Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, this is starting to look a little like my previous class-based needs suggestion.  But anyway, I think you're really bringing up the right points, because you're asking what makes people actually demand things.

If you have towns start actually demanding things based upon some sort of abstracted uses they have for it, you can start working out how the demand should actually work, instead of just assuming that demand is based upon always wanting something.  This does raise the next question, though, which is, "How many stone mugs does one town go through in a year?"  Currently, we have no really good answer to this - although dwarves from 40d will tend to buy mugs whenever they have free time and money if they love mugs, and will happily toss them on the floor of their room or some random spot on the fort's floor instead of putting them away.  I guess their mugs never breaking or being used never stops them from collecting more.  Still, you need to answer the "how many mugs per person who is in the class range to buy a mug go through in a year?"  Theoretically, there should be a rate of breakage or some such.

This only sets up the baseline of demand, though.  You see, demand is not about, "how many mugs are they willing to buy?" it's about, "how much are they willing to pay?"  And there are two major points to answering this question, but they both relate to one major aspect of supply and demand, "elasticity of demand".  The first of which is how much they really need it or are desperate for it.  If we're talking about having the stone to build a wall around your city before the next wave of attacks comes, they probably need it.  If we're talking about a lute or something, they probably can wait for the prices to come down a little. 

The more major complication on elasticity of demand is "substitutables".  In real life, beef is the most heavily demanded and pricey meat.  Pork is a substitute for beef - it's cheaper, but people want beef more, so they are willing to pay more for beef.  Cereal is an even cheaper substiute than either of them. 

Let's say there's an outbreak of mad cow disease or something, and beef supply goes down, prices go up.  When prices for beef are a certain point above pork, then people will say "screw it, I don't like beef that much more than pork", and just buy pork, instead.  Unless supply of pork goes up to compensate (slaughter more pigs), then the price of pork may also go up (and the lower demand will cause beef prices to come back down a little), causing the price difference between pork and beef to come back closer together, and people will start migrating back towards beef.

Let's say the economy tanks, plenty of people need to cut back on their spending, and as such, they can't afford the "luxury" of beef.  Beef demand goes down.  Pork demand, as a cheaper substitute, goes up.  If prices of pork go high enough, and people are desperate enough for a cheaper food, maybe they'll just go buy cereal, instead.

This is why, after the big recession, there was only one Fortune 500 company to actually turn a bigger profit than before - Campbell's Soup.  Soup is cheap.  It's a cheaper substitute than many other forms of food (Hell, you pretty much have to go for Ramen-level food to get cheaper), so its sales only really take off when people can't afford more luxurious foods.

Now then, here's where this can intersect with DF - not only are there plenty of substitues for dog leather or quarry bush leaf roasts, but if we are just talking about mugs and mugs alone, then there's still room for substitutes.  Which would you rather have to go drinking with your friends - a microcline mug that was baby's first craft project, or a masterwork obsidian mug with an image of a dwarf chopping a forgotten beast in half with an axe in green glass on it and menaces with spikes of iron?  One's cheap, but the other is a kickass drinking mug. 

How much more are you willing to pay for a kickass mug?


Now then, the thing is, Supply is actually really simple, especially in a world without economies of scale to make it more interesting.  Demand's the hard part.  Supply is just a measure of how fast the world will produce that given type of good.  Demand is the passing fads and trends and desires of the entire world's population. 

To find where supply and demand intersect, you just need to start a "bidding war" for the goods.  You need to find what everyone is willing to pay for a given good, and then how many are on the market at that piont in time.  If you have 5 mugs of a certain type, then the person who is willing to pay the fifth-highest price is the one who sets the price of those goods.  Nobody else below the fifth-highest bidder is willing to pay the price, but that's OK, you only need to sell 5. 

Now, this means you can really perform some neat tricks by creating some illusions of quality, like with the image in green glass - there's only ONE of those, so the guy willing to pay the most outrageous prices just to have the most kickass mug in town will be the only one to get one.  The guys willing to settle for more microcline mugs will be marketed the bulk-made cheap crap.


There is also the potential here for a dependency on a certain kind of good.  Someone may want to make a contract with you if you produce a large quantity of a certain kind of good to supply certain amounts of that good every year.  For example, the cities are dependant upon the villages to supply them with food, and their continued existence is based upon the expectation that food will be traded to them from the villages every year. 

If you flood the market with cheap microcline mugs, maybe all the other mug craftsmen decide that it's not worth their time to compete with you on price, anymore, and local woodcrafters might decide to just start making bolts or something, instead.  You get contracts to supply the local economies with pretty much all their mug demands.  It would still be cheap, but since you're driving your competition into other markets, you would still be able to at least offload your goods somewhere.  (You could also suddenly inject a shock to the system by not renewing your contract for one year, driving prices up on remaining mugs for the next year, but that would re-introduce competition trying to take up the slack.)

[AngleWyrm]

If you have towns start actually demanding things based upon some sort of abstracted uses they have for it, you can start working out how the demand should actually work, instead of just assuming that demand is based upon always wanting something.  This does raise the next question, though, which is, "How many stone mugs does one town go through in a year?"

This is where a definition of demand has to take place. One way to approach defining the demand for the various products is to weight them in relation to each other, across a full set of possible products. Start by saying there is a demand for one of everything annually per dwarf.

Then customize this demand pattern per product. Maybe one mug per dwarf per year is a reasonable amount of demand, but one quiver per dwarf per year is excessive and should be adjusted down. So for quivers it becomes one quiver per fifty dwarves per year, as a town-level demand for a product.

[therahedwig]

So argueably, classes should have a set price-range that determines what they will buy, based on a budget(probly what the town produces in excess anyway) and a little bit of randomisation.(Some people will buy pork even if beef is cheap)

There's also brand awareness to think about. However, what would be easier to track? Whether a mug was made by Urist Mclegendary or whether the mug came from the fort of Urist Mclegendary? Plus, how would this awareness spread? Like the adventure reputation system? Make one fantastic mug for the local elven lord, and suddenly Roperiddled is Mug-central to the elves?

Finally, there's interest, debt and other things that make baby jesus cry. It's probly not too interesting to have a bank on a short term, but I think it would be important if we would want a bit more realistic entity-heads, politics and nations and how this ties to the army-arc.(To start a war you need money)

EDIT: I just realised I can't figure out what the OP was trying to say, partially because of big walls of text and partially because of weird sentence-structure.

[NW_Kohaku]

Real-life Medieval society didn't really have much in terms of moneylending and debt and interest to worry about, thanks to the church's ban upon "usury" (moneylending), where only the Jewish could be bankers.  (Which didn't help them in terms of being viewed with hostility and suspiscion when they were making more money as bankers because they were allowed to do that "sinful" action.)

Of course, that's a religious bar upon economics, which I certainly wouldn't expect, say, goblins to live by.

As for brand names, as I said earlier, in America, there is a preference for certain stereotypes of other nations - French wines and German beers are epected to be of superior quality, while French beers and German wines are viewed with suspiscion.  Dwarves might be pigeonholed into making stone and metalcrafts, because that's "what dwarves are good at", while your prepared meals and quarry bush leaves are viewed with suspiscion.  I mean, a farming dwarf is as strange as a wine-drinking German!

[GreatWyrmGold]

All of this stuff is complex; therefore, let's start small.

Each type of item has a certain number that are needed per person every year, maybe 1000 for meals and 0.02 for swords. If a nation can't produce that many whatevers, the price goes up for them and the nation won't export them; if they make a lot more than they need of a certain item (or have tons in stock from your last caravan), then the price will go down and they'll start exporting more.
Different entities can have varying additional value modifiers-for instance, elves pay twice as much for metal goods because they can't make their own, and dwarves will only pay one-half as much for stone goods because they have tons (literally) of stone to use just from making their homes, and goblins would pay extra for weapons and armor (assuming you can trade with them), but will not pay as much for instruments.

Nice and simple...compared to your ideas, at least. (Although they still should be implemented, eventually.)

[NW_Kohaku]

All of this stuff is complex; therefore, let's start small.

Why? It's Dwarf Fortress.

Each type of item has a certain number that are needed per person every year, maybe 1000 for meals and 0.02 for swords. If a nation can't produce that many whatevers, the price goes up for them and the nation won't export them; if they make a lot more than they need of a certain item (or have tons in stock from your last caravan), then the price will go down and they'll start exporting more.

If they aren't producing anything, then maybe they should start doing so.  That's part of the supply curve, after all, the ability to have a stonecrafter say "mugs are already flooding the market, I should go into making toys, instead".  Unless they have no metal whatsoever, or something, then they should just start producing it.  That doesn't mean any human in his right mind wouldn't be trading for dwarven steel, though.

Nice and simple...compared to your ideas, at least. (Although they still should be implemented, eventually.)

Toady isn't really one to do things in baby steps, in case you haven't noticed.  He tends to write out giant chunks of code in anticipation of where he is going in the future, including building things that have no real purpose until some other aspects of the game actually do make it in.  Alchemist's workshops were kept around for a long time even though there was no alchemy, only soap.  Toys have been around, even though there are no ways to play with them, and nobody really even likes or wants them.

[therahedwig]

Ah, but wine-drinking frenchmen and beer drinking germans is also upheld by the countries themselves.

For example, all most French families drink low-quality wine at each meal, with high-quality wines being too expensive or for export.
Furthermore, said high quality wines are also under heavy restrictions, like how they're not allowed to add extra sugar and certain conservatives. This creates a certain elitistic quality about the wine. This doesn't always mean that it's better though, right now Chilli is considered the country with the best wines.

Similarly, German beers are made from aquifer water and again, they don't add extra sugar to it. This means that the water is of top-quality and also that you don't have to super-cool it before drinking it. Furthermore, because most european beers in general are supplied with aquifer water, it means that they never get very big. Many a brand only has one main still. This decreases the supply of the product, giving yet again a 'elitistic quality' to it.

On an even other note, I've lived in the Netherlands all my life, but I'm pretty certain I've actually never eaten Dutch beef. This is because the Dutch beef is much more valuable as export product(Plus, we are known as a frugal people, that's what a winter without food can do to you). Instead, we get African beef.

It's probly one of those cyclic things when you think about it.


Actually, I just googled across a book that mentions that the church was quite lenient on the whole usery thing.

[Andeerz]

Hmmm... I like where this is all going.

With regard to supply... I wonder how this stuff should be represented.  I can see what should affect supply and how it should affect price and all that.  Ultimately demand should create the incentive for someone to meet that demand.  Demand is among the biggest factors that affects supply.  That and availability of raw materials and resources like time, labor, and educational capital.  But how would dwarves (or whoever) peddling their wares or making stuff be aware of that demand?  Also, how would know that something is relatively rare/requires a lot of specialized labor and therefore merit a higher price? This is where the ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE bloat should come into play.

Ok, so, for a person who makes chainmaille; how would that person get into making that stuff in the first place?  Yeah, the player can force the person to do it.  That's a form of demand.  Or, in an AI controlled situation, perhaps a noble is all like "hey, I need maille.  Could you start making some?"  (How would the noble know about maille and that he would need it?).  How would the question be presented to the potential maillecrafterdwarfperson?  What would factor into a decision to undertake such a specialized craft?  The decision-making idea I posted earlier could set up a framework for this...  But how would the crafter know or get a good estimate (or bad if they are bad at that sort of thing) of what to demand in exchange for his services? 

And how would organizations come about that would exploit demand, like guilds (which are basically cartels!!!) that would try to monopolize educational capital (to teach craftspeople), resources, and the laborers themselves?  Churches, and enterprising entrepreneurs as well...  I think I got into this idea a bit in the class warfare or return of the guildmasters thread or something.

Also... NW_Kohaku, moneylending and debt and interest were things that were worried about in medieval times.  That, and money changing!  And this was no simply the domain of nobles and powerful people and merchants.  Though peasants probably didn't have much in the way of currency relative to others, debt, interest, and lending could still take place for them too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking).  I think I went into this in another thread.  I may refer to it later as this discussion progresses.  Also, the church certainly had a say, but think about how hypocritical they've always been, and reassess your statement.  XD Just pokin' fun there...

Also also, as for your comment on brand names!!!  I can support that for medieval times!!!  In several publications I've read on the matter with regard to armour, weapons, and other wares, there were sort of "brand names" back in the day.  For example, the best plate armour and wrought iron/steel was pretty much always accepted throughout the medieval times to come from Germany and Northern Italy (I forget the names of the exact locations!!!).  This was because of a few things:
1. The iron ore available in those areas had the right metallurgical composition (largely beyond the control of people at the time!!!) to yield good quality steely wrought iron that was hardenable

2.  A handful of guilds held a virtual monopoly on the raw resource, as well as the knowledge of how to optimally treat that iron ore to yield good steel, as well as the skills of making well made armour (they had control over the educational capital).  These guilds tended to keep these people in the area, and those that went elsewhere were well known and highly sought after by governments at the time, and tended to keep affiliated with their guild.

These guilds and individual craftspeople as well as the name of the urban centers/geographic areas where the good iron, guilds, and craftspeople were from became the "brand names".  There are numerous accounts of monarchs demanding iron from a particular location in germany (Innsbruk I think?), and also demand for armorers of a famous guild to come stay in their country and work for them and teach people.  Also, the term "brand name"... I wonder if it has to do with swords, as "brand" means sword in some language I forget... it might have to do with exactly this!!!  Ok, I am rambling now and I need to get back to work...



 

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm sure that when it matters, DF players are going to want to have the ability to ensure that their obsidian mugs with green glass decorations and spikes of steel will not be stolen by the local nobles who won't even pay for the goods they take.  It would probably be a situation more like the French low-quality wines for the people who actually live there, and the high-quality wines for export. 

Still, yes, that's the sort of thing we would probably want to spring for - our fortress is known for superlative steel weaponry and excellent weaponsmiths.

As for church usery, yes, they did have ways around it, especially the further forward through the Middle Ages and into the Rennaisance they got, and the economic benefits were just too good to pass up for some silly reason like that they, the church itself, had banned it.  The Knights Templar made their money through banking, and they were the military arm of the church.  (Using an elaborate set of metaphors to avoid actually call it lending.)  They were eventually declared heretics largely because the French king, who controlled the Pope at the time, owed them so much money his nation would be bankrupt if he didn't somehow cancel the debt (by killing the creditor).


Oh boy, Andeerz posted something ninjaing me.  It's long enough that I'll just post this, anyway, and respond to Andeerz separately.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, Go-Go-Gadget-Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_name#History

Brand names derived (as I suspected) from the act of branding (burning), especially cattle to mark ownership.  (An overwhelming number of Medieval legal cases were settling disputes over who owned what cows or what piece of property, and hedgerows marking territory and brands for cattle could make ownership more provable.)

Most craftsmen themselves would generate their own trademarks or brands on their goods.  A pewter dishware maker would stamp some logo and his initials on his work to say who had made those goods.

[Demicus]

On the note of Brand Names, I think it should be proceedural, so interesting things happen, like a civilization of humans that are reknown for making excellent wines, or a small fortress of dwarves that are the fashion central of the world because of their brand name over clothing. Sure it should be influenced by raws, since a world where dwarrves are laughed at for making metal or stone items would be weird.

[GreatWyrmGold]

All of this stuff is complex; therefore, let's start small.

Why? It's Dwarf Fortress.

A.) Real life is complicated; every nuance would take a LONG time to code. The arc is underway; I'd be content with a half-solution now.
B.) (more important) It should be easily grasped by players. Toady can't make it perfect, but he can make it comprehensible. Same with, say, metalsmelting.

On the note of Brand Names, I think it should be proceedural, so interesting things happen, like a civilization of humans that are reknown for making excellent wines, or a small fortress of dwarves that are the fashion central of the world because of their brand name over clothing. Sure it should be influenced by raws, since a world where dwarrves are laughed at for making metal or stone items would be weird.

Agreed. Procureal generation of any brand names goes without saying.
"This sword is genuine Sheep of Malice steel from Randomfort, forged by the legendary smiths of Magmaslayer!"
"I prefer the handling of Greenstone smiths, personally."

[Urist McUselessNoble]

The more major complication on elasticity of demand is "substitutables".  In real life, beef is the most heavily demanded and pricey meat.  Pork is a substitute for beef - it's cheaper, but people want beef more, so they are willing to pay more for beef.  Cereal is an even cheaper substiute than either of them.

I think there are ways to deal with this without making our computers cry.

Dwarf Fortress has, essentially, four classes of goods:

Spoiler: Raw materials and intermediate goods (click to show/hide)

Leather
Rock and clay**
Ore
Flux
Cloth
Wood**
Bars**
Blocks*
Seeds
Anvils*
Pump works*
Picks*
Animals
Dyes
Cooking-required raw foods (flour, sugar, QB leaves, etc.)
Gems
Bags*
Thread
Ropes**
Barrels*
Sand
Raw glass
Coal
Lye and potash
Pearlash
Buckets*
Nest boxes, hives, jugs*
Mine carts and wheelbarrows*

Spoiler: Civilian goods (click to show/hide)

Food
Drink
Clothes
Some furniture* (beds, chairs, tables, coffins, doors, armor stands, hatch covers, grates, etc.)
Slabs

Spoiler: Military goods (click to show/hide)

Weapons and Armor*
Ammo
Plaster
Splints, crutches*
Waterskins, Quivers, Backpacks*
Mechanisms, Trap Components and Cages*

Spoiler: Luxuries (click to show/hide)

Crafts, toys, instruments, mugs (would become civilian goods if used in skill training, etc.)
Other furniture (statues, windows, etc.)*
Blood, extracts, golden salve, gnomeblight (ditto)
Anything with decorations

Stuff that does not break and is not consumed (capital goods, if you will) is marked with an asterisk. A double asterisk denotes goods which have both consumption and capital uses (e.g. rocks can be both a building material and a raw material, chains can be both furniture and input into traction benches).

Just from skimming the list, we can already arrive at two rules:

Spoiler: Pricing Principle 1: Stock-flow consistency (click to show/hide)

Demand for non-perishable goods must be based on stock variables, demand for perishables on flow variables. Supply of non-perishables is the available stock, while supply of perishables is the available flow.

A farming village of the human civilization The Rusty Buckets with a population of 26 and a wealth level of Subsistence will need a number of barrels in total and a number of meals per year. Prices of barrels will depend on the number of barrels available in the center of trade relative to the number of barrels needed by the entities using that CoT. Prices of meals will depend on the number of meals brought into the CoT per year, relative to the number needed by the users of the CoT.

(This is a key part of what is called "stock-flow consistency" in econospeak. Failure to observe stock-flow consistency is the single fastest way to put your model on the crazy train to la-la-land.)

Spoiler: Pricing Principle 2: Demand drivers (click to show/hide)

Demand for luxuries should be based on the level of wealth of the community. Demand for military goods should depend on the (desired) level of military preparedness. Demand for the necessaries of life should depend on population size and species.

In the real world most prices adjust only slowly, for a variety of reasons. Quality can be treated simply as nested subsets:

Spoiler: Pricing Principle 3: Price stickiness (click to show/hide)

The base price for a category evolves as [category base price, this year] = [category base price, last year] x(1/(1+[constant specifying ease of stockpiling]x[last year's relative surplus, if any]) + [constant specifying urgency of making up shortfalls]x[last year's relative shortfall, if any]) - [constant related to fungibility between quality levels]x[absolute markup over next-best quality level (if any)]

A "category" is defined by fungibility and quality. "Weapons, + or better" could be a category, if entity military doctrine is not specified. Alternatively, "short swords, + or better" could be a category, if each entity has a preferred TOE for its armed forces.

This model provides a computationally simple algorithm which is able to produce quite complex behavior. Depending on supplier behavior, it can generate Lotka-Volterra-style cycles, you can see higher-quality items crowding out lower-quality items as the manufacturing base becomes more skilled, etc.

That should about cover it for the demand side and the pricing mechanism. Next in line is the supply side, a market structure and a bit of wrap up of some loose ends in defining the precise demand functions.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Neat. I'd like to point out that nearly everything you listed as unbreakable should break, and probably will at some point in the future.

[Urist McUselessNoble]

And if and when that occurs, we can repurpose the capital goods classification to cover desired buffer stocks. If the bucket in your well is liable to rust away, you will want to have a stockpile with a couple of buckets for replacement. Different name, but identical mechanics. We already have to deal with demand for stuff like ropes which is both a furniture and reaction item, so demand must be the sum of the stock-demand and the flow-demand, even if one of them will at present be zero for some goods.

Actually, a "desired buffer stock" demand might be added to all the flow goods from the ground up without loss of generality or any great increase in computational overhead.