Bay 12 Games Forum

Your assumptions are based on how the game currently is, Squirrelloid. The game currently makes no sense in a number of different ways. You get more sensible results if you base your arguments on reality, which includes animals eating, wagons costing to buy/make, having to pair for repairs, more frequent eating/drinking (it's only so rare in-game because it takes so long for the dwarves to do), et cetera.

I expect merchants to obey the same rules everything else in DF does.  That said, some of these rules will change and some will not.

I expect the economic behavior to improve.  So its rational to allow for that.  Ie, letting them buy below the listed cost, or increasing the price to buy above the listed cost as the default sell price, or something that makes an economy actually function.

I expect wagons to have a cost, I allowed for that.  I also expect them to cost less than a domestic animal, because they do in reality (and always have afaik).

I do not expect to ever see objects break in DF since it doesn't seem to be on the developement list (afaict), certainly its not a core component.  Thus no wagon repairs because they never break and will never break.  At best, as creatures, wagons would have a 'lifespan' and 'die of old age', which I tried to account for.

I expect merchants to eat and drink on the same cycle as dwarves.  The infrequency is a matter of simulation - presumably those meals are scaled such that they are eating the right amount of food per year (whatever that is), and its more convenient to cause them to show eating behavior the current number of times (~7/year iirc).  Since merchants are eating the same scale food, they should 'eat' just as often.  Its completely unreasonable to think a merchant should eat 50 times as much food value as a dwarf each year.  I mean, sure, we can imagine them eating 50 times as often, but then they're eating 1/50th as much to keep the simulation reasonable.

I expect animals will eventually eat, and I even accounted for that.  However, I also expect Ruminants and Hippomorphs to be able to eat *grass*, a resource that you don't exactly track.  I even accounted for the cost to feed animals above.

Basically, with the exception of wagon repairs, I accounted for everything you said, or see no reason why merchants should behave differently from dwarves, and did so using logic based on how the game currently functions or is expected to function.  Historical arguments are ridiculous when we don't even know how much a dwarfbuck is historically.  I mean, yes, maybe it costs 4 denari to move a donkey one mile, but maybe a dwarfbuck is 1000 denari.  Who knows.  I'm pointing out the logical things that contribute to transportation cost are relatively cheap in dwarfbucks to the sellprice in dwarfbucks - how can i compare the price of transport in Roman currency to the sell price of goods in dwarfbucks?  How can anything possibly be concluded from that?

Heh.

Casual gamers are dumbing down games! RAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEGGGGG

I would have rather said: the mass market is full of casual gamers who don't want a complicated game. 

The gamers who dictated the nature of computer games in the 90s still exist.  They just aren't the mass market for computer games anymore.

Ah, the Immortal.  Classic stuff.  I remember being totally unable to beat that game without the walkthrough, and even then it was no picnic.

I think Isometric's great, second only to 3D for pleasing portrayal of tile-based games.

And I agree with you that a huge graphical renovation would shatter the barrier between DF and the gaming community at large.  The "algebra vomit" or "psychedelic Matrix" is the only thing keeping people from seeing the game for what it really is.  At this point in the alpha, though, "what it really is" is lacking key features, shabbily balanced and totally unpolished.  Really, the ASCII is what lets me keep the game's state of completion in mind, and keeps me from hating it for its flaws.  A graphical revamp would take away the barrier between this project and the standards to which pretty games are held.  I'll tolerate a roguelike's interface in a game that looks like a roguelike, but if it gets pretty, I'll wonder why there's no good way to tell my military how to defend my fort.

The graphics should wait until it's really worth revealing and can stand up to the scrutiny that it'll inevitably get from all the people who never took it seriously before.

I think you overestimate the appeal of the game.  Sure, its sort of in the Sim genre of games (which is popular), but the nitty gritty is a lot 'nittier' and a lot grittier. 

While the gritty isn't a bad thing from a marketing perspective, its not what the average Sim player wants (they want the Sims or Sim Teddy Bear or whatever it is they're making these days).  Ie, its in the wrong genre for that to be a mass marketing 'bonus'.

The 'nitty' is a terrible thing from a mass market perspective.  Even with a cleaned up interface and polished graphics, the game would still have an incredibly steep learning curve.  Getting someone to sit down and look at it who isn't going to actually play more than 5 minutes doesn't help anyone.  Most people who buy those mass market games don't want a game with this much depth and complication.

The audience that might be interested is the economic/business sims people.  Unfortunately, the actual size of that market is grossly overrepresented by current game offerings, because in general they seem to have dumbed down the games to capture more users.  The last 'true' successful business/econ sim in my mind is RRT2, which is from the *90s*.  And half its user-base were railroad enthusiasts who probably learned the economic bits because they really wanted to play an awesome railroading game (and it was an awesome railroading game).  Even given that, that game is a lot less complicated theoretically than DF currently is.  (And attracting this audience would mean spending a lot of time implementing economics that felt real, which adds even more complication).

Making a graphical Rogue-like worked because hacking monsters to death is a simple concept with simple rules and simple gameplay.  Making DF graphical doesn't remove any of the real barriers to mass market appeal.  DF fails the KISS principle, which almost guarantees no mass market.

I mean, which masses do you think are going to flock to DF's door solely because better graphics were implemented?  The FPS players?  Please.  The TBS players?  They're mostly in it for the smashing another person part.  The Facebook flashgame players of games like... um.. whatever that fricking farm game is?  "OMG, its not just point and click and something is done!"  Lets face it, the inherent audience for a game like DF is not really mass market.  Graphics do not change this equation.

(I do vastly prefer the ASCII, but that's because I think its easier to play with.  And DF is currently a masterpiece of ASCII art.)

Quote from: Neonivek on November 09, 2009, 07:15:31 pm

The problem with alcohol and some objects (like Bolts) is that they are used up SOOO FAST and require constant diligence to restocking.

Power cranking food and booze is a constant battle.  If you grow food too rapidly, the spare barrels get filled up with food as the dwarves drink them dry, then there is no space to make more booze....

That in itself is the main reason my first fortress eventually became a food production monstrosity.  I just kept cranking barrels.  I had a decent number of trees, and after a while I would order trees from the humans AND the dwarves and buy all of them plus all the empty barrels I could as well.

This methodology is sustainable only because there is also a cap on the number of dwarves.  LOL!  Otherwise I swear you could devote a map to growing and boozing and eventually they would drink it dry.

I eventually learned to just stop planting for a few seasons if the situation gets too out of hand.  I guess the rule of thumb is keep plenty of food and twice the booze, and let off the accelerator when you note your booze count diving toward your food count.

I just tell my prepared meals stockpile to not accept barrels - that way I can clear the food out of my barrels by cooking it.  (Also, makes it much easier to trade if i want/need to).

My examples were just that: examples. They were meant to get you to think in terms of weight and value, not in terms of what the actual game uses. The numbers are made up because they make the math easier. My point, which I suppose I should have made more clear earlier, is this:

Heavy items are too cheap.

Or, put another way

Light items are too expensive.

Of course a log has more practical value to you than a gem does. The fact remains that the profit that traders currently get from logs is so small as to be practically nonexistent. Even if you only buy one gem, that's worth more to the traders than 20 logs, because the prices are fixed in DF's absurd excuse for an "economy".

Lets consider real world economies for a moment.

Gems are worth a lot of money.  They get transported in a briefcase because the reasonable demand for a given buyer isn't that large, and the risk in transporting more than that is large.

Coal is worth very little per pound.  It gets shipped in large quantities in the most efficient way possible (for example, by train). 

Both get 'shipped'.  The economics of the situation determine that you ship coal by the most efficient method possible, because it will be bought and sold in bulk.  (Like logs, which you would expect in DF get shipped by the wagonload).  Gems are carried in the most secure method possible, and in small quantities.  In DF terms, the merchants should carry them in their pockets. 

Similarly, merchants should expect to sell a lot more of something like logs and a lot fewer of something like gems.  So it doesn't matter how many gems they could carry, there's no reasonable expectation they could sell that many.

The value of a dwarf?  How many z-levels did the body parts get scattered over? =)

Possibly my newbiness at defense is what is making this a larger issue for me than for most people, but no... refilling pools do not cut it once you get beyond a certain fort size. Even non-ill dwarves start sucking down water occasionally for reasons not entirely clear to me.

You ran out of alcohol.

Yes, your stocks may say you have alcohol left, but remember dwarves drink from the barrel, and any drinks in that barrel they *aren't* consuming also aren't available for anyone else.  So when Urist McThirsty goes to get a drink, and notices all the barrels of booze currently have dwarves doing kegstands on them, he can't simply wait his turn, he wanders over to the nearest water to sate his thirst.

For example, if a mule can carry 1000 weight and costs 100 to bring to your fort, then if the average profit to weight ratio for the goods on the mule is below 10, it's not worth bringing. The mule literally cannot carry enough to pay its own way.

In what DF universe does a Mule cost 100 to take anywhere?  Even assuming it eats (which it doesn't in DF), it would have at most 3.5 meals per trip, or 7 per round trip (i think that's the right number per year), same as dwarves.  And it would eat something cheap, ie, 2/meal assuming you had to provide a meal that had a cost, as opposed to grass.  So its cost/trip is remarkably small.