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[GavJ]

Well the supply/demand equations part, and the list of which resources get consumed by demand part, and the resource (abstract) modeling part, These things are all actually fairly trivial to code. Since they're just equations, and not even very many of them. And they wouldn't really be "band aids" they could be done right away easily AND in a finalized form. You never really need more than abstract equations even after full DF release for these parts of it. Balancing of these things could also be largely left to the alpha players by just putting the constants in the raw files (stuff like how much of which resources you demand, which ones are swappable, which ones are more valuable for different purposes, how quickly mining costs ramp up, etc.)

Armies and trade routes however would take awhile and are lower priority IMO. It might feel a little stilted without things like that, but it's still very worthwhile to implement all the easy stuff ASAP on its own.

[Jorn Stones]

Some things just need to be reworked in terms of prices..

Why mine gold, when I can fill up a barrel with masterfully prepared roasts and sell that for 20.000 dwarfbucks.

Why is a log worth 3 but a single wooden shield many times that?

Trading shouldn't be more challenging neccecerily, but definitely more balanced.

Value multipliers on items, either passively from the type of good or from the quality the end good was made, should become considerably less, especially when the end item is created at the end of an industry in which multiple quality modifiers come to play, leading to, for example, a pig tail fiber cloak worth almost 1000.
Instead of going anywhere from x1 to x12 on quality value modifiers, it should be a lot less, perhaps x1 to x3, meaning you will need a lot more items to make the same trade.


Some more usable exotic goods would also be nice. Nobody wants that elven wood armor, or the large human clothing, or blood barrels.. and that what is there, such as drinks, food, etc is priced relatively low and only a handfull of items can buy everything of those from the trader. Lifestock is rather cheap too, butchering them right away gives you a profit usually. Weapons and armor are often too low in quality to be useful either way. I can't make silver crossbows, or make high boots. The silver crossbows that dwarves bring have no quality or a low one, if they were masterfully made, my crossbow dwarfs would have a somewhat better hammer in close combat (I usually fight in the open field, so it was inevitable)

Craft, trinkets, other goods.
If these ever become useful to dwarfs, buying them from caravans actually becomes a decent idea. If a dwarf likes platinum and likes flutes, and you see a caravan sell a platinum flute, you could buy it. Sooner or later, that dwarf, or any other dwarf with no material preferene, takes it and gets a happy thought about their new item. After a while they would decay, or break in case of metals.
Children could possibly play with toys of their preference, and break them (perhaps even getting some tiny fraction of exp in a profession) giving a reason for those as well.


More dynamic prices, as also already said, would be an interesting idea. If a civ is able to bring me tonnes upon tonnes of food, and I trade it for my own prepared food, there should be a normal or slightly below average price, since they value my quality meals, but do have plenty of food to survive next winter. If they bring barely any food, or none at all, they might have some issues at home, and would likely be willing to pay more for your food, considering it will be worth even more when they sell that again.

When a major siege against a friendly city failed and there were many causalities on both sides, they may offer a decent price on ammunition, but not on weapons an armor, seeing as there is plenty of goblinite to go around with for them at the time, and not enough soldiers to wear it all.

When you asked for loads of armor in the previous year, they bring you loads of it. Not only would you be able to buy that, you could probably sell them metals and coal at higher prices, seeing as your request made them burn their supplies. Of course, if you now decide not to buy any of their armor, they will bring less of whatever you request next, because last time you ordered it and did not buy it.

Thats kinda what I imagine dynamic prices and scarcity could do

[Scruiser]

Some things just need to be reworked in terms of prices..

-snip-

Thats kinda what I imagine dynamic prices and scarcity could do

I think most players are on the same page with this. It mostly is a question of how to do it in a fun to play, realistic, balanced, and reasonably to program way.

You never really need more than abstract equations even after full DF release for these parts of it. Balancing of these things could also be largely left to the alpha players by just putting the constants in the raw files (stuff like how much of which resources you demand, which ones are swappable, which ones are more valuable for different purposes, how quickly mining costs ramp up, etc.)

I like that idea.  It has the benefits of a more detailed system in its accuracy, while keeping things understandable to the player.  I would be willing to help balance that kind of feature.

[GavJ]

More dynamic prices, as also already said, would be an interesting idea. If a civ is able to bring me tonnes upon tonnes of food, and I trade it for my own prepared food, there should be a normal or slightly below average price, since they value my quality meals, but do have plenty of food to survive next winter. If they bring barely any food, or none at all, they might have some issues at home, and would likely be willing to pay more for your food, considering it will be worth even more when they sell that again.

This would be better than what we have for sure, but it has the problem of being a dead end feature, one that you have to totally overwrite later if you do the proper economy. Because you aren't the center of the world, and if there's some elves 10 feet away from you selling the same stuff as you, the prices you fetch will simply never be high for it no matter what, for example. They're just gonna be like "well screw you asking for 15 bucks, these guys have it for 12." So algorithms based directly on just your actions become obsolete eventually, which is inefficient to code, a bit. Depending on how long it would actually take (maybe not long enough to matter)

[Jorn Stones]

indeed the rest of the world should also be taken into consideration, only I made little mention of that myself. No matter what you do though, the player is going to be a lot more aggressive with trade then AI.

The human town might buy 3-5 steel items from the caravan.
I will buy the other 50 steel items because I like steel, and largely ignore the rest of what they have.

Item generation and availability is another.. Instead of making my own leather, which is a painfull thing and gives me barely any unless I have 10 pens full of cats, I simply order some from the dwarven caravan and receive like 250 bins of leather in the next season. How did they even manage to gather that much? Why do they still only ask for 200 bucks per bin?

[Henny]

Some things just need to be reworked in terms of prices..

I think many modders would be interested in doing this, but while it's possible for some items (wheelbarrows, minecarts), it's not possible for others (trap parts, prepared food). Extension to the raws would be nice.

[Crinkles]

I think trade routes are essential to a proper economic system because without it, you can't properly model supply and demand--or even availability of items. With trade routes also comes the necessity of post-world-gen map-level effects, especially by the player.

For example, if you live in an evil biome, the route to you should have a high "path cost" for traders--caravans will take a wide berth around your fortress unless they expect enough profit out of you that they are willing to hire protection. You would have trouble in the early years, being able to only get caravans subsidized by the Mountainhome, but do well once you prosper (and word gets out). This would also bring in an aspect of civ politics, where not keeping your liege happy means dwarven caravans are not subsidized.

Similarly, lets say a fortress is behind a river. Caravans can take a route around the river, but that too will have a high pathing cost. If you embark on the river and build a bridge, that should dramatically lower the pathing cost to all fortress behind the river. But if you charge a high toll on passing caravans for use of the bridge, then caravans will consider whether it will be profitable to make the journey.

It's not strictly necessary for players to be able to make map-level changes like bridges for this to work, but it would be quite annoying if player trade was at the mercy of the dwarf civilization AI.

[Scruiser]

I think trade routes are essential to a proper economic system because without it, you can't properly model supply and demand--or even availability of items. With trade routes also comes the necessity of post-world-gen map-level effects, especially by the player.

I think trade routes have been in since DF2012, but they don't have many of the elements you suggest like pathing costs for dangerous/hard-to-reach areas, or even adjustment of prices for distance.

Some things just need to be reworked in terms of prices..

I think many modders would be interested in doing this, but while it's possible for some items (wheelbarrows, minecarts), it's not possible for others (trap parts, prepared food). Extension to the raws would be nice.

Just modding prices doesn't cover it because of all the special cases were items should inflate or deflate in value mid-game/mid-worldgen. Hence, the repeated suggestions of various dynamic pricing schemes.

[GavJ]

There are trade routes, sort of, but I believe they are nothing more at this point than "flood fill the world out to 30 world tiles or whatever, and mountains and oceans are impassable, except for dwarves, the end."

Not taking into account roads or some terrain being more difficult, or near versus far partners within the radius, or actually having a path available AFTER settlements are constructed or terrain changed by play, etc. Also, I think every settlement of a civilization has all good available at equal cost as every other settlement of that civ.

[MDFification]

Once the in-fort money economy is reimplemented, you could have individual dwarves buy things they like from the traders for coins. This would make trading 'harder' for the player; you now have to sell a certain value to the caravans, or else your fortress bleeds cash and dwarves start to get unhappy (for being unable to add to their personal items, etc). If buying items generated happy thoughts as well, you'd have an additional incentive to try to keep all of your dwarves productive so they could get paid.
It'd also provide a use for all of the junk items in caravans so far - if crafts actually were bought to please dwarves, it'd make sense to produce them in-house as well.

I've mentioned it before, but I think that currency being reimplemented should change the game for trading considerably. It'd mean your fortress bleeds valuable metals unless you play your cards right, and adds an additional constant challenge to the player; maintain your treasury or risk loosing valuable supplies and general unhappiness. Hard bargaining merchants, in-fort crime, and paying tribute to invaders could all helps stress your money supply unless you create tons of value.

[Shazbot]

I wouldn't call it "bleeding" precious metals. I would call it "exchanging inedible gold for tasty, tasty prepared giraffe sweetbreads".

[Scruiser]

I wouldn't call it "bleeding" precious metals. I would call it "exchanging inedible gold for tasty, tasty prepared giraffe sweetbreads".

I think this is the problem with a straightforward built in assumption of the value of metals.
For floating currency values (Fiat Currency):
  Currency issued by your fort should depend on your forts export to determine its value.  If you systematically rip merchants off and make lots of coinage your currency inflates (decreases in value), if you export a lot for low prices and limit your currency production, your currency deflates (increases in value).  If the player is able to issue the Mountainhomes currency, then it should I think the Mountainhome should regulate how much the player produces in accordance with their tribute to the Mountainhomes.  If the player ignores this, then the Mountainhome gets angry at its currency being inflated.

For fixed currency (Hard Money):
  Currency value is equal to exactly that of the metals in it, no more, no less.  Of course, if gold is worthless because its been mined out like crazy, then your gold coins will be worthless.

[GoblinCookie]

I wouldn't call it "bleeding" precious metals. I would call it "exchanging inedible gold for tasty, tasty prepared giraffe sweetbreads".

I think this is the problem with a straightforward built in assumption of the value of metals.
For floating currency values (Fiat Currency):
  Currency issued by your fort should depend on your forts export to determine its value.  If you systematically rip merchants off and make lots of coinage your currency inflates (decreases in value), if you export a lot for low prices and limit your currency production, your currency deflates (increases in value).  If the player is able to issue the Mountainhomes currency, then it should I think the Mountainhome should regulate how much the player produces in accordance with their tribute to the Mountainhomes.  If the player ignores this, then the Mountainhome gets angry at its currency being inflated.

For fixed currency (Hard Money):
  Currency value is equal to exactly that of the metals in it, no more, no less.  Of course, if gold is worthless because its been mined out like crazy, then your gold coins will be worthless.

There is actually a far simpler way to achieve the same effect. 

What we do is give each settlement on the map a production of a certain amount of goods based upon the resources available in their territory and their population.  The goods they do not produce they would have to import in a quantity based upon their population and other factors.

If a settlement has something to sell but present wants to buy nothing useful, it will instead buy gems, silver, gold and coins.  Actually goods are divided up into essentials, furnature, luxury goods, precious metals/gems and finally money, settlements buy these things is order of priority and sell in reverse order of priority. 

Caravans refuse to buy goods that are massively in excess of the settelements they are set up to visit's demand last year.  So precious metals, gems and coins will not be able to be sold unless there are settlements that wish to buy those things, that is settlements with a present surplus of goods. 

[GavJ]

Caravans refuse to buy goods that are massively in excess of the settelements they are set up to visit's demand last year.  So precious metals, gems and coins will not be able to be sold unless there are settlements that wish to buy those things, that is settlements with a present surplus of goods.

A better way to do this is:
1) Use trade routes (important again) to calculate distance and terrain difficulty into some overall difficulty score for the trip.
2) Have a general cost assigned to difficulty points for caravans.
3) Caravan weight also adds incrementally more difficulty and cost of travel. Thus you can now list all available potential goods in order of expected profit (based on supply demand etc) / pound, and you can recalculate total trip profit after each addition. Go down the list, adding the highest profitability / pound goods available (up to the amounts of each they expect the player to buy), in that order, until the caravan is full.
4) Now go back and look at the intermediate calculations for total trip profits after each addition. Choose the load with the highest expected profit. This may be in the middle (a not full cart), if for instance, the last load of stuff filling up the cart was bulky low profit things they don't expect you to buy, then they wouldn't bother hauling them expensively to you.
5) They also have a rough estimate of how much profit to expect from the return goods, which is just based on last year in some way. If the sum of outbound and inbound = 0 or negative, then you don't get that caravan at all that year.
6) If positive, then you do get the caravan, and once they arrive they will trade ANYTHING you have for whatever its going rate is from supply/demand/your location. That's just good business -- once you've invested in the trip already, you would buy anything with >0 profit, even if it's less than what you hoped for (although you may be wary of future trips).

What we do is give each settlement on the map a production of a certain amount of goods based upon the resources available in their territory and their population.  The goods they do not produce they would have to import in a quantity based upon their population and other factors.

If a settlement has something to sell but present wants to buy nothing useful, it will instead buy gems, silver, gold and coins.  Actually goods are divided up into essentials, furnature, luxury goods, precious metals/gems and finally money, settlements buy these things is order of priority and sell in reverse order of priority.

That's what people were describing earlier, minus the coins thing. Which sounds like a good idea, sure.

I would add though that local resources don't just leap out of the ground for you though. It costs money to mine things. More money the deeper you mine, too. They should only mine goods if the going rate for them is greater than the cost of mining. And if you want to get especially fancy, they have X amount of labor available for trade, and mining requires labor AND cost. In which case, they'll mine only the most profitable things until they run out of labor or investment capital for the resources needed. Then, even if there's a ton of profitable stuff nearby, a small, low-population settlement won't mine very much of it at all.

[Henny]

This might be of interest.