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[GoombaGeek]

Coinage Reform

Okay, it's been a while, and at this point I'm pretty much a Bay12 Suggester (Rusty). Anyway, I was making batches of coins in my latest fortress, trying to make some every year (eventually, one of each year and composition would go on display somewhere). Unfortunately, the monetary system as it is now is pretty boring, what with the lack of a working economy. Coins are either projectiles or practice tools for your metalcrafters. Come on! There's lots of changes we can make, so that we'll have a much richer system that'll hopefully make a real economy that much easier. Of course, you can still do it the old way for simplicity, but more control over your money could mean greater success in trade.

Striking: it's not pretty

Right now, you get some dwarf at an anvil to strike batches of 500 coins in one go. Since we live in modern civilization, we probably envision these to be nice and round, especially because dwarfs are supposed to be good at this sort of thing. Well, if you're just striking these things at an anvil, this lumpy thing is more representative:


And yes, we should probably call that particular task "Strike [metal] coins" instead of "Mint [metal] coins". More on that later.

The first actually round coins were the Chinese ones with the holes in. They would get put on a square dowel and lathed into shape - this was invented more than a thousand years ago (are you tech-level wankers still around?)! However, the first way to make a coin by machine was invented by da Vinci: the screw press. Oh wait, we already have a screw press! Well, I can't imagine dwarves using the same press for food and metal - that's just unclean (and we all know how clean our forts are). So let's invent a new workshop, which is just called the "Mint". (Note - this won't replace the "Strike Coins" task, but it will supplant it.)

The Mint

This particular workshop needs power - until the invention of the steam press, many strategies were used, ranging from water-wheels to just using livestock to do the work. Yes, water-wheels. It's almost like this is historically justifiable. Anyway, plug it in to your nearest water reactor, and you're ready to undergo a three-step process to make your fortress' currency. (Why would you bother? Wait and see!)

The first task would be converting metal bars into blanks (the lumps used at the anvil are called "flans", while the round blanks used nowadays are called "planchets"). This would require power, and give you a bunch of blanks (but the process would still train Metalcrafting). These blanks could be traded for their metal content alone, or launched at goblins. And your results can be more customizable - you can select the number of blanks to make from a few lists (e.g. make 100, make 250, make 500, make 1000, make 2000), and their size will scale accordingly. So now you can have different sizes of bullets money!

Then you engrave the dies with your Metalcrafters - you have to select the composition and size here. (Hear me out - some metals strike differently than others, and a die made for hard nickel could totally mess up a gold blank.) The designs will be random as usual, but they'll have more stuff depending on how big the blanks are: a small coin could have just one simple element (e.g. the date and a dwarf), while a big one could have a whole tableau (e.g. the date, the full civilization name, and a royal procession). Since coins of a certain size and composition will use the same dies, their design will stay the same until you engrave new dies (which will replace the old ones - "dies" aren't really items). Other things that could influence the design would be commemoratives - if there's been a round number of years (10, 20, 30... 100, 200, 300...) since a certain event, it's likely that the event will show up on your dies that year ("King Urist: 90 Years of his Glorious Reign!"). Or a noble could mandate that you put his ugly mug on that year's pennies, and the metalcrafter will comply automatically when you engrave the dies (if you don't re-engrave them in time, the nearest metalworker gets hammered!).

Then you strike! This takes a Mechanic, who oversees the process. Everything goes smoothly - you get however many coins as you put in, and you now have stacks of nice, round coins, ready to be thrown at your enemies (OR used to facilitate commerce). These coins still lack quality modifiers.

But what's the point of all this??

Facilitating Commerce

Right now, coins are just small bars. They're sold for their metal value and have no quality, and they never circulate. Well, can't we make them a bit more interesting? (Yes)

First, traders need to accept your coins. This will be a slow process. In the first year, they'll take your coins like they take bars of metal, and you won't receive much of an advantage. However, they will begin to get familiar with your fortress' currency, and trust it more. The trust-o-meter (independent to every civilization) is increased with every trade you make with your coins, and properly minted coins increase it much faster than crudely struck ones. Next year, they'll take your coins for the same price as last year - but this time, they'll let you get more for your money. Once you've established long-term relations with a civilization and they trust your currency, you'll be able to trade near-parity - you get nearly ☼50,000 of goods for ☼50,000 in coins.

Other civilizations issue coins, too! They'll probably need to meet certain criteria in population or wealth before issuing minted coinage, but these coins will be accepted by their home civilizations at parity with the insubstantial dwarfbuck. And caravans will bring you some foreign coins as well, selling them above their face value. Imagine that you've spent years buying up all the goblin money you can, and when the next goblin siege comes, you leave it in a conspicuous location. They grab it and leave without killing anyone. Or, once history still happens during Fortress Mode, a roving adventurer offers his services in exchange for the money of his home civilization. You'll be able to make intercivilizational deals and trades much easier this way.

Wear

We assume that once dwarfs can individually buy things, they'll start carrying around coins in their pockets. Why not let them wear down in this scenario? After about a year, they'll downgrade from coin to xcoinx, and after about two years, XcoinX, and after about four years, XXcoinXX. They'll stay as XXcoinXX indefinitely, but merchants are likely to refuse these coins, or pay less (as they'll be lighter with wear). The solution is to re-strike them at the Mint through some kind of private deal-making. For our purposes, you can keep striking the same coin from XX to brand-new forever. There's precedent for this, too: in the early days of America, the newly opened Philadelphia mint would take your jewelery, silver spoons, and foreign silver, and melt it down into brand-new American coins, which would be returned to you at no cost. As long as coins were traded based on precious metal weight (e.g. since antiquity), these deals abounded.

Adventure mode

Coins from other civilizations can be spent by you at a loss, and you could probably find buyers for very old coins you find in tombs and the like. Lairs will have money from all over inside, and some of it could have a value greater than its metal value (for those of you keeping track at home: during the Renaissance, collecting ancient Greek or Roman coins was a popular hobby among the upper class)

Miscellanea

There are more aspects that could work with a real economy, but they seemed easily abused - like debasement (lowering the precious metal content) and inflation. For instance, I thought that a government, when times were tough, could switch from silver to sterling silver, and the sterling silver coins would exchange for less and less compared to the pure silver as time went on. This could work if governments only debased one way (like in real life), but then I realized that this is Dwarf Fortress and some yobbo would probably work something out, like:

- Make valuable silver coins.
- Switch to lead next year. These lead coins are traded for less than silver, but still above lead because it's only been a year since debasement.
- Switch back to silver. The value of your currency will rise back up, and you can repeat, making a massive profit off of worthless lead coins.

There was also clipping (cutting slivers of precious metal off the edges of coins), but it seemed too minute to represent in-game just yet. Counterfeiting could be interesting, but we don't have many situations where the omniscient Overseer can't tell what's going on - vampires seem a few steps up from such mundane sneakiness as fake money.

I was also thinking of having collector interest and high prices for rare coins, but this seemed like a surefire path to exploitation. However, you could probably balance it out - let's say you've made 200 1051 coins, and 5,000 1052 coins. The 1051 coins will be worth a bit more. Now let's say you've made 50 1051 coins, and 50 1052 coins. Neither of these will have a premium over the other, despite the low mintage. On the other hand, this is fundamentally a supply and demand market, which seems a bit out of reach for now. And one last suggestion that didn't make it all the way:

Cupronickel

A mixture of copper and nickel is used to this day in coinage (American nickels especially). I think some people hate nickel, though, cos it's unrealistic. Well, bad news - nickel alloyed with copper was first used in coinage in the 2nd century BC. So we could add it, coins-wise, but it's mostly been used as a silver substitute in floating currencies not on any standard, which is a bit too economically advanced for us.

[Urist MacNoob]

I like the idea. It sails way over my head, but I like it.

[Gargomaxthalus]

When it comes to nickel, we actually have a mind blowing situation. There is evidence that electroplating could go back thousands of years. This means that it is feasible to use nickle plating to increase the longevity of iron and steel items when the issue of general item wear is hammered out. On a related note it has been found that the Romans and Egyptians developed water powered saws in order to cut large quantities of wood and even stone in an efficient manner and there is also the matter of old prized alloys like Damascus Steel, which go above and beyond what others could accomplish at this time. Hell the Britons, and the Germanic tribes were likely using iron and even steel weapons before the Romans thanks to the regions peat bogs. This raises the question of exactly how Toady is defining his time cut off point. Is it stuff that had existed up to that point, or is it stuff that existed in Europe at that point.

[Mr. Palau]

When it comes to nickel, we actually have a mind blowing situation. There is evidence that electroplating could go back thousands of years. This means that it is feasible to use nickle plating to increase the longevity of iron and steel items when the issue of general item wear is hammered out. On a related note it has been found that the Romans and Egyptians developed water powered saws in order to cut large quantities of wood and even stone in an efficient manner and there is also the matter of old prized alloys like Damascus Steel, which go above and beyond what others could accomplish at this time. Hell the Britons, and the Germanic tribes were likely using iron and even steel weapons before the Romans thanks to the regions peat bogs. This raises the question of exactly how Toady is defining his time cut off point. Is it stuff that had existed up to that point, or is it stuff that existed in Europe at that point.

No gunpowder in DF, so Europe circa 1400 b/c if he included the world we would need gunpowder b/c the chinese had it.

[Dwarf Kitty]

My idea for a mint streamlines this:  A treasurer noble design the coins, then a smith would mint the actual coins.  Coldstamping would work, too.  So would employing a craftsdwarf to make wooden coins in a pinch.  The treasurer could then design new coins each year.
 
However, I'd then make the coins "disappear."  The designs could still be viewed, but they'd vanish as in-game items.  This might be the only way to deal with a problem that cropped up when the economy was first attempted:  Dwarves became more interested in storing their coins of earned wages than in actual work, or they'd leave coins lying around, cluttering up the fort.  The old economy worked with or without coinage, so an easy workaround would be just not to make coins.   
 
Another compromise would be that the internal economy of the fort is handled on paper, but the coins are used as currency in trading.  Part of a fort's wealth would then be in a vault, and the game could come up with some art for the coinage of the other civs.  Since the game does generate civ events for everyone, this would be pretty simple to implement and fun to discover.  Maybe keep track in the civillizations screen.
 
 
I'm not all that certain you could justify a coin-collection element.  First, Urist McCollector would simply stash away a set or two of the freshly-minted 1053 coins he gets in his wages and keep them instead of pursuing the buy-sell market for coins.
 
Second, if we did have an internal market for coins, that'd take more time away from the real work of the fort.  Players would be annoyed if Urist did his Gollum impression over a few lovely coins when he should have been brewing beer.
 
Third, the only in-game justification for coin collecting is for trading value, and the coins you make for general circulation won't be rare enough to warrant trading to caravans at a hundred times their face values or worth in metal.

[zkenyon]

I feel like inventions of leonardo fall slightly after the game's arbitrary historical cutoff, which seems to have been specifically chosen to avoid the renaissance. That said I am always in favor of more details.