GoblinCookie: Stop thinking of things as a game, where every mechanic must make things better for the player. The vampire mechanic does nothing but screw over your fortress, to the point that the people who write utilities find ways to make it easier to find them. The ghosts rising does nothing useful for you (barring silly bugs that will be squished in the future). They're just there to make the game more interesting and enhance the simulation. Yes, it still needs to be playable, but none of the suggestions you rage against so vehemently would actually ruin the game. Maybe they'd bug you, but nothing here would faze me. You also constantly compare what people suggest to older, broken mechanics without actually taking into account the fact that Toady can write a better way of doing things in that regard.
You do not seem to see the difference. Vampires can be killed, ghosts can be buried but if the game forces you to implement certain economic policies that actually do not make any sense in your own situation what then?
If the game has set your food prices too high for your favourite dwarf to eat then there is no solution in the game unless we can set the prices ourselves, which of course tends to be what lots of governments do or give away food for free which again is what lots of governments do.
If we can do those things then why would we ever play along with the system in the first place? Everyone will simply set the food price to 0 or give away all the food their fortress produces for free as a permanent policy. Is it really worth going to the bother to implement a vast and elaborate system of internal prices when the first page of the tutorial will simply tell each new player to set all prices to 0?
The player doesn't implement food prices any more than the player implements haunting ghosts or wound infections or vermin. They're elements of the setting. If you don't like a new feature (and it's not adjustable to your liking), just don't upgrade your free copy of the game.
Rember that at the moment internal food prices are simply not part of the setting unlike ghosts, wound infections and vermin. They are not even in the development plan so your confidence about the idea seems misplaced.
Transitioning from an outpost-like commonwealth to a city-like market without a discrete state change would be quite a feat, but it's essential for an on-site economy to function properly. It's out of scope for this suggestion thread on temples, except to note that temples can smooth the transition by looking out for the undercapitalized.
At the moment there is no logical need for any transition and everything works quite fine; it would continue to work just fine forever, as everyone happily works for free and helps themselves to what they need. I do not think the temples would do much smoothing of anything since they have to buy loads of other stuff that is more expensive probably than food, leaving themwith no money left over to tend to the poor.
We have to introduce flaws into the existing system and have the flaws become more serious as our settlement grows. The flaws are obviously related to first problem, everyone works for free. There is nothing essentially unrealistic about people working for free, people do volunteer to do lots of things, but they need to be motivated. I can think of a number of demotivaters that we can add to make our dwarves progressively less intrinsicly motivated as our fortress gets more advanced.
1. "Somebody else can do it": As the population grows the number of other dwarves that are equal or better to you at a given task increases and so does your motivation to work decrease.
2. "The fortress really does not need a thousandth plump helmet": As the number of a given item in stock compared to the population increases the task is seen as less and less vital, so dwarves motivation to do that task increases.
3. "I am so bored of hauling plump helmets": The more times a given dwarf does something in particular the less motivated they are to do it again. This is reset only by doing other tasks, particularly ones of a different category to the task they are used to doing.
The key thing is that the transition is both voluntery and gradual, the player decides to put certain items up for sale at a price and also decides what their dwarves will be paid for particular kinds of labours. Dwarves are programmed to be savvy enough to realise that money is worthless if nothing is for sale, they are only motivated to work by being paid if there is something they want to have up for sale.
The clever thing is this; the dwarves get paid for performing a particular labour however they get paid regardless of whether they actually have any plans for the money and are actually being motivated by it. Lowering their wages upsets them, meaning that the player starts to need to sell things in order to get the money and therefore can now end up going bust. However the player can subsidise things or give things away for free, provided that other areas of trade, whether internal or external can make up the slack.
We'll have a better idea how this is intended to work when the taverns appear in a release.
It reminds me of an entertaining discussion the writers had back in the days of Deep Space 9. Some were insisting that the Star Trek universe was post-capitalist and there was no money. "Well then," went the counterargument, "what are all of those people doing in the casino?"
There is not really a counter-argument since capitalism is not needed for their to be things of value to be gambled away and there are other things of value than money. For instance the players could really be gambling their own casino ration tokens instead of money. The casino could actually issue it's own internal 'currency' that functions simply as a measure of score and the best gambler can then 'purchase' himself a place in the Hall of Fame.
The tavern idea is directed at visiting outsiders, basically what we are doing is representing the Adventure Mode side of things in Fortress mode by having individual visiting outsiders come to your fortress and engage in commerce with your citizens and with eachother.
That is not in the paper I linked, though it does sum up the ultimate logical conclusion of "freshwater economics" which includes the "Chicago School." This particular paper was written at approximately the same time that economics-of-information was emerging as a field, and since that time we've come to understand a lot more about when and if someone would truthfully reveal their private information. Short answer: only when it's in their own interest to do so, and in those cases it's usually costly to signal the information in a credible way (for example, offering unconditional warranties to signal your product quality).
The basic premise of the Hayek paper I actually linked is what might be called an economic version of the Gaia Hypothesis, that changes in supply and demand can influence production decisions through prices (and stock-outs). Temples may have some role to play in smoothing out economic shocks (by accepting donations during gluts and giving things away during shortages), but it's tangential to their primary purpose in a fort.
I read the paper but little of it is actually true since supply and demand is actually transmitted by means other than prices, namely it is transmitted along the supply chain and prices are largely irrelavent to the whole process (basically things would work just as well if we had the supply chain but nothing was ever paid for). von-Hayak gets things backwards, people set prices according to what they think they know about the supply and demand. The actual process is not based upon be transmitting information about supply on demand but actually concealing the information that you have.
The seller knows that what he selling is common as dirt but he depends upon the buyer not knowing that it is, he bluffs up it's value on the basis of the buyer not knowing that it is common as dirt. If it becomes common knowledge that said thing is common as dirt then the buyer will instantly see through the deception, what matters is not the reality but the perception. All this means that in every sense those who actually take prices to transmit information are the losers, those who know the actual reality behind the prices are the winners.
The end result is the ordinery consumer typically loses hard due to not knowing very much and those who control as much of the supply chain as possible (ie supermarkets) tend to win, since they have the most complete set of information and rely least on the prices to determine the situation.
That's because the supply and demand considerations aren't in the game yet. And since trading skills will continue to affect prices, we won't have a happy utopian Coase Theorem world where everything is fair. Mostly because bringing fairness into DF would be unseemly 
Dwarf Fortress is already next to perfectly equal and fair, the only thing remaining is to remove those lovely rooms the top nobles demand and then fairness will be 100%.
Supply and demand considerations are already in the game in relation to the player. You signal your demand for something by making a trade agreement with the mountainhome which ensures that given items are more likely to be present next time but also have a higher base price. You transmit information along the supply chain and based upon that information prices are set.
The AIs own demands of you are randomised I think but work on the same principle, the high demand is transmitted to you and you can set a higher price knowing this.
Not sure where you get the idea that no one would ever buy information, and even if you somehow thought that was implied, trading for information is specifically on the dev page.
I was just talking about how DF's planned statist economic development is not based upon von-Hayak. That is shown by how the information the merchants are buying is supply and demand directly rather than just the prices is a strong point of divergance from his theories, since in his theories they make decisions based upon prices.
Again, there are plenty of details outside the player's control that affect gameplay (at least for people paying attention) like grudges and assaults. Depending on the civ's relationship between church and state, the discovery of heretical religious materials might plop a crime into the justice system. Having the unsolved crime linger could cause stress.
The player could certainly hunt down the heretic, but it'd be fun to have some other alternatives. Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, does having the player order a shrine suddenly make that religion okay? Probably not. Would putting a heretic (known to the player but not the other citizens) in a position of authority soften views toward that religion "subliminally?" That would be interesting, especially given the risk of the heretic being unmasked before he/she has won acceptance for the religion... putting the faith in an even worse position than it was before.
The incentive to the player is to play along with heresy hunting to the very minimal degree that he has too. The incentive for the player is to hide all the heretics in the closet, not to expose them.
The same thing would presumably be the case for all the AI settlements throughout world-gen. Heresy hunting would starve to death because no government would find in their interests to encourage any religion to entertain such notions.
The government/player builds all the shrines, those who get the shrines are those who has the properties desirable to the government/player. It is not a case of building shrines making heretics acceptable but rather than nobody that believes in a concept like heresy-hunting would ever have been given any shrines in the first place.
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Topic: Temple ideas! (Read 10571 times)