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[GoblinCookie]

Given dwarven average morals, I doubt a dwarven civ would ever work like this.

Not normally, but values are intended to change over time; meaning that such an arrangment could happen (but would be vanishingly rare). 

Why "invent" religion in the first place then? You speak as if only the state had the power to introduce or manipulate popular culture

Invent religion?  As opposed to inventing what, Goblin Atheism or Elf Pantheism?  It is possible for the officials in charge of the system to themselves believe in religious ideas is it not? 

Yes, without private property it is pretty much only the State that has the ability to noticably introduce or manipulate popular culture.  The ability of an individual to independantly of the State make a substantial contribution to popular culture is not there unless the individual has private property, otherwise the medium he is using to do so is going to have to be controlled *by* the State, so the State can simply dissallow him from propogating his views.  If he tries to influence things simply on his own powers, the contribution of the DF Capitalist is simply cancelled out by the extremist DF Communist who thinks that the Status Quo is not Communist enough because the family still exists and people still own the clothes on their backs. 

This creates a huge problem for the topic of the discussion.  The individual not only cannot directly create private property without the backing of the State but he also cannot create a mass movement to demand it without the backing of the State.  The end result is that no private property is invented unless it suits the ends of the State for it to exist. 

Of course hereditary leadership is the norm. What I'm questioning here is that if dwarf fortress really is such a perfect collective society, why would it "invent" a hierarquical monarchy in the first place?

Because they are not social insects.  This means that their social groups have a heirachy, because they do not have a Hive Mind by which they all have the same information and all automatically form a consensus. 

If dwarf values for the [FAMILY] fall low enough, it makes sense for them to 'suspend' the hereditery nature of all positions.

They also presently enjoy the privilege of condemning commoners to be physically punished for not making the useless things they ordered. I guess "it makes sense", as dwarves usually just nod and go on with their lives after some random carpenter is beaten to death by a guard for not making a table in time, even though the people in charged forgot to make the order in the first place. *winky face*

Making up arbitery production targets and punishing people seemingly at random.  Reminds me of someone in particular.

All you need is for the site to have more than a single administrator (like the manager). He could pretty much do the same job as the baron. You could also train diplomats when necessary. There's no point to a nobility in this collective utopia that you imagine df as being right now. What I'm telling you is that DF right now is a dysfunctional society, clearly intended to be vaguely feudal but couldn't because it was too complicated to design a proper feudal economy. All I'm trying to say is that maybe, in the future, we'll see one, as Toady seems to be attempting to go into that direction.

The game makes no distinction between nobles and administrators.  The manager however is not the same job as the baron because the job of the baron is to represent the fortress at the central government level, the manager however is preoccupied with running the economy at a site level. 

It would not be complicated for Toady One to have initially created a Feudal economy.  All he would have to do is divide the generated map into abstract territories with abstracted peasant populations, carve the territories up among a number of sites and have the sites collect resources/manpower from the territories that it rules. 

It's not hard to understand what the term surplus value means. According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labour-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold. It is very much a term used in marxian economics, and for someone to believe it to be detached from it is strange to me. If you're using marxist jargon in a discussion about economy, expect people to call you out on it.

Also, you have completely ignored my main argument: while "normal fortresses" are intended to be frontier settlements or outposts, there's nothing that prevents them from being more military minded if you can organize them sucesfully to be that way. They could also be like small towns with little to no defenses if you wanted them to. So, in the future, even "normal fortresses" could be able to sustain themselves through taxes and not by being "self-sustained", whether you think such situation would bee anachronistic or not.

Marx did not himself invent the term, the developed the concept.

Surplus value means just what it says on the tin, value that is surplus.  There is no viable society where the worker does not produce more value than the worker personally consumes.  This applies equally to Animals, Hunter-Gatherers, Feudalism, Capitalism, Marx's ideal Communist society etc.  It is however the crucial difference between the Feudal Castle of History and the Dwarf Fortress in Yr 0; the latter produces surplus value while the former does not. 

Since you do not like the concept of surplus value let us put it like this: A Feudal Castle has to mantain the 'value' of it's commodity in order to survive (taxation).  Any self-government and organisation among the peasants results in them needing those in the Castle less and thus the value of the government (the amount of taxes they are willing to pay) goes down.  If it goes down too much then the Castle will not be able to pay for itself. 

This means that private property among the peasantry is a no-brainer because it reduces the amount of government that there is locally.  As with any commodity the less of it there is the more valuable it becomes.  If the government however does not have to sell it's government commodity (collect taxes) then it will conclude that having the peasants have lots of government will mean they need to 'make' less government themselves, resulting in them creating something along the lines of a DF Hillocks, with their own governments and armies. 

Again, if in the future a fortress will be able to become more similar to a medieval fortress, it'll be a viable comparison

No it will not.  As a mine the dwarf fortress produces value in it's construction, even if the dwarves do not do anything but construct it. 

Oh, I thought we were attempting to make polite conversation here, gobbman. I see how quickly you go back to your winky self. I could go that rout too so, how fast do you want this thread locked?

Anyway, marxist nonsense aside, I have nothing against public property in dwarf fortress, even some that are geared towards production. If it makes sense, who cares? Having dwarves possess their own individal workshops, however, also sounds appealing to me but it could be a nightmareto make it work given the game's limitations. Once we see what replaces VPL, it will become a bit clearer if such a thing is possible. To be fair, you can kind of arrange that in a way right now by giving each workshop you have to an individual dwarf when you have a manager.

There is no rule in the forum against Marxism, so I can actually be as Marxist as I damn well like.  If you want to escalate things into a full on flame-war that gets the thread banned, that is entirely your perogative but remember that is is your own thread that gets locked.

I have my reverse engineered quasi-Marxism and you have in response only what I can only politely call Confusion.  The constant inability to distinguish between Cause and Effect, DF and Middle Ages, DF Present and DF Distant future, Question and Answer; since that is all you have been able to so far muster so far, I am not surprised at your desire to ban Marxism.

It is inefficiant to have private workshops in DF because the craftsmen is not always working, a public workshop on the other hand can be used 100% of the time since as one dwarf exits the workshop another can take over.  There is no private workshops yet because the fortress has not invented them, so give me a reason why they would invent them?

If they are more efficient at producing what they want, they are better at meeting the needs of everybody because, well, they are everybody. You could argue that letting them use certain strategical resourses that are very limited (like steel for instance) would be bad for the fortress, so maybe it would be better to control the circulation of those particular resourses. You can also help those who can't find work by allowing them to use public dormitories and by giving them access to food. Or even better, they would probably go willingly accept joining the army or other appointed sevice for the realm. There's a middle ground for these things, you know? I assume we'll see a few options for these probems once the economy is up and running again.

No they are not everybody, they are always somebody in particular with particular skills and needs.  If you have a master dwarf craftsmen, your fortress benefits if he labours to produce dwarf crafts for the whole fortress, not simply for himself.  The fortress also does not want to have unemployed people that exist at it's expense, it wants everybody to work because even if their labour does not manage to produce surplus value it mitigates some of their cost. 

Scarce resources (like steel) can be distributed by tradable rationing cards with a use-by date.  No sensible fortress would attempt to ration goods using money, since they would never be able to set the prices correctly without knowing how much money people both have and are willing to part with. 

A lot of these are redundant or confusing, like "Military Property: [MARTIAL_PROWESS+]: To what extent do items from defeated enemies belong to the slayer." Why would military prowess influence this at all? If anything, the sense of pride and respect for the law would influence this the most. A very proud dwarf (or dwarven civ), amost religious about his respect for the law would maybe consider using equipment from a defeated foe theft and therefore a dishonorable act.

A lot of them are potentially redundant simply because they are all intended to potentially exist/not exist quite independantly of eachother and when combined a lot of them form a larger whole that is greater than what they alone make.  Your answer here is an example of what I earlier referred as the confusion between Cause and Effect or Question and Answer. 

In a society that has high levels of Military Property, the religiously law-abiding dwarf is quite happy to take things from his defeated enemies; that is because legally speaking, their property belongs to him!  By contrast at low levels of Military Property, the property of the defeated enemies is considered Foreign Property so it's new owner is decided by the laws of the civilization the defeated comes from.  At medium levels of Military Property the defeated enemies items end up belonging to the site as a whole and hence are treated according to it's Goverment Property laws.

As for why [MARTIAL_PROWESS] would decide anything, that is pretty easy.  If you were an adventurer and you saved a village from goblins, you would not want said village to operate under laws that said that the items of the defeated goblins did not belong to you?  Societies that want to encourage becoming a professional warrior then introduce laws that reward the victorious warrior with the spoils of war while societies who want to discourage that kind of thing deprive the warrior of the spoils of war in order to reduce the profitability of his lifestyle. 

The way to go about this kinda ties in with my zones thread...

But other than that, I am all for a bit more autonomy in the fortress as long as it is meaningful and makes itself notable.

EDIT:

... nonsense...

My God... The Toad walks among us...

Indeed, the Toad actually reads our lengthy economics threads. 

[Ribs]

Indeed, the Toad actually reads our lengthy economics threads. 

God, I hope not. It would be a waste of his time to be honest. Someone probably just reported us, and that forced him to skim through some of our ridiculous shitposting

Invent religion?  As opposed to inventing what, Goblin Atheism or Elf Pantheism?  It is possible for the officials in charge of the system to themselves believe in religious ideas is it not? 

You have missed my point. I used quotation marks for "inventing religion" to point out how ridiculous is the idea that you'd need to invent something like that. It's like saying you'd need to "invent" the concept of private or communal property. Yes, I understand that more advanced concepts than developed modern capitalism would be anachronistic in DF's proposed timeline, but simply owning a house and being self-employed isn't, and it also isn't something the fortress needs to "invent" in order to exist. 

There is no rule in the forum against Marxism, so I can actually be as Marxist as I damn well like.  If you want to escalate things into a full on flame-war that gets the thread banned, that is entirely your perogative but remember that is is your own thread that gets locked.

I have my reverse engineered quasi-Marxism and you have in response only what I can only politely call Confusion.  The constant inability to distinguish between Cause and Effect, DF and Middle Ages, DF Present and DF Distant future, Question and Answer; since that is all you have been able to so far muster so far, I am not surprised at your desire to ban Marxism.

I was talking about your winky ironic comments. It can be seen as impolite and can turn a friendly argument into something ugly.

Also, I don't have anything agaist Marxism on the forums or on Dwarf Fortress. Believe me or not, if you were instead a libertarian extremist banging about how Marxism would make no sense in DF at every opportunity, I'd be arguing against you for the presense of communist economics in DF instead.

My beef with you is that you seem to want to avoid having anything too close to a capitalist system on DF in the first place (including things that are already in the game such as coins), using very confusing arguments that mostly make sense only to you. Make no mistake, your logic is not nearly as convincing to most people as you think it is, and at times it appears to be very circular (as it has been pointed out by Bumper in our last thread).

It is inefficiant to have private workshops in DF because the craftsmen is not always working, a public workshop on the other hand can be used 100% of the time since as one dwarf exits the workshop another can take over.  There is no private workshops yet because the fortress has not invented them, so give me a reason why they would invent them.

This assumes that the State (or the player) is more efficient at quickly constructing workshops than individual dwarves. This is not always the case, as the player often gives too much ephasis on specific industries, and when some other industries needs attention it's hard for them to shift production.

It would not be complicated for Toady One to have initially created a Feudal economy.  All he would have to do is divide the generated map into abstract territories with abstracted peasant populations, carve the territories up among a number of sites and have the sites collect resources/manpower from the territories that it rules.

How do you know how complicated it would be? Remember that site relationships in world gen only started to be heavily worked on around 2012. A lot of things were in the way of this, like basic domestic stuff in dwarf mode such as farming, animals and how to handle soldiers, etc. Making a vassal/tributary-lord relationship between sites seem like a time-consuming advancement, but one that they have constantly talked about wanting to do for several years now. Also, they seem to be on their way to accomplish that:



edit: Apparently, this image was considered spatially inefficient by some people. Hopefully, I the problem is now fixed

[Ribs]

The way to go about this kinda ties in with my zones thread...

Haha, you botched your own link there. Here you go, pal.

I do remember that thread, and your OP is glorious. I really like the effort you put in those images, and it is indeed way more interesting than what we are discussing here. I hope Toady ends up doing something similar to what you proposed.

[Splint]

The way to go about this kinda ties in with my zones thread...

Haha, you botched your own link there. Here you go, pal.

I do remember that thread, and your OP is glorious. I really like the effort you put in those images, and it is indeed way more interesting than what we are discussing here. I hope Toady ends up doing something similar to what you proposed.

Agreed. Looks very well thought out.

It's honestly a touch concerning Toady had to get involved on that other thread, and you'd think that would be enough of a red flag to cool it with what is essentially constant arguing about communism.

As to some of what GoblinCookie has said, I find it somewhat odd that he keeps insinuating the fortress or whatever invents the concept of a private workshop for example, when that's not the fortress, that's the game being developed to allow more freedom and autonomy in the AI of the units we control, and with what I had come up with, can be countered by an eviction/seizure if the place is inconveniently located or otherwise in the way.

Just as we can't tell our soldiers to go for the legs or stop attacking an enemy's armored head, why should we have absolute and complete control over what they do with any money they come into?

I will however concede to one thing, and that's that it would be kinda cool to have your soldiers pick things up off invaders they killed after a battle and keeping them in thier rooms as reminders/trophies. Who knows, maybe later down the line off-duty combat veterans could use those items to help tell the story of how he took a helmet or shoe after decapitating or slicing the leg off of an invader, perhaps imparting a little bit of knowledge while doing so (such as a very tiny bit of xp towards the weapon they used and the fighter skill to the listeners.)

It'd also make sense on that subject that less martial cultures might frown on that sort of thing, since they may view fighting more as a necessary evil best forgotten and not celebrated.

[GoblinCookie]

Agreed. Looks very well thought out.

It's honestly a touch concerning Toady had to get involved on that other thread, and you'd think that would be enough of a red flag to cool it with what is essentially constant arguing about communism.

As to some of what GoblinCookie has said, I find it somewhat odd that he keeps insinuating the fortress or whatever invents the concept of a private workshop for example, when that's not the fortress, that's the game being developed to allow more freedom and autonomy in the AI of the units we control, and with what I had come up with, can be countered by an eviction/seizure if the place is inconveniently located or otherwise in the way.

Just as we can't tell our soldiers to go for the legs or stop attacking an enemy's armored head, why should we have absolute and complete control over what they do with any money they come into?

I will however concede to one thing, and that's that it would be kinda cool to have your soldiers pick things up off invaders they killed after a battle and keeping them in thier rooms as reminders/trophies. Who knows, maybe later down the line off-duty combat veterans could use those items to help tell the story of how he took a helmet or shoe after decapitating or slicing the leg off of an invader, perhaps imparting a little bit of knowledge while doing so (such as a very tiny bit of xp towards the weapon they used and the fighter skill to the listeners.)

It'd also make sense on that subject that less martial cultures might frown on that sort of thing, since they may view fighting more as a necessary evil best forgotten and not celebrated.

Because it does invent the concept of the private workshop and institutes that concept in law.  Nothing about the inherant nature of any workshop makes it *your* workshop, the workshop by it's inherant nature is available for use by anyone.  It only becomes *your* workshop when somebody invents the concept of private workshops and gets the government to make that concept law.  If the concept obviously only disrupts the running of the fortress, then the government will not make the concept law. 

If we have a set of laws and institutions that simply make the game harder, then all we are doing is arbiterily tying up the player to sacrifice their own dwarves for the sake of a set of principles that have no actual substance in reality, while if we give the player the freedom all the work of adding them in was for nothing.  That is why I am proposing that the laws/economy exist for a definite reason based upon the values of the creature, rather than simply being there preset for eternity or being random.

A very martial culture wants to make warfare profitable as a lifestyle, hence it rewards the items of defeated enemies to it's warriors.  A moderately martial culture wants to profit from warfare but does not want to encourage the kind of barbarism and trophy taking above mentioned, so it makes the loot property of the fortress a whole.  A unmartial culture would be ashamed to profit from others death, however neccesery and so it sends all the equipment of their defeated foes back to the sites they came from. 

The overall amount of freedom the player has to follow of break the rules (with internal political consequences) is determined by the civ's [LAW], a lawless civilization thinks that the site should make the rules up as it goes along anyway while a lawful civilization ties the site governments hand to conform with the rules of the civilization.

God, I hope not. It would be a waste of his time to be honest. Someone probably just reported us, and that forced him to skim through some of our ridiculous shitposting

You hope not? Do you really think that you have nothing to contribute? 

You have missed my point. I used quotation marks for "inventing religion" to point out how ridiculous is the idea that you'd need to invent something like that. It's like saying you'd need to "invent" the concept of private or communal property. Yes, I understand that more advanced concepts than developed modern capitalism would be anachronistic in DF's proposed timeline, but simply owning a house and being self-employed isn't, and it also isn't something the fortress needs to "invent" in order to exist. 

There is a difference here you are not grasping, some things like questions of whether or not gods exist are objective questions.  God either does or not exist, if he does he does whether or not you believe in him.  In that sense the dwarves are believing something about the world, wrongly or otherwise as it actually is, so religion is basically similar to historical research or botany or the many other things that will be added in next release.

Private property on the other hand, even the possession of the clothes on your back are not objective facts.  Nothing about those objects makes them yours, it only other people who are powerful backing up your claim on those objects that makes them yours.  This makes the whole question of anachronism complicated, if there is no actual reason for a dwarf fortress (or other site since they are organised the same) to invent private property of any kind then the kind of things you are talking about become anachronistic. 

Without a reason to introduce the correct forms of private property, nobody would logically be self-employed and nobody would have their own houses, meaning adding those things into the game is anachronistic.  What happened or did not happen in the middle ages is not relevant because there is a basic divergance between the DF world and Middle Ages in terms of historical development that cannot be rectified easily and were it rectified would essentially make it a different game altogether. 

I was talking about your winky ironic comments. It can be seen as impolite and can turn a friendly argument into something ugly.

Also, I don't have anything agaist Marxism on the forums or on Dwarf Fortress. Believe me or not, if you were instead a libertarian extremist banging about how Marxism would make no sense in DF at every opportunity, I'd be arguing against you for the presense of communist economics in DF instead.

My beef with you is that you seem to want to avoid having anything too close to a capitalist system on DF in the first place (including things that are already in the game such as coins), using very confusing arguments that mostly make sense only to you. Make no mistake, your logic is not nearly as convincing to most people as you think it is, and at times it appears to be very circular (as it has been pointed out by Bumper in our last thread).

The winky ironic conflicts are intended to lighten the tone and avoid conflicts.  I raised the problems of having individual workshops privately owned by dwarves and your response was simply to propose that we have collective workshops!  So I have to repeat myself over and over again because we keep going around in circles; the reason being that I am bieng the only person in the debate that actually adds new ideas into the system (the exception here being Enchiridon). 

The audience thankfully enough is not the other people on the forum but the devs, so it does not matter what you and random other people think.  I therefore propose mechanics for the games expansion, not vague dreams about future dwarf fortresses 20 years down the line.  Coins are in the game, the reason why the coins are in the game but have so little actual function is because the devs reflectively added in without actually thinking too much about why coins would actually exist.  The equivilant of the addition of coins is the very thing I want to avoid happening in the future, I will explain.

Coins are valuable because they have two things that normal objects do not have; a fixed value and an infinite demand.  Since at present *all* items in the game have a fixed value and infinite demand coins are therefore completely valueless.  Coins would only be invented when we end up with the situation where the value of objects is *not* fixed forever and only a limited amount of the items are actually in demand.  Because neither of these conditions are met, nobody would care or even notice if coins were to dissapear from the game altogether (they already largely have) because they have no actual value at all. 

This assumes that the State (or the player) is more efficient at quickly constructing workshops than individual dwarves. This is not always the case, as the player often gives too much ephasis on specific industries, and when some other industries needs attention it's hard for them to shift production.

The industries that do not get built are the industries the player/state does not care about.  Having individual dwarves build their own workshops to do those things means that resources are being siphoned away from the things that the player/state does care about to build things they consider valueless.  If dwarves want things enough they should complain/rebel at the player in order to influence state policy. 

This is why I proposed a lack of [COOPERATION] as the value that would lead to private workshops being built.  If it is not possible to get all the dwarves to actually cooperate towards the ends of the player/state then the player/state might want to restrict access of dwarves to workshops while at the same time forcing the dwarves to produce certain goods for the fortress as a tax to the player in order to avoid being punished for tax evasion and/or lose their property (depending upon how strong the private ownership is). 

In the abscence of Labour Property which is tied to [INDEPENDANCE] the dwarves would own the workshops, but not the actual items they produce which would actually be fortress goods.  This means that the individual dwarves are still working for the State but with tools that they own, the ownership of their tools allow the State to 'tax them' which means not handing over private goods but simply producing stuff the state wants as opposed to what the individual thinks the fortress ought to want.  If Labour Property is high then the dwarves will actually own the goods they produce in their own workshops but will hand over some of them as taxes, what most people would consider the normal situation. 

How do you know how complicated it would be? Remember that site relationships in world gen only started to be heavily worked on around 2012. A lot of things were in the way of this, like basic domestic stuff in dwarf mode such as farming, animals and how to handle soldiers, etc. Making a vassal/tributary-lord relationship between sites seem like a time-consuming advancement, but one that they have constantly talked about wanting to do for several years now. Also, they seem to be on their way to accomplish that:

[picture that takes up too much space]

As complicated as dividing up the map into areas and adding an abstracted peasant population that initially functions more or less identically to animal people.  There is no need for Toady One to initially code in all the details of the dwarves working because all goods are brought by peasants drawn from the abstracted peasant pool (like how animals populate the map in a way) in order to pay the taxes.  The game thus initially focuses entirely on site relationships, the whole stuff about work and what the peasants get up to are left entirely abstracted since they are more or less purely decorative anyway (since the player does not get directly involved in their lives).

What the devs are actually done is the very opposite of a what Feudal Fortress develop would do.  They have focused on the elements of lowest priority to such an arrangement, the details of the peasants working, the organisation of their work and abstracted the elements of highest priority to Feudalism.  As a result they have accidentally created a non-Feudal Fortress because when the government's own core 'palace' can initially produce enough surplus value to sustain itself without an external contribution then it is freed of the need to sell government to other entities (collecting taxes), which is what Feudalism is based upon. 

That is because of the basic conflict that exists between the seller of any commodity and the welfare of the society he is selling it too.  The seller wants there to be a scarcity of what they are selling but the society wants there to be an abundance of it.  The difference between selling government and selling any other commodity however, is the act of selling allows the seller to alter society how the seller wisher.  If you are the seller, then you alter society to drive up the demand for your own commodity, thus harming the welfare of society for your own gain; you basically propogate anarchy as a local level so you can sell government to the people. 

A DF site has absolutely no need to sell government to others and nobody who would actually want to buy it.  This means if one DF Site rules over another, as is planned for the DF Fortress then the relationship is based upon one site selling another central government instead of simply government, that is offering the lesser sites the benefits of being part of a larger whole.  If the Dwarf Fortress starts to disorganise it's hillocks in order to reduce the amount of government locally available so it can sell it's government to them (as above), then the hillocks simply declare independance and look for another fortress to provide them with central goverment instead.  There is also no reason for this to happen, a central government is more valuable to a local government the larger it is and the stronger it's companants are; both for 'advertisment' reasons and because it means there are more resources available for collective projects that benefit all the member sites.

[TheBiggerFish]

I...Really have to agree that the concept of "the fortress" "inventing" concepts is not a thing.
In that, "the fortress" doesn't make those books or those goods.  The dwarves make the goods for the fortress.
If the dwarves make the concept of private property, then the fortress has to react to that.
I mean, you can lock doors, right?

[Splint]

Ultimately everything belongs to the player in the fortress. not the monarch, not the baron, not the mayor. The Player. Granted the various nobles are intended to essentially be our representatives, but still.

As to circularness, you haven't really been adding new ideas. You've mainly been defending the game as it currently exists (highly communistic due in part to many things not being fully fleshed out, updated, or overhauled yet,) on the grounds that is how it is and it "doesn't make sense" to do it otherwise, despite the plans of Toady. You've argued against the concept of private workshops, even though in most settings I've seen, many dwarves would in fact have their own workshops and they're paid by their local governments for whatever is needed at the time if that's the item they specialize in, with very little collectivism involved (the only things I can think of where that is in place, is food supplies shared by the community to save time building individual larders/storage, or resources being shared by very tiny communities of a couple dozen people at most.)

Otherwise they make goods to sell to fellow dwarves or visiting merchants/travellers on their own dime and time. Granted, they're just an example of another fictional instance of dwarves practicing decidedly non-communistic economic activity, and yet even here when the local king or whatever puts out a call to arms, they're expected to get their axes, hammers, and whatnot, and follow him to war whether they want to or not, under possible penalties of shame (and social ostracization,) oathbreaking (which could lead to execution,) or exile. Though granted in that setting, many dwarves are more than happy to prove themselves skilled warriors when the muster call is made.

Sure, some degree of it makes sense. Maybe our dorfs can't buy a workshop, but they might buy materials they have a preference for or need to make something, and make it themselves at a later date when a workshop isn't in use. Oh, you bought some steel and coal and wanna make a sword because you like swords? Too bad, you have to wait your turn and slip in between militia orders or the craftsdwarves' own projects.

As to personal homes, once someone takes up residency for intents and purposes that is their home, their property generally being inside it. It's where their personal effects are stored and family sort-of raised, as children will readily sleep in their parents homes in-game with no penalties. In that vein, you didn't build your house, but it was either given to you or you bought it, so that makes it yours until someone else buys it from you, you give it away, or you get booted out at sword-point.

Note that dwarves will store items they own in rooms considered theirs. Anything stored in said room remains theirs, even to the detriment of others (such as rotting food,) until it gets abandoned for too long when the room is no longer theirs - either because the dwarf simply didn't have a new room for too long and thus nowhere to put it, or the owner of the item died and had no family to claim ownership on-site.

So private property is in-game, just currently on a small scale, generally extending to consumer goods of food, clothing, and trinkets they might have had when they arrived - you literally cannot take those items away no matter how hard you try unless they abandon them or they die, not without autodump anyway.

I mean, you can lock doors, right?

But that's gamey! A dwarf should have to physically go over there and lock it even if a cave crocodile is about to come in and kill six sleeping silk collectors! At least that's the impression I've gotten from GoblinCookie in the past, since he's obviously not a fan of such things. Yes, I'm starting to dredge up things from a month or more ago, because that's the direction this has headed.

I predict this thread is going to get locked because I'm sure I've just stepped on some toes.

[TheBiggerFish]

I meant that in the "I control access therefore I own it" way of thinking, but...That's...interesting.

[Ribs]

Ultimately everything belongs to the player in the fortress. not the monarch, not the baron, not the mayor. The Player. Granted the various nobles are intended to essentially be our representatives, but still.

Yes and no. I mean, ultimately, you can take most things from people. But since there's no command to make dwarves strip, and the clothes they claim are tagged as being owned by them, I'd say that the player sort of lacks ownership over them.

As to personal homes, once someone takes up residency for intents and purposes that is their home, their property generally being inside it. It's where their personal effects are stored and family sort-of raised, as children will readily sleep in their parents homes in-game with no penalties. In that vein, you didn't build your house, but it was either given to you or you bought it, so that makes it yours until someone else buys it from you, you give it away, or you get booted out at sword-point.

Yeah, that's kind of what I think would fit the game well when it comes to private property. Dwarves treating their homes like they would their clothes, by becoming attached to them and angry when the player tries to remove them from their houses. Maybe also owning furniture would be nice. It would be fun if instead of directly placing the furniture in their rooms, they would be smart enough to do it by themselves. So they could get their own beds for instance, and place them in an appropriate spot inside their bedrooms, then get rid of them when they feel like upgrading. It would be less tedious to the player also.

I...Really have to agree that the concept of "the fortress" "inventing" concepts is not a thing.
In that, "the fortress" doesn't make those books or those goods.  The dwarves make the goods for the fortress.
If the dwarves make the concept of private property, then the fortress has to react to that.
I mean, you can lock doors, right?

Think like that makes you only too sane for this thread

[picture that takes up too much space]

Is passive aggressiveness your way of pushing the envelope? It's like you want me to stop trying to be polite. If you think it's too big, just ask me to make it smaller... Jesus Chirst

You hope not? Do you really think that you have nothing to contribute? 

Do you really think you have contributed that much?

The winky ironic conflicts are intended to lighten the tone and avoid conflicts.  I raised the problems of having individual workshops privately owned by dwarves and your response was simply to propose that we have collective workshops!  So I have to repeat myself over and over again because we keep going around in circles; the reason being that I am bieng the only person in the debate that actually adds new ideas into the system (the exception here being Enchiridon).

I guess you do, uh?

Coins are valuable because they have two things that normal objects do not have; a fixed value and an infinite demand.  Since at present *all* items in the game have a fixed value and infinite demand coins are therefore completely valueless.  Coins would only be invented when we end up with the situation where the value of objects is *not* fixed forever and only a limited amount of the items are actually in demand.  Because neither of these conditions are met, nobody would care or even notice if coins were to dissapear from the game altogether (they already largely have) because they have no actual value at all. 

For someone who claims to be so informed about economics, that's a very strange statement. Coins do not have fixed value, as they are a good like any other, and their supply and demand are subject to constant change and adjustment. Also, if there's too many coins the inflation would be so high that the demand for coins would vanish, and people would probably go back to a different system of barter.

The value of currency is in its ability to facilitate commerce, as coins are easily portable. Coins made out of precious metal also have intrinsic value to them, and can even circulate without government backing, as they are more than simple monetary tokens. That being said, gold coins would tempt anyone, and if they exist in the game by default (say, in human towns) they would probably influence your fortress' dwarves regardless of its (or the player's) intention to "invent them".

What the devs are actually done is the very opposite of a what Feudal Fortress develop would do.  They have focused on the elements of lowest priority to such an arrangement, the details of the peasants working, the organisation of their work and abstracted the elements of highest priority to Feudalism.  As a result they have accidentally created a non-Feudal Fortress because when the government's own core 'palace' can initially produce enough surplus value to sustain itself without an external contribution then it is freed of the need to sell government to other entities (collecting taxes), which is what Feudalism is based upon.

...oh boy, here we go again. I've said it before, the only reason why the fortress is easily self-sufficient when it comes to food is because food production is currently broken. Yes, I understand that a fortress could still mantain itself through trading other goods and that's not "feudal" to you, so I suggested that this is equivalent of medieval "castle towns". The fortress site is not only a palace, but also a palace and a town. Medieval castle-towns were often very productive and there's nothing to prevent them from sustaining themselves + the palace through trading. I don't know what to tell you man, I just think your argument for DF being inherently anti-feudal is busted. The fact that you keep repeating "surplus value" over and over again doesn't make it any more valid to me.

There is a difference here you are not grasping, some things like questions of whether or not gods exist are objective questions.  God either does or not exist, if he does he does whether or not you believe in him.  In that sense the dwarves are believing something about the world, wrongly or otherwise as it actually is, so religion is basically similar to historical research or botany or the many other things that will be added in next release.

Private property on the other hand, even the possession of the clothes on your back are not objective facts.  Nothing about those objects makes them yours, it only other people who are powerful backing up your claim on those objects that makes them yours.  This makes the whole question of anachronism complicated, if there is no actual reason for a dwarf fortress (or other site since they are organised the same) to invent private property of any kind then the kind of things you are talking about become anachronistic. 

Personal propery is a pretty natural belief to me. Animals have it. When a bird builds a nest, he protects it, even against other birds that try to steal it away from him. Ever had a dog? They often act like they own their favorite toy. Of course, these are not as complex as the human understanding of private property, but it's still a clue to the way we think. Even in very communal societies, usually at least a few things are considered "personal property".

You don't need that much power to support it, either, deppending on what you are talking about. It could be just in the culture. "If Urist has been given ownership of his shirt, then it is his and no one else can claim it under x circunstances. Taking his shirt from him will be considered theft and will be punished". Also, if he decides to "sell" or "trade" his shirt to some travelling merchant it is up to him, since the shirt is his.  It's just cultural, and people respect it out of tradition. You can keep saying "BUT WHY WOULD THE FORTRESS INVENT IT???", and we will keep telling you that it doesn't need to, just like it doesn't need to invent parties or breaks.


Also, if you want a fun proposal about DF economy by me, I can think of something we've discussed before, months ago:

When it comes to wages, wouldn't it make more sense to pay everyone a fixed monthly/yearly salary? I think the variation should be more accordingly to individual skill or guild ranking status of individual dwarves. Otherwise it would be a random distribution of money, because an unlucky dwarf could easily end up not working at all for a long time because another one was closer to the workshop and ended up with all the work. Unless we introduce quotas (where each dwarf can ony work so much and is forced to stop once a certain % of the working order is reached), that system would be unbalanced.

If you're going to pay them individually like that, you may as well not call it a "wage" but a comission. You comission a job from a certain dwarf, agree on a price, and pay them when the job is completed (or maybe before that).

A wage and a comission system could even work together, harmoniously. So you give wages to everyone to assure that they don't starve to death (and also perhaps to support an apprendice system so unskilled beginners can sustain themselves when they just join a profession/guild), and at the same time reward highly skilled dwarves by giving them special jobs and more money.
de.

So let's find some common ground here:

• currency exists
• Dwarves can recieve wages fixed by the player
• Individual comissions for individual dwarves

And I'm also adding:

• dwarves can use their coins to buy their own goods in fairs (future feature)
• dwarves can sometimes use the workshops for their own personal projects and are allowed to own what they have produced, deppending on the law

Discuss.

I would argue for privately owned workshops, but I don't have the stomach to do it right now. Maybe I'll come up with something later

[Toady One]

Thinking maybe this won't work out, since it's going the same way as the other one.