Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Squirrelloid on November 10, 2009, 03:22:00 pm

(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.

Quote from: Squirrelloid on November 10, 2009, 02:49:55 pm

Except you only demonstrated it costs money to ship wheat.  The price of that wheat in Rome is the same as the price of any other wheat, no matter how much it cost you to ship it.

So the guy who ships his wheat 2 miles and paid 8 denari sells his wheat at some price P.

The guy who ships his wheat 10 miles and paid 40 denari sells his wheat at some price P.

Those Ps are the same.  Wheat is wheat.  The guy who shipped 2 miles makes more profit.

If expected P x total amount of wheat shipped < total cost to transport, it just doesn't get transported by the merchant.  He doesn't get to arbitrarily increase the price of his wheat.

Well, that was one of the goals of the Edict on Maximum Prices. It attempted to curb rampant inflation, in part through price control. So yes, in theory wheat was wheat and glass was glass. In practice, though, it was expensive and difficult to transport goods over long distances. Goods started disappearing from the market once the Edict went into effect, and merchants starting selling their goods on the black market, because it was the only way they could make a profit. In practice, prices increased over distance.

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not (directly) weight or distance

In Nunavut the prices of goods can more then double due to transportation costs. A Soda can for example can cost up to $5 dollars while it can cost up to $1 dollars anywhere else in Canada.

One issue I have with your meals argument, Squirrelloid, is that we know precisely how many meals there are in, say, one dog. There are 5, 6 if you cook the fat. Could you live most of a year off of the meat on one dog? I don't think so, not even if you were half the height you are now and consumed copious quantities of alcohol. Thus, one meal's worth of food in the DFverse is not remotely close to 1/7th of a year's supply of food. Dwarves simply don't eat often enough, because if they did, then they'd spend their entire lives in the dining room. It's part of the problem with the flow of time in-game.

It'd be significantly more realistic, food-wise, if every month in-game was actually one day (or even half a day). Of course, then you run into problems with dwarven miners carving out citadels to rival Moria in under a week, and caravans would be arriving entirely too quickly.

In general, then, trying to make arguments by way of consensus with the way the rest of the game runs is futile, because the game is inherently internally inconsistent. We're best off trying to come up with solutions that seem reasonable on their own, even if they don't make sense when you take the system as a whole.

Quote from: Squirrelloid on November 10, 2009, 01:49:35 pm

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.

No real life uses those.

You then apply relativity to the game.

Well to say casual gamers don't want complicated games is oversimplifying.