Bay 12 Games Forum

Welcome to Equalworkers, the Soviet succession game where quantity is everything, quality is nothing, and uppity dwarves go to the gulag.

The rules:
1. We don't care about quality. You have a legendary gem setter and you need beds built? He's a carpenter.
2. You may only export food.
3. Each person who finishes a year-turn may mandate production quotas until 5 people have gone. Then, those 5 are the Politburo and each of them can make 2 quotas each for the next player. That player must complete those quotas before working with any other industries. Sure, you'll get crappy quality, but this is Equalworkers. Remember that Stalin liked to quota steel, iron and coal, so these are encouraged.
4. In the first year (that's me, he he he) we have the equivalent of the NEP and I can produce whatever I wish to get the place up and running.
5. Anybody who fails to complete production quotas is an Enemy of Equalworkers, and has clearly been sabotaging industry. His dorf will suffer an unfortunate accident, and he will not be able to play another turn. So you'd better get those 5-year plans done! All dwarves will have the quota labours enabled, so you'd better pull out your copies of Dwarf Therapist.
6. Oh yeah- every 5th person, starting with the 5th player to take a turn, can mandate a "Five-Year-Plan" to be completed by the time 5 years have elapsed. Whereas the 1-year quotas should be within reason, there isn't a whole lot of reason to make these anything but outlandish. No punishment is involved, but you should do it anyway because dwarfy.
7. After the 1st year, ALL production orders MUST be filled through the manager. No workshops making their own decisions- that would be capitalism.
8. Remember- you must complete quotas before you make anything else. If you're out of alcohol, you need to get the quotas done anyway- just mandate the production of X amount of booze for the next person, or suggest it to the Politburo.
9. Any unhappy, very unhappy, or miserable dwarves are also enemies of Equalworkers. They will disappear for the rest of their lives into a locked room with garbage-chute dumped booze, food and beds. They will work in the "gulag", and be pump operators pumping air over and over.

I don't know what we should embark with- sign up now, I'll gen a world, and we can come to a consensus. (I'm using 31.16) Here's our embark:


We will embark with a guy who has adequate judge of intent and appraiser to be broker; nobody else will have skills. We'll bring dogs for breeding, and lots and lots and LOTS of booze. Many picks, 2 anvils, a wooden axe. Here's our embark points:

Here's where we ended up:

I'm going to have somebody do a little woodcutting while everybody else digs out living spaces. There's a (currently frozen) brook next to us, which I'll eventually hit for farming, but not right now.

Whoops- it seems we only brought 5 picks. We'll fix this later, but for now I'll have the leftover guy do masonry and mechanics- we need those farms up and running, we can't have the Dwarves' Republic of Equalworkers defeating capitalism on an empty stomach, now can we?

The setup has 5x5 workshop spaces next to larger stockpile spaces. Feel free to change these around as you do the quotas.

Here's the fort as of 6th slate:

I haven't been making rose gold- my personal mod changes brown stones to magenta, since I can't stand the look of brown stone. There's a large food stockpile above.

On Z-level -1, I'm getting farms going. At the time I took this picture, it's 20th Slate and I'm hooking up the floodgate to a lever.

In early Felsite, with some beds set up in a stockpile (we can do personal rooms later), it's time to get more food. Everybody's set to plant gathering.

Player Lineup
Year 1- dhokarena56
Year 2- Deviled
Year 3- ext0l
Year 4- Double A
Year 5- Megaman3321
Year 6- bayar
Year 7- Antisthenes
Year 8- Baron Baconeer

Politburo
dhokarena56
Deviled
ext0l
Double A
Megaman3321
Our expedition group name is The Red Purge.

I'm having trouble creating wealth- this is Equalworkers, after all- so I think I'm going to deconstruct the depot on the dwarven caravan this year. As of the end of spring, I'm getting a water-wheel set up to get a millstone running.


It takes a while for the farms to dry, but by 1st Hematite it's dried, and everybody is now a farmer. And a cook. And a plant processor, and a butcher. We may be able to trade after all.

In that case, the answer is socialism: from each according to his abilities (except for going on break and stuff), and to each according to his needs. Dwarves are paid rent, food money, and a little bit extra.

Hell, we could even deal with checks instead of coins.

This could also mean that eventually you could have loans implemented- but you'd have to do "dwarven credit scores" so that a dwarf who's 3000 dwarfbucks in debt can't take out another 10000 dwarfbucks to purchase himself a masterwork adamantine cabinet studded with platinum and menacing with spikes of clear diamond.

There's also the problem of "ownership"- who owns a dwarf's room?

Why record the owner of a coin? Why not just treat a coin as another object, like a log, or a stone, that happens to be worn? I mean, a dollar bill doesn't have an owner, it just happens to be used by some person at any given time, and then we give it away to somebody else in return for a good or service. Granted you might need to really mess with the source code, but it'd make things a lot simpler.

And yeah, Vorthon's right. Coins aren't really very major in the way that debit and credit are. And it'd definitely fit in with the technological level of DF, because double-entry bookkeeping and banking in this way were first invented in 14th-century Italy.

Oops. Acidentally dug into the river. There goes Busttown- and it had 79 dwarves, too...
Next time I'm building a wall between the river and my farms once it's flooded to prevent this sort of thing.

Time to abandon.  That was Fun. Time to start Riverrun.

Busttown is anything but bust! 4 babies, no ambushes yet, setting up a danger room, magma smelters and tree farm and only 2 deaths.
5 babies now, and 3 were born to my seemingly exceptionally horny stonecrafter.

Obviously you'll need to forbid the booze, or... if !!dwarves!! go swimming, will they extinguish the fire on them? If so, just make the only way to the stockpile 5/7 of water, and train everybody swimming.

Weaponize this, for !!SCIENCE!!.