I think Scruiser and Goblincookie you guys are misunderstanding what I mean by "market forces".
Let's just forget the words, you can define communism however you want, I don't care. And like I said the degree of "free markets" or "planning" really does not matter to and has nothing to do with what I'm saying. And market forces
are natural and unavoidable, and they
do exist in the game already, and if you don't think so then I think you are misunderstanding what I mean by "market forces". Dwarves already seek utility, to an extent. They like to eat, and go on breaks, and socialize etc. They already have
limited desires, and the compelling effect of those desires on their behaviour is
literally a market force. That's what I mean.
I'm literally just saying that "exchange value" in the game needs to come from supply and demand, and
the more things have their exchange value based on supply and demand, the more smooth and realistic the game's markets will be. If we don't do that then the system will break when supply changes because the price won't be able to adjust. That's why Toady needs to put in
dynamic exchange values based on supply and demand, so that prices do adjust.
Right now everything in the game has a fixed "exchange value"
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Item_value that doesn't necessarily correlate to the actual "use value" (ie the usefulness to the player, or its ability to make dwarves happy, etc.)
Because of this, we have nonsensical and annoying things happening like
caravans coming to your fort that can be completely bought out with useless crafts that don't even do anything. In real life these crafts would have virtually no exchange value because they don't have any use value (see my first post) except maybe for the idiosyncratic "likes" of certain dwarves. There are plenty of other examples of inefficiencies, self defeating caravan actions, and even slightly suicidal AI behavioural choices in the game, and I think all of these things can be fixed if Toady just expands on creature psychology and makes exchange values based on supply and demand (in other words,
based on the actual use value).
What I've basically been trying to say is that Toady should
expand the current preference system so that dwarves will have preferences for and against all goods and services in the game (including crafts, so that they will finally actually have a use value), thus simulating "demand". Then, he needs to find some way for dwarves to keep track of a good or service's availability to them, to simulate supply. Then he needs to simplify this system and generalize it to whole populations at a time outside of the player's fortress so that the entire global economy is dynamic and lifelike.
Remember that eventually caravans are going to be going around and civs will trade with the player and with each other. If we have a system of fixed exchange values then their trades will easily become lopsided because sites with a surplus of one resource will waste money buying more of it, and sites with a scarcity of a resource won't buy enough of it, and both those things are pretty much guaranteed to happen unless the prices are dynamic and based on supply/demand.
Currently, the inefficiencies of fixed exchange values are not noticeable because there isn't much market activity, as you guys have pointed out (although there is some).
That doesn't change the fact that a lot more of it will be coming later,
and when Toady puts in some more economic stuff and has caravans going around trading and items moving around the map, at that point it won't matter if all the civs are "communist", they will still have to deal with market forces (utility seeking/labor-cost minimizing), and if the exchange values of goods and services are still fixed like they are now, then we will end up with a broken system where the
AIs will constantly make irrational decisions because they won't know what things are actually worth to them. In other words, the use values and exchange values will be totally different (currently, a craft can have a higher exchange value than armor, for example, even in a site that has little armor and is constantly under siege) and this will cause the AI to suicide themselves.
I repeat yet again, what I'm talking about has nothing to do with the type of "political-economic system" that a site or player fortress has.And before someone says anything, yes, I know that there are plenty of irrational economic decisions and "clumsiness" going on in the real world too. But I
guarantee you it will be way worse in a computer game trying to simulate
an entire world with trading civilizations using fixed prices...