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[Timeless Bob]

Just to point out:
Alter = "to change"
Altar = "holy table or bench"

A temple can be a room designated around a statue of a specific deity.  Dwarves who worship that deity can then gather there to "worship".  I see priests as nobles, with increases in status brought by requirements for devotion to a deity as well as the number of dwarves who regularly worship at a given temple.  These levels and numbers are easily tracked by current systems.

[Deboche]

For personal altars and other personal belongings, I'd prefer it if the dwarves bought or somehow obtained the stuff themselves and placed it in their personal place. An altar isn't necessarily something you build. A table with candles, a figurine of a saint, photographs and adornments can be an altar, for example. Or even just a cloth on the floor with stuff on it.

Why not have dwarves be able to furnish their own rooms however they like? They get paid for their work or they can make stuff at the workshops in their free time if the workshop is free. And they'd make demands of the nobles - same as noble mandates - only for things they can't make or buy themselves.

[GoblinCookie]

For personal altars and other personal belongings, I'd prefer it if the dwarves bought or somehow obtained the stuff themselves and placed it in their personal place. An altar isn't necessarily something you build. A table with candles, a figurine of a saint, photographs and adornments can be an altar, for example. Or even just a cloth on the floor with stuff on it.

Why not have dwarves be able to furnish their own rooms however they like? They get paid for their work or they can make stuff at the workshops in their free time if the workshop is free. And they'd make demands of the nobles - same as noble mandates - only for things they can't make or buy themselves.

Because the two systems will clash, resulting in an enormous Tragedy of the Commons among other problems.  If all dwarves simply go and make their own stuff then given that the raw materials are finite then all dwarves will simply exhaust the available common resources in order to produce private items.

We will have a conflict between player use of resources for rational goals and dwarf accumulation of various items to meet their own personal goals that serve no overarching purpose.  As result we will find ourselves suffering critical and unpredictable shortages of materials needed potentially in a critical capacity.

Think of the mayhem created in our plans by one dwarf with a strange mood.  What you propose is basically that we have 100+ dwarves perpetually going into strange moods, imagine how tedious it would be to have to go through each and every dwarf to see what resources they are each going to need for their own personal production. 

It is far simpler to simply bundle all demands, including for strange moods and mandates into a single screen.  If we then introduce personal production then the materials and workshops needed for such dwarves personal projects can be listed on the screen.  If a dwarf wants to make something himself, then he will list a demand for the needed components and it will appear alongside all other demands.

[Deboche]

That's quite the straw man argument.

How did you take what I said to mean that dwarves have ready access to all materials they want? If they want to build their own table or chair, they still need to buy the materials for it.

[GoblinCookie]

That's quite the straw man argument.

How did you take what I said to mean that dwarves have ready access to all materials they want? If they want to build their own table or chair, they still need to buy the materials for it.

Using what?  We the player are selling the materials to the dwarves but we are also paying the very same dwarves to buy those materials of us. 

It is pointless because our prices are set simply being set in order to ration things.  What I am trying to make sure is that no dwarf helps themselves to more than 1 bar of charcoal for personal production so I will still have enough charcoal for weapons to defend my fort.  I have to set the price of a bar of charcoal to be half the wages of one dwarf when I could simply cut out the middle man and simply state that a dwarf is only allowed 1 bar of charcoal per month for personal use.

It is best in a project to avoid adding in redundant mechanics that cause problems, simply because you can add more mechanics to solve those problem.  Your idea of dwarves personally engaging in unregulated production fundamentally clashes with the way the game economy works at core.  That is because both systems compete for the same pool of labour and materials, the first thing any sane player if your ideas were implemented would be to set the price of everything ridiculously high so that nobody can never afford to do any unregulated production. 

If I have 15 dwarves I need 15 beds.  If I run things as at present I make the most efficiant use of scarce wood resources, there will only be 15 beds made and that is it.  If we have dwarves making their own beds then I still make 15 beds and say 5 dwarves make beds on their own, meaning I just wasted 5 units of wood that could have been more productively used to make say barrels to store food. 

It gets worse when you consider that all 5 dwarves are simultaneously working to create their own beds and thus will take up 5 workshops (and I do not know the number beforehand which makes it worse).  They are not master carpenters, so their work is shoddy and slow compared to the master carpenter that I would at the moment employ to make all 15 beds quickly using one workshop.  The dwarves that are working to create their own beds at dabbling level are better employed doing things that they are actually trained for.  This problem is the case *regardless* of whether those 5 dwarves have to buy the wood they use or can just grab it from the stockpile.

What did your autonomous production mechanics even add to the game as it presently stands?  Dwarves can already choose which items they want to use and they can already freely produce any item that is in demand at a workshop provided they are not prohibited from doing that labour. 

[Deboche]

It's like this. You have the fortress's supplies. Dwarves can go and buy whatever they want from traders with their own money. Nobody can buy your fort stuff unless you say that it's specifically for sale.

Either way, even if letting dwarves make their own stuff is too complicated, that has nothing to do with them decorating their personal space however they want.

[GoblinCookie]

It's like this. You have the fortress's supplies. Dwarves can go and buy whatever they want from traders with their own money. Nobody can buy your fort stuff unless you say that it's specifically for sale.

Either way, even if letting dwarves make their own stuff is too complicated, that has nothing to do with them decorating their personal space however they want.

I am not sure this is the right thread for this discussion but here goes. 

How did these dwarves get their own money?  What economic purpose does money serve anyway in DF?

The answer to the first question is clearly that the player pays the dwarves in something that they then own.  That brings us to the second question, why would anyone choose to initially pay their dwarves anything at all when these mechanics *have* no function and are solely destructive.

The Status Quo works essentially perfectly, hence any sane player would upon the institution of your system simply set everything to be for sale for 0 and give everyone 0 wages.  It is a lot of wasted work on Toady One's part to add a redundant feuture in response to which the online tutorials will immediately tell the player to make things work exactly as they do now as much as possible.

Dwarves being able to buy from traders with their own money does have some merit as an idea but it still introduces the clashing economics system.  Stockpiled money could certainly be picked up by individual dwarves and used to buy items of personal demand from visiting traders and that gives the fortress a reason to mint money, money works well because it is useless thus dwarves will not be trading away useful items.  Problem is what happens when a individual dwarf buys something that the fortress also wants to buy, possibly at the exact same moment.  To avoid this we should probably only open the caravan to the public right before it departs; thus the clashing systems are kept apart.

Dwarves decorating or customising their own stuff is certainly not a problem but there is simply no need to introduce buying and selling for the system to work.  Dwarves can just pick stuff up from the stockpile to decorate their rooms and this can be handled by the same system of supply&demand everything else does.  Individual production is more of a challenge though, it consumes workshops and raw materials and thus clashes with collective production over the same capital.

We certainly cannot implement this until we have a system of rationing in place by which we can make it so personal consumption of certain items is restricted to a certain quantity.  That way you can keep the two economies seperate by restricting private production when it competes with collective production, so if we are making beds we could simply set everyone's wood allowance to 0 to shut down private bed production or production of any wooden goods for that matter. 

[Dirst]

Even if you could keep track of every little item in the fort just using your own head, a good pricing system would still be helpful.  And for those of us who at least use the stock screen, it improves efficiency.

[GoblinCookie]

Even if you could keep track of every little item in the fort just using your own head, a good pricing system would still be helpful.  And for those of us who at least use the stock screen, it improves efficiency.

Whatever is the case in the real world Dwarf Fortress mechanically has no functional need for pricing at the fortress level and if introduced skilled players would likely only use it in so far as they are literally forced to do so by the game.  Quoting extremist Libertarian philosophers will do nothing to change the redundancy of pricing mechanics in Dwarf Fortress at the Fortress level.

We would be paying the dwarves in order to buy from us in order simply to ration scarce goods.  At the moment even rationing is generally redundant since resources far exceed the dwarves actual demands.  Only if personal demands were to be increased however as I advocate then rationing or prices could actually have a function however. 

What the player is actually trying to make sure is that nobody gets more than a certain amount of a good.  In order to determine these things using a pricing mechanic the player will first determine how much of a good there is, how much they can afford to lose and then how much currency the average dwarf has available. 

Rationing things directly is far superior because that way we simply have to determine the first two values, without the need to trawl through the personal possessions of dozens of dwarves and then having to do complex maths in order to figure out just how much of a given good your dwarves will be able to acquire at a given price.  All pricing is doing here is rationing goods in a less efficient manner than just rationing them would.

Anyway this thread gets more and more off topic.

[Dirst]

You keep assuming the player sets the prices manually.  You can't adjust prices on the trading screen now, and prices were fixed when the economy was activated, so I'm not where you got this idea.  To be useful, the game would need to adjust prices automatically in response to supply and demand.  The player may think he or she wants control over this, but I n a game with so many combinations of material, form and quality it would be a full-time job.

All of that aside, DF citizens do own certain things that they arrive with, or took from the fort stocks to fulfil a need.  The prototype her is grabbing a new pair of socks when the old one wears out.  The game issue is whether spiritual needs rise to the level of socks.

I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place.  THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.

[Deboche]

I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place.  THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.

Exactly, which is why I said "at some point dwarves will have their own money and buy things".

[4maskwolf]

I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place.  THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.

Exactly, which is why I said "at some point dwarves will have their own money and buy things".

To further this, I do believe Toady has said the economy will be coming back into the game once he can make it not-broken.  The timeframe for that, though, is... long-term, in all likelihood.

GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be.  Please cool off a little bit.

[GoblinCookie]

You keep assuming the player sets the prices manually.  You can't adjust prices on the trading screen now, and prices were fixed when the economy was activated, so I'm not where you got this idea.  To be useful, the game would need to adjust prices automatically in response to supply and demand.  The player may think he or she wants control over this, but I n a game with so many combinations of material, form and quality it would be a full-time job.

So basically what you are saying is that we force the player to play along with something that no player that is not specifically looking for a challenge would actually either implement or tolerate to exist. 

There is no way the AI can set the prices correctly because the AI is just not smart enough to understand all the variables and it does not have the knowledge of the future plans of the player.  What will happen if these ideas are implemented is that we the player will simply create a massive reserve of everything in order to drive the prices down to near zero so that all our dwarves will have everything they want.

I do not want to have to stockpile a mountain of surplus items just so so that my dwarves can afford to buy the items that are available.  If we try and fix prices by supply and demand all that happens is we start to plan things but counting 100 as 0, because the algorithm is afterall based upon supply and demand. 

At the moment the game is intuitive, you have this number of dwarves and you have this much stuff.  What you propose does not change the situation, it merely adds a whole new layer of complexity since now we must all learn exactly how the pricing mechanism works in order to avoid our last dwarf starving to death amidst a mountain of food he cannot afford.  If we succeed in figuring out the mechanism then we will simply work out how to break the system so that things will basically work as they do now. 

Yes we break the system to make sure that everything is so cheap that everyone can buy anything that they demand until our stocks are empty.  At which point the question arises: why did we bother to add a system of pricing when the ideal state of the player is to have everything essentially free anyway?

All of that aside, DF citizens do own certain things that they arrive with, or took from the fort stocks to fulfil a need.  The prototype her is grabbing a new pair of socks when the old one wears out.  The game issue is whether spiritual needs rise to the level of socks.

I don't think it should, at least not until a fairly robust system of private ownership and semi-automatic rationing (which is what a pricing system is) is in place.  THEN you get dwarves setting up little figurines and such in their rooms.

As I told Deboche before right before this thread derailed, dwarves setting up little figurines in their room does not require that we implement a whole economic matrix of supply, demand, prices and private property. It is quite trivial to add as things are because as you have strangely pointed out with socks the game already does the equivilant already.

I do not understand where either of you concluded that dwarves had to buy their figurines in order to set them up in their rooms.  Implementing that feuture is trivial, implemented an entire internal fortress economy with prices set by the game that actually both works and does something useful is *not* trivial. 

To further this, I do believe Toady has said the economy will be coming back into the game once he can make it not-broken.  The timeframe for that, though, is... long-term, in all likelihood.

GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be.  Please cool off a little bit.

I am no more argumentative than a large number other people.  It is just that Deboche and Dirst's ideas in their present form would ruin the game to a degree that would make the original economy seem like a golden age of functionality. 

[Dirst]

GoblinCookie: I've noticed you tend to be incredibly argumentative about suggestions that fall outside of how you believe dwarf fortress is/should be.  Please cool off a little bit.

I am no more argumentative than a large number other people.  It is just that Deboche and Dirst's ideas in their present form would ruin the game to a degree that would make the original economy seem like a golden age of functionality.

You have strangely specific ideas of how the game is supposed to operate.  This is not a D&D game you're running for your friends where you get to make pronouncements about how reality works.  It's Toady's game, and he has put reintroducing an economy on the development roadmap.  Yes, you will need to worry about your dwarves being able to afford their meals.  When that happens, there will probably be an analog of forbidding that reserves items (or entire stockpiles) for official fortress use.

The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions.  Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are?  Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it?  Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?

[Deboche]

The issue of altar items and priesthood gets dicey when it comes to disfavored religions.  Are heretics hidden from the player like vampires are?  Can you tell who owns a banned religious item by looking at it?  Is heresy/blashpemy/etc a crime handled by the dwarven justice system, or do the faithful of the dominant religion take matters into their own hands (with possible loyalty cascades)?

This is an interesting implication. I may be completely wrong here but I think Toady mentioned something about factions within a fortress. It'd be nice to have the option of free religion or to have a repressive religion tied with the law. Or maybe it could be up to the noble in charge. Do you get a Bloody Mary or a Ghandi?