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[Naryar]

Steel is too much of a waste to go on exportation of LSD's. I just use silver or copper ones, or iron if I am REALLY flooding in iron.

Cloth industry I have never really set up, unless you're talking about leather.

Prepared meal industry is awesome however. You need highly skilled growers and cooks, but even an exceptional plump helmet roast *15 sells for a pretty nice value.

Not to mention that you nearly always end up overflowing in food anyways.

[FrisianDude]

Depends on how much steel you can make, I suppose. In one of my previous fortress most of everything was carved out of marble and my furnaces were powered by magma. There was also lignite and bituminous coal aplenty, so steel was not an actual problem.

[kirrian]

I think I might try a new challenge... nothing on embark, never build a trade post. Should be fun. Like the king demanding we figure out how the hell those damn elves even survive! Willow boots?!?!

I've been ignoring the whole economy thing so far. If I can make steel on site, my only purchases from the caravans are usually booze from the first caravan and occasionally some food stuffs if I forget to butcher something during any given year.

I am really looking forward to when Toady gets the chance to work on trade and economy stuff. I'm hoping the taxdwarf has to charge someone with failure to pay taxes. Or hearing that such'n'such human town just loves our fine pewter goblets and the king wants us to make more. Fun stuff!

[nightwhips]

I think any discussion of dwarven economy as it currently exists is pretty silly. They are ALL unbalanced. There is no demand. Who the hell wants chalk cabochons? Who the hell wants xpigtail thongsx covered in dwarven entrails? Apparently the traders. If you can't buy what you need, you're doing it wrong. It only gets interesting if you NEED the stuff you might otherwise trade, like clothes, disks (if steel is rare), or potentially weapons.

[Girlinhat]

Correct, there is currently only the most basic idea of supply and demand.  Namely that the liaison will make a demand for some random assortment of items every year, which has nothing to do with last year's sales or the state of items across the world.

Thus, we're in the Caravan Arc, where this stuff gets addressed.  Patience is not only a virtue, it's mandatory.

[nightwhips]

I suspect it will always be possible to "abuse" the economy, provided you pick and choose your embark based on resources. If you have all the iron in the world, you're in a good situation, always. If you embark in an interesting location without 20k native gold or hematite, though, the economy will be a lot more fun. And I mean that in every sense. When it will get really interesting is when there are world-wide shortages of raw goods, for example. Then your leather or your wood might become that much more valuable, both to YOU, and to the world. And then you have to make choices. ("Tree-farming for !Fun! and Profit!)

[SkyRender]

Hauling is free labor, I can't imagine anyone figuring in hauling costs into their economy...

 In supply and logistics (at least when it's done right), anything between "production start" and "finished good in the hands of the consumer" is considered waste.  This mindset is specifically so one can avoid assumptions like that.  The key to high productivity is finding ways to reduce wasteful activities along the supply chain.  If you go in with assumptions of "no cost" for labors like hauling, you're automatically crippling your efforts without even realizing it!  A common justification for this sort of mindset is a focus on efficiency, which goes counter to productivity.  When a system is highly productive, it tends to be at 50% efficiency at best by most efficiency measures.  Oh, and I swapped a variable and mis-weighted for early production on time taken in that analysis above.  It should've been 2 LSSDs per day, and the average actually works out to more like 4 per day once the industry gets going.  So yeah, value over time in the long run?  Closer to 26,460,000 per year.

 This whole discussion has got me thinking about setting up a wealth-generating challenge to see how badly the economy can be broken in DF.  The game is cited by its subtitles to be all about greed and industriousness, yet everyone focuses on combat and megaprojects.  I think it's time to take the game back to its roots...

[khearn]

Hauling is free labor, I can't imagine anyone figuring in hauling costs into their economy...

I agree 100%. If you have any idle dwarves sitting around, then hauling is free. If you don't have any idle dwarves, then you need to quit atom-smashing migrants. Long hauls are not a big deal because it creates a pipeline. In the long run, ore arrives at the smelter at the same rate it is mined. Having 3 or 4 chunks of ore in transit at any given time is not a problem, assuming you have enough haulers.

Long hauls are not a problem, but long trips for your skilled workers can be. Keep input stockpiles right next to (or above/below) the shop. This reduces the time your skilled worker has to spend getting the inputs. Not only does that tie up the worker, it also ties up the shop. Output stockpiles can be as far away as needed, since that just ties up haulers, which are cheap and plentiful. Have "hauler stockpiles" near the shops, so there is minimal delay from when an item is made and when a hauler arrives to clear it out to avoid clutter.

A "hauler stockpile is a dining/meeting hall with food and booze stockpiles handy. A hauler can bring a chunk of ore to the stockpile next to the smelter, then if he has no job he'll wander to the nearby dining/meeting hall to sit around. When the smelter has bars ready, he'll get off his butt and haul them to the bar pile next to the forge, then go back to the hall to wait until weapons are done. At that point, he's still close by so he can immediately haul them upstairs to the weapon stockpile near the depot & barracks. Items never sit still for long. Shops never sit still for long waiting for the skilled worker to collect inputs. The only thing that is ever idle is the haulers.

On the other hand, trying to maximize efficiency and put every dwarf to work will just give you ulcers, and you won't be able to buy any more from a given caravan because you can already buy everything. All it will do is make it so you have to give the caravan a few hundred percent more profit. Yes, I say "have to" because you don't really want all those extra widgets sitting around dragging down your FPS. Once you're making enough widgets to buy everything you need/want from the caravan, excess production is actually more harmful than helpful.

[SkyRender]

Hauling is free labor, I can't imagine anyone figuring in hauling costs into their economy...

I agree 100%. If you have any idle dwarves sitting around, then hauling is free. If you don't have any idle dwarves, then you need to quit atom-smashing migrants. Long hauls are not a big deal because it creates a pipeline. In the long run, ore arrives at the smelter at the same rate it is mined. Having 3 or 4 chunks of ore in transit at any given time is not a problem, assuming you have enough haulers.

Long hauls are not a problem, but long trips for your skilled workers can be. Keep input stockpiles right next to (or above/below) the shop. This reduces the time your skilled worker has to spend getting the inputs. Not only does that tie up the worker, it also ties up the shop. Output stockpiles can be as far away as needed, since that just ties up haulers, which are cheap and plentiful. Have "hauler stockpiles" near the shops, so there is minimal delay from when an item is made and when a hauler arrives to clear it out to avoid clutter.

A "hauler stockpile is a dining/meeting hall with food and booze stockpiles handy. A hauler can bring a chunk of ore to the stockpile next to the smelter, then if he has no job he'll wander to the nearby dining/meeting hall to sit around. When the smelter has bars ready, he'll get off his butt and haul them to the bar pile next to the forge, then go back to the hall to wait until weapons are done. At that point, he's still close by so he can immediately haul them upstairs to the weapon stockpile near the depot & barracks. Items never sit still for long. Shops never sit still for long waiting for the skilled worker to collect inputs. The only thing that is ever idle is the haulers.

On the other hand, trying to maximize efficiency and put every dwarf to work will just give you ulcers, and you won't be able to buy any more from a given caravan because you can already buy everything. All it will do is make it so you have to give the caravan a few hundred percent more profit. Yes, I say "have to" because you don't really want all those extra widgets sitting around dragging down your FPS. Once you're making enough widgets to buy everything you need/want from the caravan, excess production is actually more harmful than helpful.

 If you look at your extended argument, you're not really saying that hauling is a free labor there.  What you ARE saying is that it's a supporting labor which the productive staff should not have to engage in.  Which is basically what my analysis was citing before; you've pretty much put my deductions into a more wordy form.  Though at a glance we disagree, in reality we're in perfect agreement.

[Mushroo]

I am a big fan of the so-called "bagriculture" industry because it allows me to reap huge profits without being quite as blatantly ridiculous as prepared meals.

Here's how it works:

Grow pig tails in summer/fall, dimple cups in winter/spring
Make dyed & decorated bags (fairly valuable right there, not as much as robes though)
Grow quarry bushes, cave wheat, sweet pods, etc.
Process or mill to bag
Store bags in decorated barrels (I am partial to platinum pots)
Profit

If you have a legendary planter and potash fertilizer, you will have 25-45 quarry bush leaves per bag and your spice barrels will be worth quite a bit.

(Of course you could also cook those same quarry leaves to lavish meals and make millions, but where's the fun in that? Bagriculture at least creates the illusion that your dwarfs are working hard.)

[rtg593]

...All it will do is make it so you have to give the caravan a few hundred percent more profit. Yes, I say "have to" because you don't really want all those extra widgets sitting around dragging down your FPS. Once you're making enough widgets to buy everything you need/want from the caravan, excess production is actually more harmful than helpful.

...Well. That explains my FPS sufferings I always abandon my fort to. It's always when I have a few thousand drink, a few thousand lavish meals, a few thousand stone, a few thousand... of everything, really.

Why have I never thought of this, lol. Guess this explains the dwarven obsession with atom-smashing, as well...

[Mushroo]

Also keep in mind the more useless,high-value stuff you make, the sooner the goblin seige will come...

[rtg593]

Also keep in mind the more useless,high-value stuff you make, the sooner the goblin seige will come...

... Isn't that the only reason to make useless, high-value stuff?

[saurio]

For trading I'd go for steel serrated disks as others have pointed out. It's upwards from 15k per disk, depending on quality.

If it's about easy profit, just stockpile some precious native metal rocks by the workshops and make some mechanisms or rock crafts. Profit for the minimum effort.

Also keep in mind the more useless,high-value stuff you make, the sooner the goblin seige will come...

... Isn't that the only reason to make useless, high-value stuff?

And maybe to stock unthinkable riches in ridiculously opulent rooms for your favorite dwarves while the rest live in squalor?

[RAKninja]

textiles is my industry.  i produce rope reeds and dimple cups.  i raise alpaca.

but this is not where most of my product comes from...

you see, the main facet of my textiles industry is liberating textiles from the goblins, and decorating them to sell for a profit.  i buy all the cloth and thread that i can, my demand is huge.

oh, and dye, i buy all that too.

and even then i tend to give away large consignments for free, just to free up space to get more goblinite off the map...  economically.