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[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, basically what Nil said...  (Didn't I say something similar? Oh well, I meant to...)

Actually, I think something like what they had back in Pharoah would be a good model - you have a trade interface which lists all the various products that you have in your city or that your trading partners will export to you, and you can set "buy X units of Y per year" from that menu, and "sell up to A units of B per year" in the menu.  You can also set the price you'll accept for sale or purchase of said goods.

Having a perhaps more flexible system, not unlike a stockpile interface for buying and selling that would let you declare "buy anything made of steel" with a "willing to pay up to 200% market value" modifier, and a "sell up to 200 mugs of any stone per year" set to "just freaking give them away!" price modifier.

[Flaede]

Why not go simpler than that, and just reverse-engineer it into the whole "Mandate" system? I mean, nobles can make mandates, why you? It would give rather clearly defined boundaries for automated trading. I suppose anything finickety that the player wanted to do specifically could be optional, but work something like you're talking about.

My point is: the possibility of "just letting it run" is a lure too great for me to ignore. A 'mandate' based system could be pretty awesome for that.

[AlexRose]

I think a mandate system is a fine way to handle large-scale transactions, but what about individual purchases? Dwarfs should have some initiative on purchasing personal goods from these outside sources; rather than having to micromanage purchases tailoring to each individual dwarf's desire, your dwarfs could go up to the traders themselves and attempt to purchase that wine they enjoy. Hell, there's a lot of potential for individual interaction between your citizens and visitors besides trading. They could simply talk and obtain some information, they could start a friendship, they could dislike each other and start a fight, they could even make deals and give services without your intervention. A dwarf's personality, which has been somewhat neglected, could certainly play a large and very interesting role with intelligent creatures that aren't under your direct contol.

[Orvelo]

I'm all for the invidual trading between your "Urist Mchandsome" wanting to buy an expensive ring off from "Ulric McTrader" so he could propose to "Lillith McPrettygirl"
Then one of these guilds could go to the trader and contract him to bring certain bulk amounts of goods, for example the metalartisans guild would make a contract with said "Ulric", whose specialty is precious metal items (rings neclaces etc.) and gemstones, for obtaining large amounts of gemstones for the artisanguilds stores so they could embed more items with gems. The artisans could pay the trader for those gems with gem embedded gold and platinum rings or plain coins made from selling those goods.
Inn would be nice too getting a small somewhat stable source of income as the elf-king who is a connoiseurs would come and taste your wines, taste your non-meat foods and sleep in your legendary bedrooms and visit for some very special treatments for your very hairy... beardy... women...
Or see that you have an elfgirl slave doing the same thing, leave furious, come back with an army with wooden swords Or negotiate and pay for her release for his own uses!
The choices are unlimited!

[NW_Kohaku]

Of course, that would require that we have elven slaves beforehand... not that I object, mind you...

[Vercingetorix]

Actually, I think something like what they had back in Pharoah would be a good model - you have a trade interface which lists all the various products that you have in your city or that your trading partners will export to you, and you can set "buy X units of Y per year" from that menu, and "sell up to A units of B per year" in the menu.  You can also set the price you'll accept for sale or purchase of said goods.

I was thinking along these lines myself. This could be made more challenging both with the addition of new goods as well as more specific requests; instead of a city demanding rock mugs, they might specifically want granite mugs, or mugs of a certain quality, or whatever.  If and when coins begin to have a greater role it will make it possible to move beyond the barter system and buy more goods than you export (or sell more), with all of the consequences of that.

Of course, most of that is much more advanced than a basic trade system, but with a combination of demand levels based on worldgen events/parameters and in-game events that affect demand, a robust trading system could be implemented without having to construct that complex economic framework.  At least initially, since there would be many additional features possible with such a system.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, EVENTUALLY, Toady's going to get around to that Caravan arc, and different locations will have different products and potentially have different goods they export and need to import.

To use Pharoah as an example again, different cities would have arbitrarily enforced products that they could or could not build.  Some were obvious - copper veins are needed for getting copper for making bronze weapons, and without copper veins, you have to import your copper.  Others were pretty arbitrary, like the game disabling clay pits so you can't dig up clay (which only requires dirt near water) to make pottery, forcing you to import pottery (which is a low-level, and hence, absolutely mandatory good).  Other goods might be something like importing a food you can't grow locally, because the number of varieties of food is a luxury stat in that game, and the upper classes are happier/wealthier/more taxable when they are given more exotic foods. 

The problem in Dwarf Fortress right now is that almost every fort can create every product.  We need some sort of regional specialties... in Improved Farming, I've been talking about making many of the aboveground plants biome-specific, but if they're all just food, then it doesn't really matter. 

This might be changable if we have something like alchemy, where different plants are used for different products, and the resulting crops aren't so fungible, or if we have something like mulberry bushes to produce silk, or laquer trees who can be farmed to make laquered wood, or exotic dyes.

Mining for gems is generally something that is fairly regional, and can be done for centuries in real life, but mines get depleted of gems so quickly in this game that they're basically useless as an industry, except for carving glass.  We would need to either have some way of having mines regenerate their ores and gems, which would actually help solve the problem of how loose this game is on matters of conservation of matter, or to make more than just one gem be produced from a single wall, but preferably make extracting said gems from the mullock much more time-and-labor intensive.  (It would also help to stop making looking for diamonds a complete waste of time.  Searching whole layers for ONE diamond?)

Other than that, there's probably going to be some major problems when some resources in the game actually stop being completely infinite.  We rely on goblinite now, because goblins and their metal equipment are inexhaustable, but if they come from worldmap locations, that can easily start to change.  There may come a time when all the iron in the world is used up (or at least, lying in piles on the corpses of some forgotten battlefield on the worldmap).  Even melting stuff down is "lossy" for recovering iron. 

IRL, there's ways we can get around that.  We can melt down iron and reuse all of it, not just 30% of it.  There are far, far more veins of iron ores in the world, or rust dissolved in underground water supplies, or whatever in the real world than in DF. 

... Actually, I wonder if we might someday get some ability to extract iron ores out of water supplies like that...

[Vercingetorix]

Upon reaching the last paragraph, I suddenly realized just how complex this system will have to be in order to be vibrant and functional.  One thing literally leads to another, and another, and another.


Definitely adding more goods and imposing biome limitations will be necessary to make that practical; right now, there really isn't enough variety or specialization to make a lot of trade practical.  I like the idea of crops like lacquer and silk, especially since it would make surface civilizations capable of producing two varieties of cloth as well as creating new uses for the alchemist's workshop.  I imagine you could mod some of these things in but I think they'd be necessary in order to make a trading system interesting and rewarding.

Adding ceramics as discussed elsewhere would open up another new dimension; right now, there's no alternative to wood besides metal, which is pretty unrealistic and unworkable given the methods available for hauling.  Plus, with ceramics you could produce a lot of related goods to add diversity and to use layers previously useless for anything but farming.

In terms of gems, as you said we'd need to create true "veins" for gems and make each gem mined out produce a lot more when cut than they currently do. Another option would be to have every tile of stone layers/deposits that  can contain gems have a small chance (varying based on geological factors in worldgen) of producing gems in addition to the stone itself so you get a small trickle of gems as long as you keep mining the stone.  Similarly, there would need to be stricter geology to accurately reflect these resources distribution; as you mentioned generally, you don't hit a small seam of coal or a small vein of iron/gold/whatever, you hit a pretty gigantic lode that can produce significant quantities for years or decades using contemporary technology.

The only downside with this setup is the potential for getting "dead" sites without much in the way of resources; of course, with a more robust trading system there would still be potential for agriculture-focused forts, especially with improved farming (ideally, the high-value cash crops and their byproducts should be very labor, resource and space intensive like in real life, making it more difficult for sites to be self-sufficient).  Overall, the first step will be making it extremely difficult for sites to be self-sufficient beyond the basics; you need an impetus for trade and by extension societal development.  Of course, this in turn would require class variation in demands for food and goods in order to require you to trade for things; tying skill levels to demands would be a step in this direction, especially if emigration is included and underserved dwarves will simply leave if conditions are below their standards for too long.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, pretty much any site that actually had people living in an area (except for maybe work camps trying to build something like a giant wall, or maybe a mining colony) would have to be self-sufficient on the most basic level - which is at least being able to feed themselves, build their own shelter, and probably clothe themselves, as well.  Medieval people were pretty darn frugal and self-sufficient, but they did need to buy things like anything metal they might use, as well as pottery, and possibly string or fabric.  Even peasants, however, would want to spend on at least a tiny amount of spices, or having nicer clothes for Sunday, or maybe eating some meat, or the like. 

We can already have fortresses that are theoretically without iron ore (although goblinite washes that away unless it really does get fixed) or flux, and not every fort has sand... but sand is just plain not important, and there's really no point in trading for luxury goods or the like right now, which means that trade is basically only useful to players right now when it involves importing raw materials that you have finite supplies of, such as gold and platinum or anything that isn't on your map.

This basically goes back to why I went and suggested the Class Warfare and the Pursuit of Happiness thread in the first place - there is no reason for players to supply their dwarves with anything beyond the bare minimum of subsistance in the current way the game is implimented, and if we want to give players a reason to want to bother building luxury goods (or trade for them), then we have to create the demand for those goods, first.

[Vercingetorix]

Yes, definitely...in my opinion, self-sufficiency should be achievable until you get the Mayor under the current noble system.  Once you hit that point, your population and economy (and the skills of your workers) have effectively evolved to the point where they would start to demand more and better goods and be willing to pay for them.  As you said, right now there is no class system in reality; a legendary miner eats and drinks the same as an unskilled peasant, sometimes worse depending on the stack they eat from.  Unless you make a conscious decision to do so, they sleep in a similar quality bedroom with the same furniture and are ecstatic about it.  This is why I actually like nobles with ridiculous demands...the difficulty of meeting them provides a challenge different from slaying yet another FB or goblin siege.

Right now, the biggest limitation is flux.  You can still get some iron on almost any map, with flux (and to a lesser extent wood) being the only real limitations on your fort.  Even wood can be averted with magma, at least as far as fuel goes.  Sand is pretty much a joke...these days, I can have a thriving glass industry provided I've got access to the three trading civs.

Ultimately, we need to get a trading system up based upon current products (as unrealistic as it might be), and go from there.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, part of the problem is that we do have "dead sites" already - we can embark on spots with no flux, no sand, no easy surface water, or even glaciers with the absolute minimum resources.

Back in 40d, we could also embark with no magma, no renewable water supplies aside from maybe a little rainwater, and no underground caverns or rivers or the like, as well.

When you're talking about trade making sand not a problem... then that's actually a case for why trade helps players, and can work right now, which is what we want to be encouraging.  (The problem is that we need to start paying a "shipping fee" for all the crap we buy - importing giant blocks of raw stone is extremely difficult and labor-intensive stuff, and you pay a price based entirely on an arbitrary percentage-based markup of the base value of an item.  Importing the steel sword directly should cost less than importing the flux and iron ore, because several tons of rock take up entire beasts of burden.)

(Also, if we're talking about classes and making late game have more requirements, I'd encourage posting in the actual Class Warfare thread... it could use the bump, if nothing else.)

[sonerohi]

Having to keep all your guests happy and in line while they're trying to riot because you've sealed them in for 2 years and the goblins aren't leaving.

[Strangething]

This basically goes back to why I went and suggested the Class Warfare and the Pursuit of Happiness thread in the first place - there is no reason for players to supply their dwarves with anything beyond the bare minimum of subsistance in the current way the game is implimented, and if we want to give players a reason to want to bother building luxury goods (or trade for them), then we have to create the demand for those goods, first.

Until something like this appears, any fortress visitors are just going to be a curious background element. Which I am totally on board with. Part of the magic of DF is the simulated fantasy world.

[Farthing]

I feel like an adventurer wandering into a fortress should be able to do anything a player can do in adventure mode. Likewise anything an wanderer can do in fortress mode should be something a player can do in adventure mode. Of course wanderers would be limited by their AI. While in the fort, they could entertain, perform jobs, rent rooms, steal and even get arrested. The primary difference being they couldn't have job preferences set by the player. Frequency could be affected by how friendly you are with a given nation on a large scale, and on an individual scale by producing goods that individual likes. If you export large numbers of swords to a human nation, maybe a swordsman or two could come to visit.

Alternatively, maybe wanderers could wander through your map without even stopping, hastily moving toward their next location. Unless they are interrupted by Fun.

[Uthric]

im good with tradeing with coins  for this idea... ONLY if the coin stacking thing is fixed...(idk if it is yet)