Bay 12 Games Forum

I still think people are conflating capitalism(all exchanges are by def. equal value and there is no such thing as trade under nonviolent distress) with supply and demand economics.

True.  My proposal has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism.  Capitalism is political buzzword for a style of government-economic relationship.  I'll note that your parenthetical isn't actually the definition of capitalism (which requires some mention of *capital*).  Capitalism most certainly isn't the case in dwarf fortress, as it requires private ownership of the means of production (!true) and capital (wealth).  This has nothing to do with how the market actually operates.

While I politically agree with Squirrelloid's inefficiencies, I'm willing to accept a (fantasy) world where government actions don't cause massive inefficiencies, or where other forms of economic layouts are possible.  Supergeniuses coming up with new economic theories is, at best, like having Einstein theorizing in Newton's day:  Sure they may be true, things may be more complicated than we see, but the apple still falls.

There's nothing political about my calling them inefficiencies.  With government intervention things get sold at the wrong price.  That's inefficiency by definition, no matter what you believe about whether the government should interfere or not.  Regardless, at the level of intergovernmental exchange there's no power regulating the nature of those exchanges.  And the fortress relationship to merchants is effectively that - your dwarves can't impose your laws on the caravan because they just won't trade, or should leave and not come back.

*sighs* don't bother trying to force capitalism upon an ancient people. Please.

I have nowhere advocated we institute capitalism in DF.  For someone accusing me of a 'pathetic' understanding of communism, you don't even seem to know what capitalism is. 

See here.  I might specifically point out: "In the modern capitalist state, legislative action is confined to defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market,..." and "...allowing the free play of supply and demand."  That is, S/D is the 'basic rules of the market', which modern Capitalism tends to defer to, but is not part of Capitalism per se.  A Capitalism which regulated a vastly different framework than S/D is imaginable (although with inefficiency like all attempts to alter the market's natural behavior), as are economic systems which are not capitalism wanting to enforce normal market behavior.

Also your understanding of communism is pathetically limited. Soviet Russia was totalitarianism as well as communist, all communist means is Government control over all businesses so everyone is in the employ of the government, slowly bringing everyone to equal level due to the fact wages can be set universally as opposed to differing for different companies, and in theory be set more fairly. By that standard USSR was not communist. The wages were by no means 'fairly' spread, therefore it was nothing but a totalitarian state pretending to be communist for control reasons.

Quoth Wikipedia: "In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism."  If I meant to refer to the more idealized concept that has never been achieved in practice, I would use the term Communitarianism, which is the preferred term in modern circles (because it doesn't carry the baggage associating communism with the USSR, China, et al.).

anyway, Yes supply and demand plays a role but the 'world' economy wasn't so big, things from far away were worth more, didn't mean the merchant would KNOW that there was a demand, he wouldn't have had any contact with the fort since the last time he came (so the only demand he'd have is for orders from people the previous visit) so he'd have to bring a wide variety of goods, in the end it was all down to bartering. the 'World economy' as you described it was nothing like today, they didn't have the communication for it to be.

Where did we move from 'the price the merchant is willing to sell goods at' to 'the goods the merchant brings with him'?  My proposal is entirely about the *price* of goods.  The merchant should arrive with an idea about the market outside the fortress, which is certainly going to influence his trading with the fortress (if he knows he can get 5x as much elsewhere, he's not going to sell it to you.  Similarly, he should make reasonable offers based on some expectation of return for goods he takes off your hands).

Also, price carries knowledge about demand.  If the merchant finds it harder to buy a particular good at last years price, he'll know that demand has gone up or supply has gone down.  This is why markets are efficient - they provide a way for information about the desires of the population to be known to those who produce (and distribute) goods so that producers can produce an appropriate supply and distributors can bring an appropriate number with them.  Sometimes there are mismatches, but its far more efficient than any other method.

How do you know he's had no contact.  Maybe he ran into another caravan who had been to your fortress more recently?  Being at your fortress is not the only way to get information about your fortress.

Meh, i'm of the firm belief that if you take a small slice of the economic pie and just observe it, for the most part it's random fun!

Therefore, having random prices and objects makes sense!

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.

ALTERNATIVE?

How about research that improves something by a very minute amount, but in which you will reap some rewards if you dedicate enough dwarf-time to it?

For instance, a dwarf performs research on masonry.  After a long while, his findings allow general masonry jobs to be something like, I dunno, 5% faster.

The farther you get into research, the slower your progress.  So your first few improvements are relatively quick, but you'll need to really work in order to shave extra time off your jobs.

Incremental research like that makes no sense.  Inventions are one-time events distributed randomly through time and space, because someone somewhere made the necessary breakthrough.

The correct way to model technology is probably the result of moods and information travelling to the fortress via merchant caravans.

Everybody voting for the weaver just because he made lots of nice cloth and hasn't spoken to anyone in 10 years doesn't make any more sense

Kids should make friends easier if anything. However, only with other kids reasonably close to their age

Whether or not making said weaver mayor makes any sense depends on dwarven values.  I can certainly imagine a social structure that did make him mayor.  ('He's a skilled craftsman (=respect) and his lack of politicking clearly indicates he doesn't want the job, which means he's the best candidate for it.')

But I absolutely cannot wrap my head around 13 year olds becoming mayor.  It totally breaks immersion.

Pumping water about I had a major overflow onto the brook tiles, which turned brown but still animated as a brook. Just to check I attempted to build a farm on it and I could.

Just seems the odd occurrence.

Its not really a bug.  The brook has a floor on top of it so dwarves can walk over it.  If you get this floor muddy, you can plant on it just like any other floor.  Basically, the simplest implementation for 'river dwarves can cross' has other consequences.

Is it on the wall or the floor?

If its on the floor you can just build a constructed floor over it, remove the constructed floor, and it should revert to the same material type as the surrounding rock.

(obviously this doesn't work on walls because you can't build on them).

I always strategically hunt for HFS when I know I have it on my map somewhere.  Sink a shaft down to about 7 levels from the bottom in the middle of each tile (generally too high to find actual HFS), mine around a bit until I hit adamantine, then drill down through where it all centers it until I hit HFS.  Have all miners set to masonry as well.  Breach the pit, then instantly disable mining on the miner who opened it and have him build a floor to seal it off.

I now know exactly where the pit is so I can collect a good ninety-something percent of the adamantine without annoyance, and can take infinite care in setting up a way to deal with the fun.

Despite doing that I had ... something... escape the HFS and stay hidden for almost 2 years before ambushing one of my dwarves.  I honestly don't know how he remained hidden for so long, but my engravers were going nuts about me having released a demon and I was quite confused.

The creamy swords of cups.

A sword of cups?  Egad, dwarf fortress has cross-bred the suits of the Tarot!

...we shouldn't make this decision based on a sense of Earth, but of the Fantasy world.

Anyone else consider an emergent economic system? Where the game develops different super-genius theorists who think up different ways of the economy functioning? Or maybe where there's a set number of models, that different civilizations use?

If not an S/D model, which of the following would you like to pretend are true?

1) Resources are not limiting (-> there is no economy)
2) The distribution of resources/goods matches the desire for resources/goods (-> there is no economy)

Assuming the converse of those are true, an S/D economy naturally follows, especially at the level of trade between governments.  (Within governments the government can introduce additional inefficiency by legislating against an S/D economy, but that leads to shortages or surpluses.  If the price of a good is too high, less of it gets bought.  If the price is too low, not everyone who wants at that price can have, and actual distribution post-transactions is often based on arbitrary things like political favor.  Basically, the real price is still the S/D price, but the government forces sale at a different price, and inefficiency occurs.  But regardless, that's an internal economy which requires top-down regulation.  An argument for options on *local* economy could be made from that, but it wouldn't effect any inter-governmental trade.)

I suppose you could also assume that dwarves do not act to acquire things they desire, but that also leads to no economy (and is a bizarre assumption since its basically violating the definition of 'desire').  It would also require the player to purchase random things from caravans (or not at all), because otherwise he is acquiring things he desires - and that sounds unfun.

S/D price-setting is an emergent behavior of individuals engaged in trading goods and services.  It requires no theorizing to cause it to occur, and specific government intervention to prevent it (not to mention crazy enforcement regimes - even the over-policed Soviet Union couldn't eliminate black markets). 

I don't know what it being a fantasy world has to do with it, honestly.  I can't see any fantasy assumptions that change that - in fact, the impetus to *do stuff*, usually a feature of the fantasy genre, generally depends upon individuals having unfulfilled desires.