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[Shonai_Dweller]

You all know that there is currently an economy in place already, right? It even gets expanded every so often (like in the upcoming release).

It gets put on pause for now after initial worldgen (due to reasons like player fortress being completely unbalanced comparatively and little things like there being no underground pops to farm the dwarven plump helmet fields, etc).

So whenever the time comes for a development arc focussed on "switching on the economy" it's not going to be something that appears out of a vacuum.

Doesn't mean all the problems Goblincookie lists won't be there, but it's not like Mythgen, Starting Scenarios and even Villains are being made without any clue of the effect the economy will eventually have.

[thompson]

Don't worry, I was aware. Although I didn't realise it paused after world gen. The difficulty is in getting a balanced fortress economy that interacts with the rest of the world without it either being Utopian post-scarcity or prohibitively difficult /slow to get anything done. To me it is an issue of balance, and where DF wants to sit on that spectrum.

[GoblinCookie]

Well, the economy *could* be balanced differently to the real world to allow small settlements to be viable. If DF agriculture is 10x as productive as middle ages agriculture you still have an economy - food is just cheap so it shifts towards more manufacturing and services. There's still a big question about what a DF economy would even look like. Gameplay is likely to take precedence over realism, so it may not be a "real" economy at all but rather some mechanisms cobbled together to create the illusion of an economy.

This discussion is all well and good in theory, but in practice there is already a significant code base that has been built up without a central economic engine, so refactoring that will take time. Clearly it has been designated a lower priority than Myth+Magic. If the code is designed in a reasonably modular way a proper economy could be built in parallel to it at a later date.

The issue is not realism but consistency; the mechanics of the game area and the wider abstracted world have to be such that they correspond.  Otherwise we will have an economy that is thrown into chaos by the simple fact of the player retiring.  It is likely matters like productivity of different fields will be influenced by myth-gen variables anyway, the key thing is ensuring they are consistent including adjusting for the time differentials that the devs stubbornly cling to. 

However it is the illusion of the economy is the problem here.  At the moment we are using placeholder illusions to substitute for the switched-off economy, stuff like the caravans full of magicked up goods with randomized price alterations negotiated last year. The problem is that while the caravan is an illusionary economy, the internal fortress economy is quite real and the illusionary economy has a quite definite effect on the internal economy, including by providing a useful sink for the vast surplus produced by our dwarves.  The moment we introduce a real economy, the demand for items is finite so we no longer have a bottomless well to dump surplus items into. 

For as long as there is no actual economy, we can have a tailer-made illusionary economy support the needs of any starting scenario we wish to create.  As soon as there is an economy, the 'walls close in' and we find the economy really does not support all starting scenarios equally at all. 

You all know that there is currently an economy in place already, right? It even gets expanded every so often (like in the upcoming release).

It gets put on pause for now after initial worldgen (due to reasons like player fortress being completely unbalanced comparatively and little things like there being no underground pops to farm the dwarven plump helmet fields, etc).

So whenever the time comes for a development arc focussed on "switching on the economy" it's not going to be something that appears out of a vacuum.

Doesn't mean all the problems Goblincookie lists won't be there, but it's not like Mythgen, Starting Scenarios and even Villains are being made without any clue of the effect the economy will eventually have.

No, the only way to know how the economy will ultimately work is to implement the economy.  The world-gen economy is pretty broken whenever you deviate from the parameters of the vanilla game, as anyone who has tried to introduce non-farming civs discovers.  Nothing works exactly the same way after world-gen as it does in world-gen, after world-gen the world is far more violent and dynamic that it is in world-gen which tends to settle into smooth and frequently entirely peaceful stagnation, then this the broken by the game actually being generated; this was not the devs intention but how it accidentally works. 

This creates an interesting chicken-and-egg problem.  The economy needs starting scenarios and the starting scenarios need the economy; it leads me to think they should probably both developed in the same release.  Another reason this is a good idea is that as boats come before the economy, it allows ports/nautical starting scenarios to be introduced alongside all the others. 

Don't worry, I was aware. Although I didn't realise it paused after world gen. The difficulty is in getting a balanced fortress economy that interacts with the rest of the world without it either being Utopian post-scarcity or prohibitively difficult /slow to get anything done. To me it is an issue of balance, and where DF wants to sit on that spectrum.

The fortress mode post-scarcity is not a deliberate planned decision of the game devs, it is an unintended consequence of the lack of investment in the original seven dwarves (aside from the handful of embark goods) and the nexus of two factors, the increase in the population and the reduction of the need to 'build stuff' since most amenities are already set up in a few years.  They did not balance anything, they simply implemented a playable game without understanding the underlying economics of what they were creating.  It is VERY common problem with computer games, most cannot cope with peace without they rely upon constant warfare to destroy the vast surplus value their productive forces generate. 

Starting scenarios as the are described in the dev page do not realistically exist because of the whims of their creators.  They exist because of the need for external investment to allow a small group of people to set up a decent site in any reasonable time frame.  The investors want something in return for their investment, this is why it focuses on a particular task initially because otherwise the investors are not efficiently getting what they want in return for their investment.  In a post-scarcity economy there *are* no 'starting scenarios', everybody does everything that the local environment permits them to do, which is exactly how fortress mode tends to work at the moment.

What tends to happen in reality is colonies are set up as specialized producers of some specific good that is valuable to the colonisers, more often than not this good was GOLD.  These initial gold mines then creates a satellite economy around it, since while the gold miners mine gold to repay their investors the capital needed to set them up, they also have demands of their own which gives rise to an economy independent of the initial investors.  In the end the gold veins are exhausted and the miners move on but the economy has by now diversified enough that the place can survive fine without the original rationale of their existence. 

[therahedwig]

Don't worry, I was aware. Although I didn't realise it paused after world gen. The difficulty is in getting a balanced fortress economy that interacts with the rest of the world without it either being Utopian post-scarcity or prohibitively difficult /slow to get anything done. To me it is an issue of balance, and where DF wants to sit on that spectrum.

Admittedly, part of the issue is that the game just isn't difficult enough in certain sections; there's no strong food preservation industry, too much food is produced for fortress mode consumption, plants grow too quickly when using a farm plot. Diseases are too rare. And I suspect that the worry is largely that if these things get introduced without stuff like hill Dwarves sending in food caravans(one of the DF talks has them talk about the idea of a early fair where holding and other visitors would come in to sell food and other supplies to replace the trading depot altogether) the game will get too difficult too quickly (as evidenced by the suggestion of booze requiring water being considered making the game a little too difficult).

Looking at it from that perspective, it makes sense to introduce trees early, and have their bugs and millions of stepladder related issues worked out before you make the player rely on harvesting fruit yearly and having it preserved before it rots.

[GoblinCookie]

We have not actually discussed very much how money fits into the whole setup.  What does it do and why is it there?


I had the idea some time ago of making money work as the ultimate item in a heirachy of demands, on an infinite loop.  When the entity gets a given amount of money, it just logs in a demand for another stack of money forever.

We could have money be absent to begin with and then be actually invented when a suitable party gets to a point where all it's demands are met.

[Azerty]

We have not actually discussed very much how money fits into the whole setup.  What does it do and why is it there?

I had the idea some time ago of making money work as the ultimate item in a heirachy of demands, on an infinite loop.  When the entity gets a given amount of money, it just logs in a demand for another stack of money forever.

We could have money be absent to begin with and then be actually invented when a suitable party gets to a point where all it's demands are met.

Or exchange would be originally based on using barter and then, once they exchange with further partners, they use coins as this is a neutral medium.

[GoblinCookie]

Or exchange would be originally based on using barter and then, once they exchange with further partners, they use coins as this is a neutral medium.

Well obviously they are using barter, the problem here is why and when do they stop using barter for everything, switching to the use of money for anything.  Money has to be in effect invented because it's irreducibly complex nature means that whoever invents money has to also arbitrarily sell things *in* money to begin with or else their money does not have any value to anyone else.  Money is only valuable because other people want money and those other people themselves only want money because other people want money (and so on). 

Yet if you think about it, in barter we are deliberately making some things for our own needs and other things to meet the needs of other factions.  There is also a hierarchy of needs here, people will barter jewelry for furniture and furniture for food.  What happens when we presently have all our needs met and yet other parties have needs that we can meet?  It is at this point that money is invented, the site issues a demand for money and tries to get suitable money (respecting political/cultural factors), if no suitable money exists the site invents money.  Then the less wealthy site produces the money and trades it to the money demanding site for the surplus *useful* items it needs.  If the previously wealthy site falls into hard times it will trade away it's money for useful items just at would trade away it's jewelry for food. 

By treating money as the eternally least useful item in the hierarchy, we can bypass the fundamental problem that exists in reality about the origin of money. 

[Scruiser]

Well obviously they are using barter, the problem here is why and when do they stop using barter for everything, switching to the use of money for anything. 

For a lot of Western cultures, money was worth the value of the precious metals used to make it... this doesn't quite work for the current value calculations (https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Item_value) of Dwarf Fortress, by the current value calculations, the item identity alone multiples the value of the base material, and then quality multiplies it further, so the raw materials aren't worth much.  I think this is an entire issue in and of itself that needs to be vastly reworked (I could write a wall of text and all the conceptual problems this approach causes).  Assuming it was fixed, then coins would make sense as a way of dividing up metal into smaller portions to be able to use it to buy goods.  Historically, money also worked as a way to standardize the weight/purity of the metal, so that people don't have to constantly weigh it or check that the metals haven't been debased/alloyed with cheaper metals. 

As to why the Dwarves in DF should want to use money... assuming the economy is turned on, and they are allowed to buy jewelry, clothes, and personal items  from other dwarves, visitors, merchants and the fortress itself, money can fill in the gaps of barter trading (if a dwarf's spare craft they are bartering away is worth 120 and they want something that costs 160, they fill in the gap with a few coins, with some variable amount of coins between 0-40 traded based on the bartering and appraisal skill of the dwarf they are trading with).  To incentive the player to introduce money, the dwarves could get positive thoughts from trades that are nearly even on value (thanks to coins smoothing out the difference), and negative thoughts on heavily skewed trades or trades that are stopped because they are too uneven and their is nothing to facilitate the exchange (because the player failed to make money).

What happens when we presently have all our needs met and yet other parties have needs that we can meet?  It is at this point that money is invented

I think another incentive for the player to start making and using money would be for dwarves to get positive thoughts from storing excess value/productivity they've earned as money and negative thoughts if they've done work they think should be further rewarded but have no way of receiving that reward (if the player refuses to activate the economy and/or refuses to mint/issue money).  This is sort of like what GoblinCookie is suggesting with once all their basic needs are met, dwarves start wanting to acquire money (as a safety net, as a way of getting what they've earned, etc.).

So the steps would go:

• Pre-economy activation dwarves are allowed to freely claim clothes/personal items from fortress stockpiles. (I.e. how DF is currently supposed to work)
  
  • I think this stage actually does need an additional administrator to go with additional options to check that you have enough clothes/personal items made.  A quartermaster I think would be a good name.
  • I think even how it currently is, the dwarves don't quite seek out objects as according to their preferences that well.
• Economy is partially activated by some threshold, presumably with some player input through relevant nobles to let them hold off on activating.  Holding off on activating the economy too long may cause negative thoughts in hardworking dwarves that think they haven't received their fair share for their work.
  
  • Partial activation makes it an option through the Quartermaster noble to set newly crafted items as freely claimable, or to put them up for auction/purchase.
  • Essentials like rooms and food are still provided at no cost.  This gives players time to start planning for the full economy activation.
  • Players can start issuing dwarves money, including a set starting amount per dwarf, wages for jobs, possibly a universal basic income.  Setting UBI too high will make hardworking dwarves mad at freeloaders, but a moderate UBI should be acceptable/reasonable. Similarly, too much wealth inequality should cause some negative thoughts from the poorer dwarves.
  • Dwarves can barter and exchange personal items with each other, merchants, and visitors (perhaps a new small time merchant visitor should be added).  Money helps lubricate this process, but is not essential.
• Full activation of the economy as another threshold is hit.  Again, ideally some player input through nobles.
  
  • At this point, money is basically required, as there are many things to purchase and sell.  Still, to minimize some the annoyances with mass hauling of coins back and forth, I think purchases from the fort itself can have the money exchange abstracted a bit, or taken care of purely on paper by an appropriate noble (Quartermaster/Tax Collector/Treasurer).
  • Rooms have a rent/purchase price.  This should be scaled by the total number and value of rooms available for rent/purchase to avoid pricing out your dwarves of the rooms even as if there is an excess (This was a problem in 40d).  This should also be possibly adjustable through a noble.
  • Food should have a price.  But having plenty of extra food should drive this price down to negligible values, again to avoid the absurdities of 40d and starving/debt slaving your poorer dwarves.
  • To get back to JonarTheDabber's original suggestion: Dwarves can rent/buy workshops and farm plots.  This can allow them to fulfill needs to craft things and to make money directly by making stuff to sell.
  • Dwarves should get strong positive thoughts from many of the steps in this process (especially permanently buying stuff).  This rewards the players for engaging in the economic system
  • Overall, letting the economy run should reward the player by reducing the need to micromanage a lot of stuff and instead let the dwarves take care of it as needed.
• Sufficient problems/disruptions should lead to deactivation of the economy:
  
  • Enough dwarves owing massive debts to the fortress should result in the economy turning off, cutting off endless negative thoughts from the poorer dwarves being in debt for a big onetime set of negative thoughts from the richer dwarves.
  • The fortress owing massive debts to the dwarves should shut off the economy.  If the player somehow messes up hard enough to somehow end up owing the dwarves more money than they can provide goods/services/minted money for, then the game should punish them and spare them further losses by turning off the economy system.
  • Enough dwarves dying should let the economy shut off without too much penalty in negative thoughts.  IF a forgotten beast kills 90% of your fortress, the remaining handful of dwarves shouldn't be too concerned with money and it would be unfun for the player to have to micromanage the economy while they are struggling to keep their fort alive.

Note a lot of the problems of the old system from 40d version: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Dwarven_economy

Among other problems: food and rooms were not adjusted according to supply and demand, but rather set on a fixed rate based on value (and as I mentioned earlier in this post, the current Value calculation gives a big multiplier based on quality), which in turn led to dwarves being priced out of good food and rooms and sending them into massive debt.  I think both the value calculation needs a rework, and it needs to act as only the first step in a supply/demand calculation (which can be done emergently be allowing dwarves to recursively bid, or done via global checks on supply).

I think the steps I propose could encompass multiple types of player fortresses (communist fortresses with a high UBI and workshops not put up for sale/rent or the economy kept only at partial activation.  Capitalistic Fortresses with all of the rooms and workshops going on sale.  Feudalistic fortresses (by editing the raws to grant nobles rights over workshops and farm plots), where the means of production are owned by nobles who rent them out and make money from an underclass that way).  The key from a play standpoint is making sure the player is rewarded/incentived and that basic supply/demand rules are used to keep prices and costs in a reasonable range for the dwarves.

[Timeless Bob]

I was looking into city-states as political entities and they sound very similar to the way that fortress mode works right now.  Many were republics governed by councils, and a few by tyrants called in Italy, "Princes".  They were for the most part self sufficient, allowing their inhabitants to indulge in art and architecture.  They kept standing companies of militants as internal security and to repel external threats.  Each City-State also became prosperous by exporting surplus to other City-States.  The wealth was not in coinage, however, but often in perishable trade-goods like food, booze and cloth for their burgeoning populations. Luxury goods such as finely built and decorated furniture, jewelry and statues made of rare metals or woods were often commissioned from crafts-guilds in other City-States.  The wealth was measured in the ability for the populace to remain healthy, fed and productive (and therefore able to produce yet more trade-goods.) Sometimes City-States would become the central figure in a series of peripheral communities who traveled to the City State to buy and sell goods.

Sounds really familiar doesn't it?


Farming usually had one person able to feed two to three others if they worked at it full time and if none of the harvests were missed.  Farming in DF therefore should either be made harder, slower, or the Dwarves have to consume and drink much more per eating/drinking episode.  It would throw most other projects off to have the dwarves simply wish to eat/drink more often.

[Lioneez]

Honestly, the economic system should be the easiest part but it will probably require a revamp about how the whole economy system works now if you can even call it that.
for the basics I would like you to take a look at a game called StarSector.
basically every planet has its own needs, which can easily be implemented by making civilizations calculate how much minerals they have on their respective map positions, each sub settlement like a hamlet will add to the basic worth of that civilization by the raw materials it is exposed to.
of course for adventure mode leave the random bonus worth since those items spawn out of thin air.

now lets take a look at another game called Haven&Hearth to get an example since the first game will basically make the units kinda useless and it will help adventure mode grow.
In that game like in the units of dwarf fortress you are able to create virtually anything given enough skills and the proper workshops, have units in dwarf fortress seek out raw material via trade and as for miners and wood cutters have them spawn raw material based on their level every time you deem necessary for common trade.
and please for gods sake have traders have the ability to haul items for trade around the world so we will be able to protect traders for example, no need for multi tile units to haul the items just make it possible to attach items on animals via a rope and add items on it as long as you pull it.

Now, of course I didnt sight the most problematic aspect and its the ever growing value with stuff like regrowing wood,bones,hides etc, for that you will need to make an algorithm like the one I mentioned from StarSector for RNG raw materials in the holding of each civilization and have units from the respective civilizations carry out that task via RNG drop every quota week based on their levels.

In short only after that you can apply on agreed currency  between  civilizations like the elves tree cutting quotas, as for the elves i think they should stay item trade but with the same systems other civilizations have, in short draw examples for a system from starsector,haven&hearth and runescape for area spawned workshops.
thats what i think at least.

[Scruiser]

Farming usually had one person able to feed two to three others if they worked at it full time and if none of the harvests were missed.  Farming in DF therefore should either be made harder, slower, or the Dwarves have to consume and drink much more per eating/drinking episode.  It would throw most other projects off to have the dwarfs simply wish to eat/drink more often.

If you dig into the details of it, your fort gets a lot of things easier and/or in greater quantity than the rest of the world does (both compared to real world and compared to the rest of the in-game world).  Within a few years, your fort typically has a decent collection of legendary dwarfs, both from strange moods and just grinding out practice.  Likewise, a military squad can reach legendary levels with a few years of practices from novice starting skills.  If you compare these skills levels to those of migrants and historical dwarfs or to the military skills to invading armies, its is definitely a discrepancy.

I think the artifacts in worldgen and the artifacts produced by your fort are also a bit disproportionate, but I haven't run the numbers as closely on that.

I'll agree that farming is the most absurd of these examples though, both because its ease is really easy to see in game with how so few tiles worth of plots can feed so many dwarfs, and the practical effect of not having to worry about farming ever.  If Toady plans on re-balancing the fortress production rates (either by itself or in conjunction with an economy update), farming is an obvious and major place to start. 

Just rebalancing the fort production of food wouldn't be enough though.  As it is, you can take the raw ingredients from trade caravans, turn them into exceptional and masterwork meals, and make a ridiculous profit ratio.
From the wiki:

Even a novice cook will greatly increase the value of raw ingredients. For example, cooking 10 plump helmets (total value 40) in a "Lavish Meal" will produce a stack of plump helmet roast with minimum value of 260. A modest cooking skill can easily double that value, while a legendary cook is theoretically capable of producing a total value of 3120, a 78x increase over the raw ingredients.

So even if you are paying a 200% markup ratio from asking for all the raw ingredients at highest priority from the outpost liaison, and trading with another x2 markup with the trade caravans, you are still making a factor of profit around 8 to 20 times.  This profit can be used to easily feed your fort many times over.

[Azerty]

As to why the Dwarves in DF should want to use money... assuming the economy is turned on, and they are allowed to buy jewelry, clothes, and personal items  from other dwarves, visitors, merchants and the fortress itself, money can fill in the gaps of barter trading (if a dwarf's spare craft they are bartering away is worth 120 and they want something that costs 160, they fill in the gap with a few coins, with some variable amount of coins between 0-40 traded based on the bartering and appraisal skill of the dwarf they are trading with).  To incentive the player to introduce money, the dwarves could get positive thoughts from trades that are nearly even on value (thanks to coins smoothing out the difference), and negative thoughts on heavily skewed trades or trades that are stopped because they are too uneven and their is nothing to facilitate the exchange (because the player failed to make money).

I think the steps I propose could encompass multiple types of player fortresses (communist fortresses with a high UBI and workshops not put up for sale/rent or the economy kept only at partial activation.  Capitalistic Fortresses with all of the rooms and workshops going on sale.  Feudalistic fortresses (by editing the raws to grant nobles rights over workshops and farm plots), where the means of production are owned by nobles who rent them out and make money from an underclass that way).  The key from a play standpoint is making sure the player is rewarded/incentived and that basic supply/demand rules are used to keep prices and costs in a reasonable range for the dwarves.

Good suggestions about the transition between primitive communism and pre-modern capitalism. I could even see mixture between these regimes, like with some industries under total control of the fortress and freer ones.

One of the motives of migration might be the desire of the settlers to become rich; to modelize this, once the Economy is enacted, part of the property of the fortress, excluding items such as weapons, prisons, libraries and other related to public order and government, shall be given to the first seven settlers (for exemple 40%), with each of them receiving a share, with the leader receiving the double. This way, they could become a sort of nobility, or patricians.

Small nitpick: feudalism would have involved the privatization of public powers and the patrimonialisation of public law (fiefs were eessentially territories whose owner was also the ruler and could levy taxes and have militias; in the Holy German Empire, jurisdictions were bale to be sold and bought); I could see some of the deeper caverns having large autonomy under the rule of their owners.

Anyway, I posted some ideas about the modelisation on the thread Torts, Contracts and Marriages, or Civil Law in Dwarf Fortress.

[GoblinCookie]

For a lot of Western cultures, money was worth the value of the precious metals used to make it... this doesn't quite work for the current value calculations (https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Item_value) of Dwarf Fortress, by the current value calculations, the item identity alone multiples the value of the base material, and then quality multiplies it further, so the raw materials aren't worth much.  I think this is an entire issue in and of itself that needs to be vastly reworked (I could write a wall of text and all the conceptual problems this approach causes).  Assuming it was fixed, then coins would make sense as a way of dividing up metal into smaller portions to be able to use it to buy goods.  Historically, money also worked as a way to standardize the weight/purity of the metal, so that people don't have to constantly weigh it or check that the metals haven't been debased/alloyed with cheaper metals.

The idea that money was worth the value of the precious metals used to make it is a common historical myth, but it is a total myth.  The coins were only 'backed' by the value of the metals themselves (through the simple expedient of melting them down  ), but they were always worth *more* than the metals they were made of.  This fact is witnessed to by the adulteration of the precious metal content in pretty much all currencies over time; the rulers bothered to reduce the metal content because the actual value of coins as coins was actually separate from the metal the coins were made of, that idea would not work otherwise. 

As to why the Dwarves in DF should want to use money... assuming the economy is turned on, and they are allowed to buy jewelry, clothes, and personal items  from other dwarves, visitors, merchants and the fortress itself, money can fill in the gaps of barter trading (if a dwarf's spare craft they are bartering away is worth 120 and they want something that costs 160, they fill in the gap with a few coins, with some variable amount of coins between 0-40 traded based on the bartering and appraisal skill of the dwarf they are trading with).  To incentive the player to introduce money, the dwarves could get positive thoughts from trades that are nearly even on value (thanks to coins smoothing out the difference), and negative thoughts on heavily skewed trades or trades that are stopped because they are too uneven and their is nothing to facilitate the exchange (because the player failed to make money).

The economy as I envision it is not 'switched on' or 'switched off', if we can simply switch the economy off and have everything function fine we are better off NOT wasting the development time on ever adding the economy at all.  It becomes a decision that is motivated by pure ideology and about dictating how dwarf society should run according to our sensibilities rather than furthering the actual development of the game according to the actual economic situation and ideology IN the game.  In my vision bits of 'economy' are 'switched on' piecemeal in the game *by* the player, when it makes sense for the player to do so; it should not just happen automatically because of some code in the game.

Goods in barter are not worth numerical values in the fashion you refer to; that items presently have a pseudo money value attached to them when being bartered is part of what is broken about the Status Quo.  Goods in barter are ranked by quality (X item is a better example of it's kind Y item, so I will trade X item away if it is a means to get Y item ), they are ranked by necessity (I need to eat more than I need my jewels, I can trade away my jewels) and they are ranked by need (I need one shirt, I do not need 100 shirts, so I can trade away 99 of my shirts). 

To put it numerical terms (since everything in a computer has to be), bartered items has a separate quality value (used against other items of the same type), a necessity value (used against items less essential) and a demand value (used against items that are surplus). 

I think another incentive for the player to start making and using money would be for dwarves to get positive thoughts from storing excess value/productivity they've earned as money and negative thoughts if they've done work they think should be further rewarded but have no way of receiving that reward (if the player refuses to activate the economy and/or refuses to mint/issue money).  This is sort of like what GoblinCookie is suggesting with once all their basic needs are met, dwarves start wanting to acquire money (as a safety net, as a way of getting what they've earned, etc.).

I was not talking about individual dwarves, I was talking about large abstract sites.  While you could make individual dwarves work that way, it would depend upon demands being modeled in a certain way (so I feed them, *then* they want clothes) rather than (they want food *and* clothes at the same times). 

The player wants to get money because they want to pay people that demand money and the want to buy things from people who demand money in return; the player's dwarves want money for the exact same reason the player wants money.  The value of the money is not based upon the player's own dwarves, it is based upon the wider worlds demand for money; you do not rent rooms to your dwarves as you used to because the ECONOMY SAYS YOU MUST, you rent out rooms only if your dwarves for whatever reason are sitting on a pile of money and you want to get it off them because money has some value to your fortress.

The AI on the other hand stacks up money as the lowest item in terms of necessity value (refer back to previous quote) and keeps creating new demands for money every time the previous stack's total demand is met.  So in effect we have an ultimately worthless item that they will trade for everything else but also that they demand in infinite quantities.  If a site has a surplus of everything it needs but still does not have any needs at present, that site will put it's effort to obtaining money and trade away all it's *surplus* items for money.

That means that they will trade all their surplus items away to get money; so money is valuable for the player (and his dwarves) to possess.  Yet if there are any items lower in the list than money (all the non-money items have a finite demand) they will trade ultimately all their money away to get those items.  This by the way means inflation can be modeled, if a lot of parties are sitting on a lot of money then this drives up the prices of anything they actually want other than more money. 

Note a lot of the problems of the old system from 40d version: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Dwarven_economy

Among other problems: food and rooms were not adjusted according to supply and demand, but rather set on a fixed rate based on value (and as I mentioned earlier in this post, the current Value calculation gives a big multiplier based on quality), which in turn led to dwarves being priced out of good food and rooms and sending them into massive debt.  I think both the value calculation needs a rework, and it needs to act as only the first step in a supply/demand calculation (which can be done emergently be allowing dwarves to recursively bid, or done via global checks on supply).

I think the steps I propose could encompass multiple types of player fortresses (communist fortresses with a high UBI and workshops not put up for sale/rent or the economy kept only at partial activation.  Capitalistic Fortresses with all of the rooms and workshops going on sale.  Feudalistic fortresses (by editing the raws to grant nobles rights over workshops and farm plots), where the means of production are owned by nobles who rent them out and make money from an underclass that way).  The key from a play standpoint is making sure the player is rewarded/incentived and that basic supply/demand rules are used to keep prices and costs in a reasonable range for the dwarves.

No, the old economy was a bad idea inherently; I am not interested in better versions of said bad idea.  Even the best implemented version of the old economy still works on the assumption of having some magical transformation overhaul the whole society to the worse for no discernible purpose and more importantly with no conflict involved in the process. 

Also prices are not set by supply+demand in reality and do not really have much role in the actual functioning of the economy either (the only exception here is the supply OF money).  Pretty much the only function prices have is negative, they fail to inhibit the functioning of the economy (successful economy) or they directly interfere with the functioning of the economy (failed economy).  They don't really do anything positive at all, they are basically a side effect of the demand for money and money in some strange loop feeds on it's own demand. 

[Scruiser]

Anyway, I posted some ideas about the modelisation on the thread Torts, Contracts and Marriages, or Civil Law in Dwarf Fortress.

So basically, in addition to the existing nobles, various other social roles/castes would be defined in the RAWs?  And various social/legal structures would also have raw definitions?   I can kind of see how it would work in fortress mode and I like it a lot for the modding potential.  But actually implementing such a scheme, making world gen respect all of the interacting roles properly, and allowing for variation across world-gen history sounds like a major rewrite to the game.  It would add an interesting additional layer to, but I think I personally would get a similar in-game experience from just a few more additional civilization tags.

The idea that money was worth the value of the precious metals used to make it is a common historical myth, but it is a total myth.

I may not be well researched on this topic, and there is definitely a more complicated relationship than precious metal equals currency, but it is definitely not a "total myth".  Debasement (or adulteration as you refer to it), was necessary when the value of the coinage deviated from the value of the base medal such that coin defacing became profitable.  The fact that the this was a deviation from the norm kind of demonstrates that at some point in time prior the intrinsic and nominal values were close together.  Likewise, after debasement, the new intrinsic value of the currency matched it's nominal value again.

In my vision bits of 'economy' are 'switched on' piecemeal in the game *by* the player, when it makes sense for the player to do so; it should not just happen automatically because of some code in the game.

I agree it makes sense to switch on the economy in pieces.  From a game play standpoint, it makes sense to give the player a large degree of control... but from a role playing standpoint, certain pieces may make sense to automatically switch on according to the starting scenario, or world events, or the needs/demands of your home civilization.  As a matter of practical implementation though, Toady might find some pieces make sense to bundle together.   Also, from a gameplay perspective, it might be simpler for the player to understand if certain economy mechanics were bundled together.  The proposal I outlined was an attempt to divide up the pieces that most go together into a two separate steps.

To put it numerical terms (since everything in a computer has to be), bartered items has a separate quality value (used against other items of the same type), a necessity value (used against items less essential) and a demand value (used against items that are surplus).

At some point you need to reduce those values into an actual dwarf behavior, which in turn means you will probably need to combine those values into a single value somehow.  I'm think we can both agree the current value system is busted, but I still think at some point, the game needs to calculate an actual price. The price might be different for different dwarfs according to individual modifiers (indeed these differences between dwarfs should drive the barter system).

Also prices are not set by supply+demand in reality and do not really have much role in the actual functioning of the economy either (the only exception here is the supply OF money).

Thinking in terms of supply and demand provides a good starting point to model how economics work.  There are cases in which supply/demand can be inelastic (which changes the slopes of the curves), or when there is a monopsony or monopoly (which does other things to how the curves intersect), or unusual types of consumer preferences (which again alter the curves, but don't change the underlying concepts).  Are you taking about macroeconomics (in which money supply is a thing?).  Or are you referencing some less mainstream economics (there are critiques of the homoeconomicus conception which I think are fair).  I think microeconomics is a lot more relevant for fort mode gameplay, although a macroeconomic model of money supply might be relevant for worldgen.  Likewise, in order to model dwarfs at all, viewing them as rational agents behaving according to some utility function is necessary.

Pretty much the only function prices have is negative, they fail to inhibit the functioning of the economy (successful economy) or they directly interfere with the functioning of the economy (failed economy).  They don't really do anything positive at all, they are basically a side effect of the demand for money and money in some strange loop feeds on it's own demand.

Okay... I think we are getting a bit off topic...

[callisto8413]

I think one thing that will have to be changed, be if in Fortress Mode or Adventure Mode, is that coins have to be useful.  For example, in Adventure Mode, it is easier to carry meat from a kill to use for barter for items I need in town then using coins.   In fact gems make for better international currency.  Because if I enter a region run by a different Civilization any coins I have are now useless.  They don't care if you have gold coins...those gold coins were not minted by them and, therefore, useless.  That seems kind of weird to me.  Or has that changed?

Surely some business owners would just see the gold or silver and not the Civilization who minted them.  Towns on the border I think would be using two or three different types of gold, silver, and copper coins.  Also, towns and cities had a person or organization whose business was to exchange money.  Luckily most coins were almost standard weight between European nations but for some coins being shaved, worn, or forged.  In other words it was pretty easy to exchange one gold coin for another.

And what happen when one Civilization invaded and takes over the cities of another?  Do they replace all the coins?  Melt them down and mint their own coins?