Edit: Having read ManaUser's post, I can only speak for myself, but I can honestly say that I would gladly spend about 50,000 dwarfbucks a year on lumber. But patience is limited, workers are indolent, etc...