Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Squirrelloid on March 10, 2009, 10:25:12 am

Quote from: Granite26 on March 10, 2009, 10:20:53 am

Note that this does not have to correspond with the existance of supply/demand value changes (1 cup could always be worth one gold coin, just nobody has the coinage to mediate the exchanges)

Actually, that no one has the coin to mediate the exchange (assuming they want to) will increase demand for coins, which will decrease the cost of the cup.  (The coin becomes worth more). 

Edit: This is true in both a fiat and fixed currency set up.  (Although in the fixed currency arrangement driving up the price of coins directly drives up the cost of the metals used to make the coins).

I think there are examples (early American Kentucky, for instance) where there wasn't sufficient (LOCAL) coinage to cover demand.  This did not result in the coinage behaving strangely, so much as people not using it exclusively as a medium of exchange (there was more barter and I.O.U.'s being exchanged than the value of the currency skyrocketing locally)

I could write a lengthy response to this, which you'd probably just agree with.  So I'll just merely state that I meant, more generally, 'mutually agreeable exchangeable value' than currency.  In many cases, this means barter and IOUs can cover shortages in money supply, but there are conditions for each of those without which they fail to function.  (If absolutely anyone would accept something, its effectively currency, like salt was for much of the middle ages).

That said, I meant more as a 'we don't have to tie realistic S/D behaviour to this as well'...  Sure S/D is realistic, but it's merits and effects and flaws can be isolated from this

Agree entirely.  I think this gets back to my earlier comment 'require a minor in economics to make plausibly intelligent decisions'.  Money supply is *complicated*.

Note that this does not have to correspond with the existance of supply/demand value changes (1 cup could always be worth one gold coin, just nobody has the coinage to mediate the exchanges)

Actually, that no one has the coin to mediate the exchange (assuming they want to) will increase demand for coins, which will decrease the cost of the cup.  (The coin becomes worth more). 

Edit: This is true in both a fiat and fixed currency set up.  (Although in the fixed currency arrangement driving up the price of coins directly drives up the cost of the metals used to make the coins).

Quote from: Scruga on March 09, 2009, 10:50:40 am

i meant wood instead of iron, for the burning and smelting

If the player has magma, as has been made perfectly clear in this thread (even in the title!), what the fuck would you be using wood for in the smelting process?

Quote from: Squirrelloid on March 09, 2009, 04:39:53 pm

Right.  But either you have magma (in which case you aren't using charcoal), or you have sedimentary layers, in which case you have magnetite (and don't care that there is goblin armor).

It's not necessarily an either/or. One map I was playing on recently had a layer of marble on the region tile right beside the magma pipe...I breached both the marble AND a crapload of magnetite in the marble simply by digging out an area to be used as a magmaworks (some smelters, some glass furnaces, some space dug out in advance for forges...the usual). Best of both worlds

Last I checked, 'or' in english is not exclusive to XOR. =)

Ok, I'm not going to say this is a good idea to implement because I don't think it would be fun at all.

But lets talk about the mechanics of the proposal.  You're basically talking about instituting a money supply (which is distinct from total wealth since it only refers to hard currency).  This would require currency to be an object which is the medium of exchange, and for the value of currency to float against that of goods.  While those are not abhorrent additions in and of themselves, it would require far better AI for handling items before we really want dwarves messing around with currency (the current AI is awful).

The real problem with your proposal is you are advocating a fixed money supply.  This leads to a permanent depression scenario as the workforce expands, because there simply isn't enough currency to carry out enough transactions for the economy to grow.  If there is a money supply, the government needs to be able to expand and shrink the money supply.  Specialized money merchants don't solve the problem - minting coins creates money.  The question is whether there is too much or too little currency in the economy, and what that means for prices and exchange rates.

Of course, now we have to know something specific about the currency.  Is a gold coin worth X dwarfbucks because it contains X dwarfbucks worth of gold?  Or is it because the mayor fiats that value?  These have rather different implications for the nature of the money supply and the effect of expanding or contracting it.  Also note that if currency has value because of its content, that creates additional demand on its constituent metals beyond the demand of industry, which leads to inflated good prices and possibly industrial stagnation (if the price of a required good exceeds the value to the industry because people value it more for currency, the industry can't acquire raw materials).

I know, I've advocated an economics-related change elsewhere, but in that case it was distinct from government action and politics.  Money supply theory is quite political and requires government action.  For a reasonable money-supply theory of the time period, mercantilism, the consequences in-game would be that you couldn't normally trade for gold, silver, and possibly other metals with other civilizations (notably humans), because that's equivalent to trading away actual liquid assets.

Basically, I oppose this for 3 reasons:
1) The economic theory isn't sufficiently developed to create a good model in the game.  If you could do so, you'd put the federal reserve board out of a job.
2) There's only one model which is sufficiently in-period to even contemplate, and it leads to less fun because you can't acquire some goods.
3) It would require a minor in economics to make plausibly intelligent decisions, which doesn't sound like fun for most people.  Everybody understands how rarity and desirability relates to price at some intuitive level.  Not many people understand how money supply relates to economic growth.

Quote from: Squirrelloid on March 09, 2009, 04:14:51 pm

Maybe in the fortresses early year(s).  But by the time you become a major industrial power (which with the rate a stonecrafter can spit out crafts, may even describe the first year in some industries) you shouldn't just be a price taker.

Also, they aren't random prices, they're fixed absolute prices.  Which makes every game feel very much the same, no matter how different the world is.  = Less Fun in my book.

Ah, but you make the fatal "I AM SPECAIL!" flaw.

If you think about how much wealth your fortress produces, and then think "wait...what if ALL dwarf fortresses are about this productive" then it goes right back to what I'm saying. You're small potatoes, even with a capped out 200 dwarf Mountainholm. Given that there are usually at least 2 dwarf civs, 2 elves, a couple humies and maybe a friend gobbo or two, at most you're producing 1/10th  the world's industry. Chances are there's an NPC town that's doing it better because it's been around 10x as long as your dwarven fortress.

Also, prices aren't fixed. You know all those liason meetings, the screen where they say "hey! This is what we want! This is what we'll pay nearly 2x price for." That part comes true. I don't know about you, but I tailor my crafts based around those screens. I see "oh look, the humans want more mugs, better put a halt on toy boats and start cranking out mugs/flasks/cups etc."  I don't have to, I can still sell my other crafts for a tidy profit, but I like to pretend that I'm doing my part to participate in the economy.

An easy way to improve this is to also make merchants not buy everything under the sun, but that's another topic. I'd say it'd be easy that while setting the prices higher, you can set prices lower as well. So the merchants might say "I don't want cloth, I'm only paying 1/2 cloth prices and if  you show up with cloth, well then tough luck, take your 1/2 price and go.

First, those price increases are 'service charges' for bothering to adhere to what they wanted.  Of course, half the time I get crap like 'we want glass windows' (wait, no sand?) or 'we want cooked meals' (geez i'm going to feel cheesy if i actually sell masterwork dwarven syrup roasts).  And they're completely inconsistent too - they ask for totally arbitrary things every year, so there's no feeling of a persistent world outside your fortress.  And their entire purpose is to vaguely mimic a S/D anyway.

Second, I have had fortresses where, for particular industries, i probably had 50% of the world's production capacity.  Consider a fortress with 10 legendary armorsmiths (done it) - that's a substantial portion of the world's armor production capacity.  You could outfit a few thousand soldiers in full platemail in a year period, which probably exceeds the world's demand for armor in many worlds.  Its not just total population vs. your fortress's population, you also have to consider labor distribution.  Most fortresses don't do everything.  And there are some jobs you can't even do (milk cows?), so that means you aren't wasting some parts of your workforce on tasks that obviously other settlements are (since you can buy cow's milk).  This isn't assuming the player's fortress is special, this is assuming that the player can choose to focus his labor effort (which he can), and that doing so should lead to a dynamical response.

Furthermore, you're ignoring that I want a S/D model to determine what prices are *in the absence of the player's fortress* to start with, so that every world has a different economy based on the actual distribution of resources and settlements.  A world where iron is worth 10 dwarfbucks/bar is going to provide quite different trading incentives than a world where its 100 dwarfbucks/bar.

I would certainly welcome the addition of negative preferences.  But that's just another ad hoc attempt to simulate vaguely S/D dynamics.  Why have an imitation of a cake when you could actually eat cake?

Now that someone mentions it, I don't recall having traded away any grizzly bear skull totems when i butchered two tame ones the elves brought me.  I didn't pay much attention at the time, because i batch order such things with 30+ skulls lying around.  But I have remembered other unusual skull totems I've sold (mostly because they're worth more than otherwise expected).

Quote from: Squirrelloid on March 09, 2009, 01:01:47 pm

Quote from: Scruga on March 09, 2009, 10:50:40 am

sorry i made a dumb mistake 

i meant wood instead of iron, for the burning and smelting

What are you doing without magma or sedimentary layers?

well it takes multiple iron items you melt to get an iron bar and that way it can take about 2-3 charcoal to get 1 iron bar which i think is a lot

Right.  But either you have magma (in which case you aren't using charcoal), or you have sedimentary layers, in which case you have magnetite (and don't care that there is goblin armor).

I've got a location (hot rocky wasteland) which has the first level soil, the next 3-4 levels siltstone, (what an ugly stone) with LOADS of all the iron ores and bauxite, and the rest down obsidian and granite, with a magma pipe in the second "igneous" level. =O it was in a "standard" medium world I think. I thought the stone types always came in different regions, not "stacked" like that.

So, the bottom layer is always Igneous Intrusive - think of it as the upper mantle layer.  The other two layers are going to depend on the geology of the location.  An area with a long-active volcano will likely have 3 igneous layers (including at least 1 extrusive) from volcanic deposition.  But magma pipes can be beneath the surface (hidden initially) and have sedimentary material deposited on top of them, and could even have forced (or be forcing) their way through either metamorphic or sedimentary rock.  The rock immediately around the pipe will always be obsidian, but only if a volcano has actively deposited the surrounding landscape will the top layer be igneous.