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[Name Lips]

We have to assume that the Dwarven Government wants to rent all of its rooms so it can make back some money. You'd think they'd be annoyed that a room is sitting vacant when they could possibly be making some money off of it, even if it's not as much as they'd really like.

How about this system: The most expensive, highest-quality room's rent is lowered slowly one copper piece at a time until there's a dwarf who can afford to rent it (probably the wealthiest dwarf). Then the second most expensive, high-quality room is subjected to the same procedure until the second most wealthy dwarf can afford it. And so on and so forth.

Until finally, assuming you have enough housing, your poorest dwarfs are in your most humble apartments paying as much as they can possibly afford to pay, and your wealthiest dwarfs are in the most expensive apartments.

Potential problems: dwarfs' wealth is fluxuating, as is the quality of the rooms. Perhaps update the room assignments every season? Every year?

Second solution idea:
Don't define bedrooms off of furniture. Any space can be defined as a bedroom even if it's totally empty, doesn't have walls or doors, etc. Then the dwarf who ends up renting the EMPTY apartment is in charge of purchasing his own furniture. These items don't change the cost of rent, but do cost his own money and he might have to save up for them. If he ever chooses to rent a larger apartment, he'll have to move all his stuff (perhaps he'll invite his friend with the large flatbed mule to help). If times ever get desperate, he can sell some of his stuff to be able to afford his rent.
To solve the "all my beds are masterwork and nobody can afford them" problem, you need to assume all dwarfs can go outside and construct a straw sleeping mat for free. If the barracks or their bedroom doesn't have a bed free, they'll just pull out their straw mat and use it instead.

[Mechanoid]

Furniture shops FTW

Hopefully room designation will be like this in the future. (though obviously players should still be allowed to place furniture)
Imagine a group of dwarves automatically filling the dining room they own with tables and chairs... Finally those damn nobles will haul their own mandated (or demanded) crap.  

[Felix the Cat]

quote:Originally posted by Name Lips:
<STRONG>If the barracks or their bedroom doesn't have a bed free, they'll just pull out their straw mat and use it instead.</STRONG>

+1 to THAT idea.

Heck, even make sleeping mats constructable somewhere would be nice. They'd be a fraction of the value of beds for room valuation purposes and would be free from quality modifiers (somehow I'm having trouble envisioning what a masterpiece straw sleeping mat would look like).

Maybe make straw something that cave wheat could be processed into, bales of straw could be fed to your ranch animals once animals eating and more effective ranching is in.

[irmo]

quote:Originally posted by Name Lips:
<STRONG>How about this system: The most expensive, highest-quality room's rent is lowered slowly one copper piece at a time until there's a dwarf who can afford to rent it (probably the wealthiest dwarf). Then the second most expensive, high-quality room is subjected to the same procedure until the second most wealthy dwarf can afford it. And so on and so forth.

Until finally, assuming you have enough housing, your poorest dwarfs are in your most humble apartments paying as much as they can possibly afford to pay, and your wealthiest dwarfs are in the most expensive apartments.</STRONG>

Auction system.  I like it.  We would need a concept of what a dwarf can reasonably afford to pay--maybe half of their monthly income, adjusted for personality traits.

quote:<STRONG>
Potential problems: dwarfs' wealth is fluxuating, as is the quality of the rooms. Perhaps update the room assignments every season? Every year?</STRONG>

How about this: run through the full auction procedure every year to calculate rent.  Other than that, if a room's value changes enough to move it above or below another room, those two rooms exchange rents.  So at the beginning of the year you have four bedrooms:

code:

Room Rent
----|----
 A  | 330
 B  | 165
 C  | 155
 D  | 120

and you have room C engraved, raising its "property value" above room B's, its rent rises to 165 and the rent for B drops to 155.

Likewise, if a dwarf can't afford to pay rent, he switches places with the occupant of the next cheapest room.  So the dwarf in C is doing his job, paying his rent of 155 a month, and spending the rest of his income on other expenses.  Suddenly his room has been upgraded and he now owes 165!  But it's not a huge problem; if he can't pay, he moves into B, and the guy from B, who was already paying 165, moves into C.  (Of course if the guy in C has some savings, he might be able to stay until the next annual auction.)

This allows room rents to fluctuate, but since changes in room value don't directly force anyone to move, you don't have everyone packing up and playing Musical Rooms every time you smooth a floor tile.

[Tamren]

Makes sense. The whole rent system is a form of property tax. Obviously if no one can afford to own anything, you would not get any anything back in taxes. So you would lower your rates to the point where you can make some money.

The auction system is one way to do it. Obviously supply and demand would have to be a factor in the system as well.

Could you also offer a simple "tax cut"?

[ September 11, 2007: Message edited by: Tamren ]

[Turgid Bolk]

So nobles and legendaries would automatically get the best rooms? Sounds good. By the way, I believe your idea irmo is called a "bubble sort" algorithm, which I think would work fine for small and rare changes in room value, but may be kind of slow if you suddenly decide to engrave half your rooms or something. As long as the whole list gets up to date every season it's no big deal, though.

I think we should be able to directly assign dwarves to rooms, regardless of cost. Maybe you couldn't give too many dwarves tax breaks, or leave too many legendary rooms empty, without the manager getting peeved, but putting your workforce where you want them should be possible.

[Dryn]

If the Govt wants to make cash (which is the assumption that we are working with) then it wants to rent out as quick as possible for the highest price possible. The 'tick down auction' (as I am calling the first suggested solution) isn't really that quick. Homeless dwarves will be sleeping for free while waiting for the price to tick down to an affordable level.

If we use the dwarves (newly coded) social ability we could get them to negotiate with others to get a room. They could try to rent at a reduced price, or to purchase a lease off another dwarf for a room they can afford, or other similar activities. Of course since it is all state owned housing if someone is willing to pay more then you, you could very well be evicted.

If dwarves had the capacity to shift to more expensive lodgings, it would also provide more space at the bottom of the market.

(As an aside what I think would be cool was if rooms could be bought by dwarves, just like stores can. )

[Tamren]

Would my "standard of living" idea work here?

The way the idea works is you can set a minimum quality for each class of housing. This way even the poorest dwarf would be allowed to live in a 3X3 double detailed room because you have 40 of them and they are ALL like that.

[Mechanoid]

Definitely.
The standard room quality of all rooms of a type should weigh heavilly on how much the room costs.

[irmo]

quote:Originally posted by Dryn:
<STRONG>If the Govt wants to make cash (which is the assumption that we are working with) then it wants to rent out as quick as possible for the highest price possible. The 'tick down auction' (as I am calling the first suggested solution) isn't really that quick. Homeless dwarves will be sleeping for free while waiting for the price to tick down to an affordable level. </STRONG>

It doesn't actually "tick down" over a period of game time.  What happens is that the game calculates (based on income, with some tweaking by personality factors) what each dwarf is willing to pay for rent.  Then the richest (highest-paying) dwarf gets the best room, the second richest gets the second-best room, etc.  Continue until you run out of rooms or dwarves.  Then the rent for each room is set to what they're willing to pay.

Social abilities like haggling could be abstracted by giving a slight boost to "affordable rent" in the room assignment step, but then calculating rent normally, so that a smooth talker has a chance at getting a better room than he could otherwise afford.

[Name Lips]

If Toady could code a true, fluxuating supply-and-demand economy, this would all be a moot point. But that would be insanely complicated, with prices varying depending on the amount of money in circulation, how many goods are available, and so on. To really get it going, you might have to PAY dwarfs to mine or construct buildings/items, with an actual "treasury" counter in the corner of the screen showing how much you can still afford. Mint more money, and inflation kicks in, and the prices for you to do things go up.

I wouldn't wish such a complicated system on Toady. That's why I was suggesting the quicker, "auction"-like system of abstracting supply and demand.

[Tahin]

I like this idea very much. This and the coin stacking issue are the two reasons that the economy is currently "bugged." Oh, and dwarves starving to death because you don't have enough work for them, but I just like to think of that as a "survival of the fittest" type of thing.